ABSTRACT
What are the chief causes of the extraordinary economic prosperity in the so-called knowledge economy of the past couple of decades? Our models of economic growth have emphasized objective, material productivity. The production of larger amounts of physical stuff seems to be the very definition of wealth. But the Austrian school,1 on the basis of what it calls its “subjectivist” approach, contends that it is mainly our ability to coordinate with one another that enables us to increase the objective standards of living of people around the globe. And our ability to coordinate with one another in turn may depend fundamentally on our capabilities for mutual orientation, to see not the things themselves, but to see how one another are seeing things.
