You took 4 years of all AP courses. You got perfect grades & crushed your SAT & your AP exams. You excelled in your art. You volunteered 1000s of hours. You were a class leader. You started a school club delivering social services. You were rejected by all top colleges. You were: You were not:

NOTES for my Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

Caldwell and Klausinger bizarrely and falsely belittle and smear Russia immigrant Boris Brasol's book *Socialism vs. Civilization*, a book published at a time when Lenin was purposely and aggressively murdering millions. 1/n The book has an introduction by respected mainstream economist T. N. Carver and it is a serious and academic look as socialist ideas and socialism in Europe and Russia: babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.…

George Harrison and the Beatles tiktok.com/t/ZTRsPH2eS/ The Beatles started out as a cover band, featuring the rock and roll guitar solos of George Harrison.

NOTES for my Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

Imagine if an intended definitive biography of Darwin left out an account of the scientific and explanatory paradigms setting the table for and contesting the spaces in which Darwin worked, little or no account of .. 1/n .. Erasmus Darwin, Paley, Lamark, Whewell, etc and their picture of how science and explanation work, and their rival castings of the problems and the solutions in the domains in which Darwin worked. 2/n

NOTES for my Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

We are told by Hayek's daughter in law that Hayek and Keynes did fire watch together at Cambridge during the war. How she would know anything about such things if she were not told about them defies imagination and .. 1/2 .. ordinary inference to the best explanation. But C and K dismiss her, evidently as a fabulist. They don't explain why. Is she known to be dishonest or pathologically unreliable? The epistemic scruples for whose reports to credit & whose to dismiss come off as rather arbitrary.

NOTES for my Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

In the beginning, the middle & the end of *Hayek: A Life* our authors are running smack into the specter of the profound & pervasive Mach, Wittgenstein & neo-Kantian programs in epistemology, logic & scientific explanation. 1/n The empiricism of the German historical school, the institutionalists, and the econometricians are all spin-off castings of the neo-Kantian program which looks for empirical laws & demands empirical data justifications. 2/n

*PHILOSOPHICAL PAPERS 1913-1946* by Otto Neurath (pdf) cominsitu.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/otto-n… "Many of us, besides myself, have been brought up in a Machian tradition. Because of this, we tried to pass from chemistry to biology, from mechanics to sociology without altering the language applied to them."

-- Otto Neurath, on Mach + neo-Kantian + Wittgenstein program

The answer Hayek and Kuhn give to Carnap and Neurath is that science does not and cannot have a God's Eye View neo-Kantian or Marxist formula for objectivity and "metaphysically pure" language and explanations. Science has only rival theory-laden castings of empirical .. 1/n .. problems with alternative causal explanations which recommend themselves or sometimes disqualify themselves on any number of considerations. 2/n

NOTES for my Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

C and K fail to include where Keynes got his core idea of of aggregate demand deficiency -- from Harlan McCracken, and they fail to discuss how much of McCracken's thinking was derived from thinking about Foster & Catchings. 1/n There is a direct link between the Keynes causal model and the Foster & Catchings causal model, and fundamental underlying similarities, which Keynes well knew reading McCracken. 2/n

NOTES for my Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

C and K misleading talk about Lerner, Kaldor, Hicks, Shackle, and others as if they were Hayek-trained cult-following Hayek disciples, when they were all trained economist, trained by others, before they knew anything .. 1/n .. about Hayek. Lerner and Kaldor were already on the left when Hayek arrived in London. Lerner was very soon editing a journal with a Marxist. Kaldor and Shackle trained under Ally Young at the LSE, and Kaldor started his economics training in Berlin and with reading Keynes. 2/n

NOTES for a Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

History is often an exercise in inference to the best explanation, especially in evaluating testimony. C and K dismiss some testimony out of hand from what one would presume are excellent sources without reason and they .. 1/n .. fully buy into other testimonies from sources which are far less than reliable or without other interests besides the truth. For example, Hayek's secretary Charlotte Cubitt and her memoir on Hayek are a real piece of work. 2/n

NOTES for my Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

C & K miss the plot when they fail to see Hayek desperately seeking to remain within the deductive neo-Kantian framework of the Mises version of the Mengerian "theoretical" economics program even as he as already escaped .. 1/n .. the deductive straightjacket in his work of 1929, 1937 & 1941 with his understanding of imperfect prices, out of equilibrium production structures, the causal process of learning using imperfect prices, and disorder debt and money. 2/n

NOTES for my Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

All rapped up in one ball are:
1) Hayek's attempt to deal with the demand of Lowe and the historical and institutional economists to make good on the neo-Kantian image of "theoretical economics" as a purely deductive system. 1/n 2) The Mach, neo-Kantian, and historical school/institutionalist idea what "science" is = universal math functional law or statistical functional relations verified or falsified by deductive or mathematical demonstration. 2/n

NOTES for my Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

Almost all of Hayek's significant scientific books and papers begin with deliberations about the problem to be explain, and what Hayek produces is a rethinking and re-casting of the empirical or logical problem to explains. 1/n Hayek even goes to the meta-level and talks about the importance of this process in science and the domain of logic. Hayek's scientific role models did the same thing, Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Hume, Darwin, Mises, Mandeville. 2/n

NOTES for my Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

A repeated problem with the C & K book is a failure to provide sufficient and clear background context, motivation, and explication of the science and ideas dealt with. The brief accounts Bohm-Bawerk and the problems .. 1/n .. of interest and imputation are cases in point. "Interest" can be two different things, a logical category in the pure theory of one man's plan, or a price in money in the market. Bohm-Bawerk tackles both. 2/n

NOTES for a Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

C & K let us know how Hayek in very old age can mythologize and misremember the past,
and then they unfortunately endorse claims by Hayek that their own book refutes just pages earlier. For example, Hayek explicitly in his .. 1/n . *Pure Theory of Capital* identifies Book 4 as his account of the dynamic/causal process. Elsewhere Hayek indicates that this is the draft of what at some point he imagined might be a longer, independently published "Volume 2" .. 2/n

NOTES for my Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

More C & K weirdness: Walter Lippmann, the author of *Public Opinion* in 1922 -- which demonstrably influenced the thinking of intellectuals around the world -- is introduced as a "newspaper columnist". 1/2 When Mises and Hayek talks about *Public Opinion* as being the dominating social force in society, they are clearly showing the widespread influence of Lippmann's landmark text.

NOTES for my Definitive review of *Hayek: A Life*

Hayek identified *The Road to Serfdom* as his "war work", the book was an independent spinoff of Hayek's "Abuse of Reason" project, which was begun before the invasion of Poland & the launch of WWII. C & K weirdly identify .. 1/2 .. the "Abuse" project itself as his "war work" which Hayek did not conceive it to be, it was an exploration of two rival understandings of how science work, and how one of them created a form of Fake Science leading to destructive social organization pipe dreams. 2/2

There is big Hayek scholarship news in the new Caldwell & Klausinger biography of Hayek. The philosophically significant Hayek-Popper correspondence will appear as an additional volume of the Hayek Collected Works. 1/n I own copies of the philosophical most interesting and important parts of the correspondence, and I can report they they discuss the shared Popper and Hayek theme of the importance of negative rules and negative knowledge -- what we cannot know and what we must not do .. 2/n

*PRIDE AND ORDER:
A STUDY OF THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN SOCIAL THOUGHT* by Daniel Luban …nd-customer-uchicago.s3.amazonaws.com/80f694b0-2320-… Hobbes, Mandeville & Smith [are said to] begin to take the atomistic, self-interested individual as the fundamental building block of their theories. Henceforth the theoretical task is to determine how such atomistic individuals can constitute a viable social order. 1/3

HAYEK 101 for PROFESSORS

Professors don't know their ass from their elbow when it comes to the science and ideas of Friedrich Hayek. It's time to fix that. What you need to know:

1. Hayek's understanding of things begins with an account of how scientific explanation works. Hayek has an interrogative model of how science works which is integrated with an account of inference to the best explanation similar to that of Darwin. 1/n