Hayek’s argument was predicated upon the premise that knowledge is always ‘local’ and all attempts to aggregate it are bound to fail. The world, in his eyes, is too complex for its essence to be distilled in some central node; e.g. the state. If we hardly understand our own preferences and capabilities, how on earth can we hope to aggregate the

In my Far from Equilibrium Economics and Finance course, the first two articles I have my PhD students read are Friedrich von Hayek’s Economics and Knowledge (1937) and The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945) , von Hayek’s classic papers that describe a market economy as a solution to the division of knowledge problem. The third article I have them

I ended up with a picture in my head of a market economy as a far-from-equilibrium communications network that uses prices to transmit information about wants and scarcities to people who make production and consumption decisions, exactly as Friedrich von Hayek4 explained almost 90 years ago.