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This reissue of Thomas Sowell's classic study of decision making, which includes a preface by the author, updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell, one of America's most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making-a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency but our very freedom. This is because actual knowledge is being replaced by assumptions based on an abstract and elitist social vision of what ought to be. Knowledge and Decisions, a winner of the 1980 Law and Economics Center Prize, was heralded as a landmark work and selected for this prize "because of its cogent contribution to our understanding of the differences between the market process and the process of government." In announcing the award, the center acclaimed that the "contribution to our understanding of the process of regulation alone would make the book important, but in reemphasizing the diversity and efficiency that the market makes possible, {this} work goes deeper and becomes even more significant.".… (plus d'informations)
themulhern: The chapter in "Bad Pharma" about the revolving door between the regulators and the industry they regulate is just a particular example of what Sowell describes in Chapter 1 in the section "The Structure of Incentives".
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As full of quotables as a fruitcake is of fruit. But I just found out it is available on audio, so I'm going to try that and then take up the book when I've tried the audio.
This book appeared on a list of 100 influential science books for the millenium, published in The American Scientist.
Sowell is an economist, and from some other mentions of his name, is very convinced of the correctness of capitalism and markets. His thesis is that the market is the most efficient means of summarizing and transmitting the knowledge that individuals need when they make decisions about trading off one benefit for another. It does this by pricing goods and services against a single standard currency, so that the benefits of antipollution devices, for instance, can be compared to the benefits of fuel economy in cars. Sowell is against any form of government intervention in the markets, arguing that regulators have a vested interest in perpetuating their own organizations, and do this by markedly increasing the cost of obtaining knowledge of the relative benefits of different courses of action. Regulators and the judiciary tend to present choices among economic alternatives as "package deals" that do not allow incremental tradeoffs to take place among the various potential outcomes. Outcomes are rights rather than goods with a cost. The cost of knowing the actions of regulators is so high that only special interest groups are willing to pay for this knowledge, and to therefore attempt to influence regulator's decisions. A very stimulating book, well argued, but single-minded in its rejection of government intervention in all things. ( )
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Man is no Aristotelian god contemplating all existence at one glance. - Walter Lippmann
Dédicace
Premiers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Various kinds of ideas can be classified by their relationship to the authentication process. There are ideas systematically prepared for authentication ("theories"), ideas not derived from any systematic process ("visions"), ideas which could not survive any reasonable authentication process ("illusions"), ideas which exempt themselves from any authentication process ("myths"), ideas which have already passed authentication processes ("facts"), as well as ideas known to have failed - or certain to fail - such processes ("falsehoods" - both mistakes and lies).
Civilization is an enormous device for economizing on knowledge. The time and effort (including costly mistakes) necessary to acquire knowledge are minimized through specialization, which is to say through drastic limitations on the amount of duplication of knowledge among the members of society.
But in many intellectual areas, notably so-called "social science", there is neither a swift nor a certain authentication process for ideas, and the only ultimate validation is whether the ideas sound plausible to enough people, or to the right people. The stricter standards and independent, often conclusive, evidence in the physical sciences can not be generalized to intellectual activity as a whole, even though the aura of scientific processes and results is often appropriated by other intellectuals.
It is very possible that, as more people cease being farmers with little or no education, and increasingly acquire more schooling, that their standards for "knowing" decline while the area of their secondhand and tenuous knowledge expands. ... There may be not only a qualitative decline in knowledge, but - more important - an erosion of the very meaning of "knowing"; for example, a young man might be said to know how to milk a cow if he could write an essay on that subject, and we would no longer demand that he take the pail out to the barn and come back with milk.
The growing complexity of science, technology, and organization does not imply either a growing knowledge or a growing need for knowledge in the general population. On the contrary, the increasingly complex processes tend to lead to increasingly simple and and easily understood products. The genius of mass production is precisely in its making more products more accessible, both economically and intellectually, to more people.
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Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their "betters".
This reissue of Thomas Sowell's classic study of decision making, which includes a preface by the author, updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell, one of America's most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making-a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency but our very freedom. This is because actual knowledge is being replaced by assumptions based on an abstract and elitist social vision of what ought to be. Knowledge and Decisions, a winner of the 1980 Law and Economics Center Prize, was heralded as a landmark work and selected for this prize "because of its cogent contribution to our understanding of the differences between the market process and the process of government." In announcing the award, the center acclaimed that the "contribution to our understanding of the process of regulation alone would make the book important, but in reemphasizing the diversity and efficiency that the market makes possible, {this} work goes deeper and becomes even more significant.".
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