Advances in Austrian Economics

While O’Driscoll and Rizzo (1985), for example, show the importance of recognizing that action takes place in real time, it is at least as important to recognize that action is never placeless. Moreover, that place is not arbitrary, especially when it comes to the actions and social interactions that constitute a complex social order. You cannot do anything just anywhere. There are more or less appropriate times and places to do business (over lunch rather than at a funeral), smile at a stranger (in a small town rather than a big city), or argue about baseball (in a bar rather than a library). So complex interactions do not happen randomly across space; we observe them more in some places than in others, whether we are talking about small groups of people as they gather in public spaces (Whyte, 1980, pp. 247–68) or large agglomerations of people in a city (Lewis, 2003, p. 19). Sometimes such gatherings are the result of deliberate design, but the more important interactions are spontaneous orders – the unplanned orders that are the result of human action but not of human design (Hayek, 1967; Jacobs, 1961, p. 433).