… is from page 158 of F.A. Hayek’s 1950 essay “Economics,” written for Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, as this essay is reprinted as chapter 11 in the hot-off-the-press Essays on Liberalism and the Economy (2022), which is volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis), of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:
Economics, as a theoretical discipline, aims at explaining those uniformities in the economic activities of society which are not the result of deliberate design but the produce of the interplay of the separate decisions of individuals and groups.
DBx: Yes. In its mode of analysis, modern economics, properly done, is quite akin to modern biology.
