How Friedrich Hayek Became a Monster

David Sloan Wilson in Evonomics:

Any serious student of economics can’t help but notice that the academic and popular versions are as different from each other as Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Take Friedrich Hayek, for example. His books could fill a bookshelf and the commentary could fill a small library, but the monstrous version can only speak in two-word sentences. “Government bad! Market good!” Likewise the monstrous version of Adam Smith, the father of economics, can only say “Invisible hand!”

Just as Dr. Frankenstein couldn’t prevent his monster from running amok, it seems that economists can’t do anything to stop the monsters they created from sowing confusion wherever they go. Some economists act genuinely alarmed but I strongly suspect that others like it that way. They are mad economists and the monsters do their dirty work for them.

The creation of the Hayek Monster is well documented and nicely summarized in a 2010 New York Times article prompted by the sudden appearance of Hayek’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom on the New York Times best seller list. That book was Hayek’s own attempt at popularization but it received two other boosts by a Reader’s Digest version in 1945, which sold more than a million copies, and a cartoon version that was published by the General Motors Corporation in Look Magazine during the same year and widely distributed by GM as a pamphlet. By then the transformation from man to monster was complete. According to the cartoon version, any step in the direction of government planning leads to a totalitarian state. The final panel of the cartoon shows John Q. Citizen being shot by a firing squad.

I’m not here to demonize Friedrich Hayek the man. I’m here to demonize Friedrich Hayek the Monster. The man was complex and so was his time.

More here.