Valuation, Choice, and Human Action: Economic Calculation Reimagined

Unintended consequencesUnintended consequences have been a mainstay of economics since the days of the Scottish EnlightenmentScottish Enlightenment when thinkers like Adam FergusonFerguson, Adam and Adam SmithSmith, Adam began injecting the concept of spontaneous orderSpontaneous order into the scientific study of societies and the processes through which they attain their organizational features. Those thinkers sought to explain the organized quality of societal living not through some law-giver’s effort to impose regular patterns of individual conduct, but rather through the efforts of the individuals living within a society to be appreciated by the other members of society. For instance, someone observing that people dress differently when they attend funerals than when they attend athletic events would not look to the promulgation of edicts by rulers but would look to the desires of people to appear suitably sensitive to the varied occasions that occur in societies and the differing mores that accompany those occasions. Theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment recognized that the ability of people to live free of oppressive edicts from rulers in no way led to anarchy in society. On the contrary, it led to patterns of living where people mostly tried to reflect values that were alive within society, and these Scottish theorists sought to understand how generally orderly societies maintained themselves without edicts from rulers. Sure, there will always be outliers among the citizenry who do not conform to those mores. Yet the Scottish thinkers were seeking to understand how societies developed their observed patterns of living. They were not trying to employ their vision of social science as a technique for imposing patterns on society so as to reflect some vision of social optimality, something they would have recognized as impossible in any case.