As was shown in Section 4, all of these factors are successfully evaluated and coordinated by the free market. The free market can accomplish this prodigious task because it is a decentralized information-processing system. Every individual directs his or her actions according to his or her personal value scale; this autonomous control is preserved even when the individual enters into voluntary associations with others. The free market provides constant high-density communication among its component units (that is, individuals), particularly through its pricing mechanism. As will be seen later in this subsection, non-market communication techniques are highly inferior in this regard. The market even tracks the predictive abilities of investors, channeling greater capital resources over the long term into the hands of the best predictors.

The superior efficiency of the free market as an information system, made possible by a highly decentralized structure in which numerous individuals simultaneously and independently pursue their own value scales, can be aptly described as information synergy. This term was introduced by this author in an article written in 1976 and published toward the end of that decade. The article is reproduced in its entirety on the following page. It has been adapted to the Web medium, but its contents have otherwise been left unchanged. While reading this article, the student may wish to consider how its conclusions might apply to more recent events and trends, e. g., the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of the Internet and other distributed information systems, the proliferation of dot-coms and similar small technology businesses, and the development of neural-net models in Artificial Intelligence.