It will be 50 years on Wednesday since economist Friedrich Hayek’s Nobel Prize lecture, “The Pretense of Knowledge,” our Alex Pollock reminds us. That was the speech in which Hayek decried the “accelerating inflation” of the day — and the bitter irony that it had “been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue.” He concluded: “As a profession we have made a mess of things.”

It was of a piece with Hayek’s role as a contrarian in the economics profession that his “brilliant presentation,” Mr. Pollock notes, “explained the inherent limits of economics and the inevitable failure of trying to make it a predictive mathematical science.” Fifty years on, Hayek’s warning “applies particularly to central banks and their yearning to be economic philosopher-kings,” Mr. Pollock adds. Is this anniversary being marked by the pretenders at the Fed?

After all, nowhere is the gap between the “pretense of knowledge” and practical outcomes wider than at the Fed. This was marked in September by the Wall Street Journal in an editorial headlined “Has the Fed Learned Any Lessons?” Published as the Fed was readying to lower interest rates in the aftermath of “the worst inflation in 40 years,” the editorial noted that “no one should forget the monetary mistakes” that led to the wave of price increases.