Quotation of the Day…

Tweet

… is from page 134 of the late Deepak Lal’s 2013 book, Poverty and Progress; this passage appears in that part of Lal’s book in which he exposes some of the many flaws in the case for industrial policy (references omitted; link added):

This so-called coordination of investment plans is of course nothing but the planning syndrome – the search for a centrally determined investment plan which takes into account not merely current but all future changes in the demand and supply of a myriad of goods. It is well known that no market economy can attain the intertemporal Nirvana promised by the utopian theoretical construct of Arrow and Debreu. But neither can the planners, as pointed out by Hayek and Mises in the interwar debate about the efficiency of Soviet-type central planning. The collapse of this system is a conclusive empirical confirmation of the validity of the Austrian insight that, in the real world, imperfect markets are superior to imperfect planning.