ABSTRACT
The fact that the present authors have, on balance, a positive view of the economic work of Karl Marx will not have escaped the reader. Although this book, with its grounding in the physical and information sciences, is by no means a work of orthodox Marxism, its presentation of economic issues is certainly influenced by Marx and the school of economics that follows him. Examination of the economics of information is, however, more associated with a very different school of economics, that of Hayek. Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) was an Austrian economist and political philosopher, noted for his defense of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought in the mid-twentieth century. Hayek’s ideas acquired a practical relevance from their political adoption, first by the Thatcher government in Britain in the 1980s and later by post-Soviet governments in Russia and Eastern Europe. We consider that he made fundamental errors in his analysis of economic information – errors which, when they became the basis for practical policy, had catastrophic effects on economic co-ordination and performance.
