DISQUS

Cafe Hayek: Marvelous Arrangement

  • George · 2 years ago

    Someday, we'll be able to model this process by using a sophisticated version of a mathematical approach called "celular automata". In this way you can model a population of individuals which obey their own set of motivations and constraints, reacting to the economy around them.


    The biggest falacy that statists have is that they believe that organization in an economy requires a top-down structure. Free market economics recognizes the self-organizing properties of a population which is persuing rational self-interest on the individual level.


    The main benefit is that, while a top-down approach requires the flow of impossible amounts of information to the top, a free marked acts as a massively parallel computation resulting in overall optimization of resource utilization.

  • Sam Grove · 2 years ago

    top-down approach requires the flow of impossible amounts of information to the top


    Whic must be accurate as well. Another impossibility.

  • Speedmaster · 2 years ago

    That was fantastic, thanks Dr. Boudreaux!

  • plopplop · 2 years ago

    "...the number of different ways to arrange, in a single dimension, a mere 20 items is much larger than is the number of seconds in ten billion years."


    It's even more interesting to consider graph theory: for example, a simple graph with 19 unlabeled nodes has 24637809253125004524383007491432768 nonisomorphic combinations. That's more seconds than there are in 700 sextillion (7x10^23) years. Would-be central planners should keep this in mind when considering the possible states and interactions of 7 billion labeled nodes (such as people).