an American journalist who specialized in economic topics for such leading publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The American Mercury, Newsweek, and The New York Times. He was widely cited in conservative circles. During nearly all of his life and activity of he defended the principles of freedom and individualism, consistently criticizing government regulation, inflation and the construction of the "welfare state".
Background
Henry Hazlitt was born on November 28, 1894 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Son of Stuart Hazlitt and Bertha Zauner.
His father having died when Hazlitt was an infant. He attended New York's tuition-free City College, but left after only a short time in order to support his twice-widowed mother.
Hazlitt died at the age of 98.
Education
College, of City of New York.
Career
Hazlitt started his career at The Wall Street Journal as secretary to the managing editor when he was still a teenager, and his interest in the field of economics began while working there.
In the early 1920s, he was financial editor of The New York Evening Mail, and it was during this period, Hazlitt reported, that his understanding of economics was further refined by frequent discussions with former Harvard economics professor Benjamin Anderson who was then working for Chase National Bank in Manhattan. Later, when the publisher W. W. Norton suggested he write an official biography of their author Bertrand Russell, Hazlitt spent "a good deal of time," as he described it, with the famous philosopher both in New York City and London.
During the interwar decades, a vibrant period in the history of American literature, Hazlitt served as literary editor of The New York Sun (1925–1929), and as literary editor of the Left-leaning journal, The Nation (1930–1933). In connection with his work for The Nation, Hazlitt also edited A Practical Program for America (1932), a compilation of Great Depression policy considerations, but he was in the minority in calling for less government intervention in the economy. After a series of public debates with socialist Louis Fischer, Hazlitt and The Nation parted ways.
From 1934 to 1946 he worked as a journalist in «The New York Times», where he wrote reviews, and editorials editorials (anonymous), covering the most pressing issues of the day. It was during these years in the works Hazlitt became quite apparent negative attitude to any form of government regulation and control, whether price caps or wartime government stimulus measures in the spirit of John Maynard Keynes. His literary reviews, and reviews regularly appeared in «The New York Times Book Review». During these years, Henry Hazlitt met and became friends with the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who had emigrated to the United States.
From 1934 to 1946, Hazlitt was the principal editorial writer on finance and economics for The New York Times, writing both a signed weekly column along with most of the unsigned editorials on economics, producing a considerable volume of work.
1946-49 he led a financial column «Business Tides» in magazine «Newsweek». At the same time he wrote the book «Economics in One Lesson» («Economics in one lesson"), which became the most famous and popular of his works - the year went through four editions and was sold over 1 million copies.
Also in 1946, agreed to help Leonard Reed (born Leonard E. Read) in the organization "Foundation for Economic Education," the vice-president who has become. And in 1947, at the invitation of the Friedrich Hayek attended the organizational meeting of the society, "the Mont Pelerin" in Switzerland.
And in 1947, Hazlitt wrote «Will Dollars Save the World?» , which strongly criticized the Marshall Plan.
With John Chamberlain, Hazlitt served as editor of the early free market publication The Freeman from 1950 to 1952, and as sole editor-in-chief from 1952 to 1953, and its contributors during his tenure there included Hayek, Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, as well as the writers James Burnham, John Dos Passos, Max Eastman, John T. Flynn, Frank Meyer, Raymond Moley, Morrie Ryskind and George Sokolsky.
In 1959, the publishing house «D. Van Nostrand »out serious work on the economy« The Failure of the "New Economics": An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies », in which the chapters Hazlitt criticized the main treatise of John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" from the standpoint of Austrian school of economics. In the following year (in the same publishing house), edited by Henry Hazlitt published a collection of well-known economists «The Critics of Keynesian Economics», continued the critique of Keynesianism.
He was awarded an Honorary Doctoral Degree at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala.
Works
book
Thinking as a Science ("Мышление как наука")
A Practical Program for America ("Практическая программа для Америки")
What You Should Know About Inflation ("Что вы должны знать об инфляции")
Economics in One Lesson ("Экономика за один урок")
The Inflation Crisis and How to Resolve ("Кризис Инфляция и способы ее решения")
From Bretton Woods to World Inflation ("От Бреттон-Вудской мировой инфляции")
The Conquest of Poverty ("Завоевание бедности")
Views
Conservatism, libertarianism
Quotations:
"People - individual animal, which limited the ability, desire is endless".
Membership
Staff Wall Street Journal 1913-1916 and New York Evening Post 1916-1918.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Benjamin Anderson, Frédéric Bastiat, David Hume, William James, H.L. Mencken, Ludwig von Mises, Herbert Spencer, Philip Wicksteed