L. Albert Hahn was one of the most highly regarded economists and bankers in Germany before World War II, but he was unknown in the United States until this translation of The Economics of Illusion appeared in 1949. He immigrated to the United States in 1940. This book is his frontal attack on the Keynesian system, which he calls “the economics of illusion.” Hahn shows how government spending creates a false prosperity, and never more than in wartime. He explodes many of Keynes’s fallacies — and with great precision too, because, it turns out, Hahn himself once advanced these same fallacies before he saw their errors. So he writes with the passion of a convert.
Ludwig von Mises thought very highly of Hahn’s work, and none other than Henry Hazlitt has written the introduction to this classic anti-Keynesian text.
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L. Albert Hahn was one of the most highly regarded economists and bankers in Germany before the war but he was unknown in the United States until the 1949 translation of The Economics of Illusion, his frontal attack on the Keynesian system.
"I have often been asked to add to my negative critique of Keynes's theory the positive exposition of an economic theory that offered a more correct explanation and description of economic reality. The present book is my answer to this request."
Insufficiently educated in the history of economic thought, they do not realize that Keynesianism — down to the most technical details, like the concept of the foreign exchange multiplier — is mercantilism or, more precisely, John Lawism pure and simple.
The community of soft-currency countries is not a community of economic conditions but a community of lax monetary and fiscal policies, a community of ignorance about monetary theory, of inexperience with monetary policy, and of political doctrinaire stubbornness.
NY: New York Institute of Finance, 1949.
