the players need to be focused, confident and relaxed to win and fixating on winning destroys all three. He encouraged coaches and players to fixate on playing their best and not care about winning. In markets, less organization produces better organization. In helping the poor, those nations that were most blind to the needs of the poor lifted more people out of poverty while those fixated on helping the poor only made everyone poor. The implications of this are profound. It means that welfare economics in its usual sense is impossible. We cannot judge an outcome by the degree to which it satisfies the individual's preferences. They do not underlie our behavior. They do not stand outside of it. We cannot look at behavior here and decide how it measures up (cf: behavioral economics). Preferences are an ex post rationalization of behavior. They are not noirmative but descriptive. Some neoclassical economists hold to this today (Gul and Psendorfer, for example). But the implications of this go further: it means that any equilibrium must be at best a pattern equilibrium -- no one can precisely predict preferences at the moment of choice. I discussed this in my comment which appears right after Buchanan's in this issues of the Literature of Liberty. I'll blog on this in a day or so at ThinkMarkets. Thank you, Pete, for bringing this up -- I had forgotten all about it! While I fully agree that the question of emergent order is profoundly important and serious,