Welcome back to the tech policy podcast.

I'm Corbyn Barthold.

Not even artificial intelligence can make central planning work.

That is the bottom line in an article published in the June issue of Reason magazine

on AI and so-called Wicked Problems. The article is by the economist and writer Arnold Kling.

Arnold is my guest today, and I look forward to talking to him about his article and the thinking

behind it. Spoiler alert, Frederick Hayek remains undefeated. Arnold is a man of profound learning.

He is an explosion of interesting thoughts, and I want to hear as many of them as I can today. So rather than

devoting any more time to an introduction, I'm going to dive right in. Arnold, welcome to the show.

Thanks.

AI has done a lot of impressive stuff lately, but to get right to your thesis, you don't think it can now

or probably will ever crack the problem of economic central planning. Why?

Well, let's just define central planning and contrast it with markets, which is very decentralized.

So let's say some, you know, shock comes along to the economy or the sort of, you know, like with the pandemic,

people either locking themselves down or being locked down.

How's the economy going to adapt to that?

And the decentralized way is that prices adjust and people react to prices and things that where

the supply has gone way down, people see that the price goes up and they consume less and so and they find

substitutes. So there's all all sorts of adaptation that takes place with a central centralized

system you wouldn't have prices. You would have some expert, let's say in Washington DC,

say okay, now the following people are going to shift from this industry to that industry,

and the following people are going to buy less of this and more of that.

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