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Friedrich Hayek Rocks!

Kevin Marks was telling a bunch of us in social software discussions how important Friedrich Hayek's thinking had been, and since then I've had a too-low priority note in the back of my brain to look into Hayek's work. Forunately I've just stumbled onto a Boston Globe article clarifying the value of Hayek's thinking, which wasn't widely accepted in Hayek's time, the mid-20th century – but is like a road map for 21st century thinking. Though he was an economist, he theorized that the brain's activity is emergent, "arising out of distributed networks of simple units (neurons) exchanging local signals." And he understood the problem of knowledge management:

Hayek's most important insight, which he referred to as his "one discovery" in the social sciences, was to define the central economic and social problem as one of organizing dispersed knowledge. Different people have different purposes. They know different things about the world. Much important information is local and transitory, known only to the "man on the spot." Some of that knowledge is objective and quantifiable, but much is tacit and unarticulated. Often we only discover what we truly want as we actually make trade-offs between competing goods."

The economic problem of society," Hayek wrote in his 1945 article, "is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate `given' resources -- if `given' is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these `data.' It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in totality."

jon posted this at 7:56 AM
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