I hope that most readers of our blog are already fans of Russ Roberts’ excellent Econtalk podcast. But in case you missed it, be sure to check out this excellent interview with Nina Munk, author of The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. It’s a fascinating, heartbreaking, and deeply revealing look at Sachs’ “Millenium Villages” project – a plan to end extreme poverty in Africa with a series of scientifically proven and expertly administered interventions like mosquito nets to fight the spread of Malaria, scientific crop management, and so on.

On paper, the plan looked great. But on the ground in ran into a whole series of problems that libertarians probably could have predicted from an exercise in centrally planned scientific humanitarianism: bureaucratic obstructionism, unintended consequences, and a massive failure to understand and appreciate the significance of what Hayek called “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.”

As I recently wrote on Twitter, concern for the poor and vulnerable is a good complement to hard headed economic analysis, but a terrible substitute for it.