With COVID-19 cases spiking, the United Kingdom and European countries like France, Italy, and Spain are imposing new restrictions on business, social gatherings, and travel.
We are paying a heavy price, with deep stresses in our social life and with mounting evidence of a mental health crisis.
Economist F. A. Hayek in his groundbreaking 1945 essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society" warned us about the dangers of scientism, which can be defined as an over-reliance on the power of scientific knowledge and techniques when applied to social phenomena.
Today, these institutes and organizations are global directorates, with budgets larger than some countries, run by technocrats who attempt to engineer solutions to complex social problems.
Hayek's point, which won him Nobel honors in 1974, was that there is no such thing as a centralized repository of knowledge from which epidemiologists, policy-makers, or anyone else "In charge" can pull any required data at any time and then - poof - solve societal problems.
Successfully containing COVID-19 is a problem that both requires scientific investigation and economic thinking.
Too many of the models have been devoid of the facts of the social sciences, which offers insights on the behavior of people.
Saturday, October 31, 2020
The current bureaucratic approach fails to account for our individual, institutional, and economic well-being.
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