Information Generation and the
Market
New information is valuable in the market for two principal reasons:
- Ideas (recipes) for organizing the structure of production are essential to the generation of goods. The quality of this category of information directly impacts the efficiency of production, the quantity of output, and even the selection of goods available in the market.
- Because acting men and women do not have full information and therefore cannot perfectly foresee the consequences of their actions, they are subject to risk. The disutility of this risk can only be decreased by increasing the quantity of relevant information available to decision-making producers and consumers.
As we observed in Section 1, human beings can acquire valid knowledge only by means of experience (pp. 1.3:56-9). The veracity or desirability (whether in terms of objective or subjective values) of new ideas can be determined only by connecting them as directly as possible to realityespecially, by trying them out in practice. In particular, practical experience provides the feedback mechanism by which mistakes can be discovered and avoided in the future.