… is the concluding sentence (found on page 85) of my former teacher Israel Kirzner’s excellent Fall 1984 Cato Journal paper titled “Economic Planning and the Knowledge Problem,” as this paper is reprinted in Competition, Economic Planning, and the Knowledge Problem (Peter J. Boettke and Frédéric Sautet, eds., 2018), which is a volume in The Collected Works of Israel M. Kirzner:
Part of the tragedy of proposals for industrial policy and economic planning is that their well-meaning advocates are totally unaware of the knowledge problem – the problem arising out of unawareness of one’s ignorance.
DBx: Yes. If you show me an advocate of industrial policy, I’ll show you someone who is unaware of his or her own ignorance.
