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Sunstein on information

Cass Sunstein writes about Hayek and information in the Washington Post:

In the past year, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that "anyone
can edit," has been cited four times as often as the Encyclopedia
Britannica in judicial opinions, and the number is rapidly growing. In
just two years, YouTube has become a household word and one of the
world’s most successful Web sites. Such astounding growth and success
demonstrate society’s unstoppable movement toward shared production of
information, as diverse groups of people in multiple fields pool their
knowledge and draw from each other’s resources.

Developing one of
the most important ideas of the 20th century, Nobel Prize-winning
economist Friedrich Hayek attacked socialist planning on the grounds
that no planner could possibly obtain the "dispersed bits" of
information held by individual members of society. Hayek insisted that
the knowledge of individuals, taken as a whole, is far greater than
that of any commission or board, however diligent and expert. he magic
of the system of prices and of economic markets is that they
incorporate a great deal of diffuse knowledge.

The rest is here. (HT: J. Bradley Jansen)

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