Dr. Birgir Thor Runolfsson, the Chair of the Economics Faculty at the University, was elected member of the Mont Pelerin Society at its biannual general meeting in New Delhi 21–26 September. The other two attendants from Iceland were Ragnar Arnason, Professor Emeritus of Fisheries Economics at the University of Iceland, and Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland. The Mont Pelerin Society is an international academy of (classical) liberal scholars and men of affairs, founded by Friedrich A. von Hayek in Switzerland in April 1947. Founding members included later Nobel Laureates Maurice Allais, Milton Friedman, and George J. Stigler, the well-known economists Frank H. Knight, founder of the Chicago School of economics, and Ludwig von Mises, founder of the Austrian School of economics, the economist Luigi Einaudi, President of Italy in 1948–1955, Dr. Trygve Hoff, Editor of Norwegian business magazine Farmand, and Swedish professors Eli F. Heckscher and Herbert Tingsten. Hannes Gissurarson attended his first meeting of the Society at Stanford in 1980. Becoming a member in 1984, he was on the Board of Directors in 1998–2004 and organised a regional meeting of the Society in Iceland in 2005.
At the New Delhi meeting, Professor Gissurarson made two interventions. In a session on economic policy in India it was described how a domestic elite replace the British raj in 1947, establishing a burdensome bureaucracy and trying to implement unrealistic ideas about central economic planning, while maintaing most formal symbols of democracy. Gissurarson asked whether it would not have been more sensible to hand over power to the existing multitude of territories, some of which had been under British rule, and some of which had been governed by Maharajas and Nawabs, such as Hyderabad and Mysore, forcibly conquered by the elite shortly after the British withdrawal. Possibly then what would have emerged would have been competition between different regimes, instead of the elite imposing on the whole of India ideas tht it had learned from left-wing university teachers in Britain. In a session on the fiftieth anniversary of Hayek’s Nobel Prize in Economics, in 1974, Gissurarson recalled when he was a student at Oxford University in 1983 that Hayek visited him and some of his fellow students. They asked him whether they could use his name and found a Hayek Society at Oxford to discuss the problems and prospects of classical liberalism. ‘Yes, if you promise me not to become Hayekians. I have noticed that the Marxists are much worse than Marx and the Keynesians much worse than Keynes,’ Hayek replied.
At the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in New Delhi the Nordic participants went together to dinner one night. From left: David Andersson, Sweden and Taiwan, Dr. Kristian Niemietz, London, Prof. Birgir Th. Runolfsson, Iceland, Dr. Lars Peder Nordbakken, Norway, Dr. Nils Karlson, Sweden, Prof. Ragnar Arnason, Prof. Anna Agnarsdottir (wife of Ragnar Arnason), Susanne Enger (wife of Nils Karlson), Sweden, Prof. Hannes H. Gissurarson, Iceland, og Håkan Gergils, Sweden.
