As chief economist of the World Ban

As chief economist of the World Bank and former faculty member at Harvard University, Lawrence Summers once asked what the most important thing was that could be learned from an economics course. He said that he tried to leave his students with the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand of the state—things happen well without direction, controls, and plans. Said Summers: “That’s the consensus among economists. That’s the Hayek legacy. As for Milton Friedman, he was the devil figure in my youth. Only with time have I come to have... increasingly ungrudging respect” (quoted in Yergin and Stanislaw 1999: 151).