🎧 Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom

Episode summary: Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) in which Hayek (1899-1992) warned that the way Britain was running its wartime economy would not work in peacetime and could lead to tyranny. His target was centralised planning, arguing this disempowered individuals and wasted their knowledge, while empowering those ill-suited to run an economy. He was concerned about the support for the perceived success of Soviet centralisation, when he saw this and Fascist systems as two sides of the same coin. When Reader’s Digest selectively condensed Hayek’s book in 1945, and presented it not so much as a warning against tyranny as a proof against socialism, it became phenomenally influential around the world. With Bruce Caldwell Research Professor of Economics at Duke University and Director of the Center for the History of Political EconomyMelissa Lane The Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University and the 50th Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham…