The Invisible Hand is Swiping Right: What Adam Smith Can Teach Us About Tinder

We’ve all been there. Endlessly swiping through a sea of faces, feeling a mix of hope, boredom, and existential dread. The modern dating app, we're told, is a technological marvel—a supercomputer designed to find our perfect match. Yet, the experience often feels less like a marvel and more like a chaotic, unpredictable market where the rules are unclear and success feels random.

But what if it isn't random at all? What if the chaos of Tinder is actually a perfect example of what the great economist Adam Smith called a system of "natural liberty," and what his intellectual descendant, F.A. Hayek, would later call a "spontaneous order"?

Welcome to our first exploration. Let's forget the dating gurus for a moment and look at the dating market through the timeless lens of classical economics.

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The Great Knowledge Problem of the Perfect Bio

In his Nobel Prize-winning work, F.A. Hayek argued that no central planner could ever run an economy efficiently. Why? The "knowledge problem." The specific, local, and often unspoken knowledge needed to make good decisions is dispersed among millions of individuals. A central committee can set a price for wheat, but it can never know about the specific soil conditions on a particular farm or a sudden local pest problem.

Your Tinder profile is a form of central planning. It's your attempt to broadcast a summary of "you" to the market. You list your height, your job, a witty (or not-so-witty) bio. But this is a tiny, woefully incomplete data set. It cannot possibly convey the tacit knowledge of what makes you a good partner: your specific sense of humor, the way you comfort someone who is sad, your particular ambitions.

The market—the collective swiping of thousands of people—tries to make sense of this limited information. The result is often inefficient. People rely on crude proxies: a photo at a fancy restaurant signals wealth, a picture with a dog signals kindness. We do this because the real knowledge is unavailable. No algorithm, no matter how clever, can solve this fundamental knowledge problem.

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There's No Such Thing as a "10"

The Austrian school of economics, particularly Carl Menger, revolutionized the field with the concept of subjective value. Before Menger, economists struggled with why diamonds (less useful) were more valuable than water (essential for life). The answer: value isn't inherent in the good itself; it's in the mind of the individual making the choice. Value is subjective.

This is a devastating critique of the modern dating obsession with objective ratings—the "he's a 10" or "she's a 6." In economic reality, there is no such thing. A partner who is a "10" to one person might be a "4" to another, based on their unique preferences, circumstances, and desires.

Tinder is not a matching engine that pairs people based on objective scores. It is a discovery process. Every swipe is an economic choice, an expression of subjective value. You are not searching for the objectively "best" person, but for the person who is most valuable to you. This is liberating. It means you don't have to appeal to everyone. You only need to find the small corner of the market that subjectively values what you have to offer.

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Human Action, Not Algorithmic Design

Ultimately, the patterns we see on dating apps—the "ghosting," the short-lived conversations, the rare successful matches—are not the product of some grand design by Tinder's engineers. They are, as the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises would say, the result of human action.

Each of us on the app is an acting individual, using means (swiping, messaging) to achieve ends (a date, a relationship, validation). The overall market is the sum of these millions of individual, purposeful actions. It is a spontaneous order.

This doesn't mean it's a perfect order. Markets can be messy, and this one is no exception. But it does mean that the solution to our dating woes isn't a better algorithm from on high. It's a better understanding of the individual choices that create the market in the first place. As Adam Smith noted, it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. Likewise, it is not from the benevolence of other swipers that we find a match, but from the miraculous alignment of our subjective interests.

So, the next time you're swiping, don't see it as chaos. See it for what it is: the invisible hand at work, imperfectly, frustratingly, but beautifully guiding millions of individual actions into a spontaneous, and distinctly human, order.