Imagine a green field of grass. Imagine a groundskeeper. Imagine a small box where every day at 6 am, an instruction on paper is written and the groundskeeper

Imagine a green field of grass. Imagine a groundskeeper. Imagine a small box where every day at 6 am, an instruction on paper is written and the groundskeeper checks it. Imagine a network of voters who vote on the instruction to be placed in the box. Their wide variety of votes will be automatically distilled into the winning instruction. The groundskeeper dutifully clears a path, shouts at people to stay on the path, fills in errant paths. Finally there is one path. Who made the decision? I only bring this up to suggest “emergent” decisions is a vapid framework to analyze this. Every phenomenon involving the aggregation of different agents is an emergent one, whether it’s an emergent system of politics leading to regulated actions or an emergent system of market participants leading to a price. This doesn’t distinguish a situation of high regulation from a situation of low regulation.