... Here's an account of Otto Neurath's correspondence with Hayek about the relative merits of social engineering and free markets.
If you are at all interested in politics, you have probably thought about this question in some form or other, and this version really gets to the heart of the matter in my opinion.
All of Neurath's opinions about politics (and some about science) can be found here.
He was not only a fantastic and original philosopher, economist and world-improver, but also articulated really clearly loads of what I think are my (possibly others' as well?) intuitive opinions. For example, he thought that science, thought really great, isn't really different in kind from other day to day activities, that predicting things is hard and that it is silly to try to measure welfare with money.
Neurath also invented the weird 'isotype' pictures that you sometimes see in European airports and maps as a way to democratise access to statistical information.
Here are some slightly Humey words of wisdom:
I even think that many people did not resist the gradual growth of modern horror, because they did not feel much abhorrence of past terrors and of terrors in countries far away, on the contrary, they had learned to call terrible periods, terrible politicians and the writers of terrible books ‘great’.
cf French Revolution/Che Guevara/Karl Marx, British Empire/Churchill/Ayn Rand or other combinations according to taste. Generally the fact that 'great' and 'terrible' are compatible is quite an important thing to keep in mind I think.
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