(Don Boudreaux)
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… is from page 23 of the late Paul Heyne’s lovely 2000 monograph, A Student’s Guide to Economics (original emphasis; link added):
[Thomas] Sowell used a quotation from Walter Lippmann as the epigraph of Knowledge and Decisions: “Man is no Aristotelean god contemplating all existence at one glance.” Who could disagree? And yet many do disagree, regularly and persistently, by presenting analyses of social problems and proposing remedies for these problems that implicitly assume we are or ought to be Aristotelean gods. they grossly underestimate the amount of detailed knowledge that has to be used to provide food and housing for the inhabitants of a city; to assure enough but not too many physicians, plumbers, poets, and airline pilots; to make electricity and telephone service available to everyone; to maintain processes of discovery that will provide new and valuable answers to old problems of discomfort, disease, and disaster.
DBx: Proponents of industrial policy fancy themselves to be Aristotelian gods.
Published on May 04, 2023 01:15
