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reduce their consumption, and no motivation to do so even if the
information was somehow communicated. By simply increasing their
demand for bananas, however, Icelanders ask other consumers through
slightly higher banana prices to reduce their banana consumption. And each

of these consumers will respond appropriately to this request. While we
cannot know how much any one non-Icelandic consumer will reduce
banana consumption, we can be confident that aggregate consumption will

decline by just enough to allow Icelanders to consume the additional
bananas they desire at the higher banana price. And, the higher banana price
will immediately inform and motivate responses from those in the best
position to expand banana production. This response will cause prices of

productive resources, including labor, to change in ways that communicate
information on the desirability of shifting resources out of other
employments and into banana production.

It is impossible to detail all the adjustments required to best
accommodate the Icelandic banana consumers, but they will be made in
response to the information communicated through market prices. No other

form of communication could come remotely close to informing and
motivating such a pattern of cooperative adjustments, and we are talking
about the adjustments to one tiny change in the information of time and

place in a small and remote country. Imagine how much more difficult it is
for people all over the world to coordinate their decisions with each other in
response to thousands of simultaneous changes, both large and small, in
their individual conditions and desires. There is no way the information

necessary to accomplish this coordination could ever be constantly updated
and communicated with any foreseeable improvements in information-age
technology. Yet this communication takes place every day through market

prices, and takes place so effectively and unintentionally that almost no one
has the slightest awareness of, or appreciation for, what an amazing feat it is
or the enormous benefits derived from it. Without the communication that
takes place through market prices we would return to a world of a few

impoverished people, even if all the electronic marvels of the information
age were fully available. Of course, these marvels would have never been
developed without the widespread dissemination of information made

possible by market communication.
We do not intend to belittle the benefits from the technological
improvements that have supposedly moved us into the information age. But

once we understand the enormous amount of vital information being
communicated through markets, which can be communicated effectively in