Friedrich Hayek and the collective brain - CapX - Matt Ridley:
March 23, 2017 - "It is possible to go through an entire education to PhD level ... without any of your teachers or professors breathing the words 'Friedrich Hayek'.... If Hayek is mentioned at all in academia, it is usually as an alias for Voldemort. To admire Hayek is to advocate selfishness and individualism. This could not be more wrong. What Hayek argued is that human collaboration is necessary for society to work; that the great feature of the market is that it enables us to work for each other, not just for ourselves; and that authoritarian, top-down rule is not the source of order or progress, but a hindrance....
"Hayek’s point in his famous essay of 1945, 'The Uses of Knowledge in Society', is that central planning cannot work because it is trying to substitute an individual all-knowing intelligence for a distributed and fragmented system of localised but connected knowledge, much of which is tacit.... In Hayek’s words, 'how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and of special circumstances ... the method by which such knowledge can be made as widely available as possible is precisely the problem to which we have to find an answer.' His answer, of course, was the price mechanism....
"Trade creates a collective problem-solving brain as big as the trade network itself. It draws upon dispersed and fragmented knowledge to create things that nobody can even comprehend, wholes that are more complex than the sum of their individual mental parts. No other animal does this....
"As Hayek put it, 'That the division of labor has reached the extent which makes modern civilization possible we owe to the fact that it did not have to be consciously created but that man tumbled on a method by which the division of labor could be extended far beyond the limits within which it could have been planned.'
"The invention of exchange had the same impact on human culture as sex had on biological evolution – it made it cumulative. So human technological advancement depended not on individual intelligence but on collective idea sharing....
"Which is, of course, why the internet is such an exciting development. For the first time, humanity has not just some big collective brains (called trade networks), but one truly vast one in which almost everybody can share and in which distance is no obstacle....
"Truly something very weird has happened to the world when, for advocating this bottom-up, egalitarian, collectivist idea, for advocating freedom for people to exchange ideas and serve their fellow human beings thus encouraging social change, Hayek is condemned by left-leaning commentators as a right-wing zealot....
"Hayek taught us to distrust the idea of putting people in charge of other people. Given that government has been the means by which people have committed unspeakable horrors again and again and again, from Nero and Attila to Hitler and Mao, why are people so forgiving of the state and so mistrustful of the market?"
Read more: https://capx.co/iAFWu
'via Blog this'
March 23, 2017 - "It is possible to go through an entire education to PhD level ... without any of your teachers or professors breathing the words 'Friedrich Hayek'.... If Hayek is mentioned at all in academia, it is usually as an alias for Voldemort. To admire Hayek is to advocate selfishness and individualism. This could not be more wrong. What Hayek argued is that human collaboration is necessary for society to work; that the great feature of the market is that it enables us to work for each other, not just for ourselves; and that authoritarian, top-down rule is not the source of order or progress, but a hindrance....
"Hayek’s point in his famous essay of 1945, 'The Uses of Knowledge in Society', is that central planning cannot work because it is trying to substitute an individual all-knowing intelligence for a distributed and fragmented system of localised but connected knowledge, much of which is tacit.... In Hayek’s words, 'how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and of special circumstances ... the method by which such knowledge can be made as widely available as possible is precisely the problem to which we have to find an answer.' His answer, of course, was the price mechanism....
"Trade creates a collective problem-solving brain as big as the trade network itself. It draws upon dispersed and fragmented knowledge to create things that nobody can even comprehend, wholes that are more complex than the sum of their individual mental parts. No other animal does this....
"As Hayek put it, 'That the division of labor has reached the extent which makes modern civilization possible we owe to the fact that it did not have to be consciously created but that man tumbled on a method by which the division of labor could be extended far beyond the limits within which it could have been planned.'
"The invention of exchange had the same impact on human culture as sex had on biological evolution – it made it cumulative. So human technological advancement depended not on individual intelligence but on collective idea sharing....
"Which is, of course, why the internet is such an exciting development. For the first time, humanity has not just some big collective brains (called trade networks), but one truly vast one in which almost everybody can share and in which distance is no obstacle....
"Truly something very weird has happened to the world when, for advocating this bottom-up, egalitarian, collectivist idea, for advocating freedom for people to exchange ideas and serve their fellow human beings thus encouraging social change, Hayek is condemned by left-leaning commentators as a right-wing zealot....
"Hayek taught us to distrust the idea of putting people in charge of other people. Given that government has been the means by which people have committed unspeakable horrors again and again and again, from Nero and Attila to Hitler and Mao, why are people so forgiving of the state and so mistrustful of the market?"
Read more: https://capx.co/iAFWu
'via Blog this'
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