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	<title>Comments on: Hayek and innovation</title>
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		<title>By: Mark Hill</title>
		<link>http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/07/02/hayek-and-innovation/#comment-288272</link>
		<dc:creator>Mark Hill</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:09:35 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description>It actually is surprising Hayek didn&#039;t emphasise entrepreneurs so much when he crticially made the (IMO correct) distinction of markets being a process and not a mechanism.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>It actually is surprising Hayek didn&#8217;t emphasise entrepreneurs so much when he crticially made the (IMO correct) distinction of markets being a process and not a mechanism.</p>
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		<title>By: Nicholas Gruen</title>
		<link>http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/07/02/hayek-and-innovation/#comment-288271</link>
		<dc:creator>Nicholas Gruen</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:09:25 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description>Ken,

The idea of dynamism is not made explicit in the quotes you&#039;ve quoted.  Everyone assumes it&#039;s there, and I guess it is in some sense, but it&#039;s remarkably &lt;em&gt;sotto voce&lt;/em&gt;. He wants those price signals flowing, but partly for the benefits of a &#039;free society&#039; and also because prices are what take a static economy to its optimum efficiency (including an efficient allocation of capital goods with which he was very preoccupied as well.) 

But not the creative destruction of innovation.  Or not until someone can turn up an appropriate reference.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Ken,</p>
<p>The idea of dynamism is not made explicit in the quotes you&#8217;ve quoted.  Everyone assumes it&#8217;s there, and I guess it is in some sense, but it&#8217;s remarkably <em>sotto voce</em>. He wants those price signals flowing, but partly for the benefits of a &#8216;free society&#8217; and also because prices are what take a static economy to its optimum efficiency (including an efficient allocation of capital goods with which he was very preoccupied as well.) </p>
<p>But not the creative destruction of innovation.  Or not until someone can turn up an appropriate reference.</p>
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		<title>By: Ken Parish</title>
		<link>http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/07/02/hayek-and-innovation/#comment-288258</link>
		<dc:creator>Ken Parish</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:34:44 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description>I read Road to Serfdom many years ago and didn&#039;t go back and check it when I wrote my post.  I confess I relied in considerable part on Don Arthur&#039;s Evatt foundation article from last year titled &lt;a href=&quot;http://evatt.labor.net.au/publications/papers/191.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hayek and Rawls&lt;/a&gt;, where he summarised Hayek&#039;s position as follows:

&lt;blockquote&gt;For Hayek, &#039;social justice&#039; meant allocative justice - the demand &quot;for an assignment of the shares in the material wealth to the different people and groups according to their needs or merits&quot; (Hayek, 1991: 121). &lt;strong&gt;Hayek had two objections to &#039;social justice&#039; -- it was incompatible with a liberal social order and it would destroy the market. The Hoover Institution&#039;s Kurt Leube neatly summarises Hayek&#039;s liberal vision &quot;Hayek sees its main task as that of finding rules to enable men with different values and convictions to live together. These rules should be so constructed as to permit each individual to fulfill his aims&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (Leube, 1984: xxv).

In a liberal social order the government has no aims of its own. As Hayek saw, this is incompatible with the pursuit of &#039;social justice&#039;. To ensure that every citizen received the share they needed or deserved, government would have to impose its own aims on society. This is because rational people differ in their interpretations of &#039;social justice&#039;. For some, merit is about equal shares for all (Hayek refers to this as &#039;egalitarianism&#039;). For others it is about reward for talent, effort or contribution to the welfare of society. For others still it is about giving people what they need to fulfill their innate potential as human beings.

&lt;strong&gt;Hayek&#039;s second objection to &#039;social justice&#039; was that it would destroy the market -- the only institution capable of supporting developed nations at their current standard of living. In his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, Hayek warned that pursuing socialism&#039;s project of central planning and nationalised industry would lead to totalitarianism (Hayek, 2001). Later he argued that pursuing &#039;social justice&#039; through the welfare state would lead to the same result (Hayek, 1994: 108).&lt;/strong&gt; The reason the pursuit of &#039;social justice&#039; is incompatible with the market is that market outcomes do not correspond to any principle of need or merit. In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek made this clear:

Most people will object not to the bare fact of inequality but to the fact that the differences in reward to do not correspond to any recognizable differences in the merits of those who receive them. The answer commonly given to this is that a free society on the whole achieves this kind of justice. This, however, is an indefensible contention if by justice is meant proportionality of reward to moral merit. Any attempt to found the case for freedom on this argument is very damaging to it, since it concedes that material rewards ought to be made to correspond to recognizable merit and then opposes the conclusion that most people will draw from this by an assertion which is untrue (Hayek, 1960a: 93-94).

In volume two of Law, Legislation and Liberty he was even blunter:

It has of course to be admitted that the manner in which the benefits and burdens are apportioned by the market mechanism would in many instances have to be regarded as very unjust if it were the result of a deliberate allocation to particular people (Hayek, 1976: 64).&lt;/blockquote&gt;

I&#039;m sure it&#039;s true that Hayek didn&#039;t place the same emphasis on entrepreneurial endeavour as Schumpeter who was writing around the same time, and it&#039;s interesting to ponder why, given that Hayek would certainly have been familiar with Schumpeter&#039;s writing and that, as you say, Schumpeter&#039;s elaboration of entrepreneurial activity and creative destruction represent a useful elaboration/fleshing out of Hayek&#039;s more general point that the social welfare state or socialism would destroy the market.  Schumpeter offers a specific way in which it could do so: by smothering entrepreneurial initiative in bureaucratic red tape.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I read Road to Serfdom many years ago and didn&#8217;t go back and check it when I wrote my post.  I confess I relied in considerable part on Don Arthur&#8217;s Evatt foundation article from last year titled <a href="http://evatt.labor.net.au/publications/papers/191.html">Hayek and Rawls</a>, where he summarised Hayek&#8217;s position as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>For Hayek, &#8216;social justice&#8217; meant allocative justice &#8211; the demand &#8220;for an assignment of the shares in the material wealth to the different people and groups according to their needs or merits&#8221; (Hayek, 1991: 121). <strong>Hayek had two objections to &#8216;social justice&#8217; &#8212; it was incompatible with a liberal social order and it would destroy the market. The Hoover Institution&#8217;s Kurt Leube neatly summarises Hayek&#8217;s liberal vision &#8220;Hayek sees its main task as that of finding rules to enable men with different values and convictions to live together. These rules should be so constructed as to permit each individual to fulfill his aims&#8221;</strong> (Leube, 1984: xxv).</p>
<p>In a liberal social order the government has no aims of its own. As Hayek saw, this is incompatible with the pursuit of &#8216;social justice&#8217;. To ensure that every citizen received the share they needed or deserved, government would have to impose its own aims on society. This is because rational people differ in their interpretations of &#8216;social justice&#8217;. For some, merit is about equal shares for all (Hayek refers to this as &#8216;egalitarianism&#8217;). For others it is about reward for talent, effort or contribution to the welfare of society. For others still it is about giving people what they need to fulfill their innate potential as human beings.</p>
<p><strong>Hayek&#8217;s second objection to &#8216;social justice&#8217; was that it would destroy the market &#8212; the only institution capable of supporting developed nations at their current standard of living. In his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, Hayek warned that pursuing socialism&#8217;s project of central planning and nationalised industry would lead to totalitarianism (Hayek, 2001). Later he argued that pursuing &#8216;social justice&#8217; through the welfare state would lead to the same result (Hayek, 1994: 108).</strong> The reason the pursuit of &#8216;social justice&#8217; is incompatible with the market is that market outcomes do not correspond to any principle of need or merit. In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek made this clear:</p>
<p>Most people will object not to the bare fact of inequality but to the fact that the differences in reward to do not correspond to any recognizable differences in the merits of those who receive them. The answer commonly given to this is that a free society on the whole achieves this kind of justice. This, however, is an indefensible contention if by justice is meant proportionality of reward to moral merit. Any attempt to found the case for freedom on this argument is very damaging to it, since it concedes that material rewards ought to be made to correspond to recognizable merit and then opposes the conclusion that most people will draw from this by an assertion which is untrue (Hayek, 1960a: 93-94).</p>
<p>In volume two of Law, Legislation and Liberty he was even blunter:</p>
<p>It has of course to be admitted that the manner in which the benefits and burdens are apportioned by the market mechanism would in many instances have to be regarded as very unjust if it were the result of a deliberate allocation to particular people (Hayek, 1976: 64).</p></blockquote>
<p>I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;s true that Hayek didn&#8217;t place the same emphasis on entrepreneurial endeavour as Schumpeter who was writing around the same time, and it&#8217;s interesting to ponder why, given that Hayek would certainly have been familiar with Schumpeter&#8217;s writing and that, as you say, Schumpeter&#8217;s elaboration of entrepreneurial activity and creative destruction represent a useful elaboration/fleshing out of Hayek&#8217;s more general point that the social welfare state or socialism would destroy the market.  Schumpeter offers a specific way in which it could do so: by smothering entrepreneurial initiative in bureaucratic red tape.</p>
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