Harvard’s Greg Mankiw Channels F.A. Hayek

It’s rare to see experts of high stature exhibit meekness.

Harvard Professor and former chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors Greg Mankiw writing in a New York Times column channels F.A. Hayek. (pointer to Professor Russ Roberts) [bold emphasis mine]

AFTER more than a quarter-century as a professional economist, I have a confession to make: There is a lot I don’t know about the economy. Indeed, the area of economics where I have devoted most of my energy and attention — the ups and downs of the business cycle — is where I find myself most often confronting important questions without obvious answers.

Now, if you follow economic commentary in the newspapers or the blogosphere, you have probably not run into many humble economists. By its nature, punditry craves attention, which is easier to attract with certainties than with equivocation.

But that certitude reflects bravado more often than true knowledge.

This exactly is the knowledge problem as Hayek pointed out long ago, which I keep talking about in this space.

F. A. Hayek in The Use of Knowledge in Society wrote, (bold emphasis mine)

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources—if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

My salute to Mr. Mankiw.

Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.