Free market

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The magic of Adam Smith’s invisible hand is an articulation of The Wisdom of Crowds, where acute wisdom emerges form the collective actions of a multitude every one whom personal experience declares to be profoundly stupid.

But the wonder is not how common good arises from an aggregation of self-interested actions — game theory explains that quite neatly — but how gigantic organisations operating in that unforgiving environment can survive, scale and thrive when they are populated and managed by men and women who should be flattered to be called only mediocre.

The JC’s elaborate theory of how the entire free market system functions so effectively is this: It happens more or less by accident.