In 1945, the Austrian economist and public intellectual F.A. Hayek published an article on “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” It was a response to those advocating for planned economies, but its lessons can be generalized. Hayek was making a profound argument: We must appreciate the limited ability of central authorities to collect and use information. Even if we could make a government agency that was lean, efficient, and staffed only with able and selfless professionals, he pointed out, it would still struggle to achieve its ambitions.
The roadblock isn't intentions; it's information. It is “a problem of the utilization of knowledge,” Hayek wrote, “which is not given to anyone in its totality.” No one can ever have all the information necessary, much less all of it smartly combined and analyzed, to make the right decisions. In his words, “the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”
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