I'm not sure why you think that the lessons of The Road to Serfdom are being ignored. Does anybody in the halls of power seriously think that Soviet style central planning is a good idea anymore?
But the real reason that nobody pays too much attention to Hayek is that the way countries recovered from the Great Depression worked entirely counter to Hayek's predictions. Going off the gold standard worked. It worked really well for every country that tried it! The way that the events of the 1970s conclusively disproved paleo-Keynesianism.
So now we have neo-Keyesianism as endorsed by people like Krugman and Monetarism from people like Friedman and they agree about a lot more stuff than Hayek and Keynes did. Now, they use different terms and have different ideas about the transmission mechanism by which monetary and fiscal policy influences aggregate demand, but everybody these days thinks of aggregate demand as the thing that drives fluctuations in the business cycle. That's progress, maybe in another 100 years economics will be a real science.
And please don't take the talking heads that show up on TV seriously. Mainstream reporting of economics is just as bad as it is of every other technical field.
Hayek addresses redistribution of wealth as well as central style planning. He even specifically notes that while they may differ at (sometimes important) points, the general cycles have very similar results. So while not many people still believe in central planning, they seem to have grasped the new theory du jour of "spread it around", and in the end that is just as dangerous. Even so, to ignore the lessons in the book simply because of a superficial difference in ideologies probably isn't wise.
I think you're rather over simplifying things. I'm no economist, but I make it my business to be at the least knowledgable about such things, and I feel recovery from the Great Depression was more of a combination of New Deal infrastructure, WWII profiteering and the resultant increase of wealth in US that was then transferred to Europe to aid in the rebuilding. But then again, that's probably one of the most complex economic time periods in modern history so I don't pretend to know everything.
To address the gold standard, there are indicators that removing the gold standard may have benefitted in the short term, but will hurt us in the long term.
You have very strang opinions. One the one hand you speak well of hayke on the other point you use the exact opposit of what hayek belived to explain the recovery from the great depression.
I dont want to go into the hold Great Depression discussion, I just wanted to point out that hayek would have made the argument that the New Deal made the GD much longer, same with the WW2. The idea that a war can help the economy would made hayek cry.
Watch this modern Rap-Video of Hayek vs. Keynes and listen closly when the talk about the war.
I'm keen on what I loosely refer to John Kay's theory of rent seeking. I like it because it puts the issues with market and state influence into perspective, especially the issues people tend to blame the economic theory they don't favour for. I think a lot of the benefit from coming off the gold standard is that it disrupted an established rent seeking power structure around gold.
> But the real reason that nobody pays too much attention to Hayek is that the way countries recovered from the Great Depression worked entirely counter to Hayek's predictions. Going off the gold standard worked. It worked really well for every country that tried it!
I would reconsider your argument here.
(1) Hayek was not a huge gold fan as it is, he changed his views on money changed over the years
(2) The gold standard that exist at the time is something very diffrent then that gold standard, gold advocates actually wanted
(3) The third and I think most importend one is that if you inflate on a gold standard, deflating back to that standard is like driving over somebody and then backing up over that person. The right solution would have been to stop prudction of money and see the new price of gold and then fix the doller to that standard again.
(4) Hayek is actually still very relevant and even mainstream. What we have to understand here it is perfectly possible to reject hayeks macro but not his micro, or the other way around. Hayek is infact very respected for his devlopment of information economics in particular.
> So now we have neo-Keyesianism as endorsed by people like Krugman and Monetarism from people like Friedman and they agree about a lot more stuff than Hayek and Keynes did.
Here you are assuming that austrians did not change since the the 50s.
Modern austrians macro in fact are really close to modern monetarist. There is infact wide agreement between Market Monetarist and Austrian Free Bankers. I would even clame that the are much closer together then neo-keynsians are.
I would also argue that mainstream economics now is much closer to austrian economics then it was 50 years ago. Things like Public Choice Theory, Law&Economics, New Institutional Econoimcs are all much closer to austrian economics then the are to standard neoclassical economimcs.
Austrians have been talking about the role of the entrepreneur for a long time, modern development economics only in the last decade started agree that it is importend, movment like micro finance are all things that spring from this.
But the real reason that nobody pays too much attention to Hayek is that the way countries recovered from the Great Depression worked entirely counter to Hayek's predictions. Going off the gold standard worked. It worked really well for every country that tried it! The way that the events of the 1970s conclusively disproved paleo-Keynesianism.
So now we have neo-Keyesianism as endorsed by people like Krugman and Monetarism from people like Friedman and they agree about a lot more stuff than Hayek and Keynes did. Now, they use different terms and have different ideas about the transmission mechanism by which monetary and fiscal policy influences aggregate demand, but everybody these days thinks of aggregate demand as the thing that drives fluctuations in the business cycle. That's progress, maybe in another 100 years economics will be a real science.
And please don't take the talking heads that show up on TV seriously. Mainstream reporting of economics is just as bad as it is of every other technical field.