An influential economist of the Austrian school, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974 for his theory of the business cycle many years after this body of work seemed to have been disproved by Keynes. Born in 1899, Hayek attended his home-town University of Vienna after the First World War. He was attracted to socialism until he read a pioneering Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, on the subject, after which, he said, “the world was never the same again”. Hayek argued that the business cycle originated from expanded credit creation by banks, which was followed by firms and people making mistaken capital investments in producing things for which the market turns out to be smaller (or larger) than expected. But after an initially enthusiastic reception, the Austrian business-cycle theory lost out in policy debates to Keynes's General Theory. After the Second World War, Hayek was a leading member of the Chicago school along with Milton Friedman, among others. Hayek was a noted proponent of the free-market system and a critic of state planning. His 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, anticipated the demise of command economies that sought to suppress price signals. This prediction came from his belief in the limits of human reason and has faith in the superior ability of capitalism to make efficient use of limited information and to learn by trial and error. His views, which echo Adam Smith’s invisible hand, are said to have inspired the free-market economic reforms undertaken in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He died in 1992.