Don Lavoie on the Continuing Relevance of the Knowledge Problem – Econlib
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It was Don Lavoie, not Friedrich Hayek, who coined the term “knowledge problem” in his seminal 1985 National Economic Planning: What Is Left? (itself a more accessible and policy-focused distillation of Lavoie’s thesis, under Israel Kirzner, entitled Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered).
Lavoie reformulated and clarified the knowledge problem as developed by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, took to task the various proposals of the day calling for more state control, and articulated a radically liberal alternative.
You might think we know all there is to know about the knowledge problem by now, but as it turns out, the proposals of the 2020s don’t differ all that much from the proposals of the 1980s, and Lavoie’s knowledge problem remains just as relevant as ever.
