Summary

• Spontaneous order is crucial for understanding fundamental human institutions (e.g., language and the law, morals, markets and money) and for defending individual liberty. But its operation is often overlooked.
  Spontaneous orders are self-generating, self-adjusting complex adaptive systems. They exist when a pattern that has not been arranged by any coordinator emerges from the interactions of multiple, dispersed individual elements.


• Characterised by Adam Smith as the ‘invisible hand’ and by Ferguson and Hayek as ‘the result of human action, but not of human design’, spontaneous order in human institutions is perhaps more clearly understood as the ‘unintended coordination of intentional action’.
  Spontaneous orders can integrate knowledge that is dispersed, dynamic, tacit and privileged. They can thus handle great complexity and arguably do so better than deliberately constructed orders.


• Spontaneous orders respect individual liberty: they are essentially non-coercive, prove that order does not require law, and only function properly if their component elements can freely react to changing circumstances.


• The power and pervasiveness of spontaneous orders show that government action, far from being essential, is seldom necessary and is often positively counter-productive. Spontaneous order justifies challenging regulation proposed for correcting market failure, promoting efficiency, or dealing with complex problems, including climate change, public health and welfare, and economic growth.


• Empirical studies have confirmed that spontaneous order has been better than coercive regulation at generating economic growth, managing natural resources and providing key public services, and better than imposed rules at detecting fraud and disease.

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