Hook
- Every household, shop floor, and street corner knows something no central plan can see in time.
- Knowledge is distributed, moving, and often tacit; committees work with yesterday’s shadows.
Key concepts
- Tacit knowledge: skill, timing, context that resists being written down.
- Local signals: what sells today, which tool is missing, which shortcut is safe.
- Administrative lag: data collection and averaging erase the specifics that matter.
Systems view
- Live feedback loops surface local facts quickly; centralized plans update on slow cycles and misfire.
- When maps are wrong, enforcement fills the gap; those with the least power absorb the cost.
Social and political implications
- Misreads land unevenly on marginalized groups; they become “data errors” to be corrected by force.
- Recognizing distributed knowledge is a democratic stance, not just a technical claim.
Expansion notes
- Add examples from housing allocations, disaster response, or workplace safety to ground the idea.
- Keep language plain; define the knowledge problem without jargon.