Friedrich Hayek

"His thinking, naturally, was shaped first by his parents, but subsequently it has been greatly influenced by Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, especially Hayek’s last book, *The Fatal Conceit: The errors of socialism.* One of Hayek’s essential insights was to see the wisdom borne out of the millions of voluntary decisions made every day by people operating in free markets and the folly of socialists who supposed they could plan for better outcomes and use the modern state’s powers of coercion to bring those plans to fruition. In their conceit, the socialists and planners show no awareness that there are huge limits to our knowledge and reason."

"Friedrich Hayek’s writings inspired Gibbs, shaped his thinking and sometimes provided the best words to articulate his thoughts. The Austrian economist’s last book, *The Fatal Conceit,* published in 1988, was his summation of the case for why socialism had failed.[3](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477309-807254973-3) Gibbs thought Hayek’s insights were stunning. His basic contention is that the civilisation we enjoy and which maintains the billions of people alive today depends on what he calls ‘the extended order of cooperation’, which is routinely known as market capitalism. And secondly, that the extended order of cooperation arose not from human design or intention, but spontaneously. Some humans struck upon certain traditions that worked best and through the process of cultural evolution they came to dominate. The ‘conceit’ came about in the modern era when intellectuals, a group for which Hayek had nothing but scorn, supposed that mankind must owe all the advantages and opportunities that civilisation offers to deliberate design rather than to the mere following of traditions."