Samuelson on Hayek

Barkley Rosser, Jr., has published a piece by Samuelson on Hayek in the current issue of The Journal of Organization and Behavior, as well as an article, by Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail, about a dispute between Hayek and Samuelson. I here record some thoughts by Samuelson in justifying his tone in an earlier article on Sraffa:

"If a scholar in his ninth decade is to record his considered opinions on an important topic, it had better be a matter not of when but of now... Dr. Samuel Johnson said that being hung in the morning greatly clarifies the mind. Nonsense. It is more likely to paralyze coherent thought. True though that as the days grow shorter, one does dispense with nice diplomancies and ancient jockeyings for victory." -- Paul A. Samuelson, "Sraffa's Hits and Misses", in Critical Essays on Piero Sraffa's Legacy in Economics (edited by Heinz D. Kurz), Cambridge University Press (2000)

Anyway, a number of bloggers have reacted. I noticed Tyler Cowen, Brad DeLong, Peter T. Leeson, Mark Thoma, and Barkley Rosser himself.

The comments sections for these posts is of varying length. I'm in the one on Rosser's co-blog. In discussing Hayek's contribution to the socialist calculation debate on Thoma's blog, Rosser brings up Jean-François Revel's The Totalitarian Temptation. I haven't read this book in decades. I'd have to reread it to see if Revel predicted the fall of the Soviet Union.

I also want to point out Chris Dillow's comments on Keynes' anti-semitism. I don't think much about Sraffa being of Jewish descent; Sraffa angered Mussolini directly anyways, what with his reporting on Italian banking in the December 1922 issue of the Guardian and Sraffa's support for Gramsci. I had known about Keynes' support of Sraffa, including intervention with the British government to obtain his release from internment. Dillow points to documentation of more broad-based support of Keynes for Jewish refugees. (I've previously linked to some other post on that month's discussion on that list.)