Saturday, 14 January 2012  The concept of “dispersed knowledge”
should be a commonplace!  I dare to state that the world would
be a better place to live in if the concept of “dispersed
knowledge” were a commonplace. Perhaps it is an elusive idea and
that is why every now and then political intervention regards
itself as the saviour from the “chaos of the market”.  But what
most people are used to call “chaos” is, in fact, “complexity”.
Every single rational agent is an administrator of the bits of
information gathered by him from the limited range of his
experience, using devices of perception, such as senses, social
values, norms, and technologies. The said devices are mostly
common to other agents and thus contribute to make the
compatibility of several individual plans, the most of them
unknown to each other, possible –and the stability of the social
order rests on the degree of such compatibility. As we said,
social spontaneous conventions as language, monetary economy,
trade, morals, and law systems –alo