Smith’s invisible hand rests on ignorance of the larger market pattern.
Evidence
Adam Smith’s famous metaphor of the “invisible hand” drew on these enduring realities of human life. Each individual, Smith reasoned, employs his capital locally in pursuit of immediate comforts and necessities. Each one attends to “his own security… his own gain… led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” That end is the efficient employ of capital in the broader market: the wealth of nations. The individual actions that produce efficient markets add up to a staggeringly complex pattern, a mystery that no one person or entity could hope to know or understand, let alone to direct: “The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would… — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1574
Categorization
- DEFINE: Reframes the invisible hand as a function of irreducible ignorance, groundwork for the contrast with surveillance capitalism’s omniscience.
- XREF: connects to: Hayek saw the market as an unrepresentable knowledge network, not a contained machine — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 171
Broader Connections
- Hayek saw the market as an unrepresentable knowledge network, not a contained machine
#corroborates(0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 171