The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945) [pdf]

The Wikipedia article on this mentions that Wikipedia was partly inspired by it, which makes sense in that it very much values local, decentralized knowledge and dismisses the possibility of an all-seeing oracle (which even the sum of Wikipedia is not, cf edit wars).

Compare and contrast the repost today of The Singularity - would Hayek believe that a computer (with the goal of being an Economy Maximizer) would even theoretically be able to have enough knowledge to implement economic equilibrium (and maintain that equilibrium over time)?

It’s not remotely true that prices are capable of transmitting all the information required to reproduce society.

This is for the simple reason that prices more or less only communicate information about the amount of labor required to produce a thing[0].

Therefore prices on their own are, for example, incapable of transmitting information about what action needs to be taken to correct the relationship to the biosphere. Information about the state of the biosphere will only enter into prices to the extent that things start taking more labor to produce. But there’s no market mechanism that would then cause that to direct action towards stabilizing the climate.

[0]: This is because cost resolves into business owner’s cut + labor cost + cost of inputs, and the inputs can recursively be split into the same until you’re left with the amount owners take, the amount paid to workers, and the amount paid to owners of natural resources.

The business owner’s cut and the amount paid to owners of natural resources are socially determined and bear almost no relationship to the physical world or reproduction of society.

"Generally accepted" is nearly impossible to discern from an individual standpoint. I prefer Wittgenstein's stance that you should essentially accept uncertainty that you refer to the same world/concepts/knowledge that others do and engage in good faith efforts to communicate the best you can. This amounts to the same thing but it's not weighted towards some (likely wildly incorrect) subjective viewpoint of the general population.

> There's an assumption here that a market economy is a competitive market economy.

Aside, there's also a fundamental trade-off been a competitive market and a market where individual actors have freedom.

For example, one model may assume that everyone has perfect price information and therefore the market is very efficient, while another assumes that everyone can make secret deals and keep prices hidden and therefore cartels are unstable.

>computing has made it possible to scale companies to planetary scale without organizational collapse

I wonder. Say we had various factories for producing goods around the world, and different factories requested the same inputs in different amounts. An algorithm could probably calculate how much of each input it should distribute to those factories. However, the structure of this economy still relies on the commodity form, since those inputs would almost certainly be worked in a certain, standardized way to be properly organized by the algorithm properly. Therefore, the computerization of the economy only leads to an image of the kind of unrestrained productivity you might imagine technology would bring, but lacks the kind of creativity necessary for it.

This is all to say that if not the market, then whatever else could've managed an incomprehensibly complex economy certainly existed before contemporary computers (and certainly, the structure of the economy in even the 19th century in early high capitalism itself was the "computer," the quantitative management of social forces). Its not as if our era, today, is particularly unique, or that Hayek was right then or wrong now, but rather that he was fundamentally wrong to believe that the market itself was the path to freedom, even then.