… is from page 103 of Virginia Postrel’s remarkably insightful and more-relevant-now-than-ever 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies:
To centralize knowledge for the sake of planning and “efficiency” – the technocratic dream – we have to throw away vast amounts of local knowledge.
Depending on topsight can easily lull us into imagining that we see not only the “big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big picture” but the whole, including the critical details. At a distance, it is easy to think that other people just don’t know what they’re doing – especially when you can override their decisions by decree rather than through persuasion or competition.
