(2005-01-17) Road To Project Serfdom

This interview with F A Hayek biographer Bruce Caldwell made me tie Hayeks' Road To Serfdom argument with Project Management. He was engaging a widespread belief that socialism was not only more just but more efficient than capitalism, that it was the way to make the world work better. Not just economics should be planned. Science should be planned. Everything should be planned. There was an influential magazine around at the time called Science. Virtually every third or fourth week, they'd run an editorial that said we need to have scientists helping plan all sorts of things. Not just the war effort, but everything about the economy to make it work better. This is what everyone who was "intelligent" thought... Sometimes the moral of Serfdom is boiled down to what's called "the inevitability thesis": If you get a little planning, you'll get more planning, and then eventually you'll have full-blown socialist planning. David Schmaltz has been writing about ever-increasing project formalism recently... To the extent that the ideas in papers like "The Theory of Complex Phenomena" (Complex System) get developed, that could be a big part of his legacy. He didn't get very far in developing the concept, but it's the basis for his claims that what we can know in the Social Science-s is ultimately very limited. It holds that Pattern Prediction-s are the best that we can often do when it comes to society. He suggested that it's better to provide explanations of the principle by which something works than to make precise predictions of how people will act.