My work in thus area started around 1950 when I was still with the Cowles Commission. I was writing a more or less expository paper dealing with activity analysis…and happened to use the term decentralization, which was then often applied to the market mechanism as a sort of a selling point. But when I used the word decentralization I thought I should explain what I meant. So I made a footnote mark, went to the bottom of the page, and began writing, By decentralization we mean… But then it struck me that I did not know what we meant by decentralization. That was the beginning of many years of work trying to clarify the concept, because I thought that if we think this property is so important, we should be able to define what it is.

In: David Warsh, "The Road to a System that Works (Without Shooting People)" at economicprincipals.com, October 21, 2007.