Tweet [1]
… 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 [2],” as this paper is reprinted in Competition, Economic Planning, and the Knowledge Problem [3] (Peter J. Boettke and Frédéric Sautet, eds., 2018), which is a volume in The Collected Works of Israel M. Kirzner [4]:
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.