  Of course, part of Hayek’s motivation for endorsing methodological individualism and demanding that social-scientific explanations specify a mechanism at the action-theoretic level is that he wants to emphasize the limitations of the individual’s actor’s perspective. It’s fine to talk about macroeconomic variables like “the inflation rate,” but it is important to remember that individual actors (generally speaking) do not respond directly to such indicators. All that they can see are changes in the immediate prices that they must pay for production inputs or consumption goods, and this is what they respond to. The large-scale consequences of the choices they make in response to these changes are largely unintended, and so any regularity in these consequences constitutes a spontaneous order. This is a crucial element of Hayek’s information-based argument for capitalism: economic actors do not have access to the same information as economic theorists, thus it is only when we see the operations of the economy through their eyes that we can begin to see the advantages of a decentralized system of coordination like the market.