#reading-list **URL:** https://www.kysq.org/docs/Hayek_45.pdf ## Summary - Early 20th century economist making an argument against centrally planned economies and in-favor of free markets. - **“there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific...the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place”** - “_the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form…It follows from this that central planning based on statistical information by its nature cannot take direct account of these circumstances of time and place,”_ - _“If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization.”_ - Echoes of this in building autonomous teams, network design (cf. [the End-to-end Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle)) - Note that this argument is invariant to technology growth in payment tracking/KYC, because the things that need to be measured have to do with human-centric circumstances. - This assumes that humans are a necessary part of the economic process, which…it’s not clear that will always be the case. - It feels like there’s an implication here on the limits of AI to automate firms in the medium-term.