Following up on Patterns of Sustainable Specialization and Trade (PSST), at Reason's Hit and Run, Stephanie Slade has a fine piece of incisive journalism on Austrian/Hayekian dynamic (as opposed to equilibrium) market theory:
The belief that had (mistakenly) evolved among mainstream economists at the time [Austrian economics elicited a correcting view of the economy, G.T.] was that the goal of market competition was to bring about a general equilibrium in which all the facets of an economy are balanced with each other and all the resources are efficiently allocated. These economists thought it realistic to expect central planners to be able to replicate, and perhaps even improve upon, that equilibrium state. The Austrians were meanwhile busy reminding people that market competition is a process that creates value precisely when an economy is in disequilibrium.
In equilibrium, profits converge to zero—there can be no new profit opportunities by definition. But outside of a perfect equilibrium, people who are clever enough can find gaps in the market and fill them. Entrepreneurs are therefore able to drive societal improvements through dynamic competition—to literally innovate their way to greater wealth.
Markets are a process, not an equilibrium state, Hayek said. More specifically, they are a process for discovering new knowledge. The absolute best a central planner can hope to do is to aggregate the information that already exists at a given moment. But the market process not only gathers and makes sense of vast, disparate information—it ushers into being knowledge that was not there before at all. Vernon Smith, [...] a [...] Nobel laureate in economics, quoted Hayek as saying, "I propose to consider competition as a procedure for the discovery of facts as [otherwise] would not be known to anyone."
This was actually a fresh and exciting revelation, Kirzner concluded [at the conference on which Slade is reporting], and it came at the very moment most onlookers were declaring the Austrian tradition dead. Mainstream economists at the time truly believed it was possible for central planners to acquire the requisite information and construct from it a utopia. Fortunately, Hayek and his Austrian school contemporaries were there to show the economics profession that the journey—an ongoing process of experimentation and discovery driven by the pursuit of profits—is far more important than the destination.
The source.
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