The Manhattan Institute Announces John F. Cogan as the 2018 Hayek Book Prize Winner

New York, NY—The Manhattan Institute has announced that John F. Cogan will be awarded the annual Hayek Book Prize for his book The High Cost of Good Intentions. Cogan will receive a $50,000 award and will deliver the annual Hayek lecture on June 7, 2018.

Upon hearing the news, John F. Cogan said, “I am deeply honored and humbled to receive the Hayek Prize. I’ve read each of the nominated books and each represents an extraordinary contribution to its particular area of inquiry. The high quality of these books makes me cherish the Hayek Prize even more.”

“John Cogan is like a surveyor plotting Hayek’s ‘Road to Serfdom’ for us. Cogan’s work shows us how far away from individual liberty and responsibility we have come, and what we might do to reverse our course,” said Amity Shlaes, jury chair.

Manhattan Institute President Lawrence Mone added, “We are pleased to award the Hayek Prize this year to John F. Cogan. His comprehensive and unflinching history of U.S. federal entitlement programs is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand how our safety net has ballooned to the untenable size it is today.”

Cogan was one of five finalists announced in January:

• Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson (W. W. Norton & Company)
• India’s Long Road: The Search for Prosperity by Vijay Joshi (Oxford University Press)
• Europe’s Growth Challenge by Anders Aslund and Simeon Djankov (Oxford University Press)
• The High Cost of Good Intentions: A History of US Federal Entitlement Programs by John F. Cogan (Stanford University Press)
• Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy by Douglas A. Irwin (University of Chicago Press)

John F. Cogan is the Leonard and Shirley Ely Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a faculty member in Stanford University's Public Policy Program.

About the Hayek Lecture and Book Prize
Political philosopher and Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek, author of groundbreaking works such as The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty, was the key figure in the twentieth century revival of classical liberalism. He was also a formative influence on the Manhattan Institute. When our founder, Sir Antony Fisher, asked how best to reverse the erosion of freedom, Hayek advised him not to begin with politics per se but to fight first on the battlefield of ideas. The Hayek Lecture and Prize affirm and celebrate this mission.