The Economics of Illusion

L. Albert Hahn

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.

Economics of Illusion by L. Albert Hahn
Meet the Author
L. Albert Hahn

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.

Mises Daily L. Albert Hahn
It is a regrettable fact that most of what is written nowadays in our field moves in such esoteric spheres and uses such technical language that it can no longer be read or understood even by a businessman interested in economic theory.
Mises Daily L. Albert Hahn
Forecasts of postwar deflation turned out to be entirely wrong. Instead, the postwar economy boomed. But the forecasters, in no way discouraged by their errors, stayed on the job.
Mises Daily L. Albert Hahn
Keynesianism presupposes an economy whose members do not see through the changes brought about by monetary or fiscal manipulation — or, as some might say, the swindle. Above all, it presupposes that people are blinded by the idea that the value of money is stable — by the "money illusion," as Irving Fisher called it. In all this we are not saying anything new; fundamentally, we are merely stating the approach of the classical economists.
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References

NY: New York Institute of Finance, 1949.