author
Henry Hazlitt
1894–1993
A sharp, plainspoken writer who spent decades explaining economics to general readers, he became best known for making big ideas feel practical and immediate. His work championed free markets and warned readers to look beyond short-term effects when judging public policy.
2 Audiobooks
Thinking as a Science
by Henry Hazlitt
The free man's library : a descriptive and critical bibliography
by Henry Hazlitt
About the author
Born in Philadelphia in 1894 and raised in Brooklyn, Henry Hazlitt built his career largely outside academia. He worked as a journalist, editor, and literary critic, and wrote for major publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Nation, and The American Mercury.
Hazlitt is most widely remembered for Economics in One Lesson (1946), a short, influential book that argues economic decisions should be judged by their longer-term effects on all groups, not just their immediate impact on a few. Across a writing career that lasted more than seventy years, he became one of the best-known popular defenders of free markets and classical liberal ideas in the United States.
He died in Fairfield, Connecticut, in 1993 at the age of 98. For many readers, Hazlitt's appeal is still his clarity: he wrote about prices, wages, inflation, and government policy in a direct style that aimed to make economics understandable to ordinary people.