Hollis Robbins:

Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is having a moment in AI and tech circles. The argument is that the knowledge needed to run any complex system is never in one place. It exists as dispersed fragments held by separate individuals whose expertise is knowledge of temporary opportunities. Call it last mile knowledge. Centralized bureaucracies fail because they assume this knowledge can be gathered and acted on from above. The idea is that LLMs are a kind of centralized bureaucracy, and the tech people reading Hayek are interested in why they may falter in the same way.

Hayek’s 1949 essay, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” circulates in very different circles. In this essay, Hayek described intellectuals as “professional secondhand dealers in ideas” whose function is not original thought but the filtering and transmission of other people’s ideas. The intellectual, Hayek writes, judges new ideas by how readily they fit into his general picture of the world. The essay is about ideological sameness among the educated class, proposing that professional structures reward conformity.

Read together, the 1945 Hayek explains uniformity as the product of a bureaucratic system that destroys local knowledge by demanding interchangeable units. The 1949 Hayek explains uniformity as the product of an intellectual class converging on fashionable ideas. Monoculture and centralization are both a matter of everyone doing the same thing but for different reasons. I have been interested in how people mistake one for the other. When critics of the American university see thousands of identical syllabi, for example, they reach for the 1949 Hayek every time and see ideology. I say, look at infrastructure.

The 27 million syllabi are scrapable because accreditation agencies require evidence of what courses contain, and state articulation agreements require documentation that a course at one institution is equivalent to a course at another.

Under the centralized transfer regime, the syllabus is the tool that makes courses legible. In the Hayekian sense, a syllabus is a compressed signal about a course and the transfer/ accreditation regime is a coordination apparatus that treats the signal as a sufficient representation of the underlying, situated activity of teaching.

People want to talk about ideology rather than centralization because it’s more fun. I get that. Nobody wants the story that the 1945 Hayek warned against because the fix is so expensive. I think American students deserve better than Big Box Education.

Hayek’s 1949 “The Intellectuals and Socialism” is a diagnosis for healthy institutions with a political problem. Hayek’s 1945 “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is a diagnosis for a system that has destroyed its own capacity to adapt. This is the world we’re living in, until critics start noticing the problem is not ideology but centralized planning.