Science Quote by Herbert Simon

There’s a sly efficiency to Herbert Simon tipping his hat to Friedrich von Hayek: it’s praise that doubles as a boundary line. Simon, the patron saint of “bounded rationality,” is not converting to free-market romanticism here; he’s acknowledging that Hayek understood what markets are best at, and why that matters even to skeptics. Coming from a scientist who spent his career dissecting how real people and real organizations actually make decisions, the compliment lands with extra bite: Hayek’s account of markets as information-processing systems is strong enough to impress someone whose default posture is empirical suspicion.

The intent is partly disciplinary. Simon is saying: if you want a clean, intellectually serious description of the market as a coordination device, start with Hayek. The subtext is sharper: many defenders of markets sell morality tales about freedom or efficiency; Hayek sold a mechanism. Prices are not just numbers, in this view, but compressed signals that move knowledge through society without anyone needing to “know” the whole picture. That framing gives markets their mystique and their argumentative power.

Context matters: Simon’s era was obsessed with planning, bureaucracy, and the promise that expertise could engineer prosperity. His work exposed the limits of centralized cognition inside firms and governments. So the line reads less like ideological cheerleading than a scientist’s begrudging respect for a rival model of coordination: not perfect, not just, but often cognitively unbeatable at scale.