Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 8 of University of Connecticut economist Richard Langlois’s monumental forthcoming (2023) study, The Corporation and the Twentieth Century:

Planning could not foresee change, and administration could not cope with innovation.

DBx: Langlois here writes of economic planning during wartime, but the point of course holds more generally. And it’s a point that proponents of industrial policy ignore or discount. Industrial-policy proponents either do not understand or do not care that their schemes, if persistently pursued, would necessarily have to squelch all genuine economic change – implying, of course, that their schemes, if persistently pursued, would necessarily have to squelch all innovation.