Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 101 of F.A. Hayek’s September 1945 paper in the American Economic Review, “The Use of Knowledge In Society,” as this paper is reprinted in the 2014 collection, The Market and Other Orders (Bruce Caldwell, ed.), of some of Hayek’s essays on spontaneous-ordering forces:

I have deliberately used the word “marvel” to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this [market] mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for “conscious direction” – and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously – should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of our utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.