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.

The spontaneous coordination that makes pizza, beer, hot dogs and croissants all reliably available—on time, on the shelf—for an unusual demand spike like Super Bowl Sunday is marvelous because it requires no central coordinator yet never produces shortages of the unusual goods nor surpluses of the displaced ones.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is not enough love to go around for society to rely on mutual caring; the power and humanity of the spontaneous, uncoordinated order is precisely that it does not require love to function well, whereas a society that genuinely relied on universal love would be in a bad situation.

The great danger of the people's romance is not merely inefficiency one can live with, but that bad people will use the romance to do something other than help the elderly; scaling shared-purpose communal arrangements up to the body politic risks not just a different mix of goods but tyranny and real evil.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Efficiency in the abstract consumer-surplus-plus-producer-surplus framework is not nearly as well-defined, exact or measurable as mainstream economists claim, because it depends on contextual factors—available options, knowledge of willingness to pay, time span, reflection—and behavioral economics shows inconsistent, regretted choices, weakness of will, and information limits; so the right response to 'it's not efficient' can be 'so what,' even while supply-and-demand and surplus remain useful for revealing the costs of interventions.

A fragmented school system avoids divisive political fights (over prayer, evolution, creationism) because families self-sort into schools matching their values, yielding both competition and an escape from the political dissension that inevitably arises when a single solution is forced on everyone.

People who insist on an encompassing, people-wide shared experience exhibit a kind of 'cultural greediness'—wanting culture their way—and are very prepared to use force against those who do not want it, whereas subduing that penchant opens abundant spiritual opportunity in more limited, voluntary forms of shared sentiment, cooperation and beauty.

Econ Journal Watch directly criticizes academic economics—pointing out omissions, irrelevance and steps in reasoning that don't follow, addressing replicability, and investigating whether economists in specific areas reach undisclosed policy conclusions—filling a function the major journals abandoned when they cut comment sections.

Major economics journals like the Journal of Economic Literature and the Journal of Economic Perspectives fail terribly to disclose how often economists working in specific areas reach policy conclusions—more often than people realize.

Listeners to this podcast share a real, if fragmented, experience: alone with earplugs yet listening alongside thousands of unknown others, illustrating that fragmented enterprises can be a route to meaningful shared experience rather than a loss of it.

Much of what is taught in economics classes is a dumbed-down version of graduate economics rather than what a civilized, thoughtful person should understand about the world, and the concatenate order is precisely what economics has to contribute to that broader understanding.

The traditional argument that having only three TV channels was better because it gave shared workplace conversation ignores the impact of competition on quality.

The reviewer who reacted in horror to a stranger thanking fund manager Peter Lynch for the returns that let him build a home addition—insisting such gratitude belonged to labor unions and political parties—reveals the people's-romance hostility to private actors as rival focal points of shared experience.

The left-right political distinction breaks down when analyzing the people's romance, since the impulse toward encompassing collective identity appears across the spectrum (left-wing solidarity, right-wing 'supporting our troops' and 'spreading democracy').

The example comes from Adam Smith at the beginning of The Wealth of Nations describing the woolen coat as the produce of the joint labor of a great multitude of workmen.