Economist Fredrich Hayek on Knowledge

Fredrich Hayek

[From article]
Perhaps the major theme running throughout Hayek’s career in formal economics concerned knowledge. For example, in a 1945 American Economic Review article titled “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Hayek wrote that the “economic problem of society” was not merely one of allocating “given” resources, the way a standard textbook might define things. Rather, Hayek argued that the true economic problem is “how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know.”
This emphasis on dispersed knowledge was one of Hayek’s key contributions to the debate over socialism during the 1930s.
[. . .]
Yet without the communication network provided by free market prices, socialist planners could not effectively mobilize the dispersed knowledge held by millions of citizens in their country.
[. . .]
The socialist economists who thought otherwise were relying on unrealistic mathematical models of the economy which completely ignored the true economic problem, because they assumed all of the relevant information was “given” to the central planner.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/05/what_one_economist_knew_.html

May 8, 2016
What One Economist Knew
By Robert P. Murphy

Contrary to Headline Americans Have Good Political Knowledge

[From article]

Education levels again factored into the responses, but Pew notes that half or more respondents with a high school education answered eight of the quiz’s 12 questions correctly. Among college graduates and post-graduate degree holders, most answered 11 out of 12 correctly.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/pew-news-iq-test-results-117421.html

Americans bomb Pew test of basic political knowledge
By Nick Gass
4/28/15 12:41 PM EDT
Updated 4/28/15 1:15 PM EDT

Radical Proposal, Citizens Should Know Governmental Process

[From article]
When people from other parts of the world become US citizens, they have to pass a test that includes questions about how our system of government works. Why shouldn’t native-born Americans have to know the same?
Many Americans grew up with civics classes. But today, civics instruction has largely been abandoned — former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor calls this “the quiet crisis in education.”
[. . .]
The questions involve basic knowledge of how the US government works. For example, students would be asked to name America’s economic system or to identify one of the three branches of government.
This last is apparently more difficult than it might appear: A recent survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania found that 35 percent of the 1,416 adults questioned couldn’t do it. (You can try the test yourself at civicseducationinitiative.com/take-the-test/).

http://nypost.com/2015/01/02/our-civic-duty/

Our civic duty
By New York Post Editorial Board
January 2, 2015 | 7:11pm

Harvard University Discusses Having Knowledge, When Someone Else Does Not Know What You Know

Photo: Connie Yan

Jill E. Abramson '76, former executive editor of The New York Times, and Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family psychology professor, discuss different styles of writing at Farkas Hall on Tuesday night.

“Once you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like for someone else not to know it,” Pinker said, adding “The reader and the writer are equals. The goal is to help the reader see objective reality,” So is that what MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber was doing when he described how the Washington DC Democratic politicians fooled "stupid Americans" when they passed Obama's heath care law? Was it hard for Prof. Gruber to understand "what it’s like for someone else not to know" what he knows? Is Prof. Gruber unique among academics?

[From article]
“Once you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like for someone else not to know it,” Pinker said.
[. . .]
“The reader and the writer are equals. The goal is to help the reader see objective reality,”

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/12/10/pinker-abramson-talk-style/

Pinker, Abramson Teach Writing Style
By SONYA A. KARABEL,
Harvard CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
December 9, 2014

Did Obama Ever Know Anything?

[From article]
The quintessential question of Watergate was “what did the President know and when did he know it?” Obamagate, the vast scandal that encompasses an entire presidency, offers a preemptive answer.
Obama didn’t know anything and he never knew it. At least not until, like smuggling weapons to druglords, bugging journalists, IRSing his political enemies and killing vets, his right hand found out about what his left hand was doing from the morning paper.
[. . .]
After skipping 58% of his daily intelligence briefings in Term 1 and 59% of them in Term 2, he went on 60 Minutes and blamed intelligence agencies for being caught by surprise by ISIS.
[. . .]
Obama finally penciled in a war, declaring, “The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force.”
And it only took him 6 years to figure that out. Talk about an intelligence failure.
[. . .]
No one needed him in the White House. If the Democratic Party was that desperate to dodge every gaffe, scandal and criticism with cries of racism, it could have gotten some other black guy. There are twenty million of them. And any one of them would have done a better job and played a lot less golf.
And now after running for office as the “Smartest guy in the room,” the Nobel Prize winner has chosen to become a born-again idiot.
[. . .]
If we begin listing the top generals, defense and security officials who were forced out to cover up for Obama’s failures at all things military, we would be here all day.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-born-again-idiot/

Obama: Born-Again Idiot
October 2, 2014

by Daniel Greenfield

Obama Knew Nothing, And He Knows Nothing

[From article]
We are assured by the headline writers that the president was “unaware” of Obamacare's website defects, and the National Security Agency spying, and the IRS targeting of his political enemies, and the Justice Department bugging the Associated Press, and pretty much anything else you ask him about. But, as he put it, “nobody's madder than me” at this shadowy rogue entity called the “Government of the United States” that's running around pulling all this stuff.
And, once he finds out who's running this Government of the United States rogue entity, he's gonna come down as hard on him as he did on that video-maker in California; he's gonna send round the National Park Service SWAT Team to teach that punk a lesson he won't forget.
[. . .]
Obamacare is not a left/right issue; it's a fraud issue.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1113/steyn110413.php3#.Unn-oN00i6Y

Jewish World Review
Nov. 4, 2013/ 1 Kislev, 5774
Obamacare is not a left/right issue; it's a fraud issue
By Mark Steyn

The Clueless President

[From article]
This weekend, we learned that President Obama "didn't know about" NSA spying on world leaders, especially German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He also "didn't know about" the posthumously obvious problems with the rollout of the ObamaCare website exchanges.
[. . .]

President Obama was also completely unaware that the IRS was subjecting conservative organizations to undue scrutiny on their tax-exempt applications.
[. . .]

President Obama also, presumably, was unaware of the Justice Department's program to allow Mexican drug gangs to purchase military-grade arms from the US.
[. . .]

President Obama also, apparently, didn't know that his spy agencies were monitoring millions of phone calls and cataloguing billions of web visits and data transfers. He, it is reported, didn't know that these same agencies were also recording phone calls in foreign countries.
President Obama also didn't know that his diplomatic mission in Libya had requested more security and felt threatened by rising tension in the war-torn country.
[. . .]

Comparing Barack Obama to Chauncey Gardiner is an insult to the iconic Peter Sellers character. At least he was honest about what he didn't know.    

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/28/Barack-Obama-The-Most-Uninformed-President-in-History

BARACK OBAMA: THE MOST UNINFORMED PRESIDENT IN HISTORY
by MIKE FLYNN
28 Oct 2013, 11:34 AM PDT

Science Cannot Explain Heinous Crimes

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/eon0725td.html

City Journal
THEODORE DALRYMPLE
Aurora Beyond Us
No science can explain massacres like last week’s.
25 July 2012

Man Imitates The Universe

PBS recently broadcast a NOVA episode, "Hunting The Edge of Space - The Ever Expanding Universe." 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/hunting-edge-space.html#hunting-edge-space-1

Information collected by the Hubble Space Telescope verifies that the universe is expanding, more rapidly than previously thought. That easily explains the fast growing number of obese humans in the US. Moreover astronomers found a new influence on the operation of the universe called Dark Energy, which makes up about 60 to 70 percent of the universe. That is about the same percentage of non white humans on earth. Caucasians are about 16 percent of the human population of the world. More evidence is what the scientists call Dark Matter which makes up another 25 percent of the universe. That leaves about 5 percent which they know and can see. It is about what humans know versus what they think they know. Finally they found evidence of the Big Bang which they say occurred about 370 billion years ago. That may be the explanation for the repeated smaller bangs today which continues to increase the population of man on earth. How many humans are aware of what they are doing? Not too many. Just as life imitates art, man imitates nature. The Greek language describes the individual being reflected in the world, and vice versa. 

You Don't Know But You Think You Know

It is not just liberals who don't know what they don't know. Mark Twain: (1835-1910)
"It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you think you know for sure that just ain't so."

http://biggovernment.com/lmeyers/2011/07/16/liberals-dont-know-what-they-dont-know/

Liberals Don’t Know What They Don’t Know
by Lawrence Meyers
July 16, 2011
BigGovernment.com

Knowing What You Know

[From article]

“It’s pretty amazing when you find a huge puzzle like that on a planet where we thought we know everything…”.

On a planet where we thought we know everything?!

Teaching Stupidity

[From Article]

"A philosopher once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of one's own ignorance. That is the knowledge that too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach our young people. [. . .]
Will Rogers once said that it was not ignorance that was so bad but "all the things we know that ain't so."

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell031010.php3

Jewish World Review
March 10, 2010 24 Adar 5770
Artificial Stupidity
New York Post
By Thomas Sowell

Clueless Readers


Readers are as clueless about suspects as voters are about politicians. Saying an innocent person would be screaming about his innocence is nonsense. That would be used by the courts as evidence of mental illness and they would have the suspect placed in a mental hospital for evaluation. Many innocent persons try suicide when in custody. Studies show that confessing to crime is not certain proof of guilt. These comments show how ignorant people are and how many people they think they know when they only believe what they think with no evidence.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1167712

Sources: Cops make gun link in Philip Markoff case
By O’Ryan Johnson, Marie Szaniszlo, Laurel J. Sweet & Dave Wedge
Boston Herald
Friday, April 24, 2009 -