Hacker News Books

A column or collection of random quotes will never adequately summarize a thinker - however his books "Knowledge and Decisions" and "A Conflict of Visions" both rank as masterpieces.

>An underlying premise of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange is that there’s tremendous amounts of knowledge tied up in “ordinary” people, and given an easy way to show it off and a little incentive they can make this knowledge available and help as many people as possible.

That is the underlying premise of free market economics and small-government conservatism, too. Go read some Thomas Sowell, a lot of his books discuss the issue, especially A Conflict of Values and, in more detail, Knowledge and Decisions.

I’m a longtime Thomas Sowell fan but I only just recently started reading his most celebrated work, Knowledge and Decisions, first published in 1980. In one of the early chapters there is a reference to the old physical mailbox systems of pre-networked offices, and how the cost of distracted attention from hundreds of employees never seems to deter managers from dumping all manner of low-value correspondence into said boxes.

Email and Slack may have kicked this problem into overdrive, but managers’ inability to efficiently organize knowledge work appears to be a long-standing open problem.

Thomas Sowell [1], an almost-published novelist turned hard core economist (i.e. got his Ph.D. in Economics) is one of the best writers of economics books, many having a libertarian slant.

I recommend the following books especially - 1. Basic Economics 2. Applied Economics and 3. Knowledge and decisions.

He also produced a crazy detailed trilogy about culture and has written an autobiography which might read a bit like the written version of Mad Men. He often remarks that he is 1/3rd as old as America itself.

And even if you end up completely disagreeing with his opinions, it is worth it to check out at least one of his works to see that it is possible to write economics books which are not utterly boring.

[1] After 9/11, he turned into a slightly loony war hawk. But his best work was produced before that.

Sowell's Basic Economics is the easiest to read one I have seen, and for the math phobic it has no equations.

Another really good, if idiosyncratic, book is David Friedman's Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life.

Also Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions covers roughly the same ground as Hayek's Use of Knowledge in Society, but is newer and more readable.

This is the reason government regulation never works as well as the regulators expect. It is the distinction between "tacit" knowledge and "explicit" knowledge. Most tacit knowledge is both local and non-verbal, some can be explained after the fact, like the chick sexing technique, but the verbal description itself isn't the useful part. And it is contained in the heads of the people actually doing the work so it is rarely, if ever, taken into proper account when formulating regulations.

For a really good explanation of the differences and the problems caused, read Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions. Hayek's Use of Knowledge in Society also discusses this, as do other books and essays, but Sowell's is more readable and his examples are closer to contemporary (it was written in the late 1970s and published in 1981).