Finding Hayek
Probably unlike most authors in this issue, I did not discover Hayek until relatively late: my third year in law school. I remember clearly how it happened. I was in Professor Henry Hansmann’s advanced Law and Economics seminar at Yale Law School, writing a paper about fish.1 For some reason, the management of fisheries had caught my interest, and I became intrigued with the weird fluctuations in salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest and the hopeless efforts of Canadian bureaucrats to manage them. It seemed the planners were always at least one step behind Mother Nature, the only predictable thing being that they always seemed able to make things worse.
At the same time that I was struggling with my term paper—the first draft was one of the worst things I have ever written—we were discussing in class some-thing having to do with economic planning. Emboldened by my deep understanding of fisheries management policy, I opined broadly that governments just were not competent to plan economies. The only reason I had for thinking this, really, was that everyone else in the recently-founded Yale Law School Federalist Society was saying it, and I was, to some extent, just parroting the party line. But I also really did intuitively think it was true. I vividly remember Professor Hansmann’s reply. He said of course the state could plan the economy: economic planning was just a matter of solving a lot of simultaneous equations. I did not know what he was talking about at the time, but later I realized he must have been referring to input/output tables—that technique of economic planning for which Wassily Leontieff won his Nobel Prize in economics. The prize emanates, after all, from Sweden.
