Cooperation or Coercion? That Is the Question

Dispersed, cooperative knowledge works in economics as it does in evolutionary biology, to accelerate advancement of the human species. Thus two disciplines are joined in Matt Ridley’s book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, for which he received the Hayek Prize this evening from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

Friedrich Hayek was, of course, the Nobel economist who pioneered work in what Ridley, in his acceptance lecture, called “bottom-up” economic and social development. (The $50,000 prize is given annually to a book author who best incorporates the late Austrian’s insights.) Hayekian thinking challenges central planning, based on isolated or centralized knowledge, as a fatal conceit.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timferguson/2011/09/26/science-and-economics-meet-at-hayek/