Bruce Caldwell wrote: "For me, the phrase "the unintended consequence of intentional human action" captures the sorts of thing that Hayek meant by spontaneous order. In the market order, people just do their jobs, they have what Paul Seabright called "tunnel vision" - they don't see what role they play in the larger order. No one person decides to feed Paris; but Paris gets fed, ..." Commentary: If a day came when our historical scholars would see brightly, they would smile and say: Oh well, EVERY ONE PERSON in Paris decides to EAT food and adequately PAY for it, in direct consequence of which others would rush to SELL food to them for PROFIT. Students would remember someone named Bohm-Bawerk and a concept called roundabout production. They would know that the event called "feeding Paris" does not occur at all, but the event called "Parisians eating" does occur. Before Parisians decide to eat and pay for the food that they wish to eat, no event called "feeding Paris" can possibly occur. In fact "feeding Paris" is neither intended nor performed: the suppliers of food do not feed Paris at all- they merely earn PROFITS by SELLING food. Their intention is to earn the profit, and not to feed Paris. Leontief provided the analytical device to understand the matter under brighter light. To see brightly, one will have to identify a variable subject to precise measurement, and then link it to another variable in some causal frame. Leontief makes it absolutely clear through an input-output relation. So a student will see the quantity of food the sellers bring to Paris as a dependent variable, where the amount of profit from food sales is the independent variable. The student will never waste time looking for intentions behind a consequence (such as feeding Paris) that does not happen at all. The student will next find the buyers of food, who most surely intend to eat the food. Here, the quantity of food bought will be the dependent variable, linked to the utility of food consumption (benevolence in Adam Smith's lingo) as the independent variable. The people of Paris cannot eat food merely by wishing to eat: they must pay for it. Then the utility of food consumption is not the final output; food is an input into the production of the means of payment the Parisian produces. In physical imagery, the food the Parisian consumes is an input to the Parisian goods he produces and delivers to the suppliers of as payment for food. This payment then becomes the input for the non-Parisian food producer, who consumes the Parisian good as input to produce the non-Parisian food for Paris. All told, there is a complete circuit. Every part of this circuitous process is intended by somebody whose intention is relevant. And being relevant means that it is subject to precise observation and measurement, and to causal linkage. The tragedy is that people who do not care about the causal issue do not see brightly, for example, as they do not see that the causal linkage is between food supply and the profit from it, and not with the non-occurrence called feeding Paris. They cannot find the intention because they are not looking for it. Nobody feeds Paris, and the event named "feeding Paris" never occurs. Parisians buy food EVERYDAY. Are Parisians beggars to let somebody feed them? The tragedy of the Austrian School's obsession with words without measurement is that it often loses track, like in case of grandpa Adam Smith, and meanders into fanciful imagination of the empty wilderness. Consequence, for example, is an essentially meaningless word until it is converted into a variable subject to strict observation and measurement. Intention likewise is a vaporous word unless it is converted into a strictly defined variable. Thus eating food is not a consequence of feeding by the producer: it is a consequence of buying food by the consumer. And feeding Paris is not the consequence of the producer's action of selling the food: the earning of revenue is the consequence. The quoted passage omits the act that creates the consequence, and wonders why the consequence occurs. The phrase "but Paris gets fed" should be changed to "and Paris gets billed for the food its eats" to become a truthful description of what happens. The tragedy on the neoclassical side is that it is obsessed with the idea of ONE decision maker as in the phrase: "no one person decides to feed Paris; but Paris gets fed,". Now, whose idea is it that there must somehow be ONE person to decide (to feed Paris)? What is wrong with many persons? The idea of coordination in the market place without ONE central planner is the relic of an era that did not have the brightness of Leontief. Students of Leontief can very clearly see that there is never a need for any ONE person to generate the entire aggregate outcome of the market. The aggregate outcome combines the small parts played by different individuals, each of whom has a very limited intention. But when all those intentions are added (and they must be added within one complete circuit of exchange to describe the entire economy-wide outcome), the analyst easily understands how the aggregate event occurred. No individual agents has to see his role in the larger order, but the analyst must see it; and see he can and brightly too, if input-output model is his tool. The micro-orientation is the tunnel vision of the analyst who sees dimly and incompletely. Thus, eating the food is carried out as intended by the consumers and there is no reason to search for the producer's intention behind the consumer's act. The analyst disregards the Parisian's intention to eat and sees the phantom named unintended consequence (feeding Paris). So all I can pray is: Let there be light. Mohammad Gani