The price mechanism, then, is not just a matter of economics—it is a matter of social and, indeed, civilizational progress.
As Hayek says in The Constitution of Liberty, “[C]ivilization begins when the individual in pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he himself acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge that he himself does not possess.” 26 I think this ties together the various threads of Hayek’s thought throughout a long life: his early work on psychology (“How do we know?”), his later epistemology (“What do we know, and what does it mean to know it?”), his economics (“How do we make knowledge usable?”), and his social and political theory (“What institutions will ensure that the greatest amount of human knowledge will be usable in the pursuit of their human fulfillment?”).