… is from page 5, of the original edition, of my late colleague James Buchanan’s brilliant 1973 paper “Introduction: L.S.E. cost theory in retrospect,” which serves as the Introduction to the 1973 collection, edited by Buchanan and G.F. Thirlby, L.S.E. Essays on Cost:
The theory of social interaction, of the mutual adjustment among the plans of separate human beings, is different in kind from the theory of planning, the maximization of some objective function by a conceptualized omniscient being.
DBx: Human beings are not chess pieces to be moved about by a master, and human society neither presents a ‘problem’ that has a unique ‘solution’ nor is a mechanism that can be engineered.
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