Russ and Pete’s Excellent Adventure into the Socialist Calculation Debate

For the last 20 years that I taught at the Naval Postgraduate School, I always covered, in every course I taught, Friedrich Hayek’s famous 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge and Society,” American Economic Review, September 1945. It’s well worth reading.

Russ Roberts’s recent EconTalk interview of Peter Boettke, “Who Won the Socialist Calculation Debate?,” February 17, 2025, is well worth listening to or reading the transcript of. For in it, Pete, with input from Russ, tracks the history of the debate. Pete notes that Hayek moved one step beyond his mentor Ludwig von Mises. As well as talking about information that central planners didn’t have, Mises had focused on the lack of incentives within socialism. Hayek’s next step was to emphasize that even if lack of incentives were not a problem, central planners could not have the information they needed to plan an economy efficiently. That information was revealed only by market prices, and market prices came about because of hundreds of millions (now billions) of people acting on their own information. Although Hayek never used the term “local knowledge,” that is the term we Hayekians now use to refer to this decentralized information.

In the interview, they briefly discuss the issue of tin prices. Here’s the tin discussion, from Hayek’s 1945 article:

Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say, tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all his without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all. The mere fact that there is one price for any commodity—or rather that local prices are connected in a manner determined by the cost of transport, etc.—brings about the solution which (it is just conceptually possible) might have been arrived at by one single mind possessing all the information which is in fact dispersed among all the people involved in the process.

Hayek then writes:

The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction. This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or “normal” level.

Why a marvel? Hayek answers:

I have deliberately used the word “marvel” to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for “conscious direction”—and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously—should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of out utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.

When I taught this, I paused at the sentence, “I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind.” I then said to my students that if the mechanism had been the result of deliberate human design, the human would almost have certainly have won the Nobel Prize in economics.

Along the way, Russ and Pete give a very nice treatment of various economic thinkers. On the site are mentioned the bios of over 20 economists. All of the bios are from David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. I wrote all of them, except the one on Karl Marx, which Janet Beales Kaidantzis wrote.

Note: The accompanying pic is if Hayek and me. Hayek was autographing my copy of Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, one of my favorite of his books, in June 1975.