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Right after we published our first findings, we started getting letters from all over the country saying, "You know, all you guys have done is rediscover Austrian economics" … I admit I wasn't familiar with Hayek and von Mises as the time. But now that I've read them, I can see that this is essentially true.
--
W. Brian Arthur, quoted in "Complex Questions" in Reason magazine (January 1996), and in Hayek's Challenge : An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (2005) by Bruce Caldwell

 

Friedrich Hayek

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Alchian: Two things you [Hayek] wrote that had a personal influence on me, after your Prices and Production, were 'Individualism and Economic Order' [sic — Alchian certainly has in mind Hayek's 'Economics and Knowledge'] and 'The Use of Knowledge in Society.' These I would regard as your two best articles, best in terms of their influence on me.
Hayek: 'Economics and Knowledge' — the '37 one — which is reprinted in the volume, is the one which marks the new look at things in my way.
Alchian: It was new to you, too, then? Was it a change in your own thinking?
Hayek: Yes, it was really the beginning of my looking at things in a new light. … I was aware that I was putting down things which were fairly well known in a new form, and perhaps it was the most exciting moment in my career when I saw it [i.e. 'Economics and Knowledge'] in print.
Alchian: Well, I'm delighted to hear you say that, because I had that copy typed up to mimeograph for my students in the first course I gave here [i.e. UCLA]. And Allan Wallace … came through town one day, and I said, 'Allan, I've got a great article!" He looked at it, started to laugh, and said, "I've seen it too; it's just phenomenal!' I'm just delighted to hear you say that it was exciting, because it was to me, too … that was a very influential article, I must say.

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

"I can date my own personal 'revolution' rather exactly to May or June 1933. It was like this. It began … with Hayek. His "Prices and Production" is one of the influences that can be detected in The Theory of Wages; it could not have been otherwise, for 1931 was a Prices and Production year at the London School of Economics … I did not in fact find it all easy to fit in whith my own ideas. What started me off in 1933 was an earlier work of Hayek's, his paper on 'Intertemporal Equilibrium', an idea which I found easier to reduce to my preferred (Paretian or Wicksellian) pattern.

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

Well, I decided that as a teenager that I really didn't know enough to describe character well and I was wasting my time. I'd learned as much as I could about story telling techniques and it wasn't a matter of technique any more. It was a matter of substance. As a result I said I was going to wait until I was a lot older and had more experience. So it was that after I got out of college I'd been away from SF for about four years. I'd read SF steadily from when I was eleven until I started college. When I started college I said, "I'm not going to read that while I'm here, I'm going to learn poetry and other things of that sort" in fact I wrote a lot of poetry then.

 

Roger Zelazny

 

Let's face it, our reading and writing skills in our country...everyday there's a story in the paper about how shitty our schools are. They just keep getting worse, all the time. I read a book, it was filled with letters that soldiers in the Civil War had written to their girlfriends back home. These guys were kids. They were fourteen, fifteen-year old kids. Most of these guys had never even been to school, but every single letter in the book was incredible. Every single letter was like: (in southern accent) "My dearest Hannah, this morn finds me wrecked by the fiery pangs of your absence. I'll bear your cherished memory with me, as I battle the forces of tyranny and oppression." Now, think about what the typical letter from your average modern-day soldier, to his girlfriend back home in like, New Jersey's got to read like: (in New Jersey accent) "Dear Marie, it is hot as f**k out here. It is hard to fight these sand monkeys, wit your balls stuck to your legs. It is very, very hot out here because I am in the dessert. What else did I wanna aks you? Oh yeah: DON'T FUCK NOBODY TIL I GET BACK."

 

Greg Giraldo

 

While in graduate school I encountered the writings of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, which shook me out of my then socialist beliefs. There was Hayek's book of essays, Individualism and Economic Order, and Mises's wide-ranging and unsettling Socialism, which showed me I had not thought through any details — economic, social or cultural — of how socialism would work. One of their arguments in particular, about the impossibility of rational economic calculation under socialism, dumbfounded me. Whether or not the argument was ultimately judged to be correct, it was amazing, something I never would have thought of in a million years.

 

Friedrich Hayek