Thursday is the 115th anniversary of the birth of F.A. Hayek, the great Austrian economist and political philosopher. Hayek had a huge impact on intellectual thought in his time, but his ideas are as relevant today as then.
Hayek’s work, whether on economics, politics or law, focused on the ineluctable problems of uncertainty and incomplete information.
In economics articles going back to the 1930s, he analyzed the price system as a mechanism for communicating information to buyers and sellers about the intensity of preferences for goods and their relative scarcity. He concluded that the information does not exist anywhere in its entirety and could not be centralized.