Hayek in "Unbroken"

I just finished reading Lauren Hillenbrand's Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, on my vacation. I highly recommend it. One excerpt:

He [Pete, Louie Zamperini's older brother] told the principal that Louie craved attention but had never won it in the form of praise, so he sought it in the form of punishment. If Louie were recognized for doing something right, Pete argued, he'd turn his life around. He asked the principal to allow Louie to join a sport. When the principal balked, Pete asked him if he could live with allowing Louie to fail. It was a cheeky thing for a sixteen-year-old to say to his principal, but Pete was the one kid in Torrance who could get away with such a remark, and make it persuasive. Louie was made eligible for athletics for 1932.

Robert Solow once said of Milton Friedman, "Whatever the issue, Milton thinks about the money supply. Well, I think about sex all the time but I don't always talk about it." I tend to see Hayek's decentralized information everywhere. Pete knew enough about his brother--Pete had "local information'--to have a strong belief that his solution for Louie's trouble-making would work. A central planner on his own--the principal or, even worse, if schooling had been centralized then--some rule-maker in Sacramento--would have been highly unlikely to think of Pete's solution for Louie.

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