[nickik]

> Firstly, by reducing the Collective Brain to merely the market/price-discovery

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.

[aerodeck]

I see a couple of interviews here:

http://hayek.ufm.edu/index.php/Main_Page

Do you have a suggestion of which one is good to start? I really want to dive deep into this guy.

Also, to be fair, theory travels. A lot of time it's more interesting to see how a concept is misused than applied correctly.

EDIT:

lol. it seems that yea, he thinks price-signals are the only thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV7-2Aua4_4&feature=youtu.be...

[nickik]

Yes, the place you linked to is the best for interviews.

A couple of things to note.

These interviews with some leading schooners came about because Hayek was old and he had not given many interviews on video. So what you are seeing there is a very old Hayek who does not always get everything correct about the past (as always happens in these situations).

Second, Hayek changed his position on some topics quite a bit. Please don't watch the interviews directly assume his book that he wrote earlier are the same.

Hayek's arguments by nature are hard to write and talk about. Him not being a good speaker (or writer) makes this very hard. He himself multiple times tried to invent new words for concepts because he felt the words that existed did not capture the meaning. Mostly he was not successful beyond his own works.

If you are open to reading, I would suggest "Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek". The auther is leading authority on Hayek and is the editor of Hayek Collected works.

Depending on what aspect you are interested in there are different more specialized books. For Hayeks own works, I think "Road to Serfdom" is a easy first read but its written for a very specific people in a specific context, that has to be understood. Some people recommend "Fatal Conceit" as a nice 'summary' for lots of stuff, but there are also some issues with it. I think also that the essay collection "Individualism and Economic Order" is required reading.

There are a couple podcasts that I can recommend, specially for beginners. One is with the author of the book above. They address different aspects of Hayek.

- Boudreaux on Reading Hayek http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2012/Boudreauxreading... (this gives a good overview about his books)

- Caldwell on Hayek http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/01/caldwell_on_hay.htm...

- Caplan on Hayek, Richter, and Socialism http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/06/caplan_on_hayek.htm...

- Larry White on Hayek and Money http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/02/larry_white_on.html