The idea of the invisible hand has had an impact not only on the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries but on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well, and it has had a curious ideological career: in previous centuries it had been used to promote ideals of secular, enlightened progress, while in the twentieth and the twenty-first, it is used inversely to promote conservative reverence toward traditions. There are two main models for invisible-hand explanations, and the current, inverse, ideological use of the idea of the invisible hand by conservative circles as against liberals and social planners springs from not distinguishing between the two models.
The invisible‐hand heuristic for origin‐destination integer multicommodity network flows