I liked this crys­talli­sa­tion of a thought I’ve only ever had more fuzzily:

From the edges #

There’s a kind of free mar­ket fan who cites, as one of their great lodestars, Friedrich Hayek, the econ­o­mist who imag­ined a mar­ket as a net­work of sen­sors, all its par­tic­i­pants out in the world, gath­er­ing in­for­ma­tion from the edges. Really good in­for­ma­tion: re­al­time, tex­tured, con­text-spe­cific. Much bet­ter in­for­ma­tion than you’d ever get in the cen­tral plan­ning of­fice.

Acknowledging that many mar­kets do not rise to Hayek’s stan­dard—the mar­ket for com­plex weapons sys­tems, for ex­am­ple, does not trans­port in­for­ma­tion very ef­fec­tively—I hap­pen to agree that a bustling, mul­ti­far­i­ous mar­ket is one of the world’s great in­for­ma­tion-pro­cess­ing ma­chines. Markets can be healthy and ex­cit­ing, full of pos­si­bil­ity. They can help peo­ple be­gin things; what could be bet­ter?

But here’s what’s strange to me:

Those same Hayekians—who so prize in­for­ma­tion from the edges—are gen­er­ally happy to ac­cept the rote po­lit­i­cal align­ment that leaves them en­thu­si­asts of fi­nan­cial mar­kets but skep­tics of so­cial lib­er­a­tion move­ments.

EVEN THOUGH those move­ments for lib­er­a­tion are for­mu­lated and led by peo­ple who, in so many cases, are out at the edges of hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence, re­port­ing back.
What gives? Maybe the Hayekian be­lieves that only a price, in dol­lars or yen, can con­vey the tex­tured in­for­ma­tion they care about so deeply (a po­si­tion that can’t ac­tu­ally be de­fended); or maybe it’s not re­ally about in­for­ma­tion. Perhaps Hayek sim­ply pro­vides a con­ve­nient cover story for a deeper set of be­liefs, which can per­haps be sum­ma­rized as: give me my money.

If true: what a bum­mer! Because that broader, “Hayek-plus” view­point is an ex­cit­ing and use­ful one. When I en­counter writ­ers and/​or ac­tivists mak­ing claims and/​or de­mands that seem strange to me—when I feel the burn of fric­tion ris­ing: “oh, give me a break…”—I of­ten re­turn to it.

If you be­lieve that a cus­tomer buy­ing ap­ples in a gro­cery store in Milwaukee is a cru­cial sen­sor node, then I think you MUST agree that the same per­son—who, by the way, uses a wheel­chair—is sens­ing just as cru­cially when they ask for bet­ter ramps in the park­ing lot. And the dri­ver of the ap­ple de­liv­ery truck, when he tells you he’s not be­ing paid enough to live. And the ap­ple or­chard’s owner, when she ex­plains her ex­pe­ri­ence of gen­der dys­pho­ria.
In so many ways, Hayek comes down to “believe peo­ple.”

Why is that so hard?

From Robin Sloan’s newslet­ter

I sup­pose (in a nut­shell if I can) the an­gle I’m in­ter­ested in is the ways in which states and state-like in­sti­tu­tions might be more aware of and re­spon­sive to what peo­ple want and need, if only they could get be­yond price/​pur­chas­ing/​con­sump­tion as the only facet of peo­ple that’s deemed in­ter­est­ing (the Hayekian/market view). The coun­ter­point to this, I guess, is that “talk is cheap”; what re­ally tells you what peo­ple value is what they spend money on. But that just seems false, for the rea­sons Sloan hints at.