A fascinating piece titled Are Property Rights Enough? appeared in the November 2009 issue (and online on October 20) of Reason Magazine, a libertarian U.S.-based magazine. The lead essay, by Kerry Howley, argues for a “thick” conception of libertarianism, which includes not just freedom from state coercion, but also cultural freedom and freedom from social coercion, as a part of what libertarians should care about. Todd Seavey and Daniel McCarthy provide response essays. Seavey’s essay argues, among other things, that expanding the scope of libertarian thought to include cultural norms complicates matters and alienates potential recruits. McCarthy delves on the difficulty of settling on what is right, and why it is better to let people choose cultures, even if such cultures reduce certain aspects of personal freedom. Howley replies to both pointing out that people aren’t born in a vacuum, and some cultural constraints may be ingrained into them from childhood.

Other response essays include:

• Ilya Somin: Libertarianism and Culture (October 24) where he agrees with some of Howley’s key points but argues that a culture that restricts freedom need not be a problem in so far as people have other options and exit rights.

• Will Wilkinson responds to Ilya Somin (October 25) (NOTE: Wilkinson is Howley’s domestic partner).

• The oldest libertarian debate (October 24) by Abhishek. He says that the difference between Howley and Seavey isn’t as wide as one might suppose, and in fact, he agrees with both.

• Ordinary Gentlemen: Libertarians and diversity argues that libertarians have difficulty grasping Howley’s point because libertarians are largely drawn from a white and male background and often face fewer cultural constraints of the kind that worry Howley.

• Timothy B. Lee: Libertarianism as a liberal project (October 21), wherein he argues that people who care about liberty ouht to be interested in the things Howley advocates for.

If you don’t want to go to each blog individually, check out this round-up by Around The Sphere.

I find myself agreeing with everybody, though my take is closest to that of Ilya Somin. My view is that the “state” has no monopoly on liberty-violating coercion, and that society can also induce liberty-violating coercion. So, the source of the coercion — whether state or society, is not relevant. The more relevant question is the particular form that the coercion takes.

If the coercion is physical coercion, or backed by a largely enforced threat of physical coercion, then it is liberty-violating. This puts a lot of social coercion in the same boat as state coercion, but leaves a lot out. If a person living in a society knows that violation of certain cultural norms (beyond the basic respect for the liberty and freedom of others) will lead to physical punishment or literal physical coercion, then, even if that person experiences no violence, that threat of violence is liberty-reducing.

In the case that powerful states create and enforce laws, however benignly and pleasantly, that threat of coercion is very much present. There may be several layers to it (violating the law in and of itself may not land you in jail, but it may require you to pay a fine, and non-payment of the fine may subject you to legal action, and so on). This is one good reason to be a lot more careful about what gets codified in law. Thus, a libertarian, even if broadly sympathetic with the goals of a law, may be wary of the implicit additional coercion that every new law and regulation creates. For those who care about libertarianism, it is also a good reason to try to influence the direction of debate towards a smaller and less powerful state, i.e., to influence the direction of public debate and views about liberty.

What about social pressures? Again, the situations where a social pressure actually leads to physical coercion, or literally dictates to people what physical actions to undertake, may be very narrow, but there could be a much broader range of situations where the threat of coercive social pressure bars certain courses of actions.

How should this be handled? Should this be handled in the same way that libertarians try to handle state coercion, i.e., by trying to reduce the set of cultural norms that might restrict people’s actions, through the use of persuasion and argument? The problem here is that while it’s easy to think of some broad parameters that make for highly coercive and highly non-coercive societies, things get a lot murkier in between, and unlike the simple mantra of “small government”, there’s no corresponding mantra of “small society”. The simplest answer, that I (and perhaps many libertarians) would espouse is the enforcement of clear boundaries on the nature and limits of coercion — that physical coercion, or the threat thereof, or literally violating people’s freedom, is not to be tolerated. Next, any culture or society that threatens to use such coercion against those who dare to dissent or exit must be suitably condemned for it. In cases where these threats may be implicit but aren’t explicitly seen, a libertarian who cares about liberty should ask the pointed questions that seek to expose the coercion that keeps the system running and stifles dissent.

For instance, if a “society” stones to death a man and a woman who hold hands or kiss on the street, that is not only a violation of their liberty — it is also a violation of the liberty of everybody else, including those who didn’t plan on exercising these rights. Whether this stoning occurs because of the state, because of a consensus in the society, or because of a consensus among a small segment of hooligans in society whom nobody cares or dares to oppose, does not matter for concluding that it is a violation of liberty. On the other hand, if the public lovers’ colleagues mock them or consider them too brazen and indecent, I don’t see that as a violation of liberty. The question then is what the ultimate enforcement mechanisms for intolerance are and whether these worst-case enforcement mechanisms are limited to things that respect people’s individual freedom.

This is not to say that social isolation or opprobrium don’t have costs, or that it is inappropriate to try to change (through the use of persuasion and argument) attitudes in society that lead people to be punished severely in the social sphere for things that we think should be matters of individual choice. But this gets into a more fuzzy area, and getting rid of the ultimate coercive element of social and state pressures seems to be quite enough for libertarianism as a political philosophy.

I’ll also take this opprtunity to quote from what Friedrich Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty. I take the liberty of quoting from Chapter 4 (Freedom, Reason and Tradition), Section 6 (Pages 62-63):

We understand one another and get along with one another, are able to act successfully on our plans, because, most of the time, members of our civilization conform to unconscious patterns of conduct, show a regularity in their actions that is not the result of commands or coercion, often not even of any conscious adherence to known rules, but of firmly established habits and traditions. [...] In some instances it would be necessary, for the smooth running of society, to secure a similar uniformity by coercion, if such conventions or rules were not followed often enough. [...] There is an advantage in obedience to such rules not being coerced, not only because coercion as such is bad, but because it is, in fact, often desirable that rules should be observed only in most instances and that the individual should be able to transgress them when it seems worthwhile to incur the odium which this will cause. It is also important that the strength of the social pressure and of the force of habit which insures this observance is variable. It is this flexibility of voluntary rules which in the field of morals makes gradual evolution and spontaneous growth possible, which allows further experience to lead to modifications and improvements. Such an evolution is possible only with rules which are neither coercive nor deliberately imposed — rules which, though observing them is regarded as merit and though they will be observed by the majority, can be broken by individuals who feel they have strong enough reasons to brave the censure of their fellows. Unlike any deliberately imposed coercive rules, which can be changed only discontinuously and for all at the same time, rules of this kind allow for gradual and experimental change. The existence of individuals and groups simultaneously observing partially different rules provides the opportunity for the selection of the more efficient ones.

El sistema de precios es un mecanismo para comunicar información.

Friedrich Hayek (economista autriaco)

]]> http://amadon606.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/john-stossel-speaks-to-true-journalism-healthcare-and-limited-government/ Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:36:47 +0000 opey606 http://amadon606.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/john-stossel-speaks-to-true-journalism-healthcare-and-limited-government/

Reposted from: http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | November 4th, 2009

The Double Standard About Journos’ Bias

By John Stossel

I made The New York Times last week.  It even ran my picture. My mother would be proud.

Unfortunately, the story was critical.  It said, “Critics have leaped on Mr. Stossel’s speaking engagements as the latest evidence of conservative bias on the part of Fox.”

Which “critics” had “leaped”?  The reporter mentioned Rachel Maddow.  I wouldn’t think her criticism newsworthy, but Times reporters may use MSNBC as their guide to life.  He also quoted an “associate professor of journalism” who said my speeches were “‘pretty shameful’ by traditional journalistic standards.”  All this because I spoke at an event for Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a “conservative advocacy group.”

It is odd that this is a news story.  In August, AFP hired me to do the very same thing. I give the money to charity.  The Times didn’t call that “shameful.”

But in August, I worked for ABC News.  Now, I work for Fox.  Hmmm.

It reminds me of something that happened earlier in my career.

I was one of America’s first TV consumer reporters.  I approached the job with an attitude.  If companies ripped people off, I would embarrass them on TV — and demand that government do something. (I now regret the latter — the former was a good thing.)

I clearly had a point of view:  I was a crusader out to punish corporate bullies.  My colleagues liked it.  I got job offers.  I won 19 Emmys.  I was invited to speak at journalism conferences.

Then, gradually, I figured out that business, for the most part, treats consumers pretty well.  The way to get rich in business is to create something good, sell it for a reasonable price, acquire a reputation for honesty and keep pleasing customers so they come back for more.

As a local TV reporter, I could find plenty of crooks.  But once I got to the national stage — “20/20″ and “Good Morning America” — it was hard to find comparable national scams.  There were some:  Enron, Bernie Madoff, etc.  But they are rare.  In a $14 trillion economy, you’d think there’d be more.  But there aren’t.

I figured out why:  Market forces, even when hampered by government, keep scammers in check.  Reputation matters.  Word gets out.  Good companies thrive, and bad ones atrophy.  Regulation barely deters the cheaters, but competition does.

It made me want to learn more about free markets.  I subscribed to Reason magazine and read Cato Institute research papers.  Then Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Aaron Wildavsky.

My reporting changed.  I started taking skeptical looks at government — especially regulation.  I did an ABC TV special, “Are We Scaring You to Death?” that said we TV reporters often make hysterical claims about chemicals, pollution and other relatively minor risks.  Its good ratings — 16 million viewers — surprised my colleagues.

Suddenly, I wasn’t so popular with them.

I stopped winning Emmys.

I was invited on CNN’s media program, “Reliable Sources,” to be interviewed by The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz and an indignant Bernard Kalb.  They titled the segment, “Objectivity and Journalism:  Does John Stossel Practice Either?”  It was in big letters over my head.

Apparently, I had broken the rules.

On the air they told me that I was no longer objective.  I was too stunned to defend myself effectively.  I said something like:  ”I’ve always had a point of view.  How come you had no trouble with that when I criticized business?”

In hindsight, I wish I’d said:  ”Look at the title on the wall, you hypocrites!  It shows you have a point of view, too.  Many reporters do.  You just don’t like my arguments now that I no longer hew to your statist line.  So you want to shut me up.”

But I didn’t.

So I’ll say it now:  Reporters who think coercive government control is generally good and I, who thinks voluntary market forces are generally better, both have a point of view.

So why am I the one called biased?

I like what “Americans for Prosperity” defends.  I’m an American, and I’m for prosperity.  What creates prosperity is free and competitive markets.  That means limited government.

And I will speak about that every chance I get.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

]]> http://civitatedei.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/does-capitalism-lead-to-new-age-thinking/ Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:53:24 +0000 Dan http://civitatedei.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/does-capitalism-lead-to-new-age-thinking/

Apropos my previous post on Tony Woodlief’s conviction that a bit of Hayek will shake the economic leftism out of most people, I want to return to the quote that he used to make this point:

“Though a man’s conviction that all he achieves is due solely to his exertions, skill, and intelligence may be largely false, it is apt to have the most beneficial effects on his energy and circumspection. And if the smug pride of the successful is often intolerable and offensive, the belief that success depends wholly on him is probably the pragmatictically most effective incentive to successful action; whereas the more a man indulges in the propensity to blame others or circumstances for his failures, the more disgruntled and ineffective he tends to become.”  (Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty)

Psst: getting Oprah to endorse you is the REAL secret!

So if you believe – even falsely – that your own efforts and abilities are the fount of your economic success, then you’re well on the road to be a good little capitalist. How little of a leap is it from this to Norman Vincent Peale? Just think the right thing about your economic position and your ability to act in the market and you’ll be a success, right? Next stop: the masturbatory banality of The Secret’s law of attraction tripe. Don’t stop and read a book that’s actually about economics or ponder if this was what Marx meant by false consciousness – instead just imagine that you too can be a big success.

Does this conform with anyone’s lived experience? At all? Most people I know find work or business opportunities through their social network and/or sheer dumb luck. Conversely, a lot of people have lost their jobs and their savings in the past year because of a bad interaction between government regulations (or the lack thereof) and the risk-tolerance of Wall St. bankers. Don’t worry, the bankers and politicians are still okay, it’s just ordinary people who are queuing up for unemployment cheques or planning to retire on the freedom 155 plan.

In Hayek’s view though, my fairly uncontroversial observations about the state of our macroeconomic situation make me a bad player in the capitalist system. Ignore facts, pretend that it’s all about having the right attitude. Of course again, apparently in Hayek’s world, this is what successful people are supposed to think – and perhaps to certain extent some of them do believe this. The truth does not, apparently, set you free in capitalism, instead it makes you aware of stubborn facts that hinder your ability to pretend that if you just have the right attitude you’ll be a winner.

This wishful belief in the self has to be contorted by someone like Joel Osteen to fit into the gospel – and even then it ends up being an awkward fit. Rather, it’s much better situated in the fantasy world of new age positive thinking.

Tony Woodlief is wondering whether it just takes some Hayek (Friedrich not Salma) in order to get people behind the idea of free market capitalism:

“The maddening thing about reading Hayek is that I come away thinking, ‘If only leftists had a proper understanding of economics and society, they would stop their infernal meddling and let people be about the business of living productive lives.’

Then I think that perhaps I’m being just as muddle-headed as I think leftists are. Admittedly, I was a leftist before I read any economics, but maybe I read the wrong kind. Maybe there’s some whole other set of thinking and philosophy out there that will bring a right-thinking person to a leftist point of view.”

I appreciate Woodlief’s challenge and I’d nominate Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang as a book that defends the idea of a mixed economy with government involvement, protectionism, and weak intellectual property laws by asserting that this is the mix of currently disavowed policies that actually gave Britain, the US, Japan, South Korea and other top global economies so much success.

Anyway, I had a proposal, I know that a lot of readers and authors of this blog are fairly pro-free market while I am not so much. I intend to leverage that diversity of opinion for a little experiment: I propose that I’ll read anything that fits Tony’s criteria – i.e.: something that’s for a thoughtful, educated audience but that isn’t intolerably long and life-interfering or that requires an advanced degree in economics to understand – in exchange for someone of the Hayek camp reading something critical free markets.

There can be posts with more or less open comment threads to discuss what everyone thinks of what they’re reading. We’ll see if just reading Hayek or anyone else can dissolve economic preconceptions.

Whadya say?

Estive longe de um terminal de computador por alguns dias, mas consegui me informar sobre o Nobel. Bem, não li ainda o que meus colegas de blogosfera publicaram, mas eis o que eu penso sobre este Nobel.

Em primeiro lugar, creio que este Nobel segue uma lógica que vem desde a concessão do prêmio para Hayek e Myrdal (por dizerem praticamente o oposto, mas por terem em comum a preocupação com o desenvolvimento e o uso do conhecimento).

Depois veríamos Douglass North e Ronald Coase serem igualmente agraciados com o prêmio por falarem de custos de transação na história e em geral. O ponto comum, novamente, é claro: o que atrapalha o funcionamento dos mercados?

James Buchanan também é parte desta história, já que ampliou nosso conhecimento sobre como o sistema político influi no funcionamento dos mercados ao invés de corrigi-lo, como reza a cartilha do “planejador benevolente”.

Se pensarmos um pouco no significado de prêmios como este, poderíamos até falar de Gary Becker e outros que abriram campos de pesquisa por meio do relaxamento de hipóteses dos modelos, digamos assim, canônicos (embora este não seja um bom nome, creio).

Oliver Williamson – na minha opinião – é simplesmente a versão North-Coase aplicada a aspectos de Organização Industrial. Já merecia ter ganho o prêmio há mais tempo. Não é uma de minhas leituras favoritas – acho até que ele é muito prolixo – mas é, sem dúvida, um importante autor na área de Organização Industrial. Sem cair no canto da sereia pterodoxo, Williamson foi capaz de reler o funcionamento dos mercados sob a ótica dos custos de transação. Estranho mesmo é pensar que Baumol ainda não ganhou o prêmio por lançar muitos dos conceitos que nós – Williamson incluso – tomaríamos como base para o avanço da teoria de Organização Industrial nos últimos anos.

O outro prêmio, o de Elinor Ostrom, é bastante merecido. Lembro-me de ter começado minha dissertação, graças ao Marcos Fernandes, com a leitura de Vincent Ostrom, seu marido, que tratava do federalismo como uma instituição. Por meio dele, acabei descobrindo os artigos de Elinor Ostrom sobre problemas de bens de uso comum. Rules, Games and Common Poll Resources, editado por ela e mais alguns outros pesquisadores, foi um dos primeiros livros que li na tradição dos estudos empíricos de economia sobre o problema (ou a tragédia) dos comuns. Não foi o livro que mais me entusiasmou na época, mas a abordagem empírica me atraiu. Depois eu teria contato com gente como Bruce Benson (a lei como ordem espontânea), Robert Ellickson (Order without Law), John Umbeck e Jack Hirshleifer (o uso da violência como forma alternativa de alocar recursos na sociedade), dentre outros.

Talvez possamos associar o prêmio de Elinor Ostrom com o de alguns anos atrás, ganho por Vernon Smith por suas contribuições à economia experimental. Talvez se possa pensar no prêmio como mais um representante do “ampliação das fronteiras do conhecimento” (Becker, Buchanan, etc), já que a profa. Ostrom, como tantos antes dela, mostrou que instituições importam para o funcionamento dos mercados. Mais ainda, não é apenas “instituições importam”, mas também como importam.

Não é um convite para que economistas fujam da economia para estudar sociologia ou antropologia. É um convite para que cientistas sociais (e alguns economistas) leiam mais Elinor Ostrom.

Agora vou ler o que meus colegas escreveram a respeito. Boa terça-feira, leitor.

At the time of this post, Wikipedia says:

The economic calculation problem is a criticism of socialist economics, or more precisely central economic planning. It was first proposed by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and later expounded by Friedrich Hayek.

However, Hayek himself would tell you that Mises was not the first to make the argument. In his Collectivist Economic Planning (1935), he published an English translation of Enrico Barone’s paper, “The Ministry of Production in the Collectivist State” from the Italian Giornale degli Economisti in 1908.

Robert Vienneau posted a fun excerpt from this paper that I’m reprinting below. Of particular note is the use of the term ‘anarchist production’ to contrast with the Ministry of Production; not even Mises would go there. Also interesting is the emphasis on experiment, which has a mutualist spirit to it. You will also get a glimpse of what Enrico might have said if asked about firms classed as “too big to fail”.

25. But it is frankly inconceivable that the economic determination of the technical coefficients can be made a priori, in such a way as to satisfy the condition of the minimum cost of production which is an essential condition for obtaining that maximum to which we have referred. The economic variability of the technical coefficients is certainly neglected by the collectivists; but that it is one of the most important sides of the question Pareto has already very clearly shown in one of his many ingenious contributions to the science.

Enrico Barone

The determination of the coefficients economically most advantageous can only be done in an experimental way: and not on a small scale, as could be done in a laboratory, but with experiments on a very large scale, because often the advantage of the variation has its origin precisely in a new and greater dimension of the undertaking. Experiments may be successful in the sense that they may lead to a lower cost combination of factors; or they may be unsuccessful, in which case that particular organization may not be copied and repeated and others will be preferred, which experimentally have given a better result.

The Ministry of Production could not do without these experiments for the determination of the economically most advantageous technical if it would realize the condition of the minimum cost of production which is essential for the attainment of the maximum collective welfare.

It is on this account that the equations of the equilibrium with the maximum collective welfare are not soluble a priori, on paper.

26. Some collectivist writers, bewailing the continual destruction of firms (those with higher costs) by free competition, think that the creation of enterprises to be destroyed later can be avoided and hope that with organized production it is possible to avoid the dissipation and destruction of wealth which such experiments involve, and which they believe to be the peculiar property of ‘anarchist’ production. Thereby these writers simply show that they have no clear idea of what production really is, and that they are not even disposed to probe a little deeper into the problem which will concern the Ministry which will be established for the purpose in the Collectivist State.

We repeat, that if the Ministry will not remain bound by the traditional technical coefficients, which would produce a destruction of wealth in another sense – in the sense that the greater wealth which could have been realized will not be realized – it has no other means of determining a priori the technical coefficients most advantageous economically, and must of necessity resort to experiments on a large scale in order to decide afterwards which are the most appropriate organizations, which it is advantageous to maintain in existence and to enlarge to obtain the collective maximum more easily, and which, on the other hand, it is best to discard as failures.

27. Conclusions. From what we have seen and demonstrated hitherto, it is obvious how fantastic those doctrines are which imagine that the production in the collectivist regime would be ordered in a manner substantially different from that of ‘anarchist’ production.

If the Ministry of Production proposes to obtain the collective maximum – which it obviously must, whatever law of distribution may be adopted – all the economic categories of the old regime must reappear, though maybe with other names: prices, salaries, interest, rent, profit, saving, etc…

It is worth noting, as David A. Reisman does in Schumpeter’s Market, that “Barone…wanted market socialism. They should, Hayek believed, have gone for the free market instead.”

BBC has put out an excellent documentary called Tory! Tory! Tory! that looks at the historical development and rise to power of Margaret Thatcher and her ideas. The excerpts I’ve found below focus on the beginnings of the Austrian School of Economic thought, something crucial to the study of Liberty. We’ll be reading The Road to Serfdom by Friedrick von Hayek eventually, so this will give you a little taste of it. Enjoy.

MP

In other words, REH-based models ignore markets’ very raison d’etre: no one, as Friedrich Hayek pointed out, can have access to the “totality” of knowledge and information dispersed throughout the economy. Similarly, as John Maynard Keynes and Karl Popper showed, we cannot rationally predict the future course of our knowledge. Today’s models of rational decision-making ignore these well-known arguments.

As you can see in our tag line, this blog is about “medical communication from the bottom-up.” This idea is inspired by several things, including my own previous scholarly work on the disintermediation of the news industry by low-cost ubiquitous digital technology.

Matt at Hyperlocalblogger get’s it! Blogging from the bottom up is better: local bloggers care more, and they know more. I started this venture with a strong understanding of the idea of Hayek and other Austrian economists of the critical importance of distributed, subjective knowledge. And good on Matt for reminding me of the critical importance of motivation when reporting on hyperlocal news.

For us, on this blog, the subject is not merely hyperlocal news in general, but rather the much more hypernarrow topic: the flu, in the winter of 2009-2010. Indeed, motivation and distributed knowledge will be key.

As I mentioned yesterday, one of the avenues I’ve been exploring over the past few months is “classical liberalism”.

This has a lot to commend it, in particular its mistrust of governments and “technique” in favour of the free decisions of individuals within society. Hayek defines liberty as “that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society”, and that is a definition I find very appealing.

However, I have a number of difficulties with that form of liberalism, particularly as it plays out in practical politics. It seems to end up as a “where the music stops” form of politics: property relations and economic systems have been subject to constant, state-directed transformation over hundreds of years, but now we are to say, “Hold! Enough!” and say that property relations and patterns of ownership are no longer any business of the state.

In other words, the state’s actions in establishing what Marx would call “bourgeois property” – for example, the Enclosure Acts or the invention of limited liability companies – are to be accepted, but any proposals to change what we have inherited from those earlier actions is unacceptable interference in private property by the state. (If you’re a Christian, you can then throw the commandment against stealing into the mix, giving modern property rights an eternal and divine status.)

So what I continue to value in liberalism: its emphasis on freedom as opposed to coercion; on the “messy-but-free” over against the rational and orderly. One reason I find Co-operative politics intriguing is the apparent emphasis on voluntary association over central control. (Again: I recognise that this sits somewhat uncomfortably with the Co-operative party’s long alliance with Labour.)

But where I currently find myself parting company from “classical liberalism” (or economic liberalism): its acceptance of existing patterns of property ownership and inequality as simply part of the natural of order of things and outside the scope of legitimate state activity, ignoring the unobserved (because so pervasive) state interference and coercion that underpin those existing realities.

There is also the apparent ease with which classical liberalism can degenerate into the sort of populist libertarianism which denies almost any role for the state, and sees even taxation as an unacceptable “coercion” (unlike Hayek, who did not see taxation as inherently contradicting the principle of liberty as quoted above).

“Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving.”

~ Friedrich Hayek

The term “theodicy” is getting a lot of exercise here recently, so, to review: a theodicy is a philosophical explanation for why there is evil in the world in spite of the existence of a benevolent deity, as in Leibniz’ Theodicy.  A theodicy almost necessarily draws on problems of free will, the hope of knowledge, and its attendant dangers.  Transforming theodicy into historical narrative, it becomes possible to periodize these themes.  Sometimes this narrative functions as an origin story (as in Genesis and the stories of Prometheus and Pandora’s Box).  Following the Enlightenment and French Revolution—just as geology and cosmology began to acquire temporal elements—more recent human history could be periodized in terms of an overarching balance of knowledge, morality, and wisdom, as in the criticism of Joseph-Marie Maistre.

Since Maistre’s time, historiographical theodicies have frequently used rationalism or scientism as explanations of evil.  Following the rise of the Soviet Union and the Nazi Party, conservative thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper regularly drew connections between the post-French Revolution thought of Saint-Simon and Comte through to Marxism, logical positivism, modernism, and the rise of totalitarian regimes.  Chris Donohue has written about this trend on this blog, and he is responsible for getting me into the topic.

Science studies has imported similar narratives of theodicy linking the philosophy of science (positivistic and otherwise), the historiography of science, and the authority of science in society.  The sociology of knowledge has, in recent years, functioned within this theodicy as a kind of deliverance from evil, restoring a true historiography undistorted by philosophy’s arbitrary elevation of science to a coherently identifiable, objective, uncultural, and therefore privileged activity.  It is the contention of this blog that this theodicy has reduced the scope of historiographical inquiry to ornamentation of socio-epistemic issues privileged by the theodicy’s narrative.  Abandoning a study of ideas for a study of practices consonant with the theodicy, our professional theodicy now deeply inhabits our historiographical synthesis.

Witness Iwan Rhys Morus’ essay review of Patricia Fara’s new book Science: A Four Thousand Year History in the latest History of Science, which he edits.  Historical explanation of evil is present and unusually explicit: “Up until the 1960s, historians of science by and large saw their discipline as the handmaiden of philosophy—and philosophers of science certainly did.  Philosophers offered up accounts of scientific method and historians scoured the historical record looking for examples of those methodologies in action.”

This historiography was consonant with the public privileging of science via method and “popular histories of science” which emphasized the narrative of science as a long, philosophically-coherent “quest”.  Now, though, “professionals” cannot bear to live in this naive “fairytale” world: “Our histories of science are fragmented; tied to particular locations and historical periods.  We think of truth as something that has to be made, remade and argued over at specific times and places, not as an eternal light in the darkness.”

We were baptized professionals by our patron saint: “Writing in this journal over a quarter of a century ago, Steven Shapin in his ‘History of science and its sociological reconstructions’”—(indeed a very nice piece)—”suggested that it was time to stop arguing about the possibility of writing sociological history of science and to start doing it.”  He gave us the Word: “Shapin proceeded to put his money where his pen was and a few years later co-authored Leviathan and the Air-Pump with Simon Schaffer.”

The dark time was followed by deliverance in the form of “the Great Escape” (or should I say Exodus): “Like most other historians, historians of science took the cultural turn during the 1980s.  We started looking at science as a patchwork of competing and complementary practices and institutions.  There was a new attention to the spaces where science was made and promulgated.  We no longer take it for granted that science is self-evidently the superior road to understanding.  We see knowledge as contested territory.”

Historiographical synthesis not only became problematized, but likely impossible: Fara’s synthesis is “the product of a very old-fashioned ambition.” Back in our days of enslavement to the philosophers we, too, were sinners: “Big picture histories of science were possible then because historians and philosophers alike agreed that there was a big story to tell.”

Nevertheless, we must evangelize the Word.  Morus is all for synthesis, but mainly as a sop to the story-loving great unwashed: “If we want the kinds of histories of science that we currently tell”—(our ornaments)—”to reach beyond the academy then we need to find ways of reconnecting with the tradition of grand narrative history that do not require us to sell our souls to the devil in the process.”  (Indeed, so great are the moral dangers of the heathen world of synthesis that it is evidently necessary to recite catechism to ward off evil: I had to explain to my own students why practically every other chapter in Morus’ own textbook with Peter Bowler began with an attack on some devil named Kuhn.)

Almost all professions make up myths about their own history, but there is something highly unsettling about the almost absurdly heroic myth we have made up about ourselves.  We are, after all, supposedly the experts in debunking self-justifying myths.  One of the more interesting consequences has been that we have played down our more specific accomplishments in favor of highlighting a few key insights that can be directed outward to the public.  It is only now that we can speak of: “people, not ideas”, “a robust counterpoint to Eurocentrism” (Babylonians!), attention to the significance of “trade and exchange”, “institutions”, and “instruments”.

But, something’s wrong: Morus observes that Fara’s new-school history looks awfully familiar, with many of the same old characters turning up.  Further, maybe a lot of these grand insights that Shapin is said to have delivered unto us are perhaps not so novel.  It turns out, for example, that Babylonians were included in histories of science “as far back as 1944″.  In truth, “We need to go back a little further to find the Babylonians, Chinese, Egyptians or Indians so cavalierly dismissed”.  Here Morus cites the assumptions of oriental mysticism versus European rationalism present in 1842’s Mirror of literature, amusement, and instruction.

Morus’ assumptions that naive attitudes toward “science” are temporal is entirely consistent with a self-serving theodicy.  But let’s go back a rather long way to Thomas Sprat’s 1666 propaganda piece History of the Royal Society, where we find Sprat was entirely forthright about the links between knowledge and “trade and exchange”, as well in the role played by place and culture, not to mention (obviously) institutions.

The theodicy requires an ascendancy of naiveté, so we round up the usual suspects: “The Victorians”—ah, the Victorians!—”thought that there was something particularly distinctive about their scientific culture that differentiated it from the past quite markedly.”  The 1842 piece is emblematic of the mutually-justifying relationship between science and Victorian culture, which our society inherits.  Historical narrative merges with historiographical theodicy. This only becomes obvious once we attempt to synthesize our safely localized studies into some larger narrative.

But what if we look to one of the arch-devils of Victorian science, the ur-historian-and-philosopher of science, William Whewell, the very man who coined the term “scientist”.  With him we can indeed find a dismissal of past achievements of other cultures, but this has little to do with orientalism.  His self-professed philosophical project sought to characterize and distinguish recent contributions to the sciences from, for example, Arabic contributions, because these contributions were being mischaracterized by other Victorians who wanted to champion them.  Perhaps we can discuss the alignment of philosophy with orientalism to explain the naive view we inherit, but, to do so, we construct an anti-history that eliminates these other Victorians—they have been necessarily subsumed within “the Victorians” so as to service the larger narrative of the theodicy.  Now we get to champion the non-Europeans, and isn’t that generous of us?

And, as in any inverted Whig narrative, we always must arrive at the present so that the act of writing history can retain its cogency.  It is, after all, only recently that sociology has empowered us to express ambivalence about the power of science, which is the great gift of modern history of science to the world.  “But we are, according to Fara, still far away from a happy ending to the scientific story….  Putting a man on the moon might have been the ultimate symbol of twentieth-century scientific hubris”—(a nice example of mobile periodization)—”but it led, in the end, to nothing more than a technological cul de sac.  Scepticism toward scientific authority is by now probably the prevailing sentiment as well as a measure of fear about what science cannot—as well as what it can—deliver.”

Our deliverance from naiveté is a good thing, even if it disturbs us a little, because we are now granted free-will from the non-contingency of philosophical accounts of history.  It is just this interrelationship between science and society that liberates us: “Science, Fara reminds us in the end, has always to some degree or other been bound up with the pursuit of political and economic power.”  Here professional anti-history is at work: this is all post-Shapin; never mind the Marxists.

I don’t know whether Fara’s narrative follows the same trail, because I haven’t read her book, but Morus’ interpretation is classic morality tale.  For all its methodological sophistication, it is designed to manipulate and conflate the history of science and the history of our profession to deliver a novel and unqualified moral message: we have the power to question science, to assert political objectives in the face of allegedly objective knowledge, to use science responsibly.  That is the gift of culture and contingency.

It may be necessary to rough up the philosophers, scientists, and the pop historians a little, but they’ll thank us for it later once they know how excellent it is to have free will.  Morus’ fn. 1: “I am being deliberately rude, of course, but it is a peculiar feature of the sort of history of science that lionizes its protagonists that it tends to deprive them of agency as much as does any heroic fairy story.  Faraday according to these kinds of accounts was as much a prisoner of fate as was Beowulf.”

Morus wants to get beyond the fairytales that pervade general knowledge of history.  I do agree that we need a better synthesis, but if we want to get there any time soon, we have to stop making up fairytales about ourselves and our brave battles against intellectual strawmen.  In our enthusiasm for the history of practices and culture, I’m not sure we realize just how enslaved our narratives are to the ideas that we have so cavalierly shoved aside as the historiographically artificial plaything of philosophically-disposed historians.

“It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.”

~ Friedrich A. Hayek

“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.”

~ Friedrich Hayek

Mais uma vez, o Prof. Bruno Meyerhof Salama (FGV-SP) nos presenteia com um belo trabalho intelectual. Já tinha falado antes no Bruno M. Salama neste blog (aqui e aqui). Desta vez, ele escreveu em parceria com o Lucas Mendes um belo artigo (mais um) sobre um livraço do filósofo e economista austríaco Friedrich Hayek: Direito, Legislação e Liberdade (vocês ficam com o vídeo de uma entrevista completa de Hayek em 1985 aqui). É um primeiro de uma série mensal resenhando cada um dos capítulos da obra-prima de Hayek. Série, aliás, que promete… Já pelo primeiro artigo, dá pra dizer que esta série acabará com muitos mitos em torno de Hayek. Espero que a má vontade dos intelecutais com as idéias de Hayek não atrapalhe a leitura (praticamente obrigatória) deste belo trabalho do Bruno M. Salama. Generalizando (e correndo todos os riscos decorrentes dela), posso dizer que Hayek não é bem visto e quisto no meio acadêmico brasileiro. No meio jurídico, então, nem se fala… Já foi chamado até de “medíocre” em um livro de um grande professor de direito. Pois é: o cara tem uma opinião diferente da sua e isto o autoriza a tachá-lo de “medíocre”. A ofensa pessoal mostra bem o patamar dos nossos intelectuais. Parte da “academia” brasileira não produz quase nada porque perde mais tempo xingando os outros que produzindo conhecimento. Mas fiquem com o texto claro e preciso do Prof. Bruno M. Salama. O primeiro de uma série mensal que, como disse, promete.

Direito, legislação e liberdade: a obra-prima de Hayek 

13 de Julho de 2009 – por Bruno Salama & Lucas Mendes

Bruno Meyerhof Salama (Professor, Direito GV)
Lucas Mendes (Mestrando em Filosofia Política, UFSM)

Alguns gênios se notabilizam por seu magnum opus; outros, por suas obras de divulgação. Friedrich Hayek, tornado famoso mesmo nos círculos intelectuais principalmente por O caminho da servidão (1944), pertence a este segundo grupo. A obra mais fascinante de Hayek, contudo, é Direito, legislação e liberdade. O compêndio de três volumes, publicados respectivamente em 1973, 1976 e 1979, contém um apanhado geral dos princípios filosóficos orientadores de sua extensa carreira intelectual.

Em 1974, o comitê responsável pela indicação do prêmio Nobel de economia daquele ano para Friedrich Hayek e Gunnar Myrdal notou que o prêmio estava sendo dado não apenas pelo trabalho naquilo que se poderia chamar de economia “pura”, mas também pela “penetrante análise da interdependência entre os fenômenos econômico, social e institucional”. [1] Alçado assim à condição de estrela, o estudo de Hayek ganhou novo impulso. E, de fato, um dos mais importantes legados de Hayek diz respeito às suas teorias sociais, filosóficas e jurídicas sistematizadas em Direito, legislação e liberdade.

Nascido em 1899, Hayek realizou seus estudos em Viena após a Primeira Guerra Mundial. Obteve dois doutorados, primeiro em direito, em 1921, e logo a seguir em economia, em 1923. Na década de 1920, Hayek interessou-se pela obra de Mises, e foi diretor do Instituto Austríaco para Pesquisa dos Ciclos de Negócios. O trabalho de Hayek sobre os ciclos econômicos atraiu a atenção de Lionel Robbins, e em 1931 a London School of Economics lhe ofereceu uma posição de professor. Em Londres, Hayek destacou-se entre o grupo de acadêmicos imigrantes. Logo após o fim da Segunda Guerra Mundial, Hayek organizou a célebre conferência de Mont Pèlerin, na Suíça, da qual participaram gigantes como Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises e Milton Friedman, dentre muitos outros, e cujo objetivo central foi defender os valores de uma sociedade aberta e uma economia política calcada no livre mercado como bases para a para a reconstrução européia no pós-guerra.

Em 1950, Hayek foi convidado a integrar os quadros da Universidade de Chicago, e é deste período que datam suas contribuições que aqui mais nos vão interessar. Destacam-se suas reflexões a respeito das possibilidades de que as ciências sociais pudessem prover respostas “cientificamente” corretas para problemas; Hayek entendia que não: as questões postas às ciências sociais são questões de políticas públicas. As escolhas que se faz na condução da política pública devem ser prospectivas (ao invés de meramente reativas), mas devem ter em conta a estrutura social do mundo a que as escolhas tendem a criar. Nada disso torna a política pública e a atividade do intelectual mais simples.

Trabalhando em Chicago, Hayek notabilizou-se como opositor do alargamento das fronteiras econômicas do Estado, da restrição da liberdade individual, do ativismo macroeconômico e, acima de tudo, do planejamento estatal. Comentando a obra de Hayek em livro recente, Douglass North notou que “Hayek estava certamente correto ao dizer que nosso conhecimento é sempre, e na melhor das hipóteses, fragmentário, e seus estudos pioneiros sobre as ciências cognitivas forneceram a fundação para lidarmos com as imperfeições de nosso entendimento. Mas Hayek não entendeu que nós não temos escolha [e precisamos] fazer engenharia social, ainda que certamente concordemos com seu argumento vencedor [na disputa com] os planejadores socialistas a respeito da eficácia [superior] do sistema de preços sobre as alternativas.” [2]

A questão da suposta inevitabilidade da engenharia social e do paternalismo estatal estão então postas. Hayek oferecerá uma poderosa negação da sua necessidade. Caberá ao leitor ponderar sobre o tema.

O presente artigo apresenta um projeto de exame de Direito, legislação e liberdade. A ideia é trazer à apreciação do leitor brasileiro uma resenha mensal sobre cada um dos 18 capítulos da obra, e de seu epílogo logo a seguir. A leitura dessas resenhas, naturalmente, não substitui a leitura do livro; ao contrário, deve encorajá-la. Ler a obra em português, contudo, não é tarefa fácil. A tradução brasileira, publicada em 1985 pela Editora Visão, há muito está esgotada (HAYEK, Friedrich A. Direito, legislação e liberdade. São Paulo: Visão, 1985. Tradução Henry Maksoud). Encontrá-la é quase impossível, não apenas para quem percorre os sebos empoeirados, mas também para quem se dispõe a varrer os sítios de buscas na internet. Tudo se torna mais complicado, é claro, quando nos deparamos com a legislação de propriedade intelectual brasileira, que veda a feitura de cópias de obras esgotadas – mesmo nas universidades.

[Continua no site da OrdemLivre.org]

A young Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)

*Apologies for late submission!

The “Austrian School” in economics traces its tradition to the work of Carl Menger (1840-1921).  Menger’s theoretical development of the origins of price has grouped him with the contemporary “Lausanne School” (identified with the axiomatic mathematical economics of Leon Walras) and the work of British economist William Stanley Jevons, all as part of the “marginalist revolution” in economics, which grounded the mechanism of price-setting in the value attributed to various quantities of goods by their buyers and sellers—a keystone of neoclassical economic theory and a critical element in the argument against the control of the economy by the state.

Menger developed his theories in opposition to the “German Historical School” headed by Gustav Schmoller (1838-1917), which gave Menger and his followers the label “Austrian”, intending the label as derogatory.  Schmoller insisted that theoretical economics disregarded essential differences in national traditions, and that only detailed historical investigations could arrive at a firm understanding of political and economic activity. The opening of the conflict between Menger and Schmoller occurred following the publication of Menger’s Principles of Economics (1871), a mere four years after Menger had received his law degree.  An anonymous review signed “G. Sch.” in a literary journal criticized the text’s scientific pretensions.  When Schmoller dismissed Menger’s Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics (1883) in the Historical School’s house journal, it provoked what became known as the Methodenstreit (“battle over methods”).

To summarize with brutal brevity, the Methodenstreit revolved around whether or not the abstract principles of economic theory could be said to have any sort of epistemological validity.  While not denying the possibility of theory, Schmoller argued that any meaningful social and political theory was necessarily a project for the distant future (which could only be accomplished through detailed historical study), and that theoretical economics was nothing but an apologetic for advancing the dogma of the self-interested economic actor.  In what would remain a stock argument of economic theorists, Menger observed the inevitability of theoretical presupposition in political and historical explanation and defended his practice of abstracting the regularities of a side of human life that was of special importance in establishing and analyzing economic policy.

In any event, Schmoller was an influential figure within the German state university system, and the conservative statist policies his school endorsed were amenable to the policies of the unified German state under the chancellorship of Bismarck.  The School would only decline in importance with the failure of economists trained in the Historical School to offer useful policy recommendations during World War I (prompting the state to turn to the industrialist Walther Rathenau).  This failure followed the influential methodological critique that Max Weber (1864-1920), a disillusioned product of the Historical School, initiated in his landmark 1904 essay “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy”, which (among other things) criticized any approach that denigrated theory but still claimed relevance for policy.

Meanwhile, the economics of the Austrian school was carried into the twentieth century by Menger’s students Friedrich von Wieser (1851-1926) and his brother-in-law, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914), through whom Austrian economics would enter the English-speaking world.  Following World War I, Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), who had studied at the University of Vienna and was a friend of Weber, became the principal proponent of Austrian economics.  Mises was confronted with a socialist government (“Red Vienna”) and the new “logical positivist” epistemology of the Vienna Circle, and set himself up as an eager opponent of both.

Mises, like his forebears, had deep methodological concerns, which he exercised in his criticisms of logical positivism’s philosophical attempt to provide knowledge (and thus governance) with certain foundations.    He spelled out his own notions in the 1933 work Epistemological Problems of Economics, which again offered a justification for abstract economic theory based on a priori principles, and the idea that “All human action is rational”, i.e. goal-seeking.  He also carried the anti-socialist side against Vienna Circle mainstay Otto Neurath and allies in the “socialist calculation debate” of this era, arguing that a state with ownership of all property had no viable mechanism to replace money and the market as a means for allocating goods efficiently.  The debate would become a major cultural reference point in later political battles within economics.

In the 1930s, the Austrian school was uprooted.  Mises accepted a position in Geneva before moving on to the United States in 1940.  Another key standard-bearer of the Austrian School, Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), who was a student of Wieser and a member of Mises’ circle in the 1920s, moved to the London School of Economics in 1931, where he would become a critic of the influential John Maynard Keynes, and where he would remain until 1950.

The early history of the Austrian School played out in the perpetual shadow of other economic programs, whether Schmoller’s Historical School, British Keynesian economics, or the more axiomatic formulations of neoclassical theory.  Nevertheless, the School’s work has had enduring influence in economic discourse.  Its opposition to socialist planning and New Deal and countercyclical fiscal policies, and Friedrich Hayek’s popular anti-socialism tract Road to Serfdom (1944) and his central role with Milton Friedman in the Mont Pèlerin Society have served to link the School to more recent conservative political and economic thought (though School members such as Hayek were more amenable to certain kinds of targeted state intervention).  Further, the School’s advocacy of transcendental theory and its role in battles against the German Historical School, as well as (with Karl Popper) its later protest against the “scientism” of the logical positivists, place its participants in a decidedly complex position within 20th-century debates concerning the relationship between epistemology, science, economics, political freedom, and public policy.

This post is undertaken safe in the knowledge that there is an enormous literature—as well as landmine-filled debate—surrounding the validity of various programs in economics and their influential political legacies.  Thus the historiography is, to this day, firmly encased in the hermeneutics accompanying disciplinary jockeying.  Rather than attempt to sort out this literature (to which I am a neophyte), I’ll simply note that I have generally relied here on historian of economic thought Bruce Caldwell’s very useful, and I think measured, introduction to the subject in the first part of his generally laudatory intellectual biography, Hayek’s Challenge (2002).

I’m hoping to get a lot of reading done this summer.  The following books are on my list:

My Books

• Cleon Skousen, The 5000 Year Leap:  The 28 Great Ideas that Changed the World
• Mark Levin, Liberty and Tyranny
• F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
• Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism:  The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
• Ronald J. Pestritto and William J. Atto, eds., American Progressivism:  A Reader
• Ronald J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism
• Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man:  A New History of the Great Depression
• Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler:  The Age of Social Catastrophe
• Glenn Beck, An Inconvenient Book
• Walter Williams, Liberty Versus the Tyranny of Socialism
• Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
• Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Library Books

• Thomas E. Woods, Jr., and Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Who Killed the Constitution?  The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush
• Randy E. Barnett, Restoring the Lost Constitution:  The Presumption of Liberty
• George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits:  How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
• Andrew Klavan, The Last Thing I Remember

Via Greg Ransom, an interesting quote from Hayek.

It is in connection with the deliberate effort of the skilful demagogue to weld together a closely coherent and homogeneous body of supporters that the third and perhaps most important element of [leftist cohort formation] enters. It seems to be almost a law of human nature that is it easier for people to agree on a negative program — on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off — than on any positive task. The contrast between “we” and the “they,’ the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses.

F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 139.

Understanding the functionality and adaptive nature of social life sheds light on this phenomenon. Free market economists give much importance to the division of labor allowed by social life. But there are two other basic and more primitive reasons why groups are important for some organisms: internal help and external aggression.

Mutual internal help is an insurance mechanism: the particular circumstances of an individual can vary in part randomly, from health to sickness, from being well fed to being hungry. These variations are asymmetrical in the sense that it is very dangerous to be in a bad situation (it can imply death) while it is just good to be in a good situation. If these variations are intense enough, an organism might occasionally find itself below the minimal threshold needed to survive, and it cannot in general compensate for the bad times with the surplus earned in the good times (apart from its ability to store food and energy;  the weakness due to sickness or to an injury cannot be repaired by taking some strength from the past). If organisms live in groups, they can soften these variations if the ones better off help those circumstantially worse off. This help mechanism works inside the collective but it does not in principle require collective action, it is simply some individuals who happen to be strong today helping other individuals who happen to be weak today. It is not about specialization since changes in individual abilities are more or less random.

Living beings compete with others for scarce resources. This competition can happen between groups (ant colonies, human tribes). War making is an essentially collective action: all of us versus all of them. It requires an internal cohesion in order to achieve the consistent participation of all members of the group and an external focusing towards a common enemy to be destroyed. Human psychology is instinctively wired this way: collective action is deeply related with war. In fact, war is possibly the main (and maybe only) essentially collective action.

Just as established businesses seek to protect their interests by getting government to erect barriers to entry that disadvantage potential competitors, so too does the liberal attempt to erect barriers to entry into the competition of ideas.

Whoever wrote that sounds like a misogynist. Or a racist. Or maybe a big doodyhead.

UPDATE – Yesterday was Friedrich Hayek’s birthday. Dang, I missed it. Well, happy birthday anyway. A hundred and ten! You don’t look a day over ninety!