ABSTRACT
The Copenhagen Lecture unifies Hayek’s work on the informational content of prices; the differentiation between individual and societal concepts of equilibrium; the institutional comparison of resource allocation in centrally planned and individually planned economies; and the problems of foresight and intertemporal resource allocation in the face of monetary disturbances. Hayek began the Copenhagen Lecture by observing that “The most characteristic feature of the work of our generation of economists is probably the general endeavor to apply the methods and results of the pure theory of equilibrium to the elucidation of more complicated ‘dynamic’ phenomena”. For Hayek, “the main difficulty” with received economic theory “is its complete abstraction from time”. The economics profession at large, after a detour through the Keynesian Revolution, had arrived at its own solution: Arrow-Debreu and Walrasian general equilibrium theory. But Austrian economists had not advanced Hayek’s program. Manne also provides an account of the seminal influence of Public Choice Theory on regulation.
