2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Knowing how to produce something does not establish whether producing it is worth the resources consumed. In this introduction to the 1981 special issue An Economic Critique of Socialism, Don Lavoie makes that distinction the starting point for a question about how economic knowledge is generated. His reading of Mises and Hayek shifts attention from prices as numbers available to planners to competition as the process that makes prices informative. On this account, instructing socialist managers to imitate competitive outcomes leaves the central problem unresolved. The short essay offers a pointed orientation to the calculation debate and explains why Lavoie regards it as a challenge not only to comprehensive planning but also to economists who claim to know how market prices should be corrected.