<story><title>Friedrich Hayek and the Collective Brain</title><url>https://capx.co/friedrich-hayek-and-the-collective-brain/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chrismealy</author><text>Having read a ton of Hayek I thought I&amp;#x27;d share what the real Hayek is like, not the libertarian poster child. Actually existing Hayek would probably disappoint most libertarians. He’s against corporate personhood, skeptical about patents and copyright, and for urban planning, unemployment benefits, public health, socialized medicine, and inheritance taxes. It seems like what gets him really riled up is setting prices for cucumbers or state-owned hat factories.&lt;p&gt;His contribution to social science is his focus on distributed information in economic production. Think about how decision-making is distributed in capitalist economies: bankers, investors, asset managers, producers, distributors, retailers, brokers, executives, corporate planning departments, middle managers, marketing departments, advertising, etc. Just imagine trying to replicate all that effort with a few office buildings&amp;#x27; worth of planners in Moscow (Compare that to just Wall Street!). You can&amp;#x27;t run an economy without enough planners.&lt;p&gt;Hayek never tells jokes. I think if he had any sense of humor at all it might have occurred to him that designing the perfect society without planners (or much democracy) was certainly a kind of planning. He&amp;#x27;s like the whiteboard in &amp;quot;Office Space&amp;quot; that says &amp;quot;Planning to Plan&amp;quot; except it says &amp;quot;Planning to not Plan&amp;quot; and it&amp;#x27;s three books and 700 pages long (&amp;quot;Law, Legislation and Liberty&amp;quot;).</text></comment>
<story><title>Friedrich Hayek and the Collective Brain</title><url>https://capx.co/friedrich-hayek-and-the-collective-brain/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aerodeck</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;However, I think Hayek makes some tremendous mistakes in his thinking. Firstly, by reducing the Collective Brain to merely the market&amp;#x2F;price-discovery, he ignores the possibility that price-controls and&amp;#x2F;or social-demonization could themselves be components of that brain (perhaps fulfilling the function of an OS&amp;#x27;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 &amp;#x2F;thing&amp;#x2F; into &amp;#x2F;commodity&amp;#x2F; is where the social slight-of-hand happens, necessarily discounting some aspect of it&amp;#x27;s worth. An example is having two identical mugs, but one of those mugs being &amp;#x2F;mine&amp;#x2F; and therefore special to me. That specialness doesn&amp;#x27;t exist if the mugs are a commodity, and perhaps that specialness fulfills an informational&amp;#x2F;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 &amp;#x27;markets&amp;#x27; differently, with incredibly different results.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></comment>