Planning vs. Experimentation

This is exactly the reason why federalism works better than centralisation, why spontaneous order is far superior to central planning.

I'm surprised its in the NYT, unless, of course, they don't see the implications.

You can access that wall street journal article for free with a thing called a netpass from: http://news.congoo.com

This was literally in the last blog I read!

It is not good. You can argue Soviet Union or China are experiments only on an unapropriate scale. Or at least you may argue that Scandinavian socialism are experiments. So we can learn if the ideal of welfare state is just that.

This point of view is bad. If all we can hope is experiment, that is really bad. Really sad. Hopeless. On the other hand, I think I understand what you are implying. But this argument I think, humbly, is empty.

Zhu,

Every experiment gives us valuable insight about a world where conditions, tastes, preferences and needs are in a constant state of flux. In such a world, it is unlikely that we can ever approach a stationary state, Utopian or otherwise.

The point is, the less costly it is to obtain the results of an experiment (and act on them), the better off we'll all be in the long run. The sooner we obtain the results, the sooner, and more precisely we can react to those results.