/lit/ - Literature

>It was some time later, probably a year or two, that I took courage to go and see him, after having learnt that he was again in Cambridge. He then lived (as always, I think) in rooms several flights up in a building outside the College. The bare room with the iron stove, to which he had to bring a chair for me from his bedroom, has often been described. We talked pleasantly on a variety of topics outside philosophy and politics (we knew that we disagreed politically), and he seemed to like the very fact that I strictly avoided “talking shop”, not unlike one or two other curious figures I have met in Cambridge. But, though these visits were quite pleasant and he seemed to encourage their repetition, they were also rather uninteresting and I went along only two or three times more.
>After the end of the War, when I had already returned to London, a new kind of contact by letter began when the possibility arose, first to send food parcels, and later to visit our relatives in Vienna. This involved all kinds of complicated contacts with bureaucratic organisations about which, he rightly assumed, I had found out details before he did. In this he showed a curious combination of impracticability and meticulous attention to detail which must have made all contacts with the ordinary business of life highly unsettling for him. However, he did manage to get to Vienna fairly soon after me (I had succeeded for the first time in 1946), and I believe he went there once or twice again.
>I THINK IT WAS in the course of his return from his last visit to Vienna that we met for the last time. He had gone to see his dying sister Minning once more, and he was (though I did not know it) himself already mortally ill. I had interrupted the usual railway journey from Vienna via Switzerland and France at Basel and had boarded there the sleeping-car at midnight the next day. Since my fellow occupant of the compartment seemed to be already asleep I undressed in semi-darkness. As I prepared to mount to the upper berth a tousled head shot out from the lower one and almost shouted at me, “You are Professor Hayek!” Before I had recovered sufficiently to realise that it was Wittgenstein and to register my assent, he had turned to the wall again.

>>19554833
>But you said “pretty much anything written by Hayek.” And we both know he goes into much more than the calculation problem in his criticisms of socialism.
Most of his literature is very theoretical, spontaneous order, price signals, knowledge and information, denationalization (and therefor the decentralization) of currency, etc. sure, it's not all about the econ-calc problem.
>studying the Viennese context would be advisable: the world of Red Vienna, Lange, Neurath, Carnap, etc.
Why would reading a bunch of histories and biographies be better than actually reading theory? how did this convert you? what did you even read?

>>18728341
>hayek was still an austrian economist with rather peculiar ideas
peculiar to him I suppose but his ideas on dispersed knowledge (which he didn't entirely originate but which he thoroughly developed and popularized), socialist calculation, spontaneous order, and price signals are well respected in the mainstream, and of course he did get the Nobel prize. In many ways, he was his own man sort of outside of Austrian economics though inextricably linked to it.
>>18728339
Mathematical economics tends towards useless tautologies that say little about the world but which are logically consistent within the theory itself. I'm not against logical rigor within theory nor am I against the use of mathematics within economics, but the mathematics which is generally used (algebra, calculus, and game theory in some cases) is usually not complex enough to capture the actual intricacies of reality. Furthermore, often these theories are unfalsifiable or are otherwise not subjected to any kind of testing, and especially in the case of macro-economics. What really matters is the scientific philosophy guiding the analysis.

This but Hayek.