The Popularity of Planning
When we think of the astounding influence of economists such as Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Gary Becker and more, it is hard to remember just how much the socialist planning ideology was commonplace at the time.
An email from Jesús Fernández-Villaverde at Penn reminds us: (without block quote)
“Tomorrow I will try to convince students that many people actually believed in central planning until quite late in the game. I compiled a long list of articles at the New York Times from 1974 to 1976 defending central planning for the US. Feel free to share/post/distribute. It is fun to think that any serious reader of the NYT would have "followed science" and get the most fundamental economic question of the 20th century totally wrong.
1) Robert Heilbroner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_HeilbronerLinks to an external site.), a famous economists, arguing for national economic planning on January 25, 1976:
2) Jack Friedman, May, 18, 1975:
3) Hubert Humphrey, December 21, 1975 (former VP and at the time senator from MN):
4) Point of View, March 16, 1975
And just a few more:
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/12/12/archives/on-national-planning.htmlLinks to an external site.
As you can see, quite often the consensus can deeply, deeply wrong.”
It's totally understandable that people would think you need planning of the economy. If you are going on a trip don't you plan? If you are building a house don't you plan? It took someone like von Mises or Hayek to articulate why a macro economy cannot be run in that same way.
I once attended a class in Germany where the professor argued that the Nobel Prize in Economics was introduced to spread neoliberal ideas, citing Hayek and Friedman among the winners as examples. But here, interestingly, we have figures like Harvard economist and former AEA president Wassily Leontief using his Nobel title to advocate for economic planning in the United States.