"You’ll see the same thing in The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945), where Hayek pits central planning against individuals making use of local knowledge: the tool he uses to explain that individuals acting independently make better use of knowledge than central planners, must also (though he neglects to mention this corollary) “explain” that an individual acting independently in the market must make better use of knowledge than they would within any organization – a large firm, a middle-sized firm, a university, the post office (local knowledge: always better than ZIP codes). We’re accustomed to critiquing Hayek’s antipathy to things collective in the political realm (“he believes in liberty, but not the liberty of workers to act collectively”), but there’s more involved here than his evident animus towards the organized lower orders: he doesn’t seem to understand the collective aspect of discovery at all. To anybody who knows anything about the processes of discovery in organizations or networks, this looks just clueless."