The appreciation given to Hayek at CATO would be akin to that of art critics visiting Michelangelo’s studio to acclaim the accumulating rubble as a masterful evocation of chaos, while failing to see anything meaningful in the Pietá’s developing outline. A more scientific appreciation would see Hayek creating his depiction of economic causality by chipping away that which is irrelevant and dysfunctional (e.g.: the medieval conviction that information must achieve focus before it can be used to impart order). If the economy is then re-conceived as a mind in and of itself, the calculation problem becomes one of emulating the economic organism’s thought process.

We know that Hayek’s later musings on the spontaneous ordering of markets have given rise to the several sciences that are now grappling with chaos and complexity. These sciences (none of which happen to be economics) have become quite adept in demonstrating how the dissociated motives of a system’s constituent parts can indeed add-up to elegant behaviors in the system’s whole — these having no visible counterpart in the petty motives by which they are created.

The science of chaos posits an ‘attractor’ as the central tendency around which complex dynamic systems furtively organize behaviors that are outwardly random and turbulent. And Hayek clearly nominates a prospective attractor for the agent of economic control when he indentifies Pareto optimality as the object of macroeconomic activity in his statement of the calculation problem.

Hayek’s anxieties over the distributed nature of economic data might have been relieved in his later realization that economics instantiates a general class of complex systems characterized by behaviors that, while determined, are nonetheless unrealizable within human reason. The implicit–but–unpredictable responses of a complex system to the forces operating within and upon it are, however, knowable through formal emulations of its internal causality. The New England Complex Systems Institute has published a version of SFEcon Model 0 as an instance of understanding in this form.

If Hayek ever specifically denied all possibility of such a demonstration, we have yet to discover the proscription in his published work. And, were a citation to this effect produced, it would in any case be overthrown by Hayek’s own unceasing efforts to portray economic calculation as a mathematically determined system. One does not spend one’s last decades ¹ working on a problem that he has concluded to be beyond solution.

While we do not see Hayek among those who have put forward their own failure with the Vienna problem as foreclosing the possibility of success by others, others can readily hallucinate their personal convictions to this effect into Hayek’s canon:

One of the great contributions of Nobel Laureate economist Friedrich Hayek was to admonish us to recognize the insurmountable limits to human knowledge. Why? Not even the brightest minds . . . can ever have the knowledge to shape an economic system entirely to our liking. To think we can represents the height of arrogance and a pretense of knowledge.²