And you alluded to it briefly about wonder, surprise and appreciation. But in the book, you make some very, very beautiful connection between the calculation debate and Michael Polanyi's insights into the philosophy of science. tend to think of science as, well, you just go out and you test this theory. And if it's confirmed by the data, then you've learned that it might, you've gotten confirmation for it, or you've increased your confidence that it's true. But the Polanyi insight is that, how do you know what to test? And it's very, very, it was beautiful to see that that's similar to the calculation debate. So explain that. Well,

Polanyi wrote a wonderful essay that you can find called The Growth of Knowledge in Society. And he explains how it is. And science is a central metaphor for Polanyi and all of this stuff. And just a little background, Polanyi was a leading physical chemist. And he's a Hungarian, you know, Austro-Hungarian, but Hungarian by birth. But he was the head of physical chemistry at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, when Einstein was the head of theoretical physics. So they were quite close. OK. But what happened, of course, is the 1930s. And so you have to leave. Right. And so they get out of get out of there as fast as possible. But some of his friends didn't get out and they didn't. They might have got out from the Nazis, but they didn't get out from the Soviets. and both the Nazis and the Soviets wanted to control science for the purpose of the state, okay? And so Polanyi started to reflect on the nature of science in a free society. Like, why is science and scientific inquiry so essential for what we understand to be a free society, and how does it contrast with what happens in a planned society? And so that's why he shifts when he moves to Manchester from physical chemistry eventually into philosophy and has these reflections as you're talking about. One of my sort of things I show my students every semester, videos of different, you know, sort of scientists and scientific philosophers. One of them is Jacob Bernowski's The Ascent of Man and the episode on the Holocaust in which he links the search for finality and truth, like in like certainty, not truth, certainty as leading to, you know, Auschwitz, basically. And it's a very emotional, it's a brilliant sort of discussion of this, and the relationship of what scientific inquiry really is, which is at the edge of error. And it's basically, you know, this idea that the more we know, the more we know, we don't know. And so we just constantly are growing like that. Polanyi was trying to get us to think in those terms at that time. The part

I liked what you said there is the analogy for me, and you can correct me or expand on it if I have it right. I don't know the alternative way to make something that I used to use tin for, and now tin's more expensive. So there's a bunch of people who use tin, and they're all trying to figure out now that tin is more scarce because they see that it's more expensive. They're encouraged as if by an invisible hand to find alternative ways to produce what they produce using something else. And some people come up with something, and we can't explain that. We don't have, like, where's the book to figure out? Now they don't have the book of what are the alternatives to 10. I want the book that says, how do I figure out what the alternatives to 10 are? And that requires a certain leap of imagination, as you talked about innovation, creativity, but that's happening in science. And we like to think about science as this sort of orderly process. And I've spoken about it before, but I encourage people, I'll try to put a link up to it. Watch Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat's last theorem, talk about what it was like when his first proof failed. He was the most lionized mathematician in the world. His proof turns out to be false. He falls off the front page of the New York Times, and he's got nothing. And watch him describe how he figured out a way to solve that challenge. He can't describe it. And it's just fun to watch him try and what his face does. And there's something ineffable, intangible, inexplicable, and very unorderly and unrational about how we make rational progress. Yeah,

what Polanyi calls is commitment. Commitment. The individual scientist has to have a commitment, but that commitment is always weighed against other things. So Polanyi has these forces working in science. So you have tradition, right, the way that other scientists. So basically what he says is that you have to have a hypothesis that you bring forth, a theory or whatever, that is plausible to other thinkers, that is of interest to other thinkers, is novel to other thinkers. And so you might have times, just like you were talking about before, where you have a novelty of your insight, but it doesn't get accepted by the community at the time. But it might in the future. Polanyi's own history of his own theories with physical chemistry prove this out, okay? That's one of the things. So one of the things that, you know, it's an interesting contrast between Polania's understanding of Einstein and Popper's understanding of Einstein, because Popper tries to force Einstein more into the three by five card of methodology, right? Hypothesis, a test, refute, fail to refute. Whereas to Polania, Einstein is, you know, this committed scientist who's obsessed exactly, right, about these issues in the world. And he's never afraid to ask a question that he can't answer. Well, he's always worried about his answers that can't be questioned. Right. So that would be science in a non-free society. Right. And so Polania is trying to get us to think about that. And then, you know, this growth of knowledge and he wants to draw a metaphor to the market. So the market is also about growing knowledge, right? This is the link between Polanyi and Hayek on these issues is that science is a growth of knowledge. The market is a growth of knowledge. The knowledge that we have tomorrow is not easily guessed from the knowledge that we have today. It's a shift. It's a total change in perspective and opening up of us thinking in new ways. It's a new window for us to see the world through. And that novelty and creativity is at the core. And just to mention again, when you talk to Matt Ridley, go back to the, think about Ridley's distinction between invention and innovation, because the invention is an input into the innovation, but it's not the same thing, right? And so you're tinkering and everything like that. That's still at this, you know, we're, we're at this innovation, invention sort of stage, but how does that then become innovation? That's what Polanyi is talking about and pushing that knowledge out.

And I don't want to overstate the wild imaginative leap that entrepreneurs or business people or scientists make. Oh, sure. When the price of tin goes up, if tin's a big part of your production, a successful person in business has a plan for what to do if that happens. They might stockpile 10. They're going to look for alternatives beforehand. They're not going to just wait for this incredible pressure of an enormously higher price all of a sudden. So I just want to make that clear. And that's the particular knowledge of time and place that-

Let me use a quick example that your readers might want to look up. You and I are weird because we find economic very minutiae and economics fascinating. But the history of the Garbean. So the Garbean was an input into fracking. All right. But it's grown in all these certain places. So now as fracking demand went up like about a decade ago, all of a sudden the price of gar beans went way up. OK, and so farmers that substituted out of other agricultural products started growing more gar beans, you know, things like that. And then what happened was because the price was high, fracking people started thinking of innovative ways to not use garens and come up with the same kind of idea as substitutes. And so this is the Julian Simon, the ultimate resources, the human imagination, and why it is he won the bet against Arthur Ehrlich. Isaac,

Isaac Ehrlich. No, not Isaac. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Paul, Paul Ehrlich. I'm getting old. Because it's because,

you know, as the price of things go up, people have an incentive to think about ways to lower those costs. And they do substitutes as well as innovations, you know. And so to me, I think that, you know, the mundane, one of the fascinating things about economics is the mystery of the mundane. Like the very things that we take for granted are in many ways the thing we should be most surprised about. So Adam Smith's butcher, baker, and brewer giving us our dinner, or the common woolen coat, or the eye pencil, or the loaf of bread, as you put it out. These are the mysteries that if we could get people to go through the wonder, surprise, and appreciation aspects of on those, we would do a tremendous job. And I think this socialist calculation debate really highlights that, because it highlights the power of the price system and the poverty of planning, and in a very stark way. Sadly, for people in large, know, for populations, huge populations that had to suffer under the yoke of these things, not only the inefficiencies, but then also the tyranny that comes from that. efficiencies that are generated by and malfunctions that are generated by planning, that really highlights on the opposite side the power of the price system.