Is the Economy Illegible? with Art Carden

Is successful management of a local, regional, national, or global economy simply a matter of having “more data”? No: what we call “the economy” is a product of knowledge dispersed among many minds that cannot confront planners and managers as data. F.A. Hayek wrote that “it is the curious task of economics to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design,” and in the language of the late political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott, the economy is illegible. It functions according to tacit knowledge that may be impossible to articulate verbally or numerically and that, therefore, is inaccessible to planners and managers. The economy’s illegibility is why efforts to simplify, codify, and control it often backfire. The social problem is of a kind that no individual mind or group of minds—no matter how great—can solve independent of the mundane give, take, and trade of day-to-day life.

About the Speaker

Art Carden is Margaret Gage Bush Distinguished Professor of Economics and Medical Properties Trust Fellow at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He is a co-editor of the Southern Economic Journal and a Fellow with numerous research, education, and outreach institutions. He is also the author of “Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World” (with Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, University of Chicago Press, 2020), “Strangers With Candy: Observations From the Ordinary Business of Life” (Libertarian Christian Institute, 2023), and “Mere Economics” (with Caleb S. Fuller, B&H Academic).

This event is supported by a gift from The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation through the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.