… is from page 261 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2019 book, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (original emphasis):
The more complex and specialized and spontaneously bettering an economy is, the less it can be planned, the less a central planner however wise and good can know about the trillions of preferences and plans for consumption and production and betterment. A household or your personal life might possibly be plannable, though anyone who believes it with much confidence has not lived very long. But a big, modern economy has vastly too much going on to plan.
DBx: Precisely so. To dispute Deidre’s point is to suffer what Hayek called, in 1976, “The New Confusion About ‘Planning'” (available here, free of charge, by scrolling down a bit.)
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