Sen concentrates on the difference between ‘unintended’ and ‘unpredictability’. I think that the argument can even be stronger than that, but, don’t pursue that reasoning here, since it is not the topic of discussion.
Fourthly, it appears that Hayek in “Road to serfdom” argues in favour of a ‘guaranteed minimum income for everyone’ - which would be called a ‘basic income’ nowadays. This is actually a fairly decent approach to the poverty problem - though I would suggest that workfare at a living wage would be more appropriate. It is interesting to see that Keynes recommended that book and supported it for its ‘ethics and philosophy’ (though not explicitly for its economics).
Fifthly, Hayek (1984)’s chapter on Bernard Mandeville is advised reading.
A note on Barrow’s “Impossibility”
John D. Barrow (1998) “Impossibility” gives a nice introduction into some of the topics that we encounter when developing the Definition & Reality methodology. I have taken a useful quote from one of his pages to emphasise a main point. A point of consideration however is that Barrow only provides an introduction and a starting point, and there is need for more discussion and refinement of the argument. Some points of warning are:
1. Barrow uncritically adopts Arrow’s explanation for his impossibility theorem - and we have shown that this explanation is erroneous.
2. On the logical paradoxes (e.g. Epimenides’ Liar paradox [142]) I have presented a ‘logic of exceptions’ that changes the argument. (Not in this book.)
3. See our discussion on non-Euclidean geometry in the main body of the text.
4. On p23 Barrow suggests that at small dimensions ‘concepts’ like velocity and position can only exist with ‘limited sharpness’ - which is a very strange thing to say.
5. Barrow p22 states: “There have occasionally been attempts to find mental consequences of Heisenberg uncertainty, but the general opinion is that the effects are too small on the scale of neurons to have any significant effect upon the human thinking process.” Well, Schrödinger gave his cat-example that quantum mechanics can extend into the macro world. (We don’t seem to have that mechanism in our head though, but there can be equivalent ones.)