Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich Hayek’s The Pretence of Knowledge

In 1974, as the world economy suffered a severe bout of stagflation, Friedrich Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. In his Nobel acceptance speech entitled The Pretence of Knowledge, he argued that the stagflation was caused by misguided Keynesian full employment policies. In making his critique of this policy, he restated several of the economic ideas with which he is most associated and provided his answers to some of the central questions in the philosophy of economics.