"The social sciences building at the University of Chicago indeed still bears since it was built 40 years ago on its outside an inscription taken from the famous physicist Lord Kelvin: "When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory." I will admit that that may be true, but it is certainly not scientific to insist on measurement where you don't know what your measurements mean. There are cases where measurements are not relevant. What has done much damage to microeconomics is striving for a pseudo-exactness by imitating methods of the physical sciences which have to deal with what are fundamentally much more simple phenomena. And the assumption that it is possible to ascertain all the relevant particular facts still completely dominates the alternative methods of dealing with our constitutional ignorance, which economists have tried to overcome. This of course, is what has come to be called macroeconomics as distinct from microeconomics."
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Philosophers from AustriaAcademics from the United KingdomAcademics from AustriaFriedrich HayekEconomists from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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"Coping with Ignorance," The Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, Originally published in Imprimis 7 (Hillsdale, Michigan: Hillsdale College, July 1978). Later reprinted in Cheryl A. Yurchis (ed.) Champions of Freedom (The Ludwig von Mises Lecture Series Vol. 5; Hillsdale, Michigan: Hillsdale College Press, 1979).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek
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Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich August von Hayek CH (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) was an Austrian, later British, economist and philosopher best known for his defense of [[w:classical liberalism|classical
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