Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 95 of the late Stanford University economic historian Nathan Rosenberg’s insightful 1992 paper “Economic Experiments,” as this paper is reprinted in Rosenberg’s 1994 book, Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics, and History:

Capitalism has provided multiple sources of decision-making and initiative, strong incentives for proceeding one step at a time, and the possibility for drawing upon a wide range of human potential – all valuable features of activities that are carried out in an environment of high uncertainty. The notion that planning and centralization of decision-making are likely to be more efficient appears to be the opposite of the truth when there is a high degree of uncertainty and when goals and objective cannot be clearly defined in advance.