Criticisms of Libertarianism

If the powers-that-be feel the need to attack you, that's probably a good thing. After all, they will only attack you if they think you are strong enough to challenge them. This bodes well for libertarianism as a movement.

Of course, there are going to be criticisms that range from ridiculous smear pieces long on accusations and short on direct proof to more legitimate criticisms, as outlined by Jacob Levy. Yes, there are subsets of stupid ideas in libertarianism, broadly understood. There are Confederate apologists and conspiracy theorists, but probably no more than one would find among conservatives or leftists, respectively (they seem larger in such a small movement).

To my mind, you cannot be a libertarian and believe in either the rightness of the Confederacy or conspiracy theories. The former accepts the equation between oppression and agricultural socialism, and liberalism -- as though those can ever be reconciled. The latter accepts that order is created by powerful elites (in this they agree with the socialists), only they don't want the socialists' order. I say this latter is un-libertarian because libertarianism argues that social order emerges naturally from human social interactions. To argue otherwise is un-libertarian, un-liberal.

There also seems to be a notion that libertarianism has only been around since the early 1970s. In the contemporary American parlance, this is technically true. This is what allows people like the one I linked to in the first link to claim that if Rothbard was a racist, and Rothbard helped found libertarianism, therefore libertarianism was founded by a racists and, thus, in racist ideas. I don't want to get into whether or not "Rothbard was a racist" is in fact a truth statement; rather, I want to get into the foundations of libertarianism. While it is true that one can point to a literal date for the foundation of the Libertarian Party and, thus, make an argument that this is the foundation for libertarianism, doing so ignores the fact that libertarianism has its true foundations in classical liberalism -- in the ideas of Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, et al. Classical liberalism generally opposed aristocratic government and supported democratic self-governance, opposed government interference in people's lives, including the economy, and supported the liberation of women, slaves, and other oppressed peoples. This carried over into the foundations of libertarianism, because in a real sense, libertarianism is a postmodern continuation of classical liberalism (this fact may in fact be the problem with it).

Let me make it clear what it is libertarians support.

Libertarians support the free movement of people -- we do not think people should be condemned by the accident of their birth to economic destitution and oppression. Thus, libertarians support open borders and free immigration. It should be difficult to argue that this is a racist policy. It is support for immigration restrictions which is racist and unjust.

Libertarians support drug legalization and ending the War on Drugs. Given that the War on Drugs grossly disproportionately targets minorities (despite the fact that whites are no less likely to use them), libertarians are supporting a policy that will overwhelmingly benefit those minorities being targeted by our legal system. It is support for the War on Drugs which is racist and unjust.

Libertarians support equality under the law and the rule of law. Special privileges for any group is a violation of both of these and leads to group conflict. Favoring one group over another is unjust. And if the groups are racial groups, it's racist; if the groups are men and women, it's sexist; if the groups are one economic group or another, it's cronyist. In all cases, we see collectivism at work. Racism and sexism are forms of collectivism, and libertarianism opposes collectivism. Libertarians think each person should be judged on their own merits.

Libertarians support eliminating the minimum wage, an idea originally developed by progressives because it would result in the unemployment of minorities. It continues to disproportionately affect minorities and teens. One result is that teens have a harder time finding employment, leaving them bored. Bored teenagers is a recipe for trouble.

The progressives may have abandoned the racist reasons progressives originally gave for their social policies, including support for the minimum wage, but they have not given up the social policies whose original intentions were to harm racial minorities and others progressives considered to be "undesirable" (eugenics was also a progressivist idea, and was only abandoned after their policy was adopted by Hitler, who demonstrated to the world what the eugenicists really wanted). It should be obvious to everyone that the libertarian opposition to government interference in people's lives would extend to racial, gender, and reproductive choices. There is nothing more un-libertarian than eugenics. Indeed, the early progressives' support for eugenics was an integral part of their opposition to classical liberalism in general, and free markets in particular.

I would also like to address the absurd dualism proposed by opponents of classical liberalism/libertarianism -- individualism vs. collectivism. Opponents of liberalism argue that if you support individualism, you oppose all forms of social living. This is reasonable if the only choices are individualism or collectivism. But this is simply not true. Yet, this is perhaps where a real division occurs between classical liberals and libertarians. Classical liberals reject the radical individualism that leads to collectivism of Rousseau and the progressives and postmodernists whose ideas derive from his. However, the libertarians are in fact rational constructivists, just like the progressives and neoconservatives. Rational constructivism can in fact lead one to support for free markets (Ayn Rand), fascism (Heidegger), or communism (Saretre). However, Hayek demonstrated the weakness of this position for classical liberalism. The strain of classical liberalism that emerged from the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers sees people as social individuals -- we are always already a social species, and our individualism emerges out of our social interactions.

Classical liberals believe humans are social mammals and that collectivism in fact undermines society in all its aspects. Where classical liberals support the peaceful co-existence of the economy, democratic self-governance, religion, science, technological innovation, the arts, philosophy, philanthropy, etc., both neoconservatives and progressives seek to reduce all social interactions to the solitary collectivism of government control. All of the different orders listed are to be subsumed into the government -- with some of those orders utterly destroyed if necessary (i.e., the anti-religious tendency in progressivism or the anti-science tendency in neoconservatism -- and progressivism, when the science is inconvenient to their ideology). Too many libertarians, following this logic, tend to subsume everything into the market economy. They tend equally toward reductionism, only into the market order rather than the democratic one.

If we return to the issue of the Confederacy, we can see the problems with libertarians supporting it if we take a Gravesean view. The southern states were not liberal, but rather were aristocratic in nature. Thus their recreation of serfdom in slavery. This would put their psychosocial level as authoritative (4th level, or blue, for those who know the patterns), whereas classical liberalism would be 5th level (orange), and libertarianism/progressivism/neoconservatism/Existentialism/postmodernism would be egalitarian (6th level, green). I have argued before that the integrationist (2nd tier, 1st level; yellow) level is where you find bleeding heart libertarianism.

To return to the topic at hand, the aristocratic (and, thus, anti-liberal) south took on liberal rhetoric in order to try to make a case for their position (much the same way the progressives, to mask their support for racist policies, adopted the term "liberal" and much liberal rhetoric). Some of the collectivist arguments of the authoritative level are in fact attractive to those in the egalitarian level (thus, much neoconservative thought), and this is true of the postmodernist libertarians as well (the postmodernist element of libertarianism is why they have a tendency toward conspiracy theories, vs. classical liberals and bleeding heart libertarians, who reject such notions). This is no doubt why we can find supporters for neo-Confederacy ideas within libertarian circles.

This hardly means that, because one can find a few kooks in a movement that everyone in the movement are kooks. I mean, communists and socialists have hardly considered Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al as black stains on their ideas and movement. They even proudly wear shirts with the image of a sociopathic mass murderer and racist -- Che Guevara -- without a second thought. This is not a defense of our kooks; rather, it is to point out the utter hypocrisy of libertarianism's leftist opponents. Libertarians would do well to reject the kooks. I myself reject the idea of a "big tent" if by "big tent" that means welcoming apologists for the Confederacy and conspiracy theorists. Those people should not be welcome. Those people harm the movement and prevent it from being taken seriously by many more people. I would like to argue that those people aren't even libertarians. In the case of Confederacy apologists, I would argue they are not. Sadly, the conspiracy theorists -- a group we share with the postmodern left and neoconservatism -- are, as least in the postmodernist sense, libertarians. But they are not classical liberals -- nor bleeding heart libertarians. If I am any of the above, I would consider myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Or, perhaps, more complex than that -- a complexity realist.

A Few Observations on Misanthropy

How many ideologies, world views, philosophies, theologies have some element of misanthropy underlying them? Why is that? Why is it so common? This element of so much thought is the source of so much evil in the world. Why does it constantly recur?

There was a time when socialists truly believed that socialism was a more efficient way of organizing the economy. However, since it was definitively proven otherwise, socialists no longer use economic arguments, and rather use arguments of fairness. More, they insist that everyone conform to their values. They think that people who have made free choices are nevertheless exploited. This suggests that these people are stupid, dupes. Anyone who thinks others are victims when they are in the position they are in due to their own free choices has a low opinion of those people. That is misanthropy.

Regulators -- including those who favor minimum wage laws -- think that people are otherwise too stupid, too rotten, too gullible to be left to their own devices. That is misanthropy.

Welfare statists think that unless the government takes care of you, you will die in the streets, so stupid, selfish, and incompetent you are. That is misanthropy.

Regulators of personal behavior -- formerly only associated with social conservatives, but increasingly associated with progressives as well -- think that you cannot make good choices for yourself, in your own private life. You have to have someone to make you live right, or else you will only ever do evil. That is misanthropy.

Anyone who thinks that without legislation, we will only ever do evil to each other, is a misanthropist.

Anyone who thinks that people are basically evil is a misanthropist. 

Anyone who "loves mankind," but then hates particular people because they never meet that person's ideals, is a misanthropist.

Anyone who thinks others to be incompetent, evil, or needing to be reformed just because they don't share their particular values or value rankings is a misanthropist.

Anyone who wants to control some one or some group holds that person or people in contempt. They are misanthropists. If you support government regulation, you want to control people. When you support welfare, you think people incompetent to live their lives and make good choices. You want to regulate people into supporting your values. That is dehumanizing, tribalistic, misanthropic. 
 

If you want to reform humanity, if you want to try to make everyone conform to your world view, if you want to re-educate people to fit your mold, if you want to "improve" mankind, then you hate mankind -- you are a misanthropist.

If you think your group is better than another group, you are a misanthropists. Indeed, this is the true source of misanthropy -- tribalism drives it -- tribalists see their group as good, human the other as evil, subhuman. In our global humanity, collectivism of this sort, derived from tribalism, is the source of misanthropy. This is the source of the idea that there ought to be a rule of the best -- aristocracy -- to rule those who cannot rule themselves. Of course, if you think others cannot rule themselves, you hold those people to be lower than you, you pity them. You only pity those you hold in contempt. Pity and compassion/sympathy are quite different. Pity is aristocratic and misanthropic; compassion/sympathy is equalitarian and philanthropic. 

The true philanthropist loves people for who they are, respects people for who they are, believes people to be competent to act and decide for themselves, embraces people in their true diversity -- even while rejecting misanthropy and misanthropic ideologies, world views, and philosophies.

I Find It Odd . . .

I find it odd that when I argue that nobody -- including me -- can know enough to control the economy, or even to create regulations the true outcomes of which we can know, that the people who think they can have such knowledge accuse me of arrogance.

I find it odd that there are people who really think that if you give people power and weapons that they won't use them against you, to force you to live as they wish, and become corrupt.

I find it odd that there are people who think that what is immoral/unjust for one person to do is moral/just for a group of people to do, so long as that group of people call themselves a government.

I find it odd that there are people who simultaneously think everyone ought to conform to their values and think they in any way support diversity.

I find it odd that people who support creationism in biology and cosmology often support evolution in economics, while many who support evolution in biology and cosmology often support creationism or intelligent design in economics and other areas of society.

I find it odd that support of an evolutionary, self-organizing network process view of society is seen as ideological and utopian, but an evolutionary, self-organizing network process of nature is seen by the same people as scientific.

Empathy, Moral Judgment, and Utilitarianism

There is more evidence that empathy plays a key role in making non-utilitarian moral judgments. This would seem to have two implications. One is that the more empathy one has, the lower one's utilitarian judgment, which may explain some aspects of libertarian vs. non-libertarian moral judgments, with libertarians tending to be more economically-literate utilitarians. (On the other side is Peter Singer's leftist utilitarianism -- with all the (in)famous conclusions that stem from it, which all become abundantly clear once you see how low in empathy he must be to be a utilitarian.) But it also explains why those who read a great deal of literature tend toward less utilitarian conclusions, even faced with economic facts.

I have argued that we should read more literature to become more empathetic to become more moral. It may seem odd, then, for a libertarian like myself to argue we need to read more literature. The above would seem to argue against reading literature and for reading economics books. However, as useful as utilitarianism is in economics, it's pretty much useless for face-to-face morality. How I should treat other people is not a utilitarian calculation. It's a moral judgment. And the more literature we read, the more kinds of people we learn to empathize with, and the better our moral judgments. We need both to live in the complex civil society in which we live.

Why Is There No Milton Friedman Today?

Econ Journal Watch asks Why Is There No Milton Friedman Today? That is, why are there no superstars of economics? One could perhaps ask the same things of a number of a number of fields. The sciences, including the social sciences, go through periods of "normal science" and periods of "revolutionary science." Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Paul Samuelson, J.M. Keynes, Mises, et al were of the generation of economics' revolutionary period. We have perhaps settled into the "normal science" era of economics.

We see this same thing in philosophy, with times of revolutionary creativity followed by scholasticism. We are clearly in the latter period in philosophy as well. And the same thing takes place in the arts. We went from the creativity of high modernism to the relative stagnation of postmodernism.

In each case, we see a transition from relative stability, as people work on the well-established problems, working out the details on the margins. But when people reach a certain point, where the models are no longer working to describe the world well, we get revolutionary periods, during which time we get the giants of the field. Milton Friedman was one such person, born and working at the right time.

Basically, this is a network effect. We expect this kind of punctuated equilibrium when there is a network.

References to My Work in Other Works

My article on "Egypt's Revolution and Higher Education" has been cited in a scholarly article, Daniel LaGraffe's "The Youth Bulge in Egypt: An Intersection of Demographics, Security, and the Arab Spring" in the Journal of Strategic Security. It has also been cited in Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East by Asef Bayat.

My more recent Pope Center piece, "Scientists and Engineers Need Literature" has been reposted at FreeThinkU.

"From Trivium to Trivality" was cited and commented upon at Community College Spotlight and ArmyEdSpace.

I'm still waiting to see my actual academic papers cited in academic papers, but I can't complain about my Pope Center pieces being so cited.

Spontaneous Orders are Naturally Occurring Processes

Humans discover far more than they invent. When we participate in spontaneous social orders, we participate in the discovery of knowledge, morals, and wisdom. But it very much goes against our arrogance as a species to admit that we are less inventors than discoverers. Humans did not invent property rights, markets, language, or morals. Rather, we have instincts for those things, which socially evolve in spontaneous orders.

As entrepreneurs, humans discover new ways of doing things that are more efficient and less expensive.

As scientists, humans discover the laws of science.

As participants in common law, we discover new laws (as legislators, humans invent legislation -- much of which is in direct violation of discovered common law). It is notable that discovered law abides by rule of law and equality under the law.

As participants in the moral order, we discover new morals. Indeed, morals are rooted in our sentiments (they are instinctual); at the same time, it is evidence our morals evolve over time. One can thus argue that morality is a discovery process, that we discover new morals, and, thus, expand our moral worlds.

We could not learn morals if we did not have a moral instinct. We could not teach morals if those we taught did not have a moral instinct. (Sociopaths are evidence of this.) If we did not have moral instincts (built in empathy and sympathy and a sense of justice), we could not have invented them. How would we know to? How would we know that the good is good to have?

The same is true of common law -- built as it is on our instinctual sense of justice and fairness. Legislation is merely the rigidification of law. It is legislators coming along and taking credit for what has already been discovered through common law (that is, for just legislation -- there is plenty of cronyist legislation which violates common law, equality under the law, and rule of law).

Free market economies are naturally occurring systems emergent from natural human interactions. The same is true of science, most of our institutions (property rights, family, etc.), morals, philosophy, religion, the arts and literature, technological innovation (the specific technologies are invented, but we have an instinct to invent, and we have a social order that rewards invention -- and not just economically), money, etc. The opposition to spontaneous social orders like market economies comes form the same psychological source as opposition to biological evolution and cosmological evolution. Humans evolved to associate order with an orderer. Theological creationists and intelligent designers think this is true of cosmological and biological evolution; social creationists and intelligent designers (who are oddly often a-theological) think this is true of social evolution.

Order requires a hands-on orderer, according to standard human psychology. This is why the fight to get widespread acceptance for evolutionary processes -- whether physical, biological, psychological, or social -- is ongoing.

Weak Bonds Make Spontaneous Orders Possible

In order for a spontaneous order to emerge, there has to be a predominance of weak social links over strong social links (of family, tribe, etc.). Randall Collins in The Sociology of Philosophies notes that studies show

that creative persons have a strong desire to make their own judgments; this in turn is typically related to childhood opportunities for independence and novel experience. Often too there is a period of physical or social isolation in which these young persons become introduced to a vicarious community of the mind. Their IR [Interaction Ritual] chains become detached from the local circulation of mundane culture and from its pressures for local conformity. The lowering of ritual density is a prerequisite for innovation; but it must also be linked to the intermittent support of the rituals of intellectual communities to give it content and energy. (34)

 That is, the creation of weak links allow one to participate in a particular spontaneous order. Much of what Collins says above could be equally applied to participation in a number of other spontaneous orders, from philosophy to technology, from markets to art. Naturally, different emotional energies, cultural capital, and interaction rituals are at play in other orders -- but that's precisely why we need to understand each kind in its own terms.

Society Does Not Decide

One often hears the phrase "society decides," but among metaphors, this has to be one of the worst -- and most damaging. The reason for this is that "society" is not capable of making a decision. To be able to make a decision, you have to be able to choose among options, and society cannot choose any more than it can decide. To be able to choose and decide, one has to be able to have goals. That means the chooser/decider has to be a teleological entity. This would include any living being, with those having complex neural structures being able to make more complex choices and decisions. Humans, having the most complex neutral networks, are able to make the most complex choices and decisions.

"Society," however, is not a teleological entity. Social processes are ateleological. They do not have goals, make decisions, or choose anything. In this sense it is utter nonsense to say that "society decides" anything.

The reason this is important is that ideas like "market failure" are premised on the idea that the market is failing to provide something that "society decides" is important, but which no individual would be willing to pay for. Thus, the market is not acting optimally (according to equilibrium theory). The argument is that since such sub-optimal products exist which people need, but which nobody would pay for, government needs to step in and provide what "society decides" it, as a whole, needs. This gets us closer to understanding what is really meant when someone says "society decides" something.

What is really meant by "society decides" is "a democratic majority agrees" about a certain outcome. But democratic decision-making is hardly appropriate for a variety of social processes. If by "society," one means a democratic majority, then any number of market products produced for a minority market would be sub-optimal. After all, the raw materials that go into a product produced for a minority market could have gone into another being produced for a majority market. And competition for raw materials drives up prices, meaning products produced for minority markets drive up the price of products for majority markets.

But what is suboptimal at one time may be optimal at another, later, time -- when prices drop. Cell phones are a good example. "Society" did not want cell phones in the 1980s, when they first came out and were extremely expensive, but "society" certainly does now that they are cheap (and are literally tiny pocket computers). But "society" would not have had the cell phones we have now if "optimality" was at all at play at the level of society. The last thing we need to be worried about is optimal outcomes for society -- especially given the fact that real economies are not at equilibrium, but are in far-from-equilibrium states.

Markets do not fail, because 1) market failure is premised on the fact that an unrealistic equilibrium model does not match the far-from-equilibrium economic reality, and 2) society cannot decide anything. Even if we accept "society" meaning "majority," the market is not a democratic process in that way -- it is far, far better insofar as minorities are able to get what they want every bit as much as can the majorities in society. When "society decides," it is minorities of every imaginable kind who suffer. This is true even though society does not and cannot ever decide anything; it is true so long as people continue to believe that society does and can decide, because the same kinds of bad decisions are being made based on the belief that it can. Who is it making those decisions? Since it cannot be society, it has to be some self-appointed spokesman, who inevitably finds that society always decides whatever HE would decide.

Morals as Spontaneous Order

Morality is a spontaneous order. As such, we should expect it to have a variety of features found in self-organizing processes. One of these would be paradoxical tensions giving rise to complex rules:

Popular writers prefer to simplify things by describing the lives of chimpanzees either in Hobbesian terms, as nasty and brutish, or by stressing their friendly side, but in fact it's never one or the other. It's always both. If people ask how chimpanzees can possibly be called empathic, knowing that they sometimes kill one another, my return question is always whether by the same token we shouldn't abandon the whole notion of human empathy as well.

This duality is crucial. Morality would be superfluous if we were universally nice. What would there be to worry about if all that humans ever did was show sympathy for one another, and never steal, never stab someone in the back, never covet another's wife? This is clearly not how we are, and it explains the need for moral rules. On the other hand, we could design a zillion rules to promote respect and care for others, but they'd come to naught if we didn't already lean in that direction. They would be like seeds dropped onto a glass plate: without a chance of taking root. What permits us to tell right from wrong is our ability to be both good and bad. (Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 27)

In order for our complex moral rules to have evolved, we had to have already been both good and bad in our potential interactions.

We would also expect our morals to have emerged from the bottom-up:

The view of morality as a set of immutable principles, or laws, that are ours to discover ultimately comes from religion. It doesn't really matter whether it is God, human, reason, or science that formulates these laws. All of these approaches share a top-down orientation, their chief premise being that humans don't know how to behave and that someone must tell them. But what if morality is created in day-to-day social interaction, not at some abstract mental level? (de Waal, 23)

 Hume argues that our morals emerge from our sentiments. I and de Waal agree. From this instinctual foundation, our moral systems are further developed in our daily social interactions with others. It is only after the fact, after these interactions have given rise to our moral orders and the institutions of those orders, that moral philosophers come along and theorize morality into higher levels of abstraction. This then works as eminent criticism of the moral order -- it thus has an effect, but it's not what truly drives the emergence of our complex moral rules.

Finally (for this post, at least), one would expect there to be a power law distribution of moral rules. Some moral rules are more important than others. We could probably place first degree murder at the very top as being the one worst thing one could do to another person. At the bottom, so to speak, would be all the various rules of etiquette -- there are many, and the worst reaction you will get from an incursion against them is a disapproving look from whoever noticed. I'm not going to proceed to give a power law ranking of all the other moral rules, as they are going to vary to a certain degree from place to place and from time to time. But we can probably get a general idea of the general rankings by considering all of the moral incursions that could have gotten you the death penalty vs. the fact that in places like the U.S., the only thing that can still get you the death penalty is first degree murder (and often it has to be accompanied by other crimes).

All of these elements suggest morality is a spontaneous order. Clearly more work needs to be done on this, but this seems a good place to start.

Status Prestige

The Edge has a new piece by Joseph Henrich on How Culture Drove Human Evolution. Given my interest in human social structures leading to social spontaneous orders, his comments on status are of particular interest:

Early work on human status just took humans to have a kind of status that stems from non-human status. Chimps, other primates, have dominant status. The assumption for a long time was that status in humans was just a kind of human version of this dominant status, but if you apply this gene-culture co-evolutionary thinking, the idea that culture is one of the major selection pressures in human evolution, you come up with this idea that there might be a second kind of status. We call this status prestige.

This is the kind of status you get from being particularly knowledgeable or skilled in an area, and the reason it's a kind of status is because once animals, humans in this case, can learn from each other, they can possess resources. You have information resources that can be tapped, and then you want to isolate the members of your group who are most likely to have a lot of this resources, meaning a lot of the knowledge or information that could be useful to you in the future. This causes you to focus on those individuals, differentially attend to them, preferentially listen to them and give them deference in exchange for knowledge that you get back, for copying opportunities in the future.

From this we've argued that humans have two separate kinds of status, dominance and prestige, and these have quite different ethologies. Dominance [ethology] is about physical posture, of size (large expanded chest the way you'd see in apes). Subordinates in dominance hierarchies are afraid. They back away. They look away, whereas prestige hierarchies are quite the opposite. You're attracted to prestigious individuals. You want to be near them. You want to look at them, watch them, listen to them, and interact with them. We've done a bunch of experimental work here at UBC and shown that that pattern is consistent, and it leads to more imitation. There may be even specific hormonal profiles with the two kinds of status.

 The evolution of status prestige explains the emergence and roles of the shaman -- which itself evolved into priests, poets, singers, actors, etc. -- alongside the dominant status alphas. If we include good hunters, innovators of various sorts, entrepreneurs, etc., we can see an ever-expanding number of those who are able to gain status prestige. Further, as prestige status has come to dominate in humans, the dominance status individuals have had to learn to act more and more like status prestige individuals. This is where the cult of personality comes from in politics. And it is where the tension between a political (or business) leader both needing the people under him to both love and fear him comes from. Chimpanzee alphas who only have dominant status only need to ensure fear.

The dominance of prestige over dominance status is what makes complex spontaneous social orders possible. While there can be only one dominant alpha, one can gain prestige in one narrow area of life, and thus not have to compete with others for that prestige. Perhaps prestige status drove specialization; specialization, in turn, drove the emergence of ever more complex social structures. The emergence of this kind of prestige thus allowed humans to interact in increasingly complex ways with more and more people, until our spontaneous social orders emerged.

Read the entire piece. He provides support for spontaneous orders in general, free markets in particular, and why rule of law is important (and emerges). Of particular note is this observation about markets:

Markets require a great deal of trust and a great deal of cooperation to work. Sometimes you get the impression from economics that markets are for self-interested individuals. They're actually the opposite. Self-interested individuals don't specialize, and they don't take it [to market], because there's all this trust and fairness that are required to make markets run with impersonal others.

This is the argument supporters of free markets need to make.

The Beautiful City

I have a new piece at The Freeman on The Beautiful City. It is the paradoxes, the creative tensions within the city that make it vibrant, that make it beautiful.

I have in the past discussed the connection between beauty and spontaneous orders; one could see this piece as a special case of a general conclusion.
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Update: The piece has been linked at Cafe Hayek, one of my regular blogs I read.

A Flowchart to Freedom (Pick Your Philosophical Path)

Here is an interesting flow chart. A few ways to get to the same point? Are there others?

Pharmacy on a Bicycle

The product of my consulting for the Bush Center, Pharmacy on a Bicycle: Innovative Solutions to Global Health and Poverty is now available. You can see my acknowledgement on pg. x of the Introduction. It was released early -- which made it right in time for the grand opening of the Bush Library at Southern Methodist University.

Self-Determination Theory

From a libertarian perspective, there is probably few psychosocial theories more promising than self-determination theory. 

Self-determination theory (SDT) posits that all human beings share a basic and universal psycho- logical need for autonomy (Deci & Ryan, 1985a, 2000, 2002, 2008). In this framework, autonomy is defined as a subjective experience, characterized by feeling free and by endorsing one’s actions. In particular, the experience of autonomy is characterized by feeling free of interpersonal coercion. In accord with SDT, when people feel more autonomous, they experience greater psychological and physical well-being, they are happier and healthier. However, to the degree that satisfaction of the need for autonomy is thwarted, research findings indicate that people suffer both psychological and physically.

 In this particular paper, the authors point out that this theory helps explain the fact that when humans feel coerced, they tend to act in a less civilized manner. In other words, the more government tries to control people, the less civilized they behave. A few implications:

1) An uncivilized act gives rise to control, which gives rise to more uncivilized acts, which gives rise to more control, etc.

2) The control of people inherent in socialism makes people less civilized.

 Of course, much of this is a matter of perception. If people don't feel controlled, they continue to behave in a civilized manner. But if one does feel like one's life is being controlled -- no matter what is doing the controlling, whether it be internal to the person or external to the person -- the response is to violently rebel. For those familiar with the existentialists' view of rebellion, this should sound familiar. 

In many ways, much of what this paper says is no surprise to your typical libertarian. It merely confirms what libertarians have intuited. However, it is good to have a specific theory explaining those intuitions. Government actions, according to this theory, are a positive harm precisely because government actions are necessarily coercive. There are no doubt other implications for a variety of human interactions and  especially management practices within organizations.

Interactive Ritual Chains

On his blog Abandoned Footnotes, Xavier Marquez does an excellent, thoughtful review of Randall Collins' Interactive Ritual Chains. Between this review and the fact that I am thoroughly impressed by Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies, I am clearly going to have to tackle pretty much everything Collins has written. I think the idea of interactive ritual chains is very important, and given Marquez's tentative development of the idea into politics suggests the fruitfulness of this idea. I will particularly note that the first paragraph of his point 1 could almost describe chimpanzee social structures around the dominant male. Political ritual chains of this sort are indeed deep in our evolved psychologies. Now, while his point 1 does explain the emergence of organizational network structures, much of the rest is suggestive of how social self-organization can take place, from spontaneous orders to swarms. I think Austrian school economists could benefit a great deal from bringing in Collins' theories.

The Devil Speaks What Can't Be Spoken

I have started reading Mikhail Bolgakov's The Master and Margarita -- a Soviet-era Faust story. I have only read Chapter 1, but it's already extremely interesting. In it, an editor, Berlioz, and a poet, Bezdomny (the poet's pseudonym, which is itself telling, since he is writing for an approved literary journal) are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when the Devil appears. The chapter is full of interesting things, but the thing I want to bring out in particular would seem to have nothing to do with theology, even if it starts off with a theological point-- a point made immediately after a discussion of the weaknesses of the rational proofs of God's existence.

The Devil/unknown man/stranger asks: "But this is the question that disturbs me---if there is no God, then who, one wonders, rules the life of man and keeps the world in order?"

'Man rules himself,' said Bezdomny angrily in answer to such an obviously absurd question.

'I beg your pardon,' retorted the stranger quietly, 'but to rule one must have a precise plan worked out for some reasonable period ahead. Allow me to enquire how man can control his own affairs when he is not only incapable of compiling a plan for some laughably short term, such as, say, a thousand years, but cannot even predict what will happen to him tomorrow?'

'In fact,' here the stranger turned to Berlioz, 'imagine what would happen if you, for instance, were to start organizing others and yourself, and you developed a taste for it---then suddenly you got . . . he, he . . .' at this the foreigner smiled sweetly, as though the thought of a heart attack gave him pleasure. . . . 'Yes, a heart attack,' he repeated the word sonorously, grinning like a cat, 'and that's the end of you as an organizer! No one's fate except your own interests you any longer. Your relations start lying to you. Sensing that something is amiss you rush to a specialist, then to a charlatan, and even perhaps to a fortune-teller. Each of them is as useless as the other, as you know perfectly well. And it all ends in tragedy: the man who thought he was in charge is suddenly reduced to lying prone and motionless in a wooden box and his fellow men, realising that there is no more sense to be had of him, incinerate him.

'Sometimes it can be even worse: a man decides to go to Kislovodsk,'---here the stranger stared at Berlioz---'a trivial matter you may think, but he cannot because for no good reason he suddenly jumps up and falls under a tram! You're not going to tell me that he arranged to do that himself? Wouldn't it be nearer the truth to say that someone quite different was directing his fate?'

In this seeming theological discussion of whether or not man is the master of his own fate -- or if it is rather God directing all -- we have the Devil arguing against the very possibility of economic planning. Note that the Devil specifically uses the terms "plan" and "organizer" -- the very things socialists believed, at the time (1938), were possible. Note too that the argument isn't about whether any particular person can rule him/herself, but rather whether or not man, as a collective, can rule, plan, and organize himself.

But the Devil points out something: in order to plan such that man rules man, man would have to be able to predict with perfect precision everything that will happen, including accidents. Mere accidents throw off the plan, meaning man cannot rule.

More than that, he points out that for all of the rhetoric about organizing for the collective good, all the altruistic organizer has to have happen is a heart attack for him to suddenly become quite concerned about his own personal well-being and to then ignore all of his efforts for his fellow man. More, under stress, the Devil points out that man will not only make rational choices -- the doctor -- but will even make increasingly irrational choices in order to save his own life. Thus, man is not ruled by reason alone -- nor will he ever be. And no man will work for man as a collective when his own individual life is at stake. The fact of self-preservation belies the dream of self-sacrifice for the collective --or of the possibility of the pure rule of reason.

One can imagine the publishing atmosphere in the Soviet Union in 1938, when this novel was finished. Bulgakov had been publishing (not without controversy) for years, and he no doubt expected this novel to be published as well. He thus puts all approved and appropriate views into the mouths of Berlioz and Bezdomny, while criticizing the very foundations on which Soviet rule was made though the mouth of the Devil. The Devil, of course, is the most evil of all evil; the Devil doesn't even exist, and is proof of the irrationality of man the Soviet Man was overcoming. To put these ideas into the mouth of the Devil was, therefore, safe. One could criticize the ideas on which Soviet central planning was based so long as that criticism was out of the mouth of an irrationally-based, nonexistent metaphor for evil. And more, the Devil is the adversary of God -- and if the Adversary is enunciating anti-communist ideas, does that not make him the adversary of the communists? -- and does that not suggest Communism has replaced/become God?

Ah, the wonders of literature! The wonders of metaphor -- compact or extended! One can say so much, and say so many dangerous things, and pretend innocence of it all. Especially in satire. Just give the Devil the words, and you can communicate them with plausible deniability. If you see the Devil appear in a work of literature, be on the lookout for him to speak what cannot be spoken.

The Sociological Eye

I love the fact that on the same day that I finished Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies, I discovered Collins has a blog. A new period reading for me (given how rarely he posts), it seems.

Scientists and Engineers Need Literature

I have a new article at The Pope Center: Scientists and Engineers Need Literature. There are those who think the arts need no justification. Part of this is due to Kant's idea of art for art's sake. Since the rest of the world apparently disagrees -- especially those paying for higher education -- it is vital we investigate all of the reasons why we need the arts. Especially stories. We spend a lot of time and energy on stories -- telling stories, listening to or watching stories -- so there must be an adaptive reason to do so. We spend most of our waking hours involved with stories, and it makes no sense that we would do so if there was not a powerful adaptive reason to do so. That is what we need to investigate.

Equilibrium or Creativity in the Spontaneous Orders

In The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Randall Collins argues the following:

• Paradoxical tensions drive creativity.

• It was the emergence of scientific technology that resulted in rapid-discovery science.

• Mathematics was rejuvenated when it came into contact with philosophy (Newton/Leibniz and Frege/Boole/Russell/Whitehead).

• Philosophy is rejuvenated whenever there is either a change in institutions or it comes into contact with another social order (math, see above; literature, with the French Existentialists and Postmodernists).

With the exception of the point regarding new institutions, each of the last three are in fact specific examples of the first point. Collins discusses the first point in regards to philosophical positions and individuals arguing them, but any time a large enough number from one spontaneous order decide to work in another, creative tensions arise. The natural response of those in the order being entered is to become defensive and to accuse the other of intellectual colonialism -- but this, too, is often a creative response in the end.

We can see this in other orders as well. It was changes in banking that drove the catallaxy of the Medieval economy into becoming mercantilist. It was the combination of technology with the catallaxy that resulted in capitalism and the emergence of the rapid-growth economy (paralleling rapid-discovery science). The three orders interact to keep each other from equilibrating and, thus, ceasing to be creative and wealth-creating. The flat economic growth that lasted to the Renaissance is a perfect example of the catallaxy at equilibrium. The paradoxical tensions the changes in monetary institutions and the emergence of rapid technological innovation provided to the catallaxy threw it into a far-from-equilibrium state, making it more creative and wealth-producing than it had ever been.

How does this happen? As a social system settles down into equilibrium, fewer and fewer opportunities become available (or obvious). Entrepreneurs need gaps to fill, and if everyone is already coordinating perfectly, there is nothing left to do. New products, new institutions, new ways of doing things all create gaps for entrepreneurs to fill. The width of the gap is the amount of profit that can be realized -- and profit is of course payment for fulfilling others' needs and wants. The same is true in any of the intellectual orders. A mathematician can show a philosopher or a social scientist or a natural scientist a gap that nobody may have been able to see, because everyone was settled down into a comfortable equilibrium. Once people realize there is in fact a gap, people begin working to fill it. This disequilibrates the system, creating more gaps -- until there is a creative far-from-equilibrium state.

We also see that the disruption leading to creativity works both ways. New scientific technology drove science, which drove technological innovation. New practical technology drove catallactic growth, which drove technological innovation. New ideas in science and philosophy drove artistic/literary creativity in the 20th century, while those artistic/literary innovations in turn drove creativity in philosophy, giving rise to postmodernism, and the sciences, helping contribute to the emergence of complexity science and chaos theory. This is what happens when two spontaneous orders, each trying to reach an equilibrium if left to their own devices, come into contact with each other. The ecotone is where creativity is driven to exponential heights.

This would suggest that equilibrium models of social processes are helpful, but limited. We have to understand what happens when multiple orders come into contact with each other. At the same time, it shows the danger of equilibrium modellers thinking their models are what the process ought to look like. This can lead to recommendations of how to "fix" the process, to bring it back to equilibrium. However, if we want creative social processes, the last thing we want are for them to be in equilibrium. The desire for social equilibrium is a conservative desire -- a desire which does have it's place in helping to maintain stability, but only insofar as life improvement is not stifled.

The Moral Order

From the first two lines of this article:

Ethics consists of the discipline of identifying, defining, and practicing a code of universal principles that makes individual human happiness possible. Politics consists of the discipline of identifying, defining, and practicing a code of universal principles that makes collective human happiness possible.

The first are developed in the spontaneous orders of philosophy, religion, and the arts and literature. The latter are developed in the spontaneous orders of the social sciences, the political economy, and philanthropy. These two groups are the six spontaneous orders which constitute the moral order.

The Minimum Wage Suppresses Wages

The minimum wage depresses wages.

This counterintuitive conclusion actually makes sense if you think through things using economic reasoning. One of the consequences of the minimum wage is to create unemployment, particularly among unskilled workers. This creates a pool of unemployed workers who are all competing with each other for the minimum wage, driving wages toward the minimum. Of course, these same workers often cannot get those jobs because of their lack of skills, and they cannot gain skills without a job -- a vicious circle they cannot get out of without spending their own money to go to school to get the credentials which act as a key to employment. Given that unemployed people likely do not have money for school, they have to get student loans, putting them in debt from the get-go. Any wages they may get will have loan payments subtracted from them. The net result may be a real income at or below the minimum wage.

A wage of $7.25 (the current minimum wage) gets you $1160 before taxes. The average student loan payment per month is about $250. One would have to make $8.80/hr to match the minimum wage with that loan payment. One would hope one would make much more than that -- but the point is that if people could gain skills through working, they could end up with the same wages and no debt to speak of.

In fact, without a minimum wage, unskilled workers could get hired at a rate that made it worth training them (which is not costless for the business), with the result that they would no longer be unskilled workers (even so-called dead-end jobs give you skills you need to hold down any job whatsoever, something many unskilled workers do not have, and quite frankly will not necessarily gain in school). As workers gained skills, they would bid up wages. Competition among businesses for workers drives up wages; competition among workers drives down wages. When you create a floor for wages, you create people who would rather work for little than for nothing at all. It is the same logic that results in mandatory insurance driving up insurance prices. Businesses competing with zero must have low prices; businesses competing with a wage of zero do not have to bid up wages. The minimum wage creates a zero wage that would not exist in a free market

So that is two ways in which the minimum wage suppresses wages -- directly and indirectly. And that leaves out the fact that it drives up the prices of goods and services (increase costs, and you increase prices) for everyone (including those you have made unemployed through your minimum wages) and protects big businesses from competition against upstarts -- especially those mom-and-pop stores the left love to wax romantic over.

So if you want to keep wages low, create a large pool of unemployed, keep large numbers of people unskilled, put a lot of people into debt, impoverish society as a whole, increase prices, and protect bug business from competition against small upstarts, then minimum wage laws are the laws you ought to support.

Paradox Drives Social Complexity

The long-term tendency of an active intellectual community is to raise the level of abstraction and reflexivity. (Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, 787)

This is particularly true in philosophy, mathematics, and the social sciences -- with the danger of this tendency coming from the latter more than the other two, since too often people have tried to apply their wild abstractions back into the real world, primarily through the (in my model) adjacent political economy. Yet, at the same time, the more autonomous an order becomes -- meaning, the more abstract and reflexive it becomes -- the more it contributes to society as a whole (to civil society) as I, working off of Russell Berman's ideas, argued in The Spontaneous Orders of the Arts" (see bottom pg. 3, top pg 4), with the conclusion that "The more alienated literature becomes from society, the more it contributes to society" (4). This of course describes the most concrete of the pure wisdom trinity of spontaneous orders. It is equally true of religion and philosophy, though going back to concretes can be seen to happen repeatedly -- particularly in religions -- under threats. Threats would likely push art into more concrete expression as well, given the inherent concreteness of art works' contents.

What causes the abstraction-reflexivity sequence? Durkheim theorized that a trend toward abstractness and universalism takes place in the collective consciousness as the social division of labor increases. As evidence he cites trends in religion and law In isolated tribal societies, religious symbols are concrete and specific; rules are reified and their violations expiated by punitive ritual. As societies grow, more stratified, organizationally and economically differentiated, the spiritual entities of religion become less localized, expanding in their scope, and eventually leaving the concrete worldly level entirely for a transcendental realm. Still further on this continuum, the "modernism" of Durkheim's day regarded God as a symbol of the universal moral order, and explained the anthropomorphic traits of earlier belief as reification, mistaking a symbol for a concrete entity. (Collins, 790)

Collins then observes that the above describes social evolution of belief over long periods of time (I would argue it describes the evolution of belief in such a way that it maps very well onto a Spiral Dynamics explanation), but that intellectual evolution is much more insulated from society as a whole, creating the conditions for more rapid development.

But what drives abstraction and reflexivity?

Once the argumentative community is constituted, causal dynamics within each sequence work much the same way: oppositions splitting the network within each generation, together the the periodic overcoming of those oppositions on a new level of abstraction. (Collins, 801)

Collins is arguing that what drives creativity in an intellectual community is paradoxical oppositions which, when they become overwhelming, result in the emergence of new, more complex (more abstract) ideas. It is this process which J.T. Fraser argues drives the emergence of complexity in the universe, from pure energy to quantum physics to chemistry/macrophysics to biology to psychology, to social processes. It is this process which Clare Graves argues drives the emergence of complexity in human pyschological and social orders, from chimpanzee-like social structures to tribes to heroic/empires to authoritative to enlightenment to postmodern to integrative to holistic. It is this which, I argue in Diaphysics, in which I combine Graves and Fraser, drives all complexity. Collins demonstrates that this complexifying process is at work in our intellectual communities (which are kinds of spontaneous orders) is driven by the same emergent-paradox-driving-new-emergent-complexity cycle.

Overall, Collins demonstrates that when the philosophical order is most isolated from the other orders, it tends to fall into a stable equilibrium -- known in philosophy as "scholasticism." Collins calls this "the "normal science" of philosophy," arguing that "Scholasticism is the baselines of intellectual life" (799) -- the superstars we all remember are few and far between, kept in check by the law of small numbers. More than that, Collins demonstrates repeatedly that the superstars are those who come into contact with another spontaneous order or orders (be it religion, science, mathematics, the social sciences, the arts, etc) -- which is unsurprising given the fact that each spontaneous order on its own will settle down into equilibrium, while far-from-equilibrium states, or creative states, come about from such overlaps. Technology pushes the catallaxy into a state of constant creativity and wealth-creation. The catallaxy in turn drives continued technological innovation (certainly at the speed at which we have seen such creativity in the last century). All of this comes about from the introduction of paradoxes to the order.

If our social systems at their most creative are driven by the emergence of paradoxes, which in turn drive the emergence of more complex levels, and this is a reflection of how more complex processes emerge in the universe as a whole, then it behooves us to do our best to emulate the universe's processes rather than fighting against them. We need to come to understand these processes and the kinds of networks that drive them and emerge from them. The more creative our social processes, the more complex they become, which means we become wealthier and create more knowledge over time. This is hardly without its dangers. Not all complexity is an improvement. There are such things as perverse orders. And the purifying tendencies of these orders can create sociopathic organizations and outcomes (though, as I observed above in relation to literature, the more sociopathic, the more social contribution it may make). But overall, if we go with the natural flows and processes of emergence and complexity in the universe, the better off we will be both socially and psychologically.

Energizing Creative Outbursts in the Spontaneous Orders

To better understand civil society as a whole, it is necessary to break it down into its constituent economies and spontaneous orders. This allows us to understand each of the orders on their own terms -- simplifying clarifies. However, there is always a danger in doing this in the possibility of overspecialization putting blinders on the researchers and thus failing to understand the complexities of overlaps and interactions among the different orders and economies.

We can see this quite clearly in economics, where economists consider technological innovation to be an "external shock." To the extent that economists only ever study the catallaxy, they are right. But the market economy includes market technologies, money and finance, and technological innovation. Those three spontaneous orders interact to create the market economy as a whole. All of this is missed by the economists studying the catallaxy, the finance and monetary economists studying money and finance, and the sociologists of technology (who are scant few in number compared to those studying the other two orders in the market economy) studying technological innovation. But it seems these three groups never speak to each other.

A result of this is most of those who study the catallaxy do not understand the role money and technology play in their chosen fields of study. This, despite the fact that Schumpeter argued for the inclusion of technology in understanding the market economy.

Another result is the predominance of equilibrium models to study these different orders. An equilibrium model might make sense if the spontaneous order being studied is in pure isolation, but the minute another order comes in contact with it, the steady-state equilibrium system is thrown into a far-from-equilibrium state. (And I am making a generous assumption, given the fact that I do not believe that equilibrium is necessarily the best way to understand any order, given the presence of bipolar feedback in every self-organizing process.)

Certain institutions can act as stabilizing elements in a spontaneous order, providing a predominantly negative feedback environment that will drive the system toward equilibrium. The German-style university system may be precisely such an institution. Indeed, once the initial rounds of creativity which emerged from the university reforms settled down, we have seen what can only be described as a very stable realm of philosophy in the United States, Britain, and Germany for many long decades. The exception has been France, where the German university system was never adopted. The result is that philosophy and literature have overlapped more:

The bases and products of philosophy and of literature have usually been distinct. The networks of these two kinds of intellectuals have touched on occasion; a very small number of individuals have overlapped both networks and produced memorable work in both genres. Most have been successful in only one attention space or the other; nevertheless, something is transmitted structurally, for where the networks of philosophers and literary practitioners have connected, the result has been to energize outbursts of creativity in either field. (Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, 755)

 The "something" being transmitted structurally is the far-from-equilibrium state that comes about from two orders coming into contact with each other. Each order has a disequilibrating effect on the other orders, resulting in creative bipolar feedback. The French Existentialist and postmodernist movements are great examples of this sort of thing, since the main players in each were either hybrid writers themselves (Sartre wrote plays, fiction, and poetry as well as philosophy) or were heavily influenced by literature if they were philosophers or philosophy if they were literary writers.

Collins also points out that when philosophers primarily write for a writer's market rather than within universities, they become more political. Part of this is from the demands of the writer's marketplace. Universities promote high levels of abstraction in philosophy, but the popular reading public will not put up with it. Thus philosophers writing for more popular readers tend to deal with more pedestrian topics, like politics. This is why the Existentialists and postmodernists have typically been more radical in their politics than even university political philosophers like Habermas. We can also perhaps begin to see why French philosophy has found a home in American English literature departments (rather than our philosophy departments).

Given all of this, we should expect to see, as universities undergo reform in response to the internet and online universities, a new round of creativity in philosophy (and other fields dominated by the German university system). We should also expect, however, considerable resistance from those who are comfortably entrenched in that system and prefer the stability and predictability of a philosophical system at equilibrium. But this, too, will contribute to creativity, as conservative retrenching has always done in the past.

In the end, there is a role for those who study each of the spontaneous orders in isolation -- but we have to be aware of the dangers, too, of doing so. Economists can mistakenly believe the market economy as a whole is properly studied as a steady-state equilibrium system, meaning they have to consider money to be neutral and technology to be an external shock, when in fact insofar as they are studying the catallaxy in combination with money/finance and technological innovations, what they are studying is a far-from-equilibrium process in which money is non-neutral and technological innovation is an inseparable part of the system. The catallaxy is not the market economy -- it is but a part of it, even if an important part. But it is almost exclusively the catallaxy economists study, and it is almost exclusively the catallaxy economists consider to be the market economy. And even then, it is rarely a catallaxy that takes place in time and space.

The same dangers can come from studying any of the orders in isolation from the others. Yet, this is a danger well worth risking in order to gain understanding of each. The disciplinary scholars are responsible for understanding their own realms; the interdisciplinary scholars are responsible for making the connections among them. More than that, there are dangers of only working within a given order, ignoring the presence of the rest. The artist, writer, philosopher working in isolation is producing work that can only be appreciated by those who also work primarily in those orders -- thus we get art about art, literature about literature, and philosophy about philosophy -- a kind of sociopathy only appreciated by those who also work in those orders, even as those who live more healthy lives, in multiple orders and, thus, in civil society, create works that matter to the rest of civil society.

Want a More Dehumanizing Government? Give It More Power

Power makes people dehumanize others. Which is why power needs to be distributed as much as possible. Which is what spontaneous orders do. If you want to make your government dehumanize you, concentrate more and more power in an ever-more-central government. We will leave aside the fact that such a government will then, in turn, attract more and more sociopaths to it as well.

The Spontaneous Order of Mathematics

I have argued that mathematics is its own spontaneous order, the most abstract spontaneous order of the "practical knowledge" set, which includes the physical sciences and the technologies that have been invented to do science, with the latter two being mixed (abstract and concrete) and concrete, respectively. But math has not always been that way. And math has not always been a spontaneous order.

In fact, as Randall Collins points out,

In the 1700s the field [of mathematics] consisted mostly of analysis, exploring the branches of Leibnizian calculus and their applications in physical science. By around 1780, the belief had become widespread among leading mathematicians that  mathematics had exhausted itself, that there was little left to discover. (697)

Note that this describes a mathematics that is firmly rooted in the physical sciences. It is not its own order. The only mathematics being investigated is math relevant to rapid-discovery science. But then,

Unexpectedly, the following century was the most flamboyant in the history of the field, proliferating new areas and opening the realms of abstract higher mathematics.

The sudden expansion of creativity arose from shifts in the social bases of mathematics. Competition for recognition increased with a large expansion in the numbers of mathematicians. The older bases for full-time professional mathematicians had consisted of the official academies of sciences, notably Paris, along with Berlin, St. Petersburg, and a few others. [...] The [German] university reform extended to mathematics the emphasis on innovative research, as well as giving a distinctive slant toward pure knowledge apart from practical application. The process of disciplinary differentiation split math from physics and astronomy, encouraging the tendency to abstraction. (697)

This is pretty much how I describe how literature and the arts emerged into their own spontaneous orders from religion. With Modernist art and literature, we end up with extremely reflexive, highly abstract works of art and literature. This is a natural consequence of spontaneous orders. We end up with science about science, technology about technology, art about art, business about business within the market economy -- and math about math. This is a necessary consequence of the emergence of differentiated spontaneous orders, even if those orders continue to influence each other in their overlapping ecotones.

Why Aren't Chimpanzees Wealthy?

Why are humans wealthy, but chimpanzees are not? Both engage in trade. Both are tool makers and tool users. Yes, there is a difference in quality and quantity, but one would surely think this similarity to humans would make chimpanzees wealthier than, say, lions, but they're not.

I recently commented on the fact that in social mammals, the entrepreneurs are the subordinates. So entrepreneurship is found in all social mammals -- which does not explain why humans are wealthy. But my musings on the issue do suggest a reason.

In all social mammals, including humans, the dominant alphas can take anything they want any time they want to do anything they want with what they take. Thus, value flows to them. And it flows to them by those alphas breaking network bonds.

Self-organizing networks can only become so complex if the bonds that make up the network are being broken all the time. Value is not increased by trade because most interactions involve value being directed to the alpha, who uses what he or she gets to improve their social position, including rewarding cronies.

In order for these networks to become more complex, you have to weaken the position of the alpha. And this is what we see in humans -- specifically, we see it happening in humans in the last few hundred years. This has allowed our trade networks to create wealth and to complexify over time. Spontaneous orders require equality among participants, freedom of entry and exit, and the rule that you get to keep what you traded. These are the rules of a social species in which the submissives have come to dominate socially.

Redistributionist schemes are thus, to a certain degree, atavistic in nature. They go back to the idea that there should be an alpha who should distribute the goods of the social group as he or she sees fit. Both it and self-organizing, increasingly complex networks are natural. But only one results in human levels of wealth. The other brings us back to the conditions of our ape ancestors.

Hard Cases Make For Bad Laws -- The Case of William Stanley Jevons

William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) is, if you are an economist, a well-known economist; if you are a mathematician, he is a well-known mathematician; if you are a philosopher, he is a well-known philosopher; if you are a computer scientist, he, being the inventor of the Logic Piano, is a well-known early computer scientist. In my model of the relations among the spontaneous orders,this places him simultaneously in the spontaneous orders of the social sciences, math, philosophy, and technology for math and science.

Of course, people can be interested in multiple disciplines, but with Jevons, these are all intimately related to each other. Jevons was a mathematizer of logic and an inventor of a piece of technology that would allow him to mechanically do logical transformations. More, he was part of the British mathematical and logical reformers that included people like Babbage, De Morgan, Cayley, and Boole, among others, and which led to Whitehead and Russell.

Much early British economics has been done primarily by philosophers: Locke, Hume, Smith, Ricardo, and J.S. Mill, to name a few. As a philosopher, Jevons certainly falls into this tradition.

This mixture in Britain had long-term consequences, because, "When the British universities reformed in the 1860's, economics now became academic, meshing with the nearest adjacent disciplines, thus intersecting with both philosophy and mathematics" (Randall Collins, 708). And Jevons, "who developed the marginal utility theory in 1871 to displace the dominant labor theory of value" (708-9) and who "colonized the field [of economics] for mathematical methods" (709), fit right into this intersection.

But this doesn't address the issue of why the mathematicians were philosophers (and, with Whitehead and Russel, the philosophers were mathematicians) and the philosophers were economists. Yet if we take a look at my model of spontaneous orders, we can see that all three areas -- math, philosophy, and the social sciences -- are all abstract orders. It should not surprise us that those attracted to one abstract order should be attracted to other orders as well -- or that they would attempt to "colonize" the other fields. And it happened not just with math doing the colonizing, as it was philosophy which colonized math first by introducing logic to math (with math returning the favor and introducing math to logic).

Thus, Jevons' work in the spontaneous orders in which he participated makes sense. While (apparently) staying out of money/finance (while nevertheless doing social science work about it in his Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875) and Methods of Social Reform and Investigations in Currency and Finance), Jevons worked in both realms of Abstract Wisdom and one of the two realms of Abstract Knowledge (again, doing social science work about the second). Further, he worked in all three orders of Pure Knowledge -- I already mentioned his being a famous mathematician as well as the inventor of the Logic Piano, but less well known was his work as an assayist (a kind of chemist) when he was a young man. Thus we can see him working along the lines of both Practical Knowledge and the Abstract, which intersect at Math.

Jevons seems to be a hard case, but in fact he helps demonstrate quite well the relations among the spontaneous orders as I have categorized them. We can see the logic of his movements, and the reasons he would have brought math to both philosophy and economics (and the reasons he would have made those choices). We can see, too, why there has been a historical relation among philosophers and economists as well as, later, among philosophers and mathematicians. The fact that all three areas are areas of Abstraction means it is easy to justify bringing those methods over into each other. More, the particularity of knowledge compared to the holism of wisdom makes it more likely that math will be transported into the social sciences and philosophy than the other way around (while philosophical logic did contribute to math, math has contributed far more to logic in return).

The case of Jevons might make us think the spontaneous order divisions I have proposed are nonsense, or that they are somehow artificial since we cannot actually disentangle them from each other and from civil society as a whole. I would argue they are no more artificial divisions than is isolating out the circulatory system from the rest of the body is artificial. There is in fact a circulatory system that does certain things only it does, even as it is vital for the rest of the body. And if we have a problem with it, we would want to go to a cardiologist, not a general practitioner. A focus on the whole only, ignoring the parts, makes for bad medicine and bad medical decisions. The same is true of focusing on civil society as a whole and ignoring the real divisions within it. We cannot understand Jevons as a whole person without understanding all the orders. But as mathematicians or computer technologists or economists or philosophers, we neither want nor need to understand Jevons the whole person. We want and need to understand his contributions to those areas. The fact that he had overlapping interests is no argument against this working in a variety of orders.

Thus we can see that though the orders are separate, they do also overlap and influence each other. But there is also a logic to the movements of people participating in those orders, as the case of Jevons (but hardly only Jevons) demonstrates. Further, we can also make sense of the methodological battle taking place in economics between the neoclassical economists (as started by Jevons and Walras) and the Austrian school (as started by Menger), as the neoclassical economists are more enamored of math, while the Austrian school is more enamored of philosophy. As complexity makes more and more inroads into economics and the other social sciences, we will soon discover that both schools of economics are right. But mathematical complexity makes for a very different kind of economics than that of neoclassical economics. Thus, it is the full complexity synthesis -- synthesizing mathematical and philosophical economics -- for which we are waiting.

The German University System and the Universal Emergence of Idealist Philosophy

Chapter 12 of Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies is a veritable case study in the degree to which institutions matter. The title of the chapter is "Intellectuals Take Control of Their Bases: The German University Revolution," and it covers what happened to philosophy not only in Germany after their university reforms in the late 1700s, but also the practically identical patterns that emerged in every country that in turn adopted the German university system.

Almost immediately after the university reforms that gave rise to the university system as we now know it, German philosophy made a turn toward Idealism. Collins argues that Idealism is a halfway house from religious dominance to complete secularization within the university philosophical faculty. However, as we will see, Idealism may in fact be a consequence of the German university system itself.

Scandinavia adopted the German system in the early 1800's, and immediately underwent an Idealist revolution in philosophy.

England adopted the German system in 1872 -- and Idealism arose in England.

The United States adopted the German system in the 1870s and 1880s, and Idealism arose in the United States (with pragmatism as a halfway house between religion and Idealism, as one would expect in a country as religious as the United States).

As Italy adopted the German system, first in the north, then in the south, Italy developed its own idealist philosophical movement (interestingly, Collins notes that Idealism stayed around longer in Italy than in other places because Fascism was essentially Idealism in politics).

Now, one could simply say that this is a consequence not just of institutions, but of culture, since these were all Western European cultures (ignoring the fact that grouping these together under "Western culture" is a kind of idealistic kitsch) -- except Collins points out that the Japanese too adopted the German system (in the 1870s-1890s), and Japanese philosophy almost immediately became Idealist. And more fascinating still, Idealism in Japan raised up Buddhism in order to have a system to act as a halfway house to secularism. Why?

The Shinto cult promoted at the national level was too particularistic and too artificial a construction to serve as a rationalized philosophy; on the other side, Neo-Confucianism, dominant in the elite schools during the Tokugamwa, was already substantially secularized. Buddhist philosophy made an unexpected comeback because it could most easily take the form of a religion of reason. (686)

The Japanese experience more than the rest demonstrates that it was the institution of the German university system that resulted in the emergence of philosophical Idealism more than anything else. After all, Japan was a completely different culture. And more than that, the philosophers in the new universities actually revitalized Buddhism in Japan just to have "a religion of reason" with which to work our their Idealist philosophy. To switch metaphors, the Japanese actually built the Buddhist island to make an Idealist bridge from it to secularism. If this does not point to the fact that it was the institution which was responsible for the kind of philosophy which emerged, I don't know what does.

Subordinate Apes and Entrepreneurship

In a real sense, entrepreneurs are society's guinea pigs. They face higher risks than the rest of us, and are more likely to fail than succeed at whatever it is they are trying. The entrepreneur may be an artist as much as the potential business person. The risk are big, but when there is a payoff, those risks prove to be worth the risks.

Humans are social mammals, and looking at what takes place in other social species is often quite instructive. As it turns out, in other social species, it is the subordinate animals which act as the guinea pigs, taking the most risks for their social groups, while the dominant (alpha) animals hang back to see how everything turns out.

This sounds exactly like what happens in an economy like ours. The entrepreneur starts off life as a subordinate -- low in the social hierarchy. They take risks, and sometimes they succeed. As their businesses become more successful, they gain dominance, become alphas themselves, and want fewer risks -- thus, they invite regulations into their industries in order to reduce competition from others and, thus, their own risks. The regulators -- people in government who are alpha primates almost by definition -- themselves are risk-adverse, and have set up a system that prevents them from experiencing too much risk.

What we then see is risk-adverse alpha primates both looking down on the risk-taking subordinates for being subordinates, and relying on those risk-taking subordinates for the success of the social group. Does  this not describe the seemingly contradictory attitudes of many anti-market people in government? Obama fits this about as beautifully as one could want. He clearly looks down on risk-takers (who we now know to be perceived by him as subordinates, who of course should be looked down on), but realizes too that he needs them for the protection of his social group.

The free market, then, is the direct promoter of the subordinate human. The entrepreneur is the subordinate taking the risks of society, and sometimes benefiting from that risk to such a degree that (s)he becomes a dominant member of society. Spontaneous orders emerge when the subordinate humans come to socially dominate. Attempts to impose hierarchical network structures are attempts by alpha humans to reassert their dominance. Given the dominance of the subordinates, the alpha humans resort to pro-subordinate rhetoric to maintain their power. It is unlikely we will ever see an end to this struggle. In fact, since one cannot have subordinates without alphas, the elimination of the alphas would result in the elimination of entrepreneurship as well. Those paradoxical tensions must exist to drive social complexity. Which means the struggle for liberty will never end.

Far-From-Equilibrium Modeling of the Economy

The belief that real markets are inefficient comes about when economists compare equilibrium models of the economy to the real economy and, noticing a huge difference between the two, conclude there is something wrong with the market. For some reason it doesn't occur to them that their models may be wrong.

One gets an equilibrium in one's model when that model uses negative feedback alone. The benefit of this is that the models are then very simple and unmessy. The negative feedback drives human action and prices to equilibrium. Competition among consumers drives up prices while competition among sellers drives down prices. Increase supply while holding quantity demand steady or decrease demand while holding quantity supply steady, and prices will drop; increase demand while holding quantity supply steady or decrease supply while holding quantity demand steady, and prices will rise. We have the law of diminishing returns -- no clearer summation of negative feedback leading to equilibrium. And more, equilibrium models show that in perfect competition (another problematic idea), negative feedback will drive profit down to zero. Thus, if there is profit, there is a problem with the market.

But what if the market is not a process in which only negative feedback exists? What if there is positive feedback as well? There is certainly a law of diminishing returns at any given time for any given individual, but what happens overtime, and when there are groups of people? What about fads, where the more popular something becomes, the more you want it -- even as the price goes up? A fad resembles a sort of mini-bubble -- as well it should. Bubbles are caused by positive feedback processes. And both bubbles and fads end -- often spectacularly.

But we can only see this if we understand the economy as being the product not of pairs of people in a sort of atemporal pinpoint, but as large groups of individuals over space and time. We thus get both positive and negative feedback at work simultaneously, creating multiple equilibria. This creates entrepreneurial opportunities and thus the opportunity for pure profit.

And this ignores the roles of money/finance and technology, two other spontaneous orders that interact with the catallaxy, keeping it in a constant far-from-equilibrium state.

In the end, the economy is and can be creative if and only if it has bipolar feedback. The economy behaves precisely as it does because it necessarily has these two forces at work, and not merely the one. Such a model of the economy will certainly be much messier than equilibrium models, but they will be more true to life -- and far less misleading. They will certainly demonstrate the utter impossibility of predicting the outcomes of certain rules and regulations.

Now, none of this is to say that there aren't aspects of the economy that aren't dominated by a tendency toward equilibrium. It is likely true that there are aspects of the economy that are dominated by negative feedback. But I don't think we are in a strong position to say what those are until we have models of the economy that make simultaneous use of both negative and positive feedback.

How Property Creates Liberty

For the average libertarian, it borders on cliche to argue that property protects liberty. So why do we need Matt Zwolinski's latest argument?

Consider this part of the argument:

For Locke and Nozick, on the other hand, property rights are only justified if they benefit (or at least do not harm) each and every individual. Now, this probably seems like an extremely tough argumentative hurdle for the defender of property to clear. Could it really be the case that each and every individual is better off under a system of private property rights than he would have been without one? Consider the position of the poorest of working-class Americans today and ask what his situation would be like if nobody had ever appropriated anything. What would his life be like if he enjoyed the full bounty of the state of nature, but none of the results of the past appropriations which (in our world) have actually taken place? He could walk or work or live on any land he chose; he could draw gold or oil from the ground, hunt or harvest all the food he could find from the land, and draw all the fish he wished from the sea.

But how would he get to the oil, or the gold? Without a system of private property in place to protect and provide incentives for creative work, who would have built the tools for him to get it? Who, even, would have built the knife or the spear with which he might hunt or fish? Tools such as these require physical resources, time, and effort to create. And unless people can be relatively sure that others will not seize the fruit of their creative efforts, why should we expect them to invest these scarce goods? No property rights means no industry or trade, even in their crudest and most basic forms. And no industry or trade means, in the famous words used by Thomas Hobbes to describe the state of nature, “no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

 But wait -- in this argument, Zwolinski only argues that property creates wealth, not how it creates liberty. But if we understand liberty as the freedom of choice -- of the freedom of choices -- then it is property which has given us increasing liberty. One could argue that this is mere materialist freedom, but this is hardly the case. All of the things Zwolinski identifies create more and more time -- time more and more people can spend doing the things they want, including creating more art and literature, more games and toys, more technology. As a result, property gives us the freedom to do more and to have the time to do it. Those of us who live in countries that more or less have free markets are so wealthy that we can do pretty much what we want when we want. We are incredibly free, and incredibly spoiled by it. We sit around and invent things to worry about, we have it so good.

This would suggest that property not only protect liberty, but creates it. Property makes us more free -- more free over time. So free that, sometimes, we fail to recognize when governments begin (or continue) to infringe on those freedoms.

I have read many pieces that talk about how property is necessary for liberty, and how it protect liberty -- but I have yet to read how it actually creates liberty. This is perhaps an area that needs more investigation.