Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Let the Market Decide: Economist Friedrich Hayek’s Assets Head to Auction
52 Plays7 years ago
Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Prize in economics and his personal dog-eared copy of The Wealth of Nations have come up for auction at Sotheby’s. Ben Miller calls on the expertise of Duke University professor Bruce Caldwell and Sotheby’s specialist Gabriel Heaton to put these and other items in historical context.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Recommended
Transcript
Freeman's Auction House and Pennsylvania's Craft Legacy
00:00:00
Speaker
Have you ever wondered who was the master of the embroidered foliage?
00:00:04
Speaker
Or wanted to know what it was like to be at Andy Warhol's factory?
00:00:07
Speaker
Freeman's, America's oldest auction house, tells the stories of these and other curious objects.
00:00:12
Speaker
Discover Pennsylvania's craft legacy, go behind the scenes at auctions and exhibitions, and uncover your passion for collecting.
00:00:19
Speaker
Visit freemansauction.com to sign up for their newsletter and get these stories and more delivered straight to your inbox.
Friedrich Hayek: Renowned Economist
00:00:35
Speaker
Hello, welcome to Curious Objects.
00:00:37
Speaker
Our subject today is Friedrich Hayek, born in 1899, died in 1992.
00:00:43
Speaker
He was an economist whose theory that market prices are an efficient mechanism for individuals to communicate information is a cornerstone of modern economics and led to Hayek receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974.
00:00:57
Speaker
He was born in Vienna and split his career between London, Chicago, and Freiburg.
00:01:02
Speaker
In 1947, he organized the Mount Pelerin Society, a group of classical liberal economists who developed arguments against socialism.
00:01:11
Speaker
Although he once wrote an essay titled Why I Am Not a Conservative, nevertheless Hayek's ideas about self-regulating markets have deeply influenced economic policymakers like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
00:01:23
Speaker
He is often described as a countervailing force to the ideas of John Maynard Keynes.
Auction of Hayek's Personal Effects
00:01:28
Speaker
There's even, I don't know if you know this, there's a YouTube rap battle between the two of them, which is very entertaining.
00:01:35
Speaker
Hayek is one of the most widely cited economists of all time, and now his personal effects are being offered for sale at Sotheby's in London.
00:01:43
Speaker
To mark the occasion, I'm speaking with Gabriel Heaton, a specialist at Sotheby's who has organized the sale, and Bruce Caldwell, professor of economics at Duke University and the general editor of the collected works of F.A.
00:01:56
Speaker
Hayek.
00:01:58
Speaker
Gabriel, why are these items coming up for sale now?
00:02:02
Speaker
They're coming from the family, and it is for personal reasons.
00:02:06
Speaker
It's an appropriate time for them.
00:02:10
Speaker
to be disposing of them.
00:02:11
Speaker
But it's all coming directly from the family, from his descendants.
00:02:15
Speaker
One thing that we did bear in mind and that has, and it did affect our timing here somewhat, is that it's the 75th anniversary of the publication of the Road to Serfdom in March of this year.
00:02:26
Speaker
Could you tell us a little bit about the marquee item of the sale?
00:02:30
Speaker
What is that object?
00:02:33
Speaker
The key item in our sale is the original Nobel Prize, the medal awarded to Hayek in 1974.
00:02:45
Speaker
And like all of these prizes, it's a gold medal.
00:02:50
Speaker
But also, there are a couple of other items that come with it.
00:02:52
Speaker
So they always have a bespoke box, and then they come with a citation, which is a
00:03:01
Speaker
calligraphic documents and then also watercolour as well by a Swedish artist.
Value and Significance of Hayek's Nobel Prize
00:03:06
Speaker
So obviously the key item is the medal, but then there's a small package of items there.
00:03:12
Speaker
Now, for those of us who have never received a Nobel Prize, how large is this piece and what does it weigh?
00:03:19
Speaker
It's about three and a half inches long, solid gold, and it is obviously engraved on both sides.
00:03:28
Speaker
with in the distinctive manner of the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics.
00:03:34
Speaker
Now the... Each of the prizes have different engravings on them.
00:03:38
Speaker
Oh, I see.
00:03:39
Speaker
Right.
00:03:40
Speaker
But the value of this object, I would imagine, is significantly higher than the value of the gold that makes it up.
00:03:49
Speaker
Could you tell us what do you think this piece is worth?
00:03:54
Speaker
We're putting an estimate of £400,000 to £600,000 on the Nobel medal.
00:04:02
Speaker
Very significantly more than it.
00:04:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:04:07
Speaker
Bruce, what was Hayek's key insight that the Nobel Prize was recognizing?
00:04:14
Speaker
Well, they recognized him for two contributions.
00:04:17
Speaker
Early in his career, he made contributions to monetary economics.
00:04:24
Speaker
John Maynard Keynes engaged in the battles that are represented in the rap video that you mentioned.
00:04:32
Speaker
And the other contribution that the Nobel Committee identified was his contribution to social theory.
00:04:41
Speaker
He got the Nobel Prize together with Gunnar Myrdal, who was much more left-leaning.
00:04:48
Speaker
So they had one Nobel winner who was...
00:04:52
Speaker
a free market advocate, the other one who was an advocate of planning of various sorts and government intervention of various sorts.
00:04:59
Speaker
But both of them, in addition to being economists, had written in areas outside of economics.
00:05:05
Speaker
Hayek contributed to political philosophy with books like The Constitution of Liberty or Law, Legislation and Liberty.
00:05:13
Speaker
He contributed to social science methodology.
00:05:16
Speaker
He actually even had a book called The Sensory Order that was on theoretical psychology.
00:05:21
Speaker
So
00:05:22
Speaker
They were recognizing, the Nobel Committee was recognizing the fact that here are two economists, but they are economists who did something more than economics, that they tried to study social and cultural and political aspects of a society in a way that a straight economist is simply building models of the economy going beyond that sort of contribution.
00:05:48
Speaker
Gabriel, how do you determine the value of an object like this?
00:05:51
Speaker
You said four to six hundred thousand pounds.
00:05:55
Speaker
Where does that number come from?
00:05:57
Speaker
Well, the value of Nobel Prizes is very much in the in the recipient and really where the where the recipient sits in our culture today and how much how much he or she means to people.
00:06:15
Speaker
so they do vary enormously in value and it is quite hard to predict how they will perform at auction but Hayek is someone who has been so key to our kind of economic and political thought in recent decades and is cited so much by a range of people and is very much at the heart of a kind of economic and political movement that has been hugely influential so
00:06:45
Speaker
That's why we think that he is someone who will be really treasured by people and so that there will be strong competition for what is really the ultimate public accolade for his thoughts.
Hayek's Economic Theories and Legacy
00:07:03
Speaker
If it does sell in the range of your estimate, will that be a record for a Nobel Prize or are there others that have gone for even more?
00:07:13
Speaker
There are others that have gone for even more.
00:07:16
Speaker
The record is the James Watson Nobel Prize, which sold for, I think it was around $3 million.
00:07:26
Speaker
They're not very easily comparable.
00:07:33
Speaker
Now, Bruce, as Gabriel insinuated earlier, Hayek is a politically charged figure and is sometimes associated with various political controversies.
00:07:47
Speaker
His career, I think it's fair to say, was defined, at least as we see it, by intellectual debates.
00:07:57
Speaker
What was the nature of those debates?
00:08:00
Speaker
Could we dive into that a little bit deeper?
00:08:03
Speaker
What are the controversies that define Hayek as an ideological figure today?
00:08:10
Speaker
Sure.
00:08:11
Speaker
I'll do a little self-promotion and let you know that if there are people who want to know more about Hayek in a very painless way, I gave a talk that was taped.
00:08:22
Speaker
at Clemson University, and it's on my website at Duke University, about the life and times and ideas, contributions of Hyatt.
00:08:31
Speaker
But you're exactly right.
00:08:33
Speaker
This is a person who was of interest to me as an historical figure because he seemed to be at the right place at the right time, but he was always fighting with the people that he was around.
00:08:43
Speaker
So in the early 1930s, he had the debate with John Maynard Keynes about what the appropriate
00:08:52
Speaker
policy should be in terms of dealing with what we would call macroeconomics, the macroeconomy today.
00:08:59
Speaker
He also engaged at that point in debates with people who were favoring socialism.
00:09:06
Speaker
There has been an increased interest today in democratic socialism while he was debating people at the London School of Economics and elsewhere on the merits of socialism in the 1930s.
00:09:18
Speaker
It was
00:09:20
Speaker
In the process of those debates that he came up with the idea of how a market system within an appropriate set of other social, juridical, political institutions is a remarkable device for coordinating economic activity in a world in which knowledge is dispersed.
00:09:42
Speaker
That would be a phrase that could be used to describe it.
00:09:46
Speaker
He also talked about what he calls spontaneous orders.
00:09:51
Speaker
These are complex phenomena, theory of complex phenomena is something that he wrote about.
00:09:57
Speaker
And this is something that goes indeed far beyond economics.
00:10:02
Speaker
His work in psychology was also looking at how the interaction of individual agents can sometimes create structures that are much greater than unintended structures.
00:10:14
Speaker
that contribute to whatever phenomena you're looking at.
00:10:18
Speaker
So, for example, within the brain, we have individual neurons that are firing.
00:10:24
Speaker
They're not trying to accomplish anything, but the end result of all of that is human consciousness.
00:10:30
Speaker
In a like manner, the working of individual agents in a market, nobody intends to feed Paris every day,
00:10:38
Speaker
You've got millions of people, though, whose work, either from directly feeding people through restaurants, but also people who are bringing food to market or growing the food, who are miners, whose end products end up being silverware.
00:10:53
Speaker
All of these people are contributing to feeding Paris every day, although no one plans to do it.
00:10:58
Speaker
Those are the sorts of things that he was examining, and it's why, actually, his contributions are important.
00:11:03
Speaker
are viewed as, although, as you say, obviously there are political elements that are tied to this, but his understanding of how a market system works and what to do when it fails to work, I think, are quite insightful.
00:11:16
Speaker
Among the other Nobel Prize winners in economics, I saw one paper one time by a person, a scholar named David Scarbeck, that said, of all of the Nobel Prize winners in economics, the ones who cite other Nobel Prize winners
00:11:32
Speaker
in economics in their Nobel addresses, Hayek was at the top of the list of people who other people cited.
00:11:37
Speaker
So that gives you some sense that he's not really just an ideological figure, although he's been embraced by certain groups in various ways.
00:11:45
Speaker
He's a real scientist contributing to the science of economics.
00:11:50
Speaker
So for someone like Gabriel or I, who is not a professional economic historian, where might we look to see the effects of Hayek's work and ideas in today's politics and economy?
00:12:05
Speaker
So as you pointed out, he has a paper that said, well, I am not a conservative.
00:12:10
Speaker
So he is somebody who believes in free trade.
00:12:13
Speaker
So those who would argue for protectionism, he would oppose that.
00:12:19
Speaker
And indeed,
00:12:21
Speaker
In 1945, he had written his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, and he came to the United States thinking he was going to give a few lectures at universities, and because the book went into a Reader's Digest condensation, they turned over the whole tour to a professional touring company, and they worked him to death.
00:12:44
Speaker
He was going for a full month with multiple presentations, and
00:12:49
Speaker
But he kept saying, look, I'm not a Republican.
00:12:55
Speaker
The Republicans seemed to love him.
00:12:56
Speaker
The Democrats seemed to hate him.
00:12:58
Speaker
There was all of the same sort of political focus that we might have today.
00:13:03
Speaker
And he would appear before a Republican audience and said, look, I just want to make sure you understand.
00:13:07
Speaker
Yeah, this is not a partisan message.
00:13:10
Speaker
I'm for free trade, for free borders.
00:13:13
Speaker
The sorts of things that he would be for is the free movement of ideas, people,
00:13:19
Speaker
capital goods across, throughout a country and across borders.
00:13:25
Speaker
So at one point when he gave a talk before
Hayek's Personal Items and Their Significance
00:13:29
Speaker
some, a Republican senator got him in front of some of his constituents and the person who reported on the talk said the temperature in the room went down 10 degrees when Hayek started to talk about free trade because they, free trade, but not for our industry.
00:13:46
Speaker
You know, we're not for our industry.
00:13:48
Speaker
but not free trade in general.
00:13:50
Speaker
In many ways, he's a mainstream economist in terms of his policy views, I would say.
00:13:57
Speaker
Now, Gabriel, there are some other items in this sale.
00:14:03
Speaker
Could you run us through some of the more interesting pieces that are going to be available?
00:14:10
Speaker
Well, I think my personal favorite would be Hayek.
00:14:14
Speaker
own copy of Alasdut's Wealth of Nations.
00:14:18
Speaker
It's an everyman edition published in 1911.
00:14:22
Speaker
It's not a valuable antiquarian book, but this is Hayek's copy with his underlinings and the occasional marginal notes in there, which is just such an evocative object bringing these two great economists together.
00:14:42
Speaker
But there are other things as well, things like his writing desk and typewriter, both from the 1930s, both almost certainly is what he would have been writing The Road to Serfdom on.
00:14:53
Speaker
These are things from his LSE, his LSE times.
00:14:59
Speaker
And we have, oh, there was a lovely item you mentioned.
00:15:02
Speaker
Again, very, very, in terms of individual value, very, very slight.
00:15:07
Speaker
But we have these...
00:15:11
Speaker
gold coins that were spent in the late 1970s as a currency that did not have government backing.
00:15:18
Speaker
But these are Hayek's, so they had his face on them.
00:15:21
Speaker
And of course, this is all very topical today because these are basically a precursor of Bitcoin.
00:15:33
Speaker
So all sorts of treasures.
00:15:35
Speaker
And a few other books from his library, these sorts of things, yeah, that's it.
00:15:39
Speaker
nice grouping of things enough to give a flavor of the man actually another thing which of course does that would be photograph albums so we have three albums of his which really they trace his life right through his I mean this is a man who his childhood was spent in Vienna under the Austro-Hungarian Empire when it was one of the great cultural centers of the world he then fights in the
00:16:09
Speaker
Austrian army in the First World War.
00:16:11
Speaker
He's in, he leaves mainland Europe in the early 30s just before the rise of the Nazis.
00:16:22
Speaker
He spends the war in Britain.
00:16:24
Speaker
You know, he's really pretty extraordinary life.
00:16:27
Speaker
And then in his old age, he becomes this incredibly fated public figure meeting presidents and the Pope and Margaret Thatcher's favorite economist famously.
00:16:38
Speaker
But there's a long journey that gets into that place, and items which trace that journey are really quite special.
00:16:46
Speaker
Now, I wonder if you could say another word about valuing these objects.
00:16:51
Speaker
Let's take his copy of The Wealth of Nations, for example.
00:16:56
Speaker
You mentioned that it's a book that's not particularly valuable from a collector's standpoint outside of its association with Hayek.
00:17:05
Speaker
But, of course, it is associated with Hayek.
00:17:08
Speaker
Now, as an auctioneer, how do you come up with an estimate for an item like that?
00:17:13
Speaker
It's different from the Nobel Prize, where there are at least comparables, you know, other medals that have been awarded to other people, and you can sort of go back and forth about who's more important.
The Mont Pelerin Society's Influence
00:17:24
Speaker
But this is different, right?
00:17:27
Speaker
Actually, the comparables for Nobel Prizes, they're not really different.
00:17:33
Speaker
hugely helpful.
00:17:34
Speaker
I mean, they're helpful in that there's clearly, there are benchmarks there which show that there is no reason why a Nobel Prize cannot fetch really quite substantial summit auction.
00:17:45
Speaker
But beyond that, they're not, the comparables are not terribly helpful because they're such different figures, different people who are interested in them.
00:17:54
Speaker
And they're interested in each of the, each Nobel Prize for different reasons.
00:17:58
Speaker
So actually,
00:17:59
Speaker
Yeah, the comps don't take you that far.
00:18:01
Speaker
But you're quite right with the wealth of nations.
00:18:05
Speaker
There are two ways of going about it.
00:18:06
Speaker
I mean, you can value it simply as a book.
00:18:09
Speaker
And you say, okay, as a book, this is worth, you know, actually in this case it wouldn't even be this, but you'd say it's worth a couple of hundred pounds.
00:18:17
Speaker
You put it in at that and then obviously you would expect it to go for significantly more than that because you let the market decide the value of the
00:18:27
Speaker
of the association.
00:18:28
Speaker
You can think, well, what do people pay for really good association books for kind of, you know, relating to economics and political theory?
00:18:39
Speaker
And you reach an estimate that way.
00:18:42
Speaker
But you always want to be on the conservative side for these sorts of items.
00:18:48
Speaker
You do want to allow the market to...
00:18:54
Speaker
to operate and especially you want any auctioneer, you want competition.
00:19:01
Speaker
Because that's what really, that's what gets you the best prices in the end is strong competition between real bidders.
00:19:11
Speaker
What is the number that you've put on the Wealth of Nations?
00:19:14
Speaker
Oh, sorry, it's three to five thousand pounds.
00:19:35
Speaker
Let's take a quick break.
00:19:36
Speaker
First, I want to remind you that, as always, there are images of the objects we're talking about on the web at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast, and also on my Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:19:47
Speaker
And you can get in touch with me directly by emailing podcast at themagazineantiques.com.
00:19:53
Speaker
I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions for future guests.
00:19:56
Speaker
Thanks so much for your feedback.
00:19:57
Speaker
If you like the podcast, leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening.
00:20:02
Speaker
We'll get back to Gabriel and Bruce right after this.
00:20:08
Speaker
Would you like to learn how much the most expensive American looking glass ever sold at auction went for?
00:20:13
Speaker
Or to find out if your collection is appropriate for sale?
00:20:16
Speaker
Freeman's, America's oldest auction house, has the answers.
00:20:20
Speaker
Discover how Thomas Aiken's gross clinic stayed in Philadelphia.
00:20:24
Speaker
Delve into the work of Wayne Thiebaud, the great draftsman, and much more on their website, freemansauction.com.
00:20:31
Speaker
From modern masters to French furniture, Freeman's takes you behind the scenes at auctions and exhibitions, delivering the latest in art market news, events, and stories.
00:20:39
Speaker
Subscribe to their bi-weekly magazine and get it sent straight to your inbox.
00:20:43
Speaker
Visit Freeman's at freemansauction.com to learn more.
00:20:48
Speaker
Now, there are other items in the sale, and I mentioned the Mont Pelerin conference.
00:20:58
Speaker
Gabriel, there's a piece commemorating that conference in the sale, is there not?
00:21:04
Speaker
There is.
00:21:05
Speaker
There's a small gold ingot that was presented to Hayek in 1972 on the 25th anniversary of the conference, which is a
00:21:17
Speaker
A lovely memento, actually, of this key moment in post-war economic and political thinking.
00:21:25
Speaker
And a really lovely gesture to Hayek.
00:21:30
Speaker
Bruce, can you give a little context around Mont Pelerin?
00:21:33
Speaker
What was it and why did it matter?
00:21:36
Speaker
Sure.
00:21:37
Speaker
The Mont Pelerin Society was a meeting that took place in Switzerland in 1947.
00:21:42
Speaker
Hayek was the person who organized the conference.
00:21:47
Speaker
It attracted people who in later years would become famous, people like Milton Friedman, George Stigler.
00:21:55
Speaker
So these are members of the University of Chicago Economics Department, so the Chicago School of Economics, as it were.
00:22:03
Speaker
And the way Hayek described the meeting was that he would go around to each country after World War II, and there was such enthusiasm for building a welfare state, the beverage report,
00:22:17
Speaker
in England in the 40s that outlined the way forward.
00:22:22
Speaker
He said there was very few people who, like him, embraced classical liberalism, who were more in favor of a pre-market approach.
00:22:29
Speaker
So he gathered people from different countries all over Europe.
00:22:35
Speaker
This is post-war Europe.
00:22:36
Speaker
He had a few people from Germany, but mostly the States, England, other places.
00:22:43
Speaker
And he...
00:22:44
Speaker
saw it as a place where people who had these similar views, although they disagreed with each other about the way forward, they agreed on certain basic principles, rule of law, trying to create a society where people had the maximum liberty, but also within a government framework as well.
00:23:06
Speaker
So they weren't anarcho-libertarians by any means, but they were going against the grain of their times.
00:23:15
Speaker
And it was actually quite successful in a number of ways in providing an intellectual framework for developing some of the ideas that Hayek, for example, would express in books like Constitution of Liberty.
00:23:29
Speaker
So would you say it was influential in terms of the, shall we say, the mainstream of economic thought in the latter half of the 20th century?
00:23:41
Speaker
So it was interesting in the way that it was influential.
00:23:44
Speaker
It was quietly influential.
00:23:45
Speaker
A lot of people don't know anything about the Monterey society.
00:23:49
Speaker
It's not like they put out discussion papers or anything like that.
00:23:52
Speaker
It's a meeting of individuals.
00:23:55
Speaker
But the ideas that they generated certainly did enter into the mainstream, particularly after the 1970s.
00:24:03
Speaker
You know, if you take a look at the economic history of that period, you've got stagflation, that is to say, simultaneously high levels of inflation and unemployment, low growth.
00:24:16
Speaker
And this was following kind of the rise of Keynesian economics, where the idea was that government could be
00:24:23
Speaker
manage the economy, have full employment with low inflation, and exactly the opposite is what was taking place.
00:24:29
Speaker
So in England, in the United States, in other places, these ideas suddenly had a resonance that they might not have had during the immediate post-war period.
00:24:42
Speaker
So it's in that way that these ideas started to spread.
00:24:45
Speaker
And then they had political, you know, representatives who would engage them
00:24:52
Speaker
Often the theories and the politics weren't always in line exactly, but certainly in terms of the general influence in favor of less government intervention, of deregulation, that certainly caught on.
00:25:07
Speaker
And it is obviously part of an ongoing debate.
00:25:12
Speaker
And I have to point out that this was in 1972, so this was just when –
00:25:18
Speaker
stagflation was actually starting to ramp up.
00:25:22
Speaker
So although Hayek early in his career favored a gold standard, later he did not.
00:25:28
Speaker
And indeed later in the 1970s he wrote a book on the denationalization of money competing currencies.
00:25:34
Speaker
But the idea of remembering his contributions of founding the society by giving him this piece of gold was
00:25:41
Speaker
was to say, well, we need to have a secure currency, and the gold standard was something that at least at one time seemed to have worked pretty well.
00:25:49
Speaker
Gabriel, had you studied economic history at all before, or was this a brand new subject for you?
00:25:58
Speaker
It was pretty much brand new.
00:26:01
Speaker
I mean, obviously, as I said, I was aware of him, but I was aware of him really more from a
00:26:08
Speaker
in terms of what I did know about political philosophy rather than me.
00:26:13
Speaker
But it's one of the great pleasures of my job is to discover new writers, new thinkers, and to just try and understand what it is about them that makes them so compelling.
00:26:29
Speaker
And when the gears started turning and the sales started to come together, what sort of work were you doing to prepare for that?
00:26:39
Speaker
And what sort of research were you conducting?
00:26:46
Speaker
Well, it was a combination of things.
00:26:48
Speaker
So I needed to understand more about kayak.
00:26:53
Speaker
and what would draw people to Hayek, really.
00:26:57
Speaker
I mean, because I knew the politics with which he was associated, but what I didn't know was about his thinking and how he reached the conclusions that he did.
00:27:11
Speaker
And what really struck me and what made me realise this is what draws people to Hayek is...
00:27:17
Speaker
his questioning nature.
00:27:19
Speaker
It's the way that he poses questions, really profound questions about the nature of society, the nature of economic transactions.
00:27:27
Speaker
He looks at these questions and that's what takes them to the economics and the politics that we're maybe more familiar with.
00:27:36
Speaker
That was a key thing for me.
Valuing Objects for Their Stories
00:27:38
Speaker
And then the other side of it was to look at the items that the family had and to think, well,
00:27:47
Speaker
to sift through, if you like, and to work out what would be appropriate for auction.
00:27:53
Speaker
And that's very much a collaborative business with the sellers, of course.
00:27:59
Speaker
I want to step back from Hayek for a second and ask you about that.
00:28:04
Speaker
Could you give an example or two of other areas that you've been thrust into, maybe without prior training or knowledge and that you had to sort through?
00:28:15
Speaker
Well, it does vary a lot.
00:28:17
Speaker
I mean, what I do quite a lot of are these very distinctive association objects.
00:28:24
Speaker
So items where the real, the value there is not in the object itself, it's about the story that the object tells.
00:28:32
Speaker
And whether that could be, I don't know, last September I was dealing with a copy of the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover that was used in a very, very famous trial.
00:28:45
Speaker
an obscenity trial here in England in the beginning of the 1960s and this is one of these things that triggered the permissive society.
00:28:54
Speaker
I mean I've dealt with other Nobel Prizes including the biologist Hans Krebs who discovered something called the citric acid cycle which is certainly something that I didn't know
00:29:08
Speaker
anything about before.
00:29:10
Speaker
Well, I thought everyone knew about the citric acid side.
00:29:15
Speaker
I mean, it's a wonderful pleasure to have that opportunity to find out about these very diverse subject matters.
00:29:23
Speaker
And as I say, it's not about becoming a great specialist in that area, obviously, but it's about understanding why people care.
00:29:37
Speaker
Right, okay.
00:29:39
Speaker
Who do you think, not specifically, but what sort of buyer or collector do you think is likely to buy the Nobel medal?
00:29:49
Speaker
And what do you think that the piece is going to mean to that person?
00:29:57
Speaker
I think it is very hard to imagine that it wouldn't be bought by someone who
00:30:04
Speaker
who is deeply interested in Hayek and for whom Hayek's thinking does not mean a great deal.
00:30:13
Speaker
That's really the key.
00:30:14
Speaker
That's really the key point.
00:30:16
Speaker
It's not about sort of someone who is a collector of, you know, Nobel Prizes.
00:30:23
Speaker
You know, that is, it will be someone for whom Hayek chimes.
00:30:28
Speaker
It really means something to that.
00:30:31
Speaker
That'll be the thing that sells the
00:30:36
Speaker
Who that would be, we will have to wait and see.
00:30:41
Speaker
But what you can say is that there are a lot of people out there for whom Hayek doesn't mean great people.
00:30:52
Speaker
including people with substantial funds.
00:30:55
Speaker
All right.
00:30:56
Speaker
Well, it's been a real pleasure.
00:30:58
Speaker
Thank you both.
00:30:59
Speaker
I really do appreciate it.
00:31:02
Speaker
I hope you've had a little bit of fun.
00:31:04
Speaker
It's been fascinating for me.
00:31:06
Speaker
I wish I had 3,000 pounds for that Adam Smith book.
00:31:09
Speaker
I'd like to see what high-end got under funds.
00:31:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's a lovely thing, isn't it?
00:31:15
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:31:17
Speaker
That I think will probably do very well.
00:31:29
Speaker
There you have it.
00:31:30
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed the conversation and maybe took something away from it.
00:31:34
Speaker
Once again, you can see images at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:31:41
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati and our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:31:45
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:31:46
Speaker
See you next time.