Amartya Sen, "An insight into the purpose of prosperity", Financial Times (September 20, 2004)
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Our debt to Hayek is very substantial. He helped to establish a freedom-based approach of evaluation through which economic systems can be judged (no matter what substantive judgments we arrive at). He pointed to the importance of identifying those services that the state can perform well and has a social duty to undertake. Finally, he showed why administrative psychology and propensities to corruptibility have to be considered in determining how states can, or cannot, work and how the world can, or cannot, be run.

— Amartya Sen on Friedrich Hayek

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Our debt to Hayek is very substantial. He helped to establish a freedom-based approach of evaluation through which economic systems can be judged (no matter what substantive judgments we arrive at). He pointed to the importance of identifying those services that the state can perform well and has a social duty to undertake. Finally, he showed why administrative psychology and propensities to corruptibility have to be considered in determining how states can, or cannot, work and how the world can, or cannot, be run." in the context of "Amartya Sen, "An insight into the purpose of prosperity", Financial Times (September 20, 2004)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

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Source: Wikiquote: "Friedrich Hayek" (Quotes about Friedrich Hayek: '''In alphabetical order by author or source , S–Z) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Amartya Sen

About Amartya Sen

Amartya Kumar Sen (born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for economics.