About Pretense of Knowledge

“The Pretense of Knowledge” was the title of a lecture given by economist Friedrich Hayek upon being awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics on December 11, 1974.

In the speech, Hayek argued that academics, central planners, and social engineers were deluding themselves by believing that they were able to possess the knowledge necessary to create and manage society. The mistake, he said, was in treating the various disciplines that study human society, including economics, as though they were similar to the natural sciences.

In the physical sciences like chemistry or physics, he argued, “any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable.” In contrast, studies of complex social phenomena can provide us with only limited information from which to draw conclusions. It isn’t just that there is too much information spread around and obscured in society, it is also that much of what one would need to know to truly predict, explain and plan is abstract and unquantifiable.

Think how much harder the study of electrons would be, as Richard Feynman once pointed out, if electrons had feelings.

The main difference between the physical and social sciences, to Hayek, was that those in the physical sciences were able to measure what they believed to be important, while in the social sciences “often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement,” ultimately twisting their conclusions.

And yet despite this flaw, Hayek argued, there was now a tendency to treat social science as actual science — particularly with the growth of statistics, mathematical modeling, and other quasi-scientific methods in the study of society — which tends to give academics a false belief in the completeness of their own expertise, or as Hayek called it, a “pretense of knowledge.”

Rather than indulge in this pretense, Hayek argued that the function of academic disciplines like economics should be “to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

This echoes an argument he had been making for much of his career. In “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” written in 1945, Hayek argued that the knowledge possessed by society was diffused among all individuals within it, and this knowledge included abstract, contextual and personal information about their own circumstances. This knowledge could not be collected or even understood, and yet it would need to be if one was to create an ideal society.

Which brings me to the purpose of this Substack.

I am a person who wants to understand and explain the world better. To do this, I have spent my life and my career exploring the intricacies of politics, economics, history, demographics, geopolitics, and culture. Along the way I have come to realize that the more I learn, the more I am aware of all that I do not know.

In his Nobel lecture, Hayek said that he would prefer “true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”

I’ve always found that position to be profound, and it is how I have modeled my own approach to studying these subjects. My goal is to analyze the world honestly, leaning on reason, critical analysis, skepticism and data to search for true but imperfect knowledge that will help understand and explain the world better.

I want to do that while being humble enough to acknowledge that there are major limitations to our understanding. I have my opinions, and you will hear plenty of them, but you are likely also to notice that I speak in terms of probabilities, likelihoods, and overall impressions, not concrete absolutes.

To do otherwise would be to assume a Pretense of Knowledge.