 I want you to open your heart and mind for Emily Shamley Wright. Good morning. Good morning, everybody. I come in praise of an idea, spontaneous order. Spontaneous order is the most important idea for understanding how a complex society works. It's an idea that's so powerful that once you see the world this way, it's impossible to unsee it. Spontaneous order thinking has its roots in the works of Adam Smith and his contemporaries like David Hume and Adam Ferguson, but it was the work of F.A. Hayek that seared this concept in my mind as a young economist. Spontaneous order is the idea that order within society widespread social coordination and cooperation comes about not by virtue of human design, not by top down rational control, but from the bottom up from a lot of experimentation, a lot of trial and error, learning and course correction. Think of language. Language is indispensable to human beings. It makes us smarter. It makes us safer. It makes us more productive. Because we have language, we have rich cultural lives. Language is so indispensable to humankind that it's very tempting to think that some really smart social engineer a long, long time ago designed it for us and passed it on to us. But of course, the languages that we use in our daily conversations with one another never emerge that way. They emerge through a really messy process of trial and error and the very slow and cumbersome evolution of language rules that help us to understand one another. The market is, of course, an order that is like this. The order of the market does not emerge from human design and intention. It emerges from the bottom up with countless market participants each pursuing their own individual plans and purposes. Now when Hayek was exploring this idea of spontaneous order, he drew our attention to the fundamental economic problem, which is not, as so many textbooks insist, one of resource allocation. The fundamental economic problem is one of discovery. How do we discover the knowledge that allows otherwise disconnected human beings to coordinate their plans with one another in a pattern of widespread mutual benefit? Each of us possesses just this tiny slice of knowledge that's needed for the overall coordination. Each of us is pursuing our own aims and purposes that are really particular to ourselves. So in that context, how do we align our disparate plans? How do we share knowledge with one another? And that's where market prices and entrepreneurial discovery come in. Because we have market prices, it's like we've been given a system of mass communication in which we send and receive signals to one another. People, we have no way of knowing who they are, but we're sending and receiving information to one another. Prices give us in a form that's ready at hand the essential knowledge we need to guide entrepreneurial action, solution seeking behavior that emerges from the bottom up. And this is why market prices are really miraculous. They allow us to make use of knowledge that we don't possess directly. They allow us to generate a pattern of social intelligence that far surpasses the intelligence of even the brightest individual minds within a society. Entrepreneurial discovery in the context of market prices transforms potential adversaries. Each of us competitors for the world's scarce resources into a world of cooperators in which we can tap one another's skills, local knowledge, and capabilities to create abundance out of that scarcity. In other words, entrepreneurial discovery in the context of market prices is an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem that grows solutions. Once we see the world through this lens, we come to understand that how it is that human society is capable of such complex coordination despite the fact that no one's consciously guiding that process. Now this insight lays the foundation for smarter public policy. It lays the foundation for smarter strategies for positive social change. But it gets even better than that. When spontaneous order thinking becomes part of our intellectual DNA, it starts to inform our moral, psychological, and even emotional outlook on the world. It starts to shape our values and even our character. Disruption, for example, looks entirely different once we shed the social engineer's notion of order. Disruption's not a bug. It's a feature of a dynamic society that's capable of adapting to new circumstances. But the challenge is that we can't know today what tomorrow's solutions are going to be and human beings are just hardwired to really hate that kind of uncertainty. But if we look at the long arc of history, we take into consideration the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the digital revolution, we see the effects of spontaneous order at work. We begin to see that these historical patterns of social progress, they're not flukes, they're systemic outcomes. We can't know for sure what the precise details of tomorrow's solutions will be, but we can be sure that there will be solutions because there's entrepreneurial discovery. The spontaneous order outlook on the world is one that greets disruption and challenge with creativity and optimism. We're confident that new opportunities will emerge not because political actors will intervene with instruments of control and power, but because we know that there are billions of individual seekers, entrepreneurs, out there continuously trying new solutions in the context of information-rich market signals. Now this kind of optimism breeds the best form of audacity, the kind that recognizes that the future is radically open to new possibilities. It's the height of audacity to bypass the imperiousness and entrenched monopoly power of taxicab licensure and instead launch a ride-sharing service that would in turn trigger a cascade of sharing economy solutions in its wake. It's the height of audacity to create the next generation of prosthetic limbs produced by 3D printers for hundreds of dollars as opposed to tens of thousands of dollars, and it is the height of audacity to imagine what women around the world will do with the dozens of hours saved every week if they no longer have to carry water to their village, but instead can rely on an inexpensive solar-powered cart to do that work for them. Now I talk a lot about audacity. I want to make sure that I'm being clear. I do not mean arrogance to totally different things. In fact, spontaneous order inspires us to steer clear from the perils of arrogance because it helps us to recognize how valuable humility is as an asset. When we have humility, of course, if we're being entrepreneurs, we'll take advantage of expertise wherever we can find it, the conventional forms of scientific expertise, for example, are certainly incredibly valuable to entrepreneurial discovery. But with humility in our pocket, we also remember that sometimes expertise comes from unconventional sources. Like, for example, the expertise that is dispersed across communities of do-it-yourself innovators, makers, hackers, consumers, and people who are just plain fed up with the status quo. Take, for example, the Night Scout Foundation. It is a nonprofit organization founded by parents of kids with diabetes. These parents came together because they were frustrated by the slow pace of FDA approval for devices that could help the parents remotely censor their kids' blood sugar levels and deliver insulin. By adapting existing technologies, by crowdsourcing solutions, by sharing open source code, this group created low-cost, lifesaving devices that did exactly that. Now, without spontaneous order thinking, the world will always seem dangerously out of control. The world will always seem to be plagued by uncertainty. That kind of thinking generates a certain set of values, overcautiousness as your default, the hubris of the micromanager, eeyore-like pessimism and fear. But with an understanding of spontaneous order, we become excited about the emergent outcomes of a free society. We greet challenge and disruption with optimism. We form bold expectations about what human society is capable of achieving. And we marry that boldness with a deep commitment to intellectual humility. In short, spontaneous order thinking inspires in us entrepreneurial values. More broadly, spontaneous order thinking allows us to envision a world in which every human being flourishes because he or she has the right to try, to fail, to learn, and to try again. This is how we generate new knowledge. This is how we discover new solutions. And this is what puts us on the path towards a more peaceful, a more prosperous, and a more humane society. Every single person in this room wants to play a pivotal part in bringing about this vision. Spontaneous order thinking helps us get there. Spontaneous order thinking is a lot like those special glasses. The TK talked about. We put them on and they give a super human vision. They allow us to see what others miss. The spontaneous order lenses, when we look out on the world, we see pathways for unleashing human potential. But here's the thing. We can't forget how rare and special that insight is. It's easy to think that everybody has that insight. They don't. And we need to work hard. We need to remember that it's our job to help people see. To help people see that world of radical openness to new possibilities. To help people. In fact, I want to challenge you to be audaciously good at helping people to realize what's possible when people are free to realize their full potential. And that means being free to try, to fail, to learn, and to try again. The fate of humanity literally depends on us getting this right. So let's get this right. Thank you very much.