Since I am in South Africa, I am reminded of my time studying with Ludwig Lachmann, the South African economist from University of the Witwatersrand.  I was seventeen, and Lachmann teaching a graduate seminar at New York University.  Someone (Richard Ebeling maybe?) had told me he was interesting, so I wanted to sit in on the seminar.  I showed up, introduced myself to Lachmann, and asked if I could listen to the lectures.  I obviously did not belong, but he was very gracious and said yes of course.  He wore a suit and tie, had a very Old World manner, and he had been a Jewish refugee from Germany.  He was 73 or so at the time, this was 1979.

His manner of speaking was very distinctive.  Of course I now recognize the South African accent, but there is more to it than that.

Lachmann was best known for his connections to the Austrian School, as he was visiting at the NYU Austrian program at the time, under the aegis of Israel Kirzner.  Nonetheless Austrian economics was not what I learned in the seminar.

On the first day, I heard plenty about Sraffa and Garegnani, and all that was new (and fascinating to me).  Lachmann had studied with Werner Sombart, so I learned about the German historical school as well.

Lachmann also was my first teacher who made sense of Keynes for me, moving me away from obsessions with the hydraulic IS-LM interpretations of the General Theory.  He flirted with views of cost-based pricing, brought me further into the kaleidic world of G.L.S. Shackle, and he insisted that a market economy had no overall tendency toward the constellation of a general equilibrium of prices and quantities.  (He did believe that most though not all individual markets tended to equilibrate.)  He inveighed against W.H. Hutt’s interpretation of Say’s Law, of course some of you here will know that Hutt also was South African.  I kept on trying to read Hutt, to see if I could defend him against Lachmann’s critiques.  I also imbibed Hutt’s economic critique of apartheid.

Lachmann did not talk about South Africa, other than to mention how long the journey to New York was.  You may know that Israel Kirzner, another early mentor of mine, had South African roots as well.  He also did not talk about South Africa.

“South African economics,” if you wish to call it that, played a significant role in my early intellectual development.

To this day, when I think about the economics of AI, and many other matters, Lachmann’s book Capital and its Structure is one of my go-to inspirations.

And I am still grateful to Lachmann for letting “a kid” sit in on his class.  I paid avid attention.