On the Comparative Performance of Spontaneous Orders

Perhaps the most enduring contribution of Austrian economics has been to explain how spontaneous order outperforms central planning in the organization of economic activity. The virtues of emergent order have been noted in other complex systems as well. And yet significant differences exist in the operation of spontaneous coordination in different systems. The three spontaneous domains of liberal community, the market, democracy, and science (di Zerega 1997), are coordinated through money and prices, votes, and citation and reputation respectively. Given the very different means of coordination, the question naturally arises whether spontaneous coordination performs equally well in all of these varied domains. For instance, public choice economics has identified numerous inefficiencies of democracy and voting relative to markets (Mitchell and Simmons 1994). Many Austrian economists who extol spontaneous coordination in the market economy question the performance of the invisible hand in economic research. Specifically, Austrian economists maintain that their school's failure to gain wider acceptance in the economics profession does not demonstrate the inferiority of their school's method and analysis. Academic disciplines in the humanities have also been accused of systematic dysfunction (Kimball 2008).

Find the article at Studies in Emergent Order.