Spontaneous Order

These are some comments I posted on the Mises blog in regard to Spontaneous Order (you can view the original blog and the fascinating conversation it has stimulated here:

http://blog.mises.org/15905/are-markets-and-other-social-phenomena-really-spontaneous/

I have always loved the term spontaneous order given my own grounding in Daoist philosophy. I can see how it might have objectionable mystical and even theist connotations to some, and that as a term it doesn’t imply or incorporate a specific human action element that could be useful to distinguish it from the invisible hand if such an connotation is indeed needed. I was just thinking that “spontaneous human order” might be a term that could add a bit more clarity for the purpose of Austrian Economics, though I personally like to use spontaneous order as a greater context for all natural ordering of things without the human element which still incorporates the human society/human markets outflows from the concept.

Equilibrium and disequilibrium are great ways to discuss the nature of market ordering or processes, but is more a subset of the greater context provided by the concept spontaneous order. The key word here is context/larger framework. Order does occur naturally as a result of infinitesimal human decisions and plans, and given the impossibility of precisely mapping (desirable?) this process, can be seen as self generating. Order or Chaos, however you wish to view it, cannot be anything but natural unless you consider the perceivers (human beings) to be outside of nature. While I respect the drive of social science to try to wrangle some sense out of natural chaos through the invention of interpretations/narrative/formulas etc. and while I acknowledge that such insights can be useful to understanding the human condition, all too often it leads to the social scientist believing that they have a unique ability to condition/plan the greater abstract order and to intervene though mechanisms such as government policy. In some ways, it seems to me the height of human intellectual arrogance to believe that some one individual or some one school of thought has a monopoly of understanding and has the “right” answers from which well intentioned but disastrous interventions flow.