In the face of the new times that approach or rather, in those that we are fully immersed already, we can hear the drums of those who try to transplant old Keynesian recipes that many believed were already withered. The polemic and the economic scientific debate of the thirties that had Keynes and Hayek as stellar main characters arise. There is no doubt that in the area of public opinion and practical application of his ideas Keynes triumphed then. Practically all the politicians from then on have been Keynesian. But what can we say about the victory of scientific truth in the field of the economy. Both dead, who will be consecrated in the end, by history, with the title of a greater approach to the always innovative and surprising truth?

Behind the confrontation between Keynes and Hayek is the dilemma between control through state machinery and coordination of chaos through the market. In those times the dominant scientific conception was that which idolized the prediction capacity and the concretion of such mathematically demonstrable prophesies. The enlightened scientific reasoning of experts and politicians felt able to dominate events, also the economic ones. Arrogance, that wants to know and to control everything, was fed by macroeconomics, statistics and econometrics. With his insistence in the aggregates of demand, consumption, income, investment, saving... etc., Keynes impelled, without wanting it many times, economic nationalism and constructivist rationalism criticized by Hayek. It was possible to direct the complex economic macro phenomenon, with their cycles included, along the desired paths as they were able to determine cause and effect from added magnitudes and statistical values.

In a more incomprehensible world than the current one, more industrial, more rigid, with less economic education and information, less flexible and with a greater time scale between the idea and its materialization, with less competition, without the current technological innovation nor computer science nor that of telecommunications, with a high pressure world of collective ideas and collectivists, it is possible that the Keynesian derivations made sense. However, today they are useless and paralysed procedures. Today all the sciences, and I do not mean the sciences that study human behaviour where innovative freedom is in the central nucleus of its fields of action, deal with events that have a highly complex and interdependent behaviour where its modelling possibility, if it were possible, would be far from being based on lineal relationships. The behaviour of any entity can hardly be described mathematically when the system that surrounds us is the macro system of chaos where the paradox "that the whole is in the parts" and "eternity is in the instant" is continually made reality. Simple causal logics hardly understand what Morin (1988) indicated commenting the epistemology of the yin yang where inside the " yin " there is a " yang " and inside the " yang " a " yin " and in turn inside each one of them there is always the other one as an infinite reflection of mirrors. In human behaviour, non-computerized, paradox and irony become art that relaxes in a thousand inaccessible directions.

It is necessary to humbly retire then, towards the pastures of our ignorance and our very limited knowledge to trust the coordinating force of social and economic interrelations. In this new world, Hayek tells us that it is a ridiculous idea to speak, as we economists do many times, of given data where we pretend to know all the data. "In fact, nobody knows all the data or the total process, and that is what led me in the thirties to the idea that the whole problem was in the use of information dispersed among thousands of people and that nobody in particular possesses. Once it is contemplated this way, it is clear that the concept of balance in some way helps to plan, because it would only be necessary to plan if all the well-known facts were known by all. But as this is not possible, everything is in vain and a mistake partly inspired by the idea that defined data exists that everyone knows." Enlarging the division of tasks and the specialization of Adam Smith to the division of knowledge among the millions of citizens of the orb, Hayek suggests the innovative spontaneous evolution where direct vital reason applied daily to each particular circumstance and, after appealing to a progressive elimination of all the direct interferences in the market systems, all government services should be carried out outside of the market, including provision of a vital minimum for those who could not obtain basic revenues in the market. Without fair markets in competition prices don't exist, the subjective valuations of thousands of millions of people cannot be shown, the orientation system in the chaos fails and is impossible, not only Mise's economic calculation, but what people can produce, how much and how, today and in the future, or in what, when and how to work daily.

Maybe Hayek was more than half a century ahead of its economic times, or maybe these times, ours, would have been able to advance if the politicians then had paid him attention. Let us trust that the new Keynesian gurus that reappear here and there do not spoil the fun on a world level for another 60 years.

Joseph John Franch Menéu
Business Gazette