Power and Rationality -- Why Decentralization enforces pragmatism

Mitchell Langbert's Blog ^ | August 23, 2009 | Mitchell Langbert

[bvw]

[Excerpts]

Decentralization enforces pragmatism. In a competitive economy markets test firms. Decentralization creates competition and so the possibility of failure. Without failure there is no pragmatism, for experiments fail more often than they succeed.

Centralization presupposes the ability of the rational mind to solve problems. It denigrates or neglects experimentation, even as it uses the rhetoric of science as its rationale. Without trial and error there is no science and no reason. There is no such thing as a priori expertise. Progressivism claims to be a movement of experts, but its claims are self contradictory. Progressivism forestalls experimentation by centralizing decisions. Progressivism is (a) ideological and (b) aims to facilitate the operation of special interests.

In order to co-opt the source of progress, Progressivism needs to claim that it offers a superior method of scientific advance. It develops this claim through the ritualization and control of knowledge in universities.

[The Progressivist establishment] develops methodologies of allocating the "right" to think through IQ and other standardized tests that have validity [i.e. valid because people have learned to trust IQ test results as predictors of success].

[But] such validity is [only] partially related to the ability to invent or to create economic value. {The validity is mostly in predicting] the ability to accomplish tasks within parameters, e.g., to perform a job well.

IQ tests have been validated with respect to job performance but NOT with respect to entrepreneurship.

Studies of millionaires do NOT find that they have extraordinarily high IQs, merely above average. Rather, they have moral, time preference and interpersonal skill characteristics that facilitate acquisition of wealth.

Development of methods of wealth creation is at part dependent upon the characteristics that IQ measures, but far from exclusively so. Progressivism limits access to universities based on IQ, then claims that universities are the chief source of wealth creation. National wealth is allocated to university-approved projects, specifically finance, legal and banking interests whose ranks are dominated by university graduates.

Without decentralization, experimentation and failure characteristic of markets [a social and market establishment based only on] IQ is not capable of innovation.

The result is a society that fixates on allocation of human resources through standardized tests and then subsidizes those with the highest IQs through government.

The system is self perpetuating and susceptible to manipulation. It is a system characteristic of decline.

[bvw]

Insightful.

I add the following: The popularity and popular access to colleges developed in early Progressive era for example with Land Grant Colleges under Hatch Act of 1887 and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914. At the same time in the Ivy League modern educational theorists began using grades rather than connections as criteria for entry. That directly resulted in a strong anti-Jew backlash in the twenties, and a return to "legacy" admission policies that lasted until just after the end of WWII. That's when the second and stronger phase of "standard" based college admissions began, based on standardized testing that included "IQ" -- all from experiences in testing, training and allocating recruits during WWII.

In general remarkable social trends of the fifties and sixties are nearly always found to have precedents in the early 1900's -- for example: suburbia, popular enrollment in colleges, shopping centers and others.