In urban transit, where information problems and network effects complicate every action, and where interlopers lies waiting to skim the cream, this logic simply may not hold. To the extent those conditions are not fulfilled in practice, the case against planning is much weakened, for decentralized decisionmaking cannot achieve desired economic goals when the conditions are violated. Some other method is then required. One of Hayek's chief missions as an economist was in fact to wean economists away from equilibrium models and technical categories as ways of describing economic affairs. Those who would drape the ideas of Hayek and Adam Smith in a rarified notion of pure competition make a mistake much like that of Lange when he sought to mimic a free economy by mimicking the rarified models of perfect competition.
Numerous traders buy and sell at equilibrium prices.
They transact speechlessly. The canon comes from Walrasian general equilibrium and perfect competition. A rich variety of models of market imperfection also are instilled in the budding economist, but they too lead him to think of the economy as atomized action within a set of neatly characterized procedures. Because the procedures are fixed, there is no role for private actors to engage in conscious planning for Schelling coordination. Commerce and industry in real life are a skein of negotiated and particularistic contracts, as well as informal and implicit relationships.