In his 1944 classic The Road to Serfdom, the Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek warned that central planning and public ownership would inevitably lead to hardship, oppression, and even tyranny, while free markets would naturally maximize general welfare. The same year, in The Great Transformation, the American-Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi offered a very different picture, arguing that market forces and society are locked in a kind of struggle: c