Pun Salad

I got a bargain on the Kindle version: $4.99. My reader reports main text (not counting footnotes and references) is 1012 pages, so that works out to be slightly under a half cent per page! What a deal.

As you can deduce from that page count, however, it is a meticulously detailed biography. For example, at one point it reports: "From 1933 through 1938 the seminar met at 2:15 on Mondays…". And Hayek was only one of the three seminar conveners!

And the book only goes up to 1950. Volume II is apparently in process.

So I confess: I skimmed a lot along the way. Still, I got a pretty good picture of Hayek's life: his family and friends (and some enemies), his intellectual development, his professional odyssey, and ongoing controversies. And a lot of history, economic and otherwise.

I was especially taken by the book's description of the economic climate that caused Hayek to write his most popular book, The Road to Serfdom, a jeremiad against socialist central planning. I did not fully appreciate how many "men of science", especially in Britain, advocated strongly for a "planned economy" during and after World War II. (They were also pretty moon-eyed about Stalin and the USSR.) Hayek and a few others were pretty lonely in their advocacy of free markets, private property, and liberalism in general. Arguably, Hayek's book saved the US (and eventually other countries) from disaster. (At least until now.)

The book also discusses Hayek's troubled love life. His first marriage to Hella was continually roiled by his infatuation with his first love (and distant cousin) Lenerl. Who was married to someone else. Hella was adamantly opposed to divorce, which caused Hayek no end of professional, romantic, legal, and financial woes. Eventually, the divorce happened, but Hayek doesn't come off well, even in the book's sympathetic retelling.