Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…But I guess as a general principle, you’d be against more government-directed production, right? Well, it depends on the context. So if it’s, say, the military, probably we ought to be building a lot more of some particular things, and it will be done through Boeing, Lockheed, and so on. But the government’s directing it, paying for it in some way, planning it, and we need to do that. We’ve at times done that well in the past. So people overrate the distinction between government and market, I think, especially libertarians. But that said, there’s an awful lot of government bureaucracy that’s terrible, doesn’t have a big market check. But very often, governments act through markets and have to contract or hire consultants or hire outside parties. And it’s more like a market than you think. I want to ask you about another part of Hayek. So, he has an argument about how it’s really hard to aggregate information toward a central planner. But then, more recently, there have been results in computer science that just finding the general equilibrium is computationally intractable. Which raises the question, well, the market is somehow solving this problem, right? Separate from the problem of getting the information, making use of the information to allocate scarce resources. How is that computationally a process that’s possible? I’m sure you’re aware, like the linear optimization, non-convex constraints. How does the market solve this problem?…

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