McCloskey/Hayek

 

                                       McCloskey/Hayek     

This is from McCloskey's new book that summarizes some of Hayek. It is simple and clear. The problem arises if it's right, particularly now with the new election results.

A person of sense trying to understand the nature of a complex modern economy arrives quickly at a certain humility. Which would not describe Mariana Mazzucato. The American columnist and political thinker George Will recently summarized Hayek’s central idea of proper humility, against top-down State steering: “Human beings are limited in what they can know about their situation, and governments composed of human beings are limited in their comprehension of society’s complexities. The simple, indisputable truth is that everyone knows almost nothing about almost everything.” Though he was the first among economists to draw particular attention to it, such sobering thought is not original with Hayek. It is implied by every thinker who has gotten beyond being a statist epigone of Plato’s Republic or The Laws (and not simply a footnote, as we all are, to Plato’s vision of philosophy). An economist who lacks such humility believes she can engineer the world, set up an ideal New Republic, imagine into existence a worldly-philosopher king manipulating her fellow citizens. Easy.