Regarding Gary North’s article today on Hayek and being productive as you grow older, I can offer a Hayek story or two of my own. Around 1983 or ’84 Hayek visited the economics department at George Mason University, where I was on the faculty. He gave a one-hour public lecture that he opened by announcing that he thought he was the only known human to have recovered from senility. He achieved this, he said, by quitting smoking, which increased the oxygen flow to his brain.! A sense of humor kept him thinking young.
In 1984 the Mont Pelerin Society meeting was held in Cambridge, Enland, to commemmorate the 40th anniversary of the publication of The Road to Serfdom, which Hayek wrote while at Cambridge. Giving the keynote address to some 700 attendees, Hayek pulled a fast one on the whole crowd, and it was hilarious.In his speech he announced that there was a man in the audience who had not seen in 40 years, but deserved co-authorship of The Road to Serfdom for having edited every page back in the dark days of 1943 in Cambridge. “Is it true that he is here?” Hayek asked. Then a gray-haired old gentleman stood up and Hayek seemed to vaguely recognize him. There was an enormous applause, and even some tears over the reuniting of these two old friends in their 80s being reunited after four decades.
The next day my friend Jim Benett and I ducked into a pub in Cambridge for some lunch, and there at the bar sat the elderly gentleman, Hayek’s long lost friend. We sat with him and talked of what a remarkable story that was, that he deserved co-authorship of this famous book, and the happy reunion.
The old gentlemen responded by saying, “I don’t know what the hell Hayek is talking about. We see each other all the time. For years we’ve gone to the theatre together . . .”
In other words, old Fritz played a practical joke on the entire assembled Mont Pelerin Society, 700 strong, and got away with it!
Lesson: Do as Gary North suggests and always read LewRockwell.com six days a week, but don’t take yourself too seriously; you’ll live longer that way.
10:21 am on August 21, 2004
