"An economy’s inventory of produced inputs is both complex and simple. Maintaining and improving upon congeries of productive inputs is an indispensable part of economic progress. All such time-phased processes will not evolve automatically: cave-people rose and fell in material well-being; eons passed without much cumulative change; great diversity of performance characterized geographically separated societies. Attempts to generalize simple family’s or related-families’ habit formation to large-group polities—à la utopian experimental cults or in the Lenin-Stalin and Mao pattern have not hitherto succeeded in organizing production with approximate Pareto-Optimality efficiency features. Gradual evolution toward near laissez-faire market mechanism responding to individual’s self-interest, history suggests and advanced economic theory second guesses, will incur areas of market failure and will generate and perpetuate considerable degrees of economic and political inequalities. Just as there is no asymptotic communist utopia, neither is an asymptotic laissez-faire utopia."
January 1, 1970