Economics in One Lesson

Henry Hazlitt lived through WWI, the Great Depression of 1929, and WWII. He authored Economics in One Lesson and published it shortly after the end of World War II. As a result, his disagreement with the common economic beliefs of his time are best understood within the sociohistorical context of those decades.

Hazlitt’s economic philosophy aligns closely with those of Classical economists, chief among whom is Adam Smith, whose most famous work, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Hazlitt mentions across several chapters. Classical economists defend the concept of the free market as being self-regulating, as reflected in the works of some of Hazlitt’s contemporaries, such as Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (1944) and Ludwig von Mises in Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949), both of whom also argue for laissez-faire capitalism and oppose government intervention. Similarly, Hazlitt implies throughout Economics in One Lesson that market forces are most efficient when they are left to balance themselves out. Although fluctuations in things such as prices of goods and wages of workers are inevitable in the short run, they will balance each other out when viewed on a longer time scale, as supply and demand equalize.