2021-09-27

Daily checklist

• Remove accidental days off

Notes

• Gladwell, insiders and outsiders with art
  • ”Maybe that’s the last and most important lesson from all of this. All of us, in the areas where we are outsiders, are prone to thinking and saying things that are just plain dumb. The trick is to recognize when we are in that zone, and keep our mouths shut.”
• I listened to amia srinivasen on Tyler Cowen
  • It’s an interesting conversation because they disagree on a lot. Tyler had problems with the lack of empirical evidence or analysis from Amia, while Amia’s ideas are very socialist and conceding no ground to the current standard which is also interesting. Especially in relation to her ideas that de growth might be inevitable that the equilibrium would be reached. I don’t really know what the Utopia she describes looks like I guess.
• Foundation and the tendrils of Christianity. Theres probably nothing there, or its obvious but interesting none the less.
• Hayek, Cowen recommendation

  • The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allcoate “given” resources … 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 the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality.

  • Planning, the allocation of resources
  • How do we determine how knowledge is received about planning which Hayek says is fundamentally what economic activity is. Is it centralized, decentralized or some mixture? Conveying knowledge of everybodys planning.
  • Knowledge of circumstance with time and place: Scientific knowledge is not all knowledge. Hayek describes contextual, social knowledge as important in efficient or useful economic activity. Hayek says that people view knowledge as always some given on starting a particular activity and that it is wrong to frown upon this practical, accumulated knowledge.
  • So the ‘man on the spot’ knowledge can’t really be centrally planned but the decisions made often have use for the higher level economic knowledge

  • It is always a question of the relative importance of the particular things with which he is concerned, and the causes which alter their relative importance are of no interest to him beyond the effect on those concrete things of his own environment

  • This is where the price system comes in, Hayek uses the example of tin and how a change in supply has reverberations on the whole economic system. As if some all knowing person made the change.
  • The price system was emergent without any real conscious decision and in that sense is slightly uncomfortable. These emergent ideas and systems happen in a lot of social sciences according to Hayek.