Sublime

At the Freedom School, Charles became particularly enamored of the work of two laissez-faire economists, the Austrian theorist Ludwig von Mises and his star pupil, Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian exile, who visited the Freedom School. Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom had become an improbable best seller in 1944, after Reader’s Digest published a conde

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, has stated that the idea for establishing Wikipedia came to him after he read this paper by Hayek and his explanation of knowledge.

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

Hayek gives us the intuition of prices conveying only what market participants deem to be the most important information and actually destroying the rest, and Holland shows how this can be represented with the formalism of complex systems.

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.

Friedrich Hayek’s book The Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism expressed with clarity and authority what I had long felt but was unable to express, namely the unwisdom of powerful intellects, including Albert Einstein, when they believed that a powerful brain can devise a better system and bring about more “social justice” than what historical evolu