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Funny to see this on HN. I am currently reading a book that details the recent history of economic theory and how it has been in bed with neoliberalism. It has much to say about Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society, a think-tank that he founded to develop his ideas. What surprises me about Hayek was that he had a radical conception of decentralization, managing to talk about human society as though on-par with an ant-colony. IMO, this sort of anti-humanism is a necessary ingredient for overcoming anthropocentrism in our current thinking and pivoting towards ecological thinking, rather than purely rational thinking. However, I think Hayek makes some tremendous mistakes in his thinking. Firstly, by reducing the Collective Brain to merely the market/price-discovery, he ignores the possibility that price-controls and/or social-demonization could themselves be components of that brain (perhaps fulfilling the function of an OS's kernel). Hayek talks much about there being no one person who can understand everything, but fails to critique himself. Secondly, he fails to see how the setup of a market has an influence on the kind of information that gets processed. In order for some thing to be exchanged on the market, it needs to be commodified in some way. This transformation of /thing/ into /commodity/ is where the social slight-of-hand happens, necessarily discounting some aspect of it's worth. An example is having two identical mugs, but one of those mugs being /mine/ and therefore special to me. That specialness doesn't exist if the mugs are a commodity, and perhaps that specialness fulfills an informational/computational function. In the end, the price is a result of a collective brain, but the market itself is a human construct. Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit and 4Chan all structure their 'markets' differently, with incredibly different results. Hayek had some good ideas, but he was too much of an apologist for the existing economic order for those ideas to really be useful. As technologists resurrect his ideas to apologize for the existing technological order, the same will likely be the case. |
He does not.
> he ignores the possibility that price-controls and/or social-demonization could themselves be components of that brain
Again. He does not. He actually talks about this question in actual interviews that you can listen to.
> Hayek talks much about there being no one person who can understand everything, but fails to critique himself.
Again, there are literal interviews where he talks about this exact question.
And making a argument myself, his point is that you can not understand everything and that's why you can not centrally control it, not that he actually knows how everything works.
Plus, he has spent a lot of time on actually trying to figure out how this processes happens, and again, there are audio recordings of him talking about it.
> In order for some thing to be exchanged on the market, it needs to be commodified in some way.
False. Prices work for uniques as well.
> This transformation of /thing/ into /commodity/ is where the social slight-of-hand happens, necessarily discounting some aspect of it's worth. An example is having two identical mugs, but one of those mugs being /mine/ and therefore special to me. That specialness doesn't exist if the mugs are a commodity, and perhaps that specialness fulfills an informational/computational function.
That is exactly what the price mechanism is for. If the mug has special value to you then you can not sell it or sell it at a higher price. You are signaling to the 'collective brain' that this is a special mug. That's the exact point.
> In the end, the price is a result of a collective brain, but the market itself is a human construct.
Nobody argued against that.