Hayek’s ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ – Simplified
Showing only those parts of the discussion that lead to #3514 and its comments.
See full discussion·See most recent related ideasLog in or sign up to participate in this discussion.
With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Hayek writes:
[P]rices can act to coördinate [sic] the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coördinate the parts of his plan.
Hayek argues that any one man always knows very little about the economy as a whole. But the price system will tell him the little he does need to know.
I wonder how far the similarities between the economy and a single mind go. If the price system is a way for parts of a decentralized system to communicate, and the mind is a decentralized system, does the mind have something like a price system for its different parts to communicate?
A mind is vast, full of ideas. Any part of it always knows very little about the rest. In this sense, ideas in a mind are like men in an economy. So how do these ideas coordinate efficiently? Do emotions act like a price system inside the mind? Ayn Rand writes:
Emotions are the automatic results of man's value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man's values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss.
The fun criterion is surely relevant in this context, too. Hayek writes that a rational economic order is about “conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to fit their plans with those of others.” That sounds like common-preference finding, which essentially works the same across minds as it does within a single mind.
Are prices inside the mind involved in finding common preferences?
If … the mind is a decentralized system, does the mind have something like a price system for its different parts to communicate?
But the mind isn’t a decentralized system. It has a central ‘I’ sitting at the top. So it’s more like a company with a CEO than a fully decentralized system.
Just as nations can have different forms of governance, minds can too.
For example: Most probably have that CEO-sense of self.
Some minds with lots of coercive memes are more like dictatorships.
People with "smaller egos" (less anti-rational memes) are more like libertarian societies.
But people with set preferences for less self are more like communist societies. That's a kind of coerced decentralisation.
Split personalities would be akin to a highly polarised society that switches governance back and forth.