Is there a consensus on the account of unemployment and inflation F. A. Hayek provides in his Nobel Lecture (1974)? I’m sympathetic to the abstract philosophy-of-science considerations he argues there, but I don’t know enough (anything) about economics to say whether he’s using that account to substantiate those considerations, or he’s using those considerations to obliquely promote a controversial account. Here’s an excerpt:
The theory which has been guiding monetary and financial policy during the last thirty years, and which I contend is largely the product of such a mistaken conception of the proper scientific procedure, consists in the assertion that there exists a simple positive correlation between total employment and the size of the aggregate demand for goods and services; it leads to the belief that we can permanently assure full employment by maintaining total money expenditure at an appropriate level. Among the various theories advanced to account for extensive unemployment, this is probably the only one in support of which strong quantitative evidence can be adduced. I nevertheless regard it as fundamentally false, and to act upon it, as we now experience, as very harmful.
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Let me illustrate this by a brief sketch of what I regard as the chief actual cause of extensive unemployment—an account which will also explain why such unemployment cannot be lastingly cured by the inflationary policies recommended by the now fashionable theory. This correct explanation appears to me to be the existence of discrepancies between the distribution of demand among the different goods and services and the allocation of labour and other resources among the production of those outputs...
Is there a consensus on the account of unemployment and inflation F. A. Hayek provides in his Nobel Lecture (1974)? I’m sympathetic to the abstract philosophy-of-science considerations he argues there, but I don’t know enough (anything) about economics to say whether he’s using that account to substantiate those considerations, or he’s using those considerations to obliquely promote a controversial account. Here’s an excerpt: