Zur Bewältigung von Unwissenheit

This file is a German translation of Hayek’s 1978 Ludwig-von-Mises memorial lecture “Coping with Ignorance.” It is a single lecture combining intellectual memoir, homage, and methodological argument. Hayek opens by tracing his path from Wieser’s Austrian economics and youthful Fabian sympathies to Mises’s decisive influence through Die Gemeinwirtschaft and the Privatseminar. That personal frame prepares the central claim: Hayek extends Mises’s socialist-calculation critique by making permanent ignorance the starting point of economics.

Ich bin zu der Auffassung gelangt, daß es sowohl das Ziel der marktwirtschaftlichen Ordnung als auch deshalb der Gegenstand ihrer theoretischen Erklärung ist, die unvermeidliche Unwissenheit jedes einzelnen über die meisten der besonderen Tatsachen, die diese Ordnung bestimmen, zu bewältigen.

English translation: I have come to the view that it is both the aim of the market order and, for that reason, the object of its theoretical explanation to cope with the unavoidable ignorance of every individual concerning most of the particular facts that determine this order.

The market order is not a device for applying data already possessed by one mind. Its relevant facts are local, transient, and dispersed; no planner or theorist can assemble them. Hayek recasts Smith, marginal utility theory, and Mises’s critique of socialism around this epistemic function. Prices are not merely cost summaries; they are signals telling producers which costs are worth incurring and coordinating adjustments to circumstances most participants never directly know.

Die Haupteinsicht, die von modernen Ökonomen gewonnen wurde, besteht darin, daß der Markt ein Ordnungsmechanismus ist, der entstanden ist, ohne daß ihn irgendjemand völlig versteht, und der es uns ermöglicht, weit verstreute Informationen über die Bedeutung von Umständen, von denen wir meist nichts wissen, zu nutzen.

English translation: The chief insight gained by modern economists is that the market is an ordering mechanism that has arisen without anyone fully understanding it, and which enables us to make use of widely dispersed information about the significance of circumstances of which we ourselves are for the most part unaware.

This yields the anti-planning argument in its strongest form. Central planning is not blocked only by the present state of science; it is blocked by the nature of the knowledge at stake. A wide division of labor depends on impersonal price signals because the required knowledge cannot be centralized. The theorist faces the same condition at a second level: he must explain many actions without knowing all the facts, or even what each actor knows.

Hayek’s answer is a restrained defense of microeconomics. Good theory can model abstract patterns of adjustment and rule out certain outcomes, but it cannot predict concrete future configurations. This is his notion of “Mustervoraussage,” or pattern prediction: an account of form and direction, not a calculation of detail.

Alles was wir erreichen können, ist zu sagen, welche Arten von Ereignissen nicht eintreten werden und welche Art Muster die resultierende Situation zeigen wird, ohne aber fähig zu sein, das spezifische Ergebnis oder die konkrete Ausprägung des Musters vorherzusagen.

English translation: All we can achieve is to say which kinds of events will not occur and what sort of pattern the resulting situation will display, without, however, being able to predict the specific outcome or the concrete form the pattern will take.

The same restraint underlies Hayek’s criticism of equilibrium when it becomes more than a useful analytic device. Equilibrating tendencies exist, but economic life is a moving stream in which local adjustments are overtaken by new changes. He also qualifies Mises’s apriorism: many economic propositions unfold logical implications, yet market order depends on communication and learning.

The lecture then turns against scientism in mathematical and macroeconomic economics. Hayek distinguishes mathematics as a way of describing abstract patterns from the mistaken belief that science requires measurement of all relevant magnitudes. In explaining action, what matters is how things appear to actors, not measurements detached from their meanings. The imitation of physics therefore produces false precision.

Was aber viel Schaden in der Mikroökonomie angerichtet hat, ist das Streben nach einer Pseudoexaktheit, indem man die Methoden der Naturwissenschaften nachahmt, die aber mit wesentlich einfacheren Phänomenen befaßt sind.

English translation: What has done much damage in microeconomics is the striving for a pseudo-exactness that imitates the methods of the natural sciences, which, however, are concerned with essentially simpler phenomena.

His critique of macroeconomics follows directly. Aggregates and averages seem to overcome ignorance, but social order is not a thermodynamic mass phenomenon. Following Warren Weaver, Hayek treats it as organized complexity: too structured for statistical mass laws and too complex for complete enumeration. Even monetary theory, he argues, should not be reduced to price indexes, because the important effects of money operate through changes in relative prices.

Ich glaube, daß es nur die Mikroökonomie ist, die uns befähigt, die entscheidenden Funktionen des Marktprozesses zu verstehen: daß er allein es uns ermöglicht, einen wirksamen Gebrauch von Informationen über Tausende von Tatsachen zu machen, von denen niemand eine vollständige Kenntnis haben kann.

English translation: I believe it is only microeconomics that enables us to understand the decisive functions of the market process: that it alone allows us to make effective use of information about thousands of facts of which no one can have complete knowledge.

The lecture’s relevance lies in this compact synthesis of Hayek’s mature knowledge problem. Spontaneous order, price signals, pattern prediction, suspicion of planning, and anti-scientism all follow from one proposition: liberal economic institutions matter because they coordinate action under ineradicable ignorance.