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As Hayek noted in The Fatal Conceit, "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design

• CWuestefeld 16y ago
  If you're lucky, you find a few books over the course of your life that completely change the way you look at the world. For me, The Fatal Conceit was one of those books. Hayek does a great job of showing how society, including its markets, evolve just like nature does. Victors impose their culture on the vanquished, but themselves aren't immune from influences of those they're occupying, etc. The product of this is something of tremendous complexity. That it works is evident, but just like a natural evolved organism (or a genetically-derived algorithm, for that matter), the way that it works is completely opaque. Today we can't even imagine actually engineering a better human being -- or even a frog for that matter. If we're lucky we can manipulate a few very basic traits. Deeper meddling than that is pretty much assured to produce stillborn offspring. Why, then, do we persist in the belief that we can fundamentally change the structure of how our markets work, or even completely engineer new ones from whole cloth?