Books, Arts & Manners: Evolutionary Economics

The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, by F. A. Hayek, edited by W. W. Bartley III (University of Chicago, 180 pp., $24.95)

Friedrich Hayek’s great insight, dating from the 1930s, was that socialism would not work as advertised, because the central planning authority entrusted with organizing production never would have at its disposal the information needed to draw up intelligent plans or to issue anything other than arbitrary commands. Nonetheless, a centrally controlled state would be able to exercise tyrannical power. And so socialist societies were doomed to poverty and slavery. Central planning was “the road to serfdom.”

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Tom Bethell

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The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, by F. A. Hayek, edited by W. W. Bartley III (University of Chicago, 180 pp., $24.95)

Friedrich Hayek’s great insight, dating from the 1930s, was that socialism would not work as advertised, because the central planning authority entrusted with organizing production never would have at its disposal the information needed to draw up intelligent plans or to issue anything other than arbitrary commands. Nonetheless, a centrally controlled state would be able to exercise tyrannical power. And so socialist societies were doomed to poverty and slavery. Central planning was “the road to serfdom.”