Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux on June 24, 2015

in Complexity & Emergence, Economics, Hayek, Hubris and humility, Myths and Fallacies, Science, Scientism, Seen and Unseen

… is from page 347 of the 2014 collection, The Market and Other Orders (Bruce Caldwell, ed.), of some of F.A. Hayek’s essays on spontaneous-ordering forces; specifically, this quotation is from Hayek’s January 1970 lecture at the University of Salzburg, “The Errors of Constructivism“:

Science can help us to a better theoretical understanding of the interconnections [that form a complex economy].  But science cannot significantly help us to ascertain all the widely dispersed and rapidly fluctuating particular circumstances of time and place which determine the order of a great complex society.

The delusion that advancing theoretical knowledge places us everywhere increasingly in a position to reduce complex inter-connections to ascertainable particular facts often leads to new scientific errors.

Astute readers will see the relevance of this quotation to Russ’s most-recent post.

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