Where Is Hayek? How Georgetown Forgot the Market

When students walk into an introductory economics class at GU-Q, they expect to study economics, the science of how free individuals make choices in a world of scarcity. Instead, many of us encounter something closer to policy science: equations, fiscal multipliers, and government-centered models that assume intervention as the default.

Week after week, we plot aggregate demand, analyze “market failures,” and discuss why the state should tax or spend. But where are the economists who warned about the limits of central planning? Where are Hayek, Mises, Friedman, Bastiat, the thinkers who treated human freedom, not government discretion, as the foundation of prosperity?

The Invisible Hand Is Missing

The structure of Georgetown’s economics major reflects the global mainstream: principles of micro and macro, intermediate theory, econometrics, and a handful of electives. These courses equip students to analyze inflation, output gaps, and policy shocks, tools that matter to central banks and the IMF. But the price of this “policy-ready” education is intellectual uniformity.

Our syllabi devote weeks to Keynes and the neoclassical synthesis yet only minutes to Hayek’s critique of collectivist knowledge or Friedman’s case for monetary restraint. Ludwig von Mises, who built the logical foundations of market coordination, is seldom mentioned at all.

Students quickly absorb an implicit lesson: markets are imperfect, governments are corrective, and equilibrium arrives only through management, not freedom.

How Keynes Crowded Out the Classics

This imbalance didn’t arise by conspiracy. After World War II, the Keynesian revolution fused with neoclassical theory to form a powerful “consensus.” Universities, policymakers, and financial institutions all adopted it because it produced formal, testable models that could be coded into spreadsheets and simulated by computers.

By the 1990s, the “new Keynesian” framework, equations of sticky prices, interest-rate rules, and fiscal stimulus, became the lingua franca of economics. Departments like Georgetown’s teach what dominates professional journals and central-bank research. From a technical standpoint, it makes sense. But this practicality hides a philosophical loss.

The Austrian tradition, from Menger to Hayek, warned precisely against the idea that economies can be engineered from above. Markets, they argued, are systems of spontaneous order where knowledge is decentralized and innovation emerges without design. When we replace that organic process with policy algorithms, we risk the very dynamism that made modern economies rich.

Economics Without Freedom Becomes Elitist Engineering

The cost of ignoring thinkers like Hayek or Bastiat isn’t just political, it’s intellectual. Students trained solely in Keynesian models learn to manipulate aggregates but not to question the assumptions behind them. They can estimate GDP but not explain why individual choice and price signals outperform bureaucratic planning.

Hayek’s Use of Knowledge in Society is more than a historical essay; it is a warning against the arrogance of technocracy. Yet it rarely appears on reading lists. Instead, we master equations that describe a world where the government optimizes everything, a world that has never existed.

This approach turns economics into a technocratic toolkit rather than a moral science of liberty and responsibility. Georgetown, with its Jesuit commitment to educating the whole person, should demand better, a curriculum that treats freedom not as an externality, but as the central variable.

A Call for Intellectual Balance

Including Hayek or Mises in the curriculum isn’t about ideology. It’s about restoring economics as a contest of ideas, not a monopoly of methods. A truly liberal education should expose students to the entire spectrum, Keynes and Hayek, Friedman and Samuelson, Rothbard and Krugman, and let evidence and reason decide who explains the world better.

Georgetown already has the resources to do this. Courses in Political Economy, Philosophy, and International Political Thought could easily host a seminar on “Markets and Knowledge: The Austrian Perspective.” Guest lectures from scholars at the Cato Institute or the Mercatus Center would enrich the dialogue rather than narrow it.

Freedom Deserves a Place on the Syllabus

At its best, economics teaches humility, the recognition that no planner, however benevolent, can out-think millions of individuals acting freely. That insight is the beating heart of Hayek’s work, and it deserves to be heard in every classroom that claims to study markets.

Keynes taught us how to manage crises. Hayek taught us how to avoid creating them. Georgetown students should learn both, and then decide which vision of the economy, and of humanity, they truly believe in.