The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

Friedrich August von Hayek.

Part I.

Conscious deliberate planning is a uniquely human activity. Non-human life forms don’t have the cognitive capacity to plan. But we do it all the time. It involves at a minimum some evaluation of the present conditions, a set of reasonably well-defined and reasonably stable preferences over present and future states of being, and an understanding of the various available means to achieve some selected or desired future state. Continue reading →