Can you compute a price?

Mises argued in 1920 that a planned economy can’t work: with no prices there’s no way to express what anything costs in terms of everything else. Lange said fine, the planner solves the equations. Hayek’s reply was the one that stuck — the information is dispersed, local, and partly can’t be written down at all.

That’s an argument about information, made decades before the vocabulary for it existed.