Don Boudreaux on The Essential Hayek

It is a project for Canada’s Fraser Institute. It will launch next week.

Boudreaux starts with a “nobody knows how to” introduction. He uses paper and ink as examples of mundane goods that require many different people and specialized tasks to be produced.

As I start my book on specialization and trade, I find myself doing the same thing. This is in a great tradition. Adam Smith used the woolen coat. Leonard Read used the pencil. My thought was to use a bowl of cereal.

4 thoughts on “Don Boudreaux on The Essential Hayek

  1. Even the cereal or milk first debate rages on. We here all know which is right and proper.

    • The cereal idea is good. I assume kids still eat a lot of cereal so they can relate to it. If only you could put it on the back of a cereal box for that insatiable need to read something whIle eating it.

    • The milk first people are monsters.
      They might as well drink a glass of milk then eat cereal dry out of a bowl.
      I’ll bet Lord is one of them…

  2. And, don’t forget Paul Seabright’s wonderful example from “The Company of Strangers”…

    This morning I went out and bought a shirt. There is nothing very unusual in that: across the world, perhaps 20 million people did the same. What is more remarkable is that I, like most of these 20 million, had not informed anybody in advance of what I was intending to do. Yet the shirt I bought, although a simple item by the standards of modern technology, represents a triumph of international cooperation. The cotton was grown in India, from seeds developed in the United States; the artificial fiber in the thread comes from Portugal and the material in the dyes from at least six other countries; the collar linings come from Brazil, and the machinery for the weaving, cutting, and sewing from Germany; the shirt itself was made up in Malaysia. The project of making a shirt and delivering it to me in Toulouse has been a long time in the planning, since well before the morning two winters ago when an Indian farmer first led a pair of ploughing bullocks across his land on the red plains outside Coimbatore. Engineers in Cologne and chemists in Birmingham were involved in the preparation many years ago. Most remarkably of all, given the obstacles it has had to surmount to be made at all and the large number of people who have been involved along the way, it is a very stylish and attractive shirt (for what little my judgment in these matters may be worth). I am extremely pleased at how the project has turned out. And yet I am quite sure nobody knew that I was going to be buying a shirt of this kind today; I hardly knew it myself even the day before. Every single one of these people who has been laboring to bring my shirt to me has done so without knowing or indeed caring anything about me.

Comments are closed.