![]() ![]() How a variety of social institutions and processes coordinate innumerable scattered fragments of knowledge, enabling a complex society to function, is the central theme of the first half of Knowledge and Decisions. The analysis begins with one of the most severe constraints facing human beings in all societies and throughout history-inadequate knowledge for making all the decisions that each individual and every organization nevertheless has to make, in order to perform the tasks that go with living and achieve the goals that go with being human. Here the focus is not on particular people or their beliefs, but on social processes and the constraints within which those processes operate. 1 There the focus was on a set of people and their perception of their role in a world whose problems they saw as caused by the inadequacies of others. The social vision underlying the analysis in Knowledge and Decisions is the opposite of what I have elsewhere called The Vision of the Anointed. The re-publication of Knowledge and Decisions now, sixteen years after its initial debut, reflects the continuing importance of the issues raised in it, and offers an opportunity to update some conclusions while re-affirming others. None of my subsequent writings has surpassed it, though it has been joined by work of comparable scope in A Conflict of Visions in 1987 and Race and Culture in 1994. Knowledge and Decisions, a winner of the 1980 Law and Economics Center Prize, was heralded as a ”landmark work” and selected for this prize ”because of its cogent contribution to our understanding of the differences between the market process and the process of government.” In announcing the award, the center acclaimed Sowell, whose ”contribution to our understanding of the process of regulation alone would make the book important, but in reemphasizing the diversity and efficiency that the market makes possible, work goes deeper and becomes even more significant.” Read ExcerptĪs of the time when it was first published in 1980, Knowledge and Decisions was by far my most important and most comprehensive book. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision makinga gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency, but our very freedom because actual knowledge gets replaced by assumptions based on an abstract and elitist social vision f what ought to be. With a new preface by the author, this reissue of Thomas Sowell's classic study of decision making updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Annointed, Sowell, one of America's most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. ![]()
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