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Hi everyone.

Author here. There are multiple comments criticising the choice of word ‘markets’ so I’ll explain my motivation here.

Yes, both biology and free-market economy are unplanned. However, just because life had a billion years of headstart, biology is much more complex with several levels of emergent structure (ATP, mitochondria, cell, organ, organism, family, tribe). All such systems interact and influence each other in ways that we don’t fully understand (or perhaps can even hope to understand). This richness came about by a blind process of natural selection.

Markets, relative to biology, are much simpler because products and services are designed not by a blind process but motivated individuals. Perhaps, as someone else pointed out, I could have called it 'abstractions'. But the point is that what we produce in markets (like a chair) is limited by the human mind’s ability to understand and design for the complex system that’s a human. In that sense, I call markets square. Because they only address the richness of nature bluntly, the subtlety of nature is necessarily lost in market transactions because it is human mind that’s doing transactions.

If we give markets millions of years, yes, perhaps the “invisible hand” will create the same richness and subtlety in offerings and transactions that we see in nature. But I’m not so sure about this. Maybe our mind will prove to be a limitation in our ability to design solutions for complex systems.

The overall point of the essay is to do with our inability to comprehend complex systems, but our tendency to act as if we do.

Hope this clarifies.



In some senses, I think it might be worth avoiding "markets" as a canonical example.. for two reasons.

One is that the ground is not just well covered, it's been a major ideological battleground for at least the last 150 years. The invisible hand of the market has had countless brain cycles, books, and political sermons dedicated to exposing it. We're hyper-aware (and paranoid) of it. We've basically been inventing invisible hand detection devices, and everyone is sure that their device is the accurate one.

The second reason is that it's inevitably unclean as an example. Governments are usually taken as non-participants in markets, alternatives to markets and such. Reality is much messier. Governments are simultaneously participants, regulators and alternatives.

More importantly, there's a tendency to think of markets as being made of people, where in fact they're largely made of companies. Companies are institutions made of people, like (sometimes very like) governments... but they aren't people. They're another thing, another(aside from markets) way of organising economic activity.. Ronald Coase started his nobel-winning line of enquiry with the question "if markets are so great, why are companies run like totalitarian regimes?" As you say, markets are both top down and bottom up.. in a mesh of ways.

Most importantly... fresh examples help with fresh thinking. How about "languages" instead of markets. They're made by people, evolve in organic-like ways, are undirected.... The invisible hand is far less visible here. Most people have barely noticed its existence.


Some languages have institutions overseeing their development and doing top-down reforms.

For example Polish has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Language_Council and it had 2 reforms in last 100 years.


I think that we do eventually get there, but demand for ergonomic chairs isn't as high as normal chairs because we have a whole other set of systems going on inside us that we are not usually aware of that shape the choices we make. Aesthetics being one, i dare say sexually motivated!

I think that its the complexity of our own internal systems filtering information and our desires that is our limitation.

Bottom-up = evolved. Its smaller feedback loops. Quicker iteration - live testing. Try everything until something works.

Top-down = planned. Its a larger cycle, but still a feedback loop. You need to re-analyze a system before you can maintain it. It involves human interaction or systems built by humans. Make changes until it works.

Its usually foresight / unintended consequences that we miss that nature has already been there, done that.


Hey, have you read Bucky Fuller's stuff?


its funny how you have a non-linear graph to illustrate how we design things in ways that we can understand them.

I would hardly call this an essay. More like a powerpoint.

the design of the chair works despite all those non-linearities, so maybe its a better design than you think?

Perfect squares are an ideal that reveal fundamental truths about nature. Don't knock it.

We are actually pretty good at comprehending some complicated behaviors. Look at the social domain. Or outfielders catching fly balls.




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