The Evolutionary Invisible Hand. The Problem of Rational Decision-Making and Social Ordering over Time is a book by the director of the F. A. Hayek Foundation, Matúš Pošvanc. The book has been published by one of the world’s leading publishing houses Palgrave Macmillan. The book is already available in an electronic version and from May 2021 it will be available in a printed version.
The book discusses several interesting questions from a theoretical perspective, like a question, why the entrepreneurs are successful in satisfying our needs, why some manage to predict the needs of people better than others, or by what means we can predict the future so that we manage to produce more and more goods to improve the satisfaction of needs of customers that have a better quality of life.
The book reflects on several questions, which in the past have been tackled by various economists or social scientists. It has been written from the perspective of the Austrian school of economics. This characteristic cannot be taken away from this book.
However, this book also offers new and yet unpublished approach to the solution of the issues of entrepreneurship, coordination of individuals within a community. It tries to explain and show how the most famous Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand of the market works in practice.
The book has multiple inspirations. While it is based on the extensive works of the economists of the Austrian school, whether of Mises and Rothbard tradition or the one of F. A. Hayek, it is also inspired by a renown neoclassical economist G.L.S. Shackle.
What is, however, particularly important from the perspective of the Austrian school tradition in the Czecho-Slovak region, is the fact that the book places within the international context and recognition the works of the Slovak philosopher living in the Czech Republic Ján Pavlík.
Pavlík’s unique approach to the works of F. A. Hayek is, according to Matúš Pošvanc, currently one of the most vital methods within the Austrian economic school and it is suitable to name it in this sense as a Hayek-Pavlík’s approach to solving the questions related to the functioning of a society.
The book can be considered to be a form of economic philosophy. It contains no graphs. It also includes fundamental questions regarding the problem of economic error, entrepreneurship, social coordination, the problem of economic equilibrium or the problem of decision making in the face of an uncertain (so-called kaleidic) future.
The first extensive chapter of the book is dedicated primarily to the fundamental questions. The second chapter focuses on a topic of economic equilibrium neglected within the Austrian theory and it brings a new proposal of a realistic of an Austrian theory of equilibration and the third part reacts to the discussion on the issue of indifference.
You do not need to read this book if you:
- can explain why the entrepreneurs are successful
- can explain how the future is predicted
- can explain how the invisible hand operates
- can explain the evolution of economic rationality
- know that the prices to not coordinate our economic behaviour (very controversial claim!)
- can explain economic phenomena over time
- can explain the economic calculation without money
- can formulate a realistic conception of economic equilibration from the perspective of Austrian school of economics
- know that the profit does not depend on the uncertainty
- know that the indifference is a vital concept within the Austrian school
If either of these problems has made you intrigued and you do not know the answer, you can open this book and immerse yourself in the exploration of these issues.
It is quite possible that you shall find satisfactory answers to numerous other questions and challenges that can be the subject of further scientific exploration.
