Not surprisingly, given the title of this blog and the focus of my research, the last video in the series for my history of economic thought course provides an introduction to Hayek and the knowledge problem.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/76456397]
Hayek’s work in the 20th century explored a range of ideas, one of the most important of which was the argument that the fundamental economic challenge in a society is the coordination of plans and actions among agents in an economy, all of whom have diverse goals and make choices based on their own perceptions and private knowledge. The knowledge problem has implications for questions from the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s to the modern policy analyses of the regulatory state.