Rod Hay wrote:
> I guess we will just have to disagree. I think that "intended" order is much
> more important than Hayekians allow.
>
I'm hoping that wasn't a reaction to having read my piece, because my
point there was precisely (as Sam Bostaph noted later) that a great deal
of what happens in the economy IS the creation of intended order by what
Hayek labelled "organizations." For all the talk of his work on
unintended order, he also was very clear to state that what comprises
the unintended order of the Great Society is the interaction of millions
of smaller-scale intended orders: firms, families/households,
governments, etc. Unintended order requires the existence of intended
orders. As modern Austrians (in particular a great paper by Peter Lewin
in the AJES a few years ago) have argued, all of that smaller-scale
activity, in turn, requires the background conditions provided by the
unintended order of the market place for firms etc. to begin to act with
intention. They need market prices to formulate budgets, for example.
Good Hayekians - or perhaps good Austrians - recognize that economic
activity is characterized by both intended and unintended orders.
Mises's "human action" and Hayek's "spontaneous order" are two elements
of the same story. Again, rephrasing Sam, the problem Austrians have
traditionally noted arises when people attempt to subsume the unintended
order of the market place within some consciously created intended
order. Hayekians hardly deny that attempts at intended order in the
broader Great Society occur and are part of the reality of the economic
world. They are very important, if very damaging. I would also add
that it's equally problematic when the institutions, values, and
practices of the market subsume smaller-scale intended orders, such as
the family.
If you'll pardon one more round of self-citation, I address this whole
constellation of issues in a recent paper "The Functions of the Family
in the Great Society," published in the Cambridge Journal of Economics,
that can be found here:
http://cje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/bei041?ijkey=mHm33v0YBFbIz6h&keytype=ref
I provide that citation so that Rod might rethink his claim that
Hayekians are paying insufficient attention to intended orders.
Steven Horwitz
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