Men and Nation do Things by Trying Every Alternative by Chandra

There are two interesting news one was recently published by David Brooks in NYTNS. It is really excellence line:

“For a time, it seemed as if we were about to use the bright beam of science to illuminate the murky world of human action. Instead, as Turkheimer writes in his chapter in the book, “Wrestling With Behavioral Genetics,” science finds itself enmeshed with social science and the humanities in what researchers call the Gloomy Prospect, the ineffable mystery of why people do what they do.

The prospect may be gloomy for those who seek to understand human behavior, but the flip side is the reminder that each of us is a Luxurious Growth. Our lives are not determined by uniform processes. Instead, human behavior is complex, nonlinear and unpredictable. The Brave New World is far away. Novels and history can still produce insights into human behavior that science can’t match.

Just as important is the implication for politics. Starting in the late 19th century, eugenicists used primitive ideas about genetics to try to re-engineer the human race. In the 20th century, communists used primitive ideas about “scientific materialism” to try to re-engineer a New Soviet Man.

Today, we have access to our own genetic recipe. But we seem not to be falling into the arrogant temptation — to try to re-engineer society on the basis of what we think we know. Saying farewell to the sort of horrible social engineering projects that dominated the 20th century is a major example of human progress.

We can strive to eliminate that multivariate thing we call poverty. We can take people out of environments that (somehow) produce bad outcomes and try to immerse them into environments that (somehow) produce better ones. But we’re not close to understanding how A leads to B, and probably never will be.

This age of tremendous scientific achievement has underlined an ancient philosophic truth — that there are severe limits to what we know and can know; that the best political actions are incremental, respectful toward accumulated practice and more attuned to particular circumstances than universal laws”.

And another one was published in the National Review.

In the 1937 essay "Economics and Knowledge," Hayek formulated the "knowledge problem" this way: "How can the combination of fragments of knowledge existing in different minds bring about results which, if they were to be brought about deliberately, would require a knowledge on the part of the directing mind which no single person can possess?" Hayek's answer was that market institutions manage to gather the "fragments of knowledge" and coordinate individuals toward efficient outcomes. No one knows just what combination of production inputs will minimize costs and produce the quantity of goods that satisfies demand. But the operations of the market, in which prices are not fixed but respond to changes in supply and demand, are a "discovery procedure" (as Hayek would later put it) for such information.

……….as Hayek explained in the 1939 pamphlet "Freedom and the Economic System," "impose upon the people the detailed code of values that is lacking" — paving a path toward despotism.)

Both these two articles are nothing but the Professor F A Hayek ideas was well researched scientific theses, premised as individuals do things based on what they possess as knowledge no central planners can gather those idea from each. In fact Professor Hayek coined broadly these processes as spontaneous order which in the market allocate the resources efficiently than the Government.