Kornai and Hayek

[Brad De Long]

>" However, I would like here to emphasize particularly four names, those
>of Marx, Schumpeter, Keynes and Hayek since they have exerted the
>greatest influence on my ideas and on the method of approach to the
>problems employed in this book."
>--Janos Kornai "The Socialist System" pg xx. Princeton University Press.
>1992.
>Kornai has come full circle. I wouldn't call him a Hayekian but ,as he
>says, he is deeply influenced by Hayek and it is evident in his latest
>work.Kornai's latest book could have been written word for word by any
>neo-liberal. Kornai ended up endorsing "shock therapy" for the former
>Soviet Bloc as well as Cuba and the other M-L states. As we have seen,
>the results of shock therapy have been,on the whole, disastrous.

Disastrous in the east east... although countries east of the Bug that have
not undertaken shock therapy are doing at least as badly...

In the west east--the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Poland, Hungary, and
probably the Baltic Republics (though I don't know enough) I thought that
the results of shock therapy were actually a little bit better than I had
expected. Don't they look on track to become western European-style social
democracies in a decade?

Brad DeLong