A couple of comments/questions: First, are there definitions of the following that distinguish them and show their relation: unintended consequences, invisible hand, and spontaneous order (and, one might even add here, 'macroeconomic paradoxes' such as the paradox of thrift)? I have always wondered whether, e.g., the invisible hand and macroeconomic paradoxes are examples of some more general phenomenon, such as unintended consequences. There doesn't seem to be any a priori reason that these phenomena must be either socially beneficial or costly, does there? Second, as far as I know, and if anyone knows more about all this I would appreciate any leads or hints, Michael Polanyi coined the term spontaneous order in the 1930s in Manchester. At that time, he and his colleague at Manchester, Adolph Lowe, were engaged in private and public professional communications on a number of issues, and Lowe started using the term "spontaneous conformity." I have an intuition that this cannot be a coincidence, but I do not have any proof of which term came first, who influenced whom, etc. I visited Manchester in 1999 and searched the archives at the university, not much on Lowe, more on Polanyi, all pretty disorganized, but besides some interesting correspondence and some book reviews I hadn't seen before, I came up with zilch. Anybody know anything? Shameless self-promotion...people might be interested in a paper I wrote: "Must Spontaneous Order Be Unintended?: Exploring the Possibilities for Consciously Enhancing Creative Discovery and Imaginative Problem-Solving," in H. S. Jensen, L. M. Richter, and M. T. Vendelo (eds.): THE EVOLUTION OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE, Edward Elgar, 2003. Thanks, Mathew Forstater