For what it's worth, I agree with you totally on this. BTW, when my
10-year-old son saw your name, he excitedly said "Yoshie!" in reference
Nintendo.
Yoshie wrote:
>... A Mieses-Hayekian opposition to our position, however, would be
>something like this: "all needs & desires of all individuals are unknown &
>unknowable to any single mind; we as individuals only possess very partial
>knowledge; it can't be properly said that we 'know' even our own needs &
>desires unless real, not hypothetical, alternatives are presented &
>opportunity costs (tacitly) calculated through our participation in the
>market; we can't explicitly go through all the relations between ends and
>means, so we need prices that help us (tacitly) make use of a relative
>value of each alternative." (This radical privileging of tacit & partial
>knowledge dispersed among individuals over explicit & collective
>knowledge, as well as opposition to conscious planning, is a theme that
>later gets carried by postmodernists to its anti-scientific extreme.)
>
>Whereas we think of the market, for instance, as a mechanism of rationing
>("A shortage of water supply? Raise the price! Unemployment? Lower the
>wage!") in the system of production for profits, not for human needs,
>Hayek thinks of the market as a mechanism of discovery of human needs &
>desires we cannot know otherwise. For us the market is a question of
>social relations; for Hayek, it is a matter of epistemology.
>
>***** 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.
>
>This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society
>faces. And the economic calculus which we have developed to solve this
>logical problem, though an important step toward the solution of the
>economic problem of society, does not yet provide an answer to it. The
>reason for this is that the "data" from which the economic calculus starts
>are never for the whole society "given" to a single mind which could work
>out the implications and can never be so given. (Hayek, "The Use of
>Knowledge in Society," at
><http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Economics/HayekUseOfKnowledge.html> *****
>
>I agree with Hayek that no single mind can command the complete knowledge
>of all our needs & desires + all available means. Why should we, however,
>strive to work out planned economy with such assumptions of divine
>perfection? Why set the bar of successful planning so impossibly
>high? There seems no reason to assume what Hayek has us assume. We need
>only know enough to meet existing needs better than capitalism does (= we
>don't have to be perfect) & leave room for improvement (say, invention of
>greener technology) through the process of trial and error (here we can
>even, if we so desire, leave a little room for the "market" as long as the
>"market" doesn't assume the character of compulsion). In other words, I
>object to Hayek's assumption about what degree of knowledge is necessary
>to get socialist planning going.
Hayek's position -- so ably put forth by Justin -- seems to be (a) in order
to avoid market rule, there needs to be a God; but (b) God does not exist;
so (c) market rule is inevitable. But then he assumes that God exists in
the form of the Invisible Hand.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
