… is from page 223 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a splendid collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the essay from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post’s print edition on March 27th, 2016):
The “fatal conceit” (Friedrich Hayek’s term) is the optimistic delusion that planners can manage economic growth by substituting their expertise for the information generated by the billions of daily interactions of a complex market society.
