Lachmann’s world is consciously similar to Schumpeter’s world of “creative destruction,” except that for Lachmann the innovating entrepreneur is not disrupting some preexisting general equilibrium. His world is one in which a continuous evolutionary process of changing patterns of capital complementarity is occurring. At any point in time, different entrepreneurs will have different and frequently incompatible production plans. Over time the market process will validate some and invalidate others. Lachmann sees the market process as tending to integrate the capital structure, in other words, rendering plans more consistent, although he is careful to add that the forces of equilibrium may be overwhelmed by the forces of change.
The concept of the capital structure is built out of the notion of capital complementarity. A production plan is a construction of the human mind. As such it exhibits a necessary internal consistency. From the point of view of the individual planner, it might be said that the plan is always in equilibrium. The plan is always in equilibrium in the sense that every planner, being rational, may always be counted on to do the best that he can, given all the relevant constraints, where such constraints include the time available to adjust to any unexpected changes. That is to say, at any given point of time any individual planner is in equilibrium with respect to the world as he sees it at that point of time. All productive resources employed in that plan stand in complementary relationships to one another. Between any two points of time, during which unexpected changes will necessarily have occurred, resource substitutions will have been made in an attempt to adjust to the changes. Complementarity is a condition of plan equilibrium (stability); substitutability is a condition of plan disequilibrium (change).
—Peter Lewin, Capital in Disequilibrium: The Role of Capital in a Changing World, 2nd ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2011), 134-135.
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