Hayek is so hot right now

Since November 2008, a recent edition of Hayek's Road to Serfdom has seen a quadrupling in sales, and has not slowed down since. I gather that these are not huge numbers we're talking about -- James Patterson needn't worry that his current thriller will be dethroned by the Austrian economist -- but even so it's a remarkable turn of events for an economics text first published in 1944 which during most of my lifetime has been all-but-ignored by the academy and media.

Not surprisingly the editor of the strong-selling volume credits current economic and political trends for the Hayek resurgence:

I think that the underlying reason for the sustained interest in Hayek's book is that it taps into a profound dissatisfaction in the public mind with the machinations of its government. Both Presidents Bush and Obama have presided over huge growth in the size of the federal government and in the size of the federal deficit, with little obvious effect on unemployment. Things seem out of control.

George Mason law professor Todd Zywicki provides a thoughtful analysis of the book's relevance to today:

What I think is timeless and relevant about The Road to Serfdom is what I think of as the key philosophical-economic insight that drives the book. Which is that there is a central economic issue that characterizes all human societies, namely the problem of scarcity. Governmental intervention cannot repeal the reality of scarcity. So, at root, we have a basic choice to make: either each of us chooses for ourselves (classical liberalism) or government chooses for us (or to put it otherwise, we all choose for each other). On this central insight, I think that Hayek has the matter exactly right–either we choose for ourselves or someone else chooses for us.

Hayek’s historical prediction follows from this basic insight–in a world where government chooses for us, somebody has to decide whose needs get met and whose do not. Which further means that government has to come up with some array of which needs are more important than others. Taxes provide the paradigm example: each dollar in taxes basically means that the individual has one less dollar to spend on what he wants and instead one dollar is given to the government to spend. At the margin, each dollar in taxes means that you have to sacrifice some of your leisure (in order to work more) or forgo some consumption activity that otherwise would have spent money on (a book, vacation, a clarinet for your child, or whatever). But Hayek’s crucial insight is keeping this central question front and center–either you decide what to do with your own money or someone else decides. Those are the only two choices.

Here we have a concise explanation of what Thomas Sowell calls the "tragic vision" -- the awareness that there are no cost-free solutions, only trade-offs. As a consequence the question of who decides what trade-offs are worth making is an important one. This is not a recipe for nihilism -some trade-offs are worth making, some decisions good and others bad. Nor is it a prescription for anarchy. But in a democratic republic in which we believe that all men are created equal, the question of "who decides" must remain, as Zywicki says, front and center. This is particularly the case when the ruling class behaves as if there were no trade-offs.

Both in their personal financial lives and on the political stage, Americans are getting a crash-course in scarcity, trade-offs, and the importance of "who decides?" It's no surprise that Hayek is getting some attention.

(For other manifestations of the Hayek boomlet, see John Stossel's recent program, and of course, the rad Hayek v. Keynes rap video. Now there's a phrase one doesn't type every day.)