ECOSYSTEMS AND
SPONTANEOUS ORDERS
CRITICAL REVIEW: A JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND SOCIETY,
FORTHCOMING
ANDY LAMEY
Students:
Mario Conti, 250466
Valentina Fiore, 251286
Dalila Putignano, 248298
Professor: Paolo Fabbri
KEY CONCEPTS
 Non intervention in financial and ecological systems
 Understanding the ecosystem as spontaneous order
INTERFERENCE implies the operation of a process that proceeds by itself on certain
principles because its parts obey certain rules.
(Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty)
ECOSYSTEM
ECOSYSTEM is defined as “the whole system”, including the complex organisms and
physical factors that forming what we call the environment.
(Hayek)
There is an affinity regarding our ignorance of financial and ecological systems.
SPONTANEOUS ORDERS
SPONTANEOUS ORDER is one that no individual has designed and which aims at no
particular purpose.
(Hayek)
Characteristics:
 Inevitability
 Complexity
 Abstraction of components
 Not created by an outside entity
ECOLOGICAL IGNORANCE
• Static ignorance related to limited awareness of the number of existing species.
• Dynamic ignorance about the interactions of countless different organisms.
The same type of reasoning can be also applied to price
THE MORAL ASPECT
• Moral obligation not to harm human beings
• It must be extended to animals and non-sentient life
• International environmental and financial organizations: Greenpeace, WWF and
IMF
• Sometimes the intervention is not just permitted but recommended
EXCEPTIONS: PERMITTED INTERVENTIONS
Such manipulations of the environment (nature or market) are allowed weather they
contribute to the same outcomes that a spontaneous order should reach itself.
Ecosystem

DISRUPTIVE MANIPULATION

CORRECTIVE MANIPULATION
Market

GROWN ORDER

MADE ORDER
Imperfect information system is the cause of impossibility to know what will be the
future outcome of spontaneous order.
INTERVENTIONS INTO ECOLOGICAL ORDER
DATTEL MUSSEL
GLOBAL WARMING
 5 km of coast for year
 + 4°C in the last 11000 years
 80 years to grow
 Kyoto Protocol, 1997
 Lex 25 October 1988
 United Nations Climate Change Conference
(UNFCCC), 1992
 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), 1988
INTERVENTIONS INTO MARKET ORDER
OIL’S PRICES
 Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC), 1960
 Oil Crisis in 1973 leads to the increase of
oil’s price by 70%
 Austerity policies (such as Sunday Walking)
SUB-PRIME
MORTGAGES
 US recession (2008-2009)
 Community Reinvestment Act in 1977
 Promotion of affordable housing
CONCLUSION
Human actions break the spontaneous order and then can restore it.
It is a mistake to think we can take all, or most of the nature and the market under our
control.
When we do seek to manipulate the ecosystem or the market, as we inevitably must, we
should do so in a manner that seeks as much as possible to preserve the number of species
or the level of prices they contain.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND WEB LINKS
 Andy Lamey, A journal of politics and Society, Forthcoming
 Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, volume I and II
 Maurizio Cortese, Cose che è necessario io riesca a comprendere: i datteri di mare non si
mangiano, www.dissapore.com
 Subprime Mortgage, www.Investopedia.com
 UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol, www.un.org
 www.opec.com
 www.treccani.it
 www.wikipedia.com