"Emergence"—what a beautiful word! We emerge from sleep; an individual brighter than the rest emerges from the crowd; the moon emerges from behind the clouds; life emerged from matter… We then speak of emergent properties: properties possessed by a system but not by its individual components. They abound in the life sciences: ants forming a distinctive line while others swarm around them, schools of fish that seem so disciplined…
In one of the Brèves de maths published in 2013, the Year of Planet Earth, Adrien Blanchet (University of Toulouse) cites the "invisible hand" of markets, formulated by economist Adam Smith, as one such emergent property. As Blanchet explains, the individual "thinks only of his own gain; in this, as in many other cases, he is led by an invisible hand to serve an end that is no part of his intention". This "hand" would therefore direct labor toward the use most beneficial to society, despite each person's constant pursuit of self-interest, thereby allowing a kind of self-regulation to emerge in the market. In economics, then, the whole would be more than the sum of its parts…
