David Warsh finally says what someone needed to say: Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

“Certainly Hayek made a big impression on me and my friends, when, as young men, we read him in the 1970s,” Mr. Warsh, a journalist, wrote on his Web site, EconomicPrincipals.com, earlier this month. “We felt the same way about the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. With the passage of time, though, 19th-century liberalism has seemed, by itself, a less and less adequate framework with which to deal with the problems of the 21st century.” These days, you constantly see articles that make it seem as if there was a great debate in the 1930s between the economists John Maynard Keynes and Mr. Hayek, and that this debate has continued through the generations. As Mr.Warsh says, nothing like this happened.

Hayek essentially made a fool of himself early in the Great Depression, and his ideas vanished from the professional discussion.

So why is his name invoked so much now? Because Mr. Hayek’s book, “The Road to Serfdom,” struck a political chord with the American right, which adopted Mr.

Hayek as a sort of mascot — and retroactively inflated his role as an economic thinker. Mr. Warsh is even crueler about this than I would have been; he compares Mr. Hayek (or rather the “Hayek” invented by his admirers) to Rosie Ruiz, who in 1980 claimed to have won the Boston Marathon, but actually took the subway to the finish line. “The claims conservatives are making about the role [Mr. Hayek] played as an economist are beginning to smack of Ruizismus,” Mr. Warsh writes. “That is, they have jumped a caricature out of the bushes late in the day and claim that their guy ran a great race.” Now, given my criticisms of where macroeconomics has gone since the 1970s, I of all people should be careful to say that ideas ignored or rejected by the professional mainstream aren’t necessarily without value. To take the most obvious example, the economist Hyman Minsky now looms large in many people’s thinking, my own included, even though he died a very marginal figure. But the Hayek thing is almost entirely about politics rather than economics. Without “The Road to Serfdom” — and the way that book was used by vested interests to oppose the welfare state — nobody would be talking about his business cycle ideas.

Reader comments from nytimes.com

Public figures like Friedrich Hayek and his theories are convenient for the rentier class. Mr. Hayek’s arguments themselves aren’t as important as the veneer of science they give to ideas that their supporters already believe in. That’s why hacks like Ayn Rand are popular.

— Carl Weetabix, Switzerland

Far too many people on the right side of the political spectrum idolize Mr. Hayek for things he never actually said or did, all in an attempt to create an anti- Keynes contemporary. This isn’t just annoying, but bad history and just plain wrong.

— Paul Boudreau, Canada

Regardless of the motives of the political right or the validity of Friedrich Hayek’s work, Mr. Krugman, it is both incorrect and haughty to claim that he isn’t an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

Like yourself, he is a Nobel laureate.

Like yourself, one of his works was selected by the American Economic Review earlier this year as among the top “20 admirable and important articles” published in the magazine’s first 100 years. It seems that his stature in the profession is quite comparable to your own. It takes great hubris for any economist to dismiss Mr. Hayek.

— Name withheld, Illinois

In the end, aren’t all economists simply searching for data to support their own positions based on whichever school they come from, be it Keynesian, Austrian or monetarist?

— Jon Olmsted, Washington

If you look at the people who have supported Mr. Hayek’s work recently, like the billionaire Koch brothers, it’s clear that his ideas are being promoted because that’s what the rich want the rest of us to hear.

— Name withheld, Virginia

In Mr. Hayek’s time, there were few nations moving from regulated to laissez-faire capitalism, while there were several moving from regulated capitalism to a form of socialism.

So while Mr. Hayek may or may not have had a problem with what is today termed “supercapitalism” or “hypercapitalism” to the degree he did with socialism, such systems weren’t being embraced by anyone in his day to the extent that socialism was. Thus Mr.Hayek focused on the dangers of the latter.

— Scott, New York