“There can be no doubt that our innate moral emotions and instincts were acquired in the hundreds of thousand years—probably half a million years—in which Homo sapiens lived in small hunting and gathering groups and developed a physiological constitution which governed his innate instincts. These instincts are still very strong in us. Yet civilization developed by our gradually learning cultural rules which were trans­mitted by teaching and which served largely to restrain and suppress some of those natural instincts.”

Austrian economist and philosopher

Friedrich August von Hayek was an Austrian economist and philosopher. He was a notable member of the Austrian school of economics, and is best known for his work in political economy, political philosophy, and intellectual history. He shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for work on money and economic fluctuations, and for showing how economic, social, and institutional forces depend on one another. He is also widely remembered for his account of how prices convey information, an idea that became an important contribution to economics.