Thomas Sowell: Why it is important for economists to combat public ignorance:
[Sowell reviewed by Callahan, Gordon 1, Gordon 2, Gordon 3.]
When you know that central planners in the Soviet Union had to set 24 million prices--and keep adjusting them, relative to one another, as conditions changed--you realize that central planning did not just happen to fail. It had no chance of succeeding from the outset. It is a wholly different ball game when hundreds of millions of people individually keep track of the relatively few prices they need to know for their own decision-making in a market economy.
Simple stuff like this is not very exciting for economists and there is no payoff in one’s professional career for clarifying such things for the general public.
