F. A. Hayek: Prices and Economic Order
"... In 1936, the year in which (entirely coincidentally) John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory, I suddenly saw, as I prepared my presidential address to the London Economic Club, that my previous work in different branches of economics had a common root. This insight was that the price system was really an instrument which enabled millions of people to adjust their efforts to events, demands, and conditions of which they had no concrete, direct knowledge, and that the whole coordination of the world economy was due to certain practices and usages which had grown up unconsciously...
I gradually found that the basic function of economics was to explain the process of how human activity adapted itself to data about which it had no information. Thus the whole economic order rested on the fact that by using prices as a guide, or as signals, we were led to serve the demands and enlist the powers and capacities of people of whom we knew nothing. It was because we had relied on a system which we had never understood and which we had never designed that we had been able to produce the wealth to sustain an enormous increase in the world's population, and to begin to realize our new ambitions of distributing this wealth more justly. Basically, the insight that prices were signals bringing about the unforeseen coordination of the efforts of thousands of individuals was in a sense the modern cybernetics theory, and it became the leading idea behind my work..."
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