Time & Perspective Quote by Friedrich August von Hayek

Hayek is picking a fight with the profession’s favorite self-image: the economist as antiseptic technician, safely sealed off from politics and moral mess. The line reads like a reprimand, but it’s also a diagnosis of how “science” can become a refuge. He’s saying the discipline’s most consequential evasions aren’t caused by ignorance; they’re caused by squeamishness - an anxious desire to keep one’s hands clean by pretending that value judgments are optional add-ons rather than baked into the questions economists choose, the metrics they privilege, and the trade-offs they normalize.

The phrase “soiling their hands” does real work. It’s deliberately tactile, almost theological, invoking contamination and guilt. Hayek suggests economists avoid the “crucial problem of our time” not because it’s too hard, but because it’s too compromising: to talk seriously about it you have to admit that policy debates hinge on contested ends (freedom, equality, security, dignity), not just on efficient means. He’s puncturing the comforting idea that you can deliver neutral expertise in a world where every “optimal” policy implies a moral ranking.

Context matters: Hayek’s career is defined by battles against central planning and technocracy, shaped by the interwar collapse of liberal orders, the Great Depression, and the postwar expansion of the administrative state. This is part of his broader warning that “expert” governance smuggles in a moral and political program while claiming objectivity. He’s not asking economists to become philosophers for sport; he’s challenging them to own the normative stakes they already influence - especially when their silence functions as consent.