This article made me think about Keynes' "Animal Spirits". You know, animals actually work pretty good. Below is a picture of a flock of starlings avoiding a red tail hawk.
Flocking in birds is a good metaphor of "Spontaneous Order". I think I remember Mises or Hayek using it as an example, actually. Spontaneous Order is the idea the idea that complicated, cooperative behaviors can develop from fairly simple rules interacting over time. The starlings in a flock dive together to avoid a hawk in this really beautiful maneuver even though most of them don't know it's there. All it takes is the behavior of individual starlings each following the simple rules of alignment, repulsion, and attraction, and you get these incredibly complicated and numerous patterns emerging.
In fact, the flock behaves far more quickly, and more intelligently than if they were all being directed by a single, even incredibly intelligent, starling. This is also a reminder that the movements of the market, like the movements of starlings, might be driving us in a direction that, individual starlings that we are, displays an intelligence greater than our own. And that even a particularly brilliant starling, a Lord Keynes among starlings, might know less than our own animal spirits going into a dive. Maybe there's a hawk.
