Apr 20, 2020

Friedrich Hayek on intellectuals and their hostility towards the free market

This reluctance [to integrate themselves into the marketplace] helps further to explain the hostility intellectuals bear towards the market order, and something of their susceptibility to socialism.  Perhaps this hostility and susceptibility would diminish if such persons understood better the role that abstract and spontaneous ordering patterns play in all of life, as they no doubt would do if better informed of evolution, biology, and economics.  But when confronted by information in these fields, they are often reluctant to listen, or even to consider conceding the existence of complex entities of whose working our minds can have only abstract knowledge.

~ Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, Chapter 5: "The Fatal Conceit"

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