Knowledge And Decisions
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As of the time when it was first published in 1980, Knowledge and Decisions was by far my most important and most comprehensive book. None of my subsequent writings has surpassed it, though it has been joined by work of comparable scope in A Conflict of Visions in 1987 and Race and Culture in 1994. The re-publication of Knowledge and Decisions now, sixteen years after its initial debut, reflects the continuing importance of the issues raised in it, and offers an opportunity to update some conclusions while re-affirming others.
The social vision underlying the analysis in Knowledge and Decisions is the opposite of what I have elsewhere called The Vision of the Anointed.1 There the focus was on a set of people and their perception of their role in a world whose problems they saw as caused by the inadequacies of others. Here the focus is not on particular people or their beliefs, but on social processes and the constraints within which those processes operate. The analysis begins with one of the most severe constraints facing human beings in all societies and throughout history — inadequate knowledge for making all the decisions that each individual and every organization nevertheless has to make, in order to perform the tasks that go with living and achieve the goals that go with being human.