Professor Jeffrey Sachs. And in the other corner, counseling us against the welfare state, Professor F.A. Hayek.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a marvelous article by William Easterly (who has written a couple of first-rate books on development economics) reporting on a recent attack made by Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs (in Scientific American — not exactly a venue for serious discussions of questions of political economy) on the work of the late F.A. Hayek. Hayek’s most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, argued that the welfare state would turn out badly due to is expansion of political control over people. Sachs claims that Hayek has been refuted, but Easterly clobbers him.
Here is Easterly’s conclusion: “Hayek gave the best exposition ever of the unpopular ideas of economic freedom that somehow triumph anyway, alleviating far more national and global poverty than more fashionable Scandinavia-envy and grandiose plans to ‘make poverty history.'”
Read and enjoy!
