Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is

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Today is November 28th and my guest is Daniel Klein of George Mason University. He's the author of

the forthcoming book, Knowledge and Incordination, a Liberal Interpretation. Daniel, welcome back

to Econ Talk. Thanks very much. So our topic for today are the ideas in your book, becoming

out in December. At the center of the book is the idea of economic coordination and trying

to capture what economists talk about loosely, sometimes formally, but you and I always

talk about much more loosely, which is sometimes described as market, sometimes described

as complex interactions, sometimes described as spontaneous order. Talk about the underlying

issue that you're trying to illuminate in this book, this issue of spontaneous order

and coordination.

Okay. So it's about seeing the economy as a vast concatenation of things and talking

about the better or worseness of that, but recognizing that we don't actually see it,

we want to talk about the beauty of it and the improvement of it, and in that sense,

the better coordination of it, the virtues of it. Yes, but at the same time, acknowledging

fully that we don't actually have a window on it. And as you say, I talk about coordination

and I distinguish two types of coordination. One is this concatenate coordination that

we've begun to talk about. The other one is what game theorists call coordination and

Thomas Shelling calls coordination, which is mutual coordination. I don't really mean

...