Nobel economist Friedrich Hayek once failed Latin, Greek and maths at school
As a Viennese schoolboy, Friedrich Hayek languished near the bottom of his class and flunked three core subjects. He preferred theatre, botany and adult company. Decades later he shared the 1974 Nobel economics prize for work that included an influential account of how prices pass information through an economy.
Hayek was born in Vienna on 8 May 1899 into a family of scholars. His father, a municipal health doctor, lectured part time in botany at the University of Vienna, and both grandfathers were academics, one of them an economist and close friend of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, a founder of the Austrian School. The surname traces to a Czech ancestor, Hagek, who left Prague in the 1500s. On his mother's side he was a second cousin of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and he read the Tractatus in its first German edition in 1921. He also once researched his own ancestry, curious about speculation, and found no Jewish forebears within five generations.
An avid reader before he started school, he nonetheless did badly there, bored and clashing with teachers. At his father's suggestion he read evolutionary biologists and the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, named Goethe his greatest early influence, and tried writing tragedies. As a teenager he fought in the First World War, later saying that the experience, and a wish to avoid the errors that caused it, pulled him towards economics. He took doctorates in law in 1921 and political studies in 1923 at Vienna.
His career crossed borders. He taught at the London School of Economics, became a British national in 1938, moved to the University of Chicago and finished at Salzburg and Freiburg. His Nobel, shared with Gunnar Myrdal, honoured work on money, economic fluctuations and the links between economic, social and institutional life. His 1945 article The Use of Knowledge in Society was later named among the 20 best papers in the American Economic Review's first century.
The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, became his most popular book and has been reprinted many times since. Often called a conservative, Hayek rejected the label, preferring classical liberal or libertarian. He became a Companion of Honour in 1984, received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom from George H. W. Bush in 1991, and died on 23 March 1992.
Source: Friedrich Hayek
