Tom Sowell - perhaps the smartest economist never to win a Nobel and, ahem, a Chicago boy, has an update on Hayek and the knowledge problem. Hayek if you recall proposed that the reason that social engineering and central planning in particular doesn't work is the inability of the planners to know all of the information embedded in the billions of daily transactions/interactions that people have. Dr. Sowell adds to this the point of experience: why is it that for most of life's needs we rely on terribly average older adults rather than brilliant youngsters? experience. For the vast majority of human interactions a lifetime of experience is far more useful than abstract smarts - so we respect age, we choose experience. And of course the accumulated experience of all human beings in a society far outweighs the genius of the social engineers at the top. The key to society is figuring out how to facilitate the spontaneous organization of this distributed experience and intelligence. Money graf:
"Elites may have more brilliance, but those who make decisions for society as a whole cannot possibly have as much experience as the millions of people whose decisions they preempt. The education and intellects of the elites may lead them to have more sweeping presumptions, but that just makes them more dangerous to the freedom, as well as to the well-being, of the people as a whole."
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