Content deleted Content added
m Robot - Speedily moving category Works about information economics to Category:Works about the information economy per CFDS. |
Roggenwolf (talk | contribs) Changing short description from "Book by Thomas Sowell" to "1980 book by Thomas Sowell" |
||
| (16 intermediate revisions by 13 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{Short description|1980 book by Thomas Sowell}}
{{Infobox book | <!-- See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Novels or Wikipedia:WikiProject_Books -->
| name = Knowledge and Decisions
| image = KnowledgeandDecisions.jpg
| caption =
| author = [[Thomas Sowell]]
| cover_artist =
| country = United States
| language = English
| series =
| publisher = [[Basic Books]]
| pub_date = 1980
Line 20 ⟶ 21:
}}
'''''Knowledge and Decisions''''' is a non-fiction book by American economist [[Thomas Sowell]].<ref>{{cite
Sowell
Hayek said that this book expanded admirably on his original concepts and made them clear to lay readers, with examples of economic activity drawn from the real world.<ref>[https://reason.com/1981/12/01/the-best-book-on-general-econo/ Hayek], Reason, 1981, retrieved 2021-07-24</ref>
▲Sowell explicates social and economic knowledge and how it is transmitted through the many facets of society, and how that transmission affects decisions made. The book's central theme is drawn from [[F.A. Hayek]]'s article "[[The Use of Knowledge in Society]]."
The last section of the book deals with [[intellectuals]], those whose profession is the distribution of ideas. Sowell questions the popular unwavering faith in the expert intellectual and "articulated rationality" for "solutions" to economic or political problems. He explains that through intellectuals, government agencies, such as the [[United States Environmental Protection Agency]] and [[National Institutes of Health]], have become more numerous and more powerful. Sowell explains that agencies make more laws than Congress does, but the agencies are insulated from any sort of consequences of their decisions because the officials are not
▲Emphatically, Sowell repeatedly rejects the popular tendency to put economic and political decisions and their results in moral terms. Doing so, he argues, ignores the tradeoffs and limitations inherent in every economic system and society. Consistent with his established [[laissez-faire]] viewpoints, Sowell also indicts [[price controls]] (such as [[rent control]], [[minimum wage]], [[price fixing]], and [[subsidies]]) as interfering in the implicit communication between consumers and producers necessary to optimize the choices of each. The fact that some industries or government agencies seem particularly incompetent or corrupt over many turnovers of their staff, he argues, is not bad people performing the duties but of rational people acting in their own interests responding to whatever incentives have been established in the system.
Sowell also
▲The last section of the book deals with [[intellectuals]], those whose profession is the distribution of ideas. Sowell questions the popular unwavering faith in the expert intellectual and "articulated rationality" for "solutions" to economic or political problems. He explains that through intellectuals government agencies such as the [[United States Environmental Protection Agency]] and [[National Institutes of Health]] have become more numerous and more powerful. Sowell explains that agencies make more laws than Congress does, but the agencies are insulated from any sort of consequences of their decisions because the officials are not even elected. That has the effect of creating a larger divide between people who make decisions and those who experience the consequences.
▲Sowell also dwells on the recurrent unintended consequences of many intellectual decisions. Consequently, Sowell advocates a decentralizing of the decisions by allowing people to make economic choices for themselves rather than assuming that non-elected intellectuals at centralized planning agencies will make better decisions.
==See also==
* [[Adam Smith]]
* [[
* ''[[Information Rules]]'' (book)▼
* [[Supply and demand]]▼
▲*''[[Information Rules]]'' (book)
▲*[[Supply and demand]]
==References==
{{Wikiquote|Thomas Sowell}}
{{Reflist}}
{{Thomas Sowell}}
{{Evolutionary psychology}}
[[Category:1980 non-fiction books]]
[[Category:Basic Books books]]
[[Category:Books by Thomas Sowell]]
| |||