Hayek is a good thinker but lousy writer. The writing is entirely unengaging. Fortunately, the book is a short 150 +/- pages.

This book's redeeming value is that Hayek's arguments are well-formulated and occasionally bring out an, "oh!" I had personally never given much thought to the Malthusian problems of overpopulation, beyond cursing at traffic or the occasional issue of NGS. His take on "overpopulation" is so obvious, I wonder why it's even brought up as an issue anymore.

In any case, the Fatal Conceit deals with the fundamental error of socialism - that a top-down committee or bureaucracy can manage a whole economy. He refutes the idea that anyone can allocate a country's priorities and resources and labor. An economy is made of all the minute decisions every individual faces each day. Whether you go to the park or the movies is an economic decision. Whether you jog to improve your health or become a couch potato is an economic decision. The first extract is that if the government runs the economy, where does its authority end in the individual's life? Liberty and socialism are incompatible. The second is that each and every society is a complex network of actions and decisions by many individuals with knowledge of their particular situation. Because no one high level person can have perfect knowledge, the person on the spot is likely in a better position to make an informed decision and cost is the metric used in decision-making. He argues that civilization has built up naturally, not by any high-level conspiracy or direction. That while individuals and groups make decisions, the civilization is built up over many, often conflicting, tides. Therefore it is as natural as any ecosystem. Just like an ecosystem, park rangers and wildlife managers have discovered around the world that the tighter they manage the more they botch it.

He goes on to address the leftist habit of loading language, Laputan tendencies, and finding end-of-the-world catastrophes around every corner "unless we do something now."

Despite an utter lack of writerly craft, Hayek manages to be thought provoking. As I read the book my mind would drift out every few sentences and I would have to snap it back: "this is important!" As a result, I probably read this book 3 times at once. ( )

The central themes of this book are those of cultural evolution and the inability of centralized economies to make economic calculations without a price system to harness diffuse knowledge.

It is the revelation that culture, including morals, institutions and such, is neither designed by human minds nor a result of inborn instinct but an evolved system that does not admit of simple explanations that is humbling.

When this is understood it becomes clear that a rationalist approach to analyzing tradition is unlikely to be fruitful.

Hayek's essay, [Why I am not a Conservative] might add to an analysis of these thoughts since Hayek here seems to present a very powerful conservative thesis.

Hayek's remarks early in the book about the possibility that Darwin might have been inspired by evolutionary ideas in the social sciences seems a bit overblown, particularly when it is well known that Darwin himself claimed that it was a book about gradualism as a shaping force in geology that he took with him on his sea voyage aboard the Beagle which led him to think along that line. Nevertheless it is true that various evolutionary explanations were in the air during his youth, including from economists but also from naturalists in his own ancestry.

I am one of those who think it is very odd that as someone once said, it seems that the left and right are mostly divided between those who disbelieve in spontaneous order and evolutionary feedback regarding the market but very accepting of it in biology on one hand and those on the other side who accept spontaneous order in economics but don't credit it in regard to the world of living things. ( )

Bartley, William Warren (Editor)