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Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 134 of the late Deepak Lal’s 2013 book, Poverty and Progress [2]; 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 [3]. 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.

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