It is sometimes said that “knowledge is power”. Hayek showed that a strong reading of this claim – that knowledge and power always go together – is profoundly false. While knowledge often confers power, the reverse is not true. Centralizing power over an economy, or any other large-scale cooperative system, does nothing to centralize knowledge of how that system works or could be made to work better. Knowledge remains dispersed, being passed around in small quantities by people’s ability to signal to each other, through prices. In a working economy, nobody knows everything but everybody knows something. And things work best when it’s kept that way.

Daniel Halliday and John Thrasher (2020). The Ethics of Capitalism. An Introduction, p 66