No, not the idea, but the place it\’s seen.
What we need is a good idea. Lots of good ideas.
In this regard, we just may be in luck, because we are higher primates, with enormous frontal lobes, capable of dazzlingly complex thought. And while we wouldn\’t even be able to make a pencil if left to our own devices – no single person knows how to mine graphite, make rubber or paint etc – we\’re not individuals, we\’re a species. Our collective intelligence is both extraordinary and infinite.
Which is just as well. Because if it was left to our governments, we might as well get in the suicide pills now.
Have we really just had the Observer editorial telling us that markets work and planning doesn\’t?
More unbelievably still, the pencil example is a straight lift from Milton Friedman…
Surely not!?…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8
Tim adds: No.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html
The original is Leonard Read. Friedman used it, sure, but Read was the first (and Friedman, in the book, acknowledges this).
Friedman acknowledges it in the video clip, too (or at least in one of the video clips I have seen, maybe not that one).
Encouraging that someone at the Observer is reading a little more widely than usual.