The use of knowledge in society

The article tells us that in a free market we don't have to possess all the information; instead, we just have to understand what we are comparatively good at and pursue maximum profit. For a central-planning country leader, however, he must be omniscient, which is simply impossible.

What's intuitive in this article is that Hayek points out: Knowledge which all separate individuals possess is dispersed while incomplete and frequently contradicted.

As the technology and science are becoming more and more complex, it's impossible to appear encyclopedia scholar or leader. Even in economics there are polarized views on the same phenomenon.

Important point: The problem of a society is how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know. (Tacit Knowledge)


Any dictator who wants to do the planning should be impersonal. But is that possible? Even if there really exists philosophers as Plato described, they simply are not god who can make response quick enough to adjust any tiny change within the market. (Besides, God is dead. There is no fucking god who can save me. The only way is to evolve into overman.)

What's great:
Scientific knowledge is not the sum of knowledge. Too much pursuit of scientific knowledge separates intellectuals and businessmen, making the former lofty and cynical, which is really fucking ridiculous. Wisdom and rumination cannot occur without necessary food and products, which are produced by producers and gathered together by middlemen.

Those who advocate altruism is quack. People do things for themselves.(Please refer to John List's economic experiments) Those who condemn capitalism immoral are freaks. People do things based on self-interest.

A doubt: If people are really that altruist, why is there shortage of kidney donations?

A man doesn't have to know all the information. All that's significant for him is how much more or less difficult to produce they have become compared with other things with which he's also concerned, or how much more or less urgently wanted are the alternative things he uses or produces.


Whitehead:  Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use after he had stumbled upon it without fully understanding.