• theneverfox@pawb.social
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    1 year ago

    What he described by the invisible hand was the idea of systematic forces - essentially emergent properties of a system.

    They’re patterns in a system that emerge not from individual actors, but from the interaction of many actors. No one has to enforce the behaviors - hell every individual actor in the system might be against it - but the system itself creates certain forces

    Smith approaches the concept awkwardly and very cautiously - he probably was afraid he’d sound like a lunatic, or that the concept would be controversial