John Maynard Keynes on Friedrich von Hayek, and Friedrich von Hayek on John Maynard Keynes: Thursday Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot-Bang-Query-Bang-Query Weblogging

A certain asymmetry here, by which, IMHO, you can tell the good guys who respect argument and evidence from the bad guys who do not:

Keynes on Hayek:

In my opinion [The Road to Serfdom] is a grand book. We all have the greatest reason to be grateful to you for saying so well what needs to be said. You will not expect me to accept quite al the economic dicta in it. But morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it, and not only in agreement with it, but in a deeply moved agreement….

I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I hold say that we almost certainly want more. But the planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share your own moral position. Moderate planning will be safe if those carrying it out are rightly orientated in their minds and hearts to the moral issue…

By contrast, Hayek on Keynes:

Are we not even told that, since 'in the long run we are all dead', policy should be guided entirely by short run considerations? I fear that these believers in the principle of apres nous le déluge may get what they have bargained for sooner than they wish…

Hayek: Derp. No-class. Derp.

There interesting thing is that this derpitude has been transmitted as an intellectual style.

A Keynesian, discussing Hayek and his arguments, will say something like:

Paul Samuelson: Just prior to Hayek’s departure from post World War II mainstream economics came what must be hailed as his greatest important contribution to economic science… [in]the famous debate between Lerner–Lange and Ludwig von Mises (1935) over the role of the supply-and-demand mechanism in a socialist state…. Autobiographically, I can testify that most economists born after 1910 at that time would have voted Lerner and Lange to be the debate winner, with Mises as the prime loser. (Even my Harvard mentor Schumpeter saw some merit in the Lerner–Lange conjectures.) In the 1940s Friedrich Hayek in an invited Harvard lecture introduced a new dynamic element into the debate. Call it “information economics.” The broad competitive markets, Hayek proclaimed, were the recipients of heterogeneous idiosyncratic bits of individuals’ information. Playing for matches rather than for real money or blood was as different an economic dynamics as night is from day. I was not at all the only one to be converted to the view that, as between Abba Lerner, Oskar Lange and Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek was actually the debate’s winner…. The jury of history judges innovators not by adding linearly their plus and minus contributions. Hayek’s 1974 Stockholm Nobel Prize was importantly won for him by his notions about decentralized information economics discussed that day in Cambridge, Massachusetts…

But, say, Austrian Peter Boettke will say, instead:

Charles Rowley has never shied away from speaking truth to power. This is a very admirable trait. In a series of posts this week he demonstrates that principled stance as an economist again and is discussing the state of modern macroeconomics…

Charles Rowley's "principled stance":

[T]he Keynesian model never worked… has been resuscitated by opportunistic economists not because they believe in its merits as an agent of macroeconomic rehabilitation, but because they recognize its political value as a weapon for moving economies from laissez-faire capitalism, or (hopefully) beyond that to fully-fledged socialism…

Derp.