Systems built to satisfy the people's romance perform comparatively well on the people's-romance metric but perform terribly on almost everything else—materially failing to produce woolen coats and the goods people actually care about, and frustrating fundamental liberal pursuits.

JSTOR research by Klein and Aaron Orsborn shows that economists historically used 'coordination' to mean concatenate coordination, but after Thomas Schelling and game theory the usage shifted to mutual coordination, with the efficiency/optimality paradigm simultaneously crowding out concatenate coordination because it could not engage it while remaining value-free.

Cooperation, properly defined, requires both a referent concatenation (a chain of activities people contribute to) and mutual coordination of awareness and sentiment about contributing to it; people merely linked in a production chain without mutual awareness (like distant links in the woolen-coat chain) are not actually cooperating.

The people's romance is an evolutionary atavism analogous to our penchant for sweets—adaptive in the ancestral environment of solidaristic hunter-gatherer bands but maladaptive now; unlike sweets, where we bear personal costs and have strong incentives to subdue the impulse, the people's romance lacks such individual feedback and is harder to restrain.

Adam Smith's two books form a sequence: the Moral Sentiments posits a strong natural penchant for coordinated sentiment (sympathy), consistent with our solidaristic hunter-gatherer origins, while the Wealth of Nations authorizes self-interest to be 'cut loose' because, when we think hard about how concatenations work, focusing on the local works out better for making things like the woolen coat.

Coordination differs fundamentally from efficiency/optimality/social-welfare-function economics because coordination requires no well-defined maximum and makes no pretense of one, whereas the modern paradigm presumes a well-defined maxim—a presumption driven by the urge toward scientific status and positivism.

The vast concatenation is 'incredible' in a literal sense: any claim to know it in detailed fashion is not credible, and because society cannot really be known or explained, it is unlikely to be officially manipulable—which is a key reason to dwell on its incredibleness when thinking about policy.

Because Super Bowl viewers know that millions of others are watching simultaneously, advertisers concentrate on 'social goods' (drinks, fashions, software) whose value depends on common knowledge; the shared viewing acts as a focal point making a brand acceptable or stylish to display at any party.

We lack a language, verb and pronouns to describe non-cooperative spontaneous coordination—thousands of people can truthfully say 'we made the Super Bowl pizza' yet this is fundamentally different from a team literally cooperating in one room—a gap Hayek agonized over throughout his career.

The 'people's romance' is the political urge to mythologize the whole polity or society as a single organization that literally cooperates—seeking encompassing coordination of sentiment, common purpose and shared narrative—which leaders and pundits constantly exploit, often more than they actually believe it.

Sustaining the people's romance is a cultural disaster because the power structure, focal points, public schools, utility grids, and the superstitions and notions promulgated to maintain the system fail badly in terms of intellectual quality and integrity, so the deepest case for a liberal society is that the culture would be better, not merely that coats would be cheaper.

Social Security is a leading instance of the people's romance—'us taking care of us'—where the language of a social safety net that encompasses everyone gives the whole polity the flavor of an encompassing shared experience and sentiment.

The people's romance actively crowds out, subverts and is jealous of more meaningful local 'club romances'—voluntary club coordination of sentiment (Buchanan-style club goods) such as homeschooling, private schooling, churches and private concentrations of wealth—sometimes working against them almost deliberately, as seen in antagonism toward Walmart.

When we judge the whole concatenation as 'well coordinated,' we are implicitly imagining a mind able to behold the whole that we ourselves cannot, and we are negotiating an incomplete, aesthetic conversation about what that mind would find more satisfying or beautiful—not computing a well-defined maximum.

The vast chain of activities producing everyday goods like a woolen coat or pencil constitutes a 'concatenate coordination'—a series of linked, mutually complementary activities that produces society's output without being enclosed in any single plan or comprehensible to any real human being's view.

Concatenate coordinations can be more or less planned: within a firm there is an actual coordinator (the boss) who delegates details but coordinates the basic scale of activities, whereas vaster concatenations proceed without any central planning through spontaneous mechanisms.

Human intuitions about coordination are evolved for the concrete small group—the hunter-gatherer band our genes come from—which makes it cognitively difficult to fathom the vast, extensive concatenation of links and the mechanisms holding modern society together.

There is a second, distinct sense of coordination—'mutual coordination' associated with Thomas Schelling and game theory—where parties like a supplier and baker coordinate terms, schedules and prices; this usage now dominates economics, having largely displaced the older concatenate sense.

Marx clearly understood that capitalism's vast concatenation is not actually a cooperation; he hated capitalism precisely because it was not one unified cooperation, and he wanted the whole economic chain to become a single organization.

Adam Smith distinguished two kinds of rules: definite and exact rules (like grammar, where criticism is only negative and merely meeting them earns no praise) versus loose, vague and indeterminate aspirational rules (like those for sublime writing, art and beauty), and much of economic conversation belongs to the latter aesthetic realm despite economists' science-pretensions.