Sublime

At the time, a fierce debate was raging about whether centrally planned economies like that of the Soviet Union—in other words, economies where there was a single core responsible for creating and distributing goods and services—worked better than free market economies where planning and production were done by an undirected, decentralized crowd. M

Regardless of how exactly one generates theories of other people's minds, it's clear that these theories profoundly affect moral decisions. Look, for example, at the ultimatum game, a staple of experimental economics. The rules of the game are simple, if a little bit unfair: an experimenter pairs two people together, and hands one of them ten dolla

We should be skeptical of ideologues who claim to know all of the relevant paths to making ours a better world. How can we be sure that a favored ideology will in fact bring about good consequences? Given the radical uncertainty of the more distant future, we can’t know how to achieve preferred goals with any kind of certainty over longer time hori

a proposal for a guaranteed income would today almost certainly be attacked as a liberal mechanism for attempting to bring about “equal outcomes.” Hayek himself explicitly rejected this, however, writing that “it is unfortunate that the endeavor to secure a uniform minimum for all who cannot provide for themselves has become connected with the whol

bankrupt, and Maximalists would have no money if they surrendered to the state.

Gains from trade are greatest when there’s a big discrepancy in comparative advantage,

If you run a two-sided marketplace, you’ll find contra Hayek that not all knowledge is local. For example, Sidecar lost to Uber because drivers set prices themselves, as opposed to setting them centrally. Hayekians would agree that Sidecar’s approach was optimal: drivers have local knowledge and central planning can’t work. But Uber’s central plann

Tyler Cowen summarizes this reality more bluntly: “The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?”