Hayek and Myrdal Quotations

Hayek had a good argument about the difficulties of central planning. The planners do not have a mechanism for using tacit knowledge distributed among agents. But when it came to describing how contemporary western economies work, Hayek gave up:

"It is important to realize in any investigation of the possibilities of planning that it is a fallacy to suppose capitalism as it exists today is the alternative. We are certainly as far from capitalism in its pure form as we are from any system of central planning. The world of today is just interventionist chaos." -- F. A. Hayek (1948). "Socialist Calculation", in Individualism and Economic Order

On a different topic entirely - I am amused by this Myrdal quote:

"It has been suggested that if one tried to construct a consistent system from Marshall's footnotes and reservations, one would arrive at something very different from the Marshallian system. But it seems to me that if the job were critically, one would not arrive at any system at all." -- Gunar Myrdal, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory (Trans. by Paul Streeten) pp. 127-128

One such reservation is Appendix H in the eighth edition of Principles of Economics, titled "Limitations of the use of statical assumptions in regard to increasing returns".