1945] HAYEK:THE USE OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOCIETY 521 among many individuals.Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning-direction of the whole economic system according to one unified plan.Competition,on the other hand,means decentralized planning by many separate persons.The half-way house between the two,about which many people talk but which few like when they see it,is the delegation of planning to organized industries,or,in other words,monopoly. Which of these systems is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge.And this,in turn,depends on whether we are more likely to succeed in putting at the disposal of a single central authority all the knowledge which ought to be used but which is initially dispersed among many different individuals,or in conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to fit their plans in with those of others. III It will at once be evident that on this point the position will be different with respect to different kinds of knowledge;and the answer to our question will therefore largely turn on the relative importance of the different kinds of knowledge;those more likely to be at the disposal of particular individuals and those which we should with greater confidence expect to find in the possession of an authority made up of suitably chosen experts.If it is today so widely assumed that the latter will be in a better position,this is because one kind of knowledge,namely,scientific knowledge,occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind that is relevant.It may be admitted that,so far as scientific knowledge is concerned,a body of suitably chosen experts may be in the best position to command all the best knowledge available-though this is of course merely shifting the difficulty to the problem of selecting the experts.What I wish to point out is that,even assuming that this problem can be readily solved,it is only a small part of the wider problem. Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge.But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowl- edge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowl- edge of general rules:the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others in that he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made,but of