Competition, Economic Planning, and the Knowledge Problem

Competition, Economic Planning, and the Knowledge Problem expands on the ideas Kirzner first discussed in Competition and Entrepreneurshipthe role of the entrepreneur and its relation to the determination of prices and the coordination of individuals plansas well as economic planning, the knowledge problem, market-process theory, and the parts played by information, knowledge and advertising. It includes a paper on F. A. Hayeks theory of market coordination and the Austrian business-cycle theoryseen now for the first time in its original English. As a whole, the volume expresses Kirzners understanding that economics cannot be separated from its human element. Competition is a rivalrous process of entrepreneurial activity in which individuals and firms discover, innovate, and outdo each other. Kirzner discusses why this dynamic view of the economy is so important to understand, particularly in the contexts of economic planning and the workings of competitive markets. Over the course of this books nineteen articles and one monograph, Kirzner also stresses another point: though knowledge is present in all economic interaction, it is also dispersed in the economy such that no individual mind can ever centralize it all. This knowledge problem implies, as Mises and Hayek have argued, the impossibility of central planning. Kirzners contribution is to show that, ultimately, it is only the free, competitive entrepreneurial process that can overcome this problem through generation of knowledge that enables the most efficient allocation of scarce resources.