≡ Menu

Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 246 of F. A. Hayek’s January 1966 essay in the Oriental Economist titled “Personal Recollections of Keynes and the ‘Keynesian Revolution’,” as this essay is reprinted as Chapter 12 of Hayek, Contra Keynes and Cambridge (Bruce Caldwell, ed., 1995), which is volume 9 of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:

Even though the schemata of microeconomics do not claim to achieve those quantitative predictions at which the ambitions of macroeconomics aim, I believe by learning to content ourselves with the more modest aims of the former, we shall gain more insight into at least the principle on which the complex order of economic life operates, than by the artificial simplification necessary for macro theory which tends to conceal nearly all that really matters. I venture to predict that once this problem of method is settled, the ‘Keynesian Revolution’ will appear as an episode during which erroneous conceptions of the appropriate scientific method led to the temporary obliteration of many important insights which we had already achieved and which we shall then have painfully to regain.