Knowledge is never a “given”

Free Banking: Theory, History and a Laissez-Faire Model (Larry J. Sechrest)
- Highlight Loc. 1875-79  | Added on Friday, November 11, 2011, 11:44 PM

the knowledge of prices is “of temporary and fleeting significance” and tends to be profitable precisely to the extent that and only so long as “others do not also know it” (O’Driscoll and Rizzo 1985, 103). That is to say, useful economic knowledge is essentially a private knowledge of disequilibrium conditions. Knowledge is never a “given” for any economic agent except in the Walrasian world of eternal general equilibrium, and in that context, such “knowledge” is not really economic in nature, but merely engineering knowledge about physical production relations.