in the same direction. As an economic theorist, his explanations can be given a rational explanation. But as a legal and social theorist, he leans, by contrast, very heavily on a conservative and traditionalist approach which instructs us to submit blindly to a flow of events over which we can have little control. Proposed examples Markets Many classical-liberal theorists, such as Hayek, have argued that market economies are a spontaneous order, and that they represent "a more efficient allocation of societal resources than any design could achieve." They claim this spontaneous order (referred to as the extended order in Hayek's The Fatal Conceit) is superior to any order a human mind can design due to the specifics of the information required. Centralized statistical data, they suppose, cannot convey this information because the statistics are created by abstracting away from the particulars of the situation. According to Hayek, prices in a market economy are the aggregation of information acquired when the people who own resources are free to use their dispersed knowledge. Prices then allow everyone dealing in a commodity or its substitutes to make decisions based on more information than he or she could personally acquire, information not statistically conveyable to a centralized authority. Hayek argues that interference from a central authority which affects price will have consequences they could not foresee because they do not know all of the particulars involved. According to Norman Barry this is illustrated in the concept of the invisible hand proposed by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Thus in this view by acting on information with greater detail and accuracy than possible for any centralized authority, a more efficient economy is created, and this benefits society as a whole. Lawrence Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education, a libertarian think tank in the United States, argues that spontaneous order "is what happens when you leave people alone—when entrepreneurs... see the desires of people... and then provide for them." He further claims that "[entrepreneurs] respond to market signals, to prices. Prices tell them what's needed and how urgently and where. And it's infinitely better and more productive than relying on a handful of elites in some distant bureaucracy." Hayek’s account of the spontaneous order and the impersonal nature of the economic outcomes in the free market has led him to reject the notion of social (or distributive) justice as a meaningless concept.