Hayek points out that sensibly allocating scarce resources requires knowledge dispersed among many people, with no individual or group of experts capable of acquiring it all. Informed economic decision-making requires allowing people to act on the information of “time and place” that only they have, while providing a system of communication that motivates us and informs us on how best to do it. Market exchange and prices generate the information and motivation. Yet economics students are invariably taught that the market works properly only if all participants have perfect knowledge. This is nonsense, as Hayek explains. If everyone had perfect knowledge, the case for the market would largely disappear. The market is essential precisely because it allows people to benefit from widely dispersed knowledge when no one has more than the smallest fragment of that knowledge, not even government planners. Every time a government plan restricts market exchange, ignorance is substituted for knowledge.
Read Hayek’s article and you will approach your future reading with a more informed perspective on what economics is about.
~ Dwight Lee
THE USE OF KNOWLEGE IN SOCIETY
BY F.A. HAYEK
I
What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic. That is, the answer to the question of what is the best use of the available means is implicit in our assumptions. The conditions which the solution of this optimum problem must satisfy have been fully worked out and can be stated best in mathematical form: put at their briefest, they are that the marginal rates of substitution between any two commodities or factors must be the same in all their different uses.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário