The Organization Nobody Asks For
How emergent order is one of the most powerful forces in our lives and why it's important for political thought.
Note: Apologies for second week running for late publishing. I suppose I should just try to say I publish on Thursdays and have the 10AM CET time as a goal that may or may not be plausible at this point.
So I figure I should probably go into one of my minor obsessions that illustrates my view of how I think of a huge portion of the world: Emergent order. Emergent order or emergence (I’ll use them interchangeably) is the organization that emerges naturally without any planning, just following the rules of many small decisions.
So it’s a an incredible thing how so much of the world is able to organize itself just by the nature of its own existence. This is from the atomic scale and the formation of molecules all the way to the sideral movements of the universe. It’s how we think, and I mean that quite literally about how a brain is able to function, how market works and can even design footpaths.
Understanding this idea is pretty fundamental to understanding how I think about a huge amount of the world and societal organization. The simplest definition is that emergent order is the order that results from every operator in a system trying to optimize itself.
This doesn’t have to be conscious either. Think of a brain, a wonderful jelly of neurons that allows us to breathe, eat, and enjoy cute animal p ictures on the internet. We all understand just how awe inducing it is that a brain can ponder its own existence but the fact is it’s just a network of neurons. Any single neuron cannot “think”. It just responds to signals and when it receives a signal in a certain way. It’s the whole network and their connections that allow an entire brain to come together. We have ideas about how it works more generally but no scientist can tell you exactly how it works.
The same idea is everywhere in economics. It’s one of the most basic ideas underlying how we understand the whole field. No need to retread what so many other before me have done but the obvious point to start is Friedrich Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society. Then there is the classic I, Pencil by Leonard Read. For a more fun and modern take, there’s the poem It’s a Wonderful Loaf by Russ Roberts.
All of these have the fundamental idea that the sum of all the information necessary to take any sort of decision or to even do something basic like buying a pencil is distributed among thousands to millions of people. This all comes from millions and millions more making their own optimizations. The amount of data contained in the fact that the loaf of fresh bread I like to purchase every day is costs 59 cents is incalculable.
We can have some indication about how these things will ripple but the idea is you never know exactly where things will lead. Will war in Europe lead to people changing their choices of tacos in the US? Well we are already seeing an effect on grain prices, so if wheat flour becomes more expensive, it could lead to corn flour being a much more attractive alternative and considering tacos are common with wheat or corn tortillas, it could shift the equilibrium. Not exactly an effect that was at the top of people’s mind.
Now a logical conclusion to this is that just letting everyone act freely as possible is the best way to order things most efficiently. But the important thing to remember is that the emergent order is the effect of every individual actor optimizing their situation. They know they are also acting within certain constraints. The most intellectually pure form of an emergent society is something like the feudalism of the dark ages where there were basically no limits on an individual’s behavior.
So what to make of it? The structures are the most important part of what makes the order work. It might be advantageous to me to form a gang and just steal from people, but I know that if I do that, there’s a high likelihood that I will go to jail and lose everything I’ve gotten so it becomes a less optimal decision. We have made structures for protecting personal property that make each individual a part of a much larger society.
That is why the importance of law is so fundamental. Understanding outcomes, lack of arbitrariness, the ability to be wrong and correct course are all the structures that allow enlightenment values to be realized in society.
Now as it relates to politics, this is basically summed up as caring about the process rather than the results, something that is unfortunately becoming far less common. Censorship becoming an issue only when it affects your side as a prime example. Using the argument that teachers don’t have free speech rights when advancing anti-CRT laws (something I have very complex opinions on) until it becomes they should have free speech rights. And yeah this kind of thought can be legalistic and technical, but it’s extremely important to follow the process, even if it sometimes lead to conclusions you find disagreeable.
Laws are themselves a process about how to act and behave so using laws to mandate a result in itself is rarely going to be effective and just lead to unfortunate consequences. I suppose it’s inevitable that a post on emergence would be Hayek heavy, but it’s why he was so emphatic on the difference between law and legislation.
Personal Update
In canine happenings, it’s been a rainy and then dusty week and he hasn’t been happy about that. But otherwise just content to enjoy life with the panache that only a dog of his energy level can.
On the personal side, I mentioned last week that my job will take up more of my time and it’s quickly ramping up to occupying a ton. Just to say again that I will try to keep publishing here, even if it’s just a few hundred words while I’m in the jaws of starting up the US market.