Foundational Papers in Complexity Science pp. 1105–1165
DOI: 10.37911/9781947864535.37
Tipping Points: Schelling’s Account of Sorting and Segregation
Author: H. Peyton Young, University of Oxford and London School of Economics and Political Science
Excerpt
In a remarkable but not very well-known article, the philosopher and polymath Michael Polanyi distinguished between two kinds of order: planned and spontaneous. A planned order is constructed and designed from the top down; its components are placed into specific positions and constrained to act in particular ways by a central authority. A spontaneous order, by contrast, is an ordered arrangement resulting from the “spontaneous mutual adjustment of its elements.”
This concept has deep roots in the social sciences—indeed, it played a central role in the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith, and other members of the Scottish Enlightenment. They argued that many social institutions, including legal systems and markets, could be understood as forms of spontaneous order, and furthermore that such systems are often superior to those that have been deliberately designed to achieve some goal. Much later, this point of view was revived by members of the Austrian school of economics, including Carl Menger and Friedrich Hayek. Nevertheless, in spite of these distinguished antecedents, in Thomas Schelling’s day the evolutionary point of view had been largely sidelined: the reigning paradigm in economics was expressed in terms of optimization, high rationality, and equilibrium.
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