Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt did the seemingly impossible, something that was and is a magnificent service to all people everywhere. He wrote a line-by-line commentary and refutation of what he considered to be one of the most destructive, fallacious, and convoluted books of the century. The target here is John Maynard Keynes's "General Theory," the book that appeared in 1936 and swept all before it. In economic science, Keynes changed everything. He supposedly demonstrated that prices don't work, that private investment is unstable, that sound money is intolerable, and that government was needed to shore up the system and save it. It was simply astonishing how economists the world over put up with this, but it happened. He converted a whole generation in the late period of the Great Depression. By the 1950s, almost everyone was Keynesian. But Hazlitt, the nation's economics teacher, would have none of it. And he did the hard work of actually going through the book to evaluate its logic according to sound conservative and libertarian logical reasoning. The result: a nearly 500-page masterpiece of exposition. With this book The Failure of the New Economics we have a perfect analysis of Keynesian economics that "destroys the whole Keynesian theory".

LARGE PRINT EDITION More at LargePrintLiberty.com. It's incredible that this 1916 tutorial on how to think, by none other than Henry Hazlitt, would still hold up after all these years. But here's why. Hazlitt was largely self-educated. He read voraciously. He trained himself to be a great intellect. In the middle of this process, he discovered that it is far more important to learn to think clearly than to merely take in information. The result was this book. In some ways, it is a course in logic. But more than that, it is a training manual for how to fire up and manage one's mental energy. He discusses how to think about analogies and discover their errors. He speaks of the error of too much aggregation and misplaced definitions. He presents the rules for the interplay between theory and example. He shows how to spot errors in theory and experiments. He shows how to think all the way to the end of a problem. He gives some very practical advice on the relationship between thinking and reading - and how to plan that reading so that one uses one's time well. His examples of how to think and how not to think are lucid and compelling. His influences in this little book include Stanley Jevons and Herbert Spencer, so we can see here that Hazlitt was already steeped in economic literature when he wrote this book in 1916. It remains an excellent primer in how to gain, and make use of, a good education.