order emerges without a central “ controller ” or a global optimum design , and with “ no captain at the helm ” ( Root , 2013 , pp . 217 – 235 ). The idea of a central controller or that a small number of influential thought and culture leaders can control and direct social process jars with a belief in cognitive fallibility .

( 5 ) He recognized that early cultural adaptations or mutations can place a population on paths that differ from the prior and unique circumstances that paved the way for Western development . In any ecology , multiple adaptive peaks are possible . Populations , he suggested , are more likely to reach the highest adaptability along a local trajectory than by switching from one adaptive peak to another ( Hayek , 1976 , p . 27 ).

( 6 ) Hayek postulated that laws

belonging to “ lower ,” more fundamental levels of a system cannot be used to reconstruct the universe in which they form only one part . Transplanted institutions rarely survive . In this sense , social institutions , such as the state , are not built ; they grow . Thus Hayek sought a public policy designed “ to cultivate growth by providing the appropriate environment , in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants ” ( Hayek , 1989 , p . 7 ). This stands in contrast with Keynes ’ s notion ( 1931 ) that in the future , economics would surrender its place of importance to “ matters of greater and more permanent significance ” and would become both a mundane and technical ” matter for specialists — like dentistry ” ( 1930 ).

( 7 ) When Hayek refers to the “ impersonal and anonymous social processes by which individuals help to create things greater than they know ,” and when he described outcomes that are not products of individual reason or “ consciously designed ... or ... fully intelligible to it ” ( Hayek , 1948 , p . 8 ), he is describing what modern evolutionary science calls emergence . For him , as for contemporary complexity science , emergence is the most dramatic process in the course of human interactions , often resulting in outcomes that lie outside of the range of human intention and beyond the precognition of the agents .

( 8 ) He was skeptical of social engineering , based on his understanding that perception and cognition are bottom-up processes . Yet he also saw a dynamic relationship between top-down and bottom-up causality , e . g ., in his

10 “ It is tempting to describe as an ‘ equilibrium ’ an ideal state of affairs in which the intentions of all participants precisely match and each will find a partner willing to enter into the intended transaction . But because for all capitalist production there must exist a considerable interval of time between the beginning of a process and its various later stages , the achievement of an equilibrium is strictly impossible . Indeed , in a literal sense , a stream can never be in equilibrium , because it is disequilibrium which keeps it flowing and determining its directions . Even an apparent momentary state of balance in which everybody succeeds in selling or buying what he intended , may be inherently unrepeatable , irrespective of any change in the external data , because some of the constituents of the stream will be results of past conditions which have changed long ago ” ( Hayek , 2012 , pp . 338 – 339 ).

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Journal on Policy & Complex Systems Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 167