In his final book, Hayek referred to Hardin in a section titled “the calculus of costs is a calculus of lives.” Expanding on his ideas of cultural evolutionary progress measured in the quality and quantity of lives, Hayek suggested that humans could be ranked by utility: “The good hunter or defender of the community, the fertile mother and perhaps even the wise old man may be more important than most babies and most of the aged.” “The requirement of preserving the maximum number of lives,” he wrote, “is not that all individual lives be regarded as equally important.”

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 29