These ideas were elaborated further by Von Mises’s student Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992). Von Hayek argued that people have little knowledge of the world beyond their immediate surroundings. This is the crucial ingredient that makes the price system work, for prices are not merely “rates of exchange between goods” but also “a mechanism for communicating information” (von Hayek 1945). Von Hayek saw the free price system not as a conscious invention (that is, intentionally designed by humans) but as a spontaneously derived order (that is, coming from thousands of uncoordinated choices). In a complex, uncertain environment, economic agents are not able to predict the consequences of their actions, and only the price system can coordinate the whole economy. For von Hayek the “fatal conceit” of the socialists was that they believed this complex system could be designed by a planning system that “gets the prices right.” Von Hayek argued that in centrally planned economies an individual or a select group of individuals must determine the distribution of resources. But these planners can never have enough information to carry out the allocation of productive resources reliably—hence, inefficiency and constant crises. An economy can never be designed by social planning, but rather emerges spontaneously from a complex network of interaction among agents with limited knowledge.