This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series, Innocence and Design, given by David Henderson, was originally broadcast in 1985.

Last week I showed my hand as the price mechanism that I am, and I argued, with the help of my fictional colleague Mr. McQuedy,

that individual willingness to pay should be the

main test of how resources are used. You may recall that we made fun of a number of soap opera

notions of do-it-yourself economics, DIYE. In this lecture, I want to enlarge on the contrast between

DIYE and economic orthodoxy. I want to enlarge on the contrast between DIYE and economic orthodoxy.

I want to consider first an aspect of DIYE which I call unreflecting centralism.

It has two mutually supporting elements.

One is the disposition to assume that outcomes have to be planned and decided by governments.

The second is the tendency to think of governments and states as the principal or even the only actors on the economic scene

and to attribute to them roles and functions which aren't necessarily theirs.

A good example of this tendency appeared in a speech which I had the pleasure of hearing

in Brussels last year by the Irish Prime Minister, Dr. Garrett Fitzgerald. Interestingly, Dr. Fitzgerald is

one of two prime ministers within the European community who count as professional economists,

the other being the Prime Minister of Greece, Dr. Andreas Papandreou.

In his speech, he described himself engagingly as an economist on leave.

Nevertheless, in reviewing the problems of the community, he advanced a prize specimen of

unreflecting centralism. For Dr. Fitzgerald, there are two economic superpowers, the United States and Japan,

and he argued, attempts to compete on an equal basis in the economic sphere

with these superpowers by independent, individual action, are quite simply bound to fail.

The moral drawn by Dr. Fitzgerald, in common with many

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