|Peter Boettke|
On October 2, 2014, our F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics held a large public event to celebrate and critically examine the impact of F. A. Hayek's receipt of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1974. A public lecture was delivered by Israel Kirzner, and this was followed by a panel that included remarks from Nobel Prize winners Edmund Phelps, Erik Maskin, and Vernon Smith. Unfortunately, Professor Phelps could not attend due to illness, but his prepared remarks were read to the crowd.
The video of the talks is now available. The video begins at the 8:30 mark due to a delay caused by the crowd. Over 700 people were in attendence, and the auditorium at the Law School only holds about 500, so an overflow room was set up with a live video stream of the talks. The staff at Mercatus was, from my perspective, just masterful in their handling of the event and their attention to detail.
There has been some traditional and social media coverage of the event that you can also track down.
Richard Ebeling has also posted an insightful reflection on Hayek's prize and its importance.
P.S.: Kirzner in his talk rightfully highlighted the critical importance of Gerald O'Driscoll's Economics as a Coordination Problem for understanding the unity in Hayek's research program. Unfortunately, I think Kirzner also failed to stress in his remarks the tight connection between Hayek's research program in monetary theory and business cycles with his work on the problems with socialist planning and the nature of knowledge and the competitive market process. The brilliance of O'Driscoll's book, however, is to demonstrate this link. Coordination is the problem, the competitive market process provides the solution. NOTE: the title of this blog!
The idea of coordination also permeates Hayek's work in legal theory and legal philosophy.
Posted by: Mario Rizzo | October 14, 2014 at 07:39 PM