Posted on 01/04/2006 7:33:35 AM PST by Nicholas Conradin
Scion of America’s greatest Keynesian, James K. Galbraith recently penned one of the most astonishing near misses in recent memory. In the December/January edition of Mother Jones Galbraith accuses free-market economists starting with Adam Smith of being Intelligent Design (ID) hucksters.
“Economists… have been Intelligent Designers since the beginning,” Galbraith writes. “Adam Smith was a deist; he believed in a world governed by a benevolent system of natural law… Smith's Creator did not interfere. He simply wrote the laws and left them for events to demonstrate and man to discover.” Galbraith’s analogy is badly forced. But it is forced ultimately to synthesize two of the left’s favorite bromides: that free-market economists are crazy, and that creationists are ignorant rubes.
Galbraith (deliberately?) misunderstands the bulk of the arguments for ID. After all, if “Smith’s Creator did not interfere,” his analogy with ID does not hold. ID depends on the idea of a Designer’s interference in the process of forming complex life-forms. By contrast, there’s Darwin, whose process is seemingly blind and purposeless.
Indeed, if ever there were a view of economics that builds in the blind, purposeless processes of trial-and-error, specialization, and complexity (the hallmarks of the Darwinian algorithm) it is Smith’s invisible-hand economics -- the Austrian variants of which are the most strikingly evolutionary in character. It is therefore odd that Galbraith calls his article “Smith v. Darwin.”
Indeed, if ever there were a view of economics that builds in the blind, purposeless processes of trial-and-error, specialization, and complexity (the hallmarks of the Darwinian algorithm) it is Smith’s invisible-hand economics -- the Austrian variants of which are the most strikingly evolutionary in character. It is therefore odd that Galbraith calls his article “Smith v. Darwin.” Indeed, it is the economics of the left, so affectionately espoused by Galbraith and his compatriots, that is secular Intelligent Design par excellence.
Consider quotes like this from the New York Times’ Paul Krugman: “What's interesting about [the Bush Administration] is that there's no sign that anybody's actually thinking about ‘well, how do we run this economy?’”
The very idea of “running” an economy is predicated upon the notion that economies can be run and fine-tuned, much like a machine. But what Krugman and folks like Galbraith fail to understand is that the economy isn’t a machine at all, but an ecosystem. And ecosystems aren’t designed, they evolve.
Recall the last time you were in a room with both liberals and conservatives. If the liberal heard the conservative start to talk about Intelligent Design, you might have seen him shake his head rather smugly. Why? Because he will have read his Kaufmann, his Dawkins, and of course, his Darwin. He’ll let the creationist say his piece, and then he’ll reply along these lines:
As long as the basic regularities of nature are in place, Darwinism and complexity theory predict that the myriad forms of life and details of the world will emerge from the simplest substructures -- i.e. atoms, amino acids, DNA and so on. The world doesn’t need a designer. The complexity of the world is a spontaneously generated order. The laws of nature yield emergent complexity through autocatalytic processes.
But does our smug Darwinist extend this self-same rationale beyond life’s origins?
He ought to; because like our diverse ecosystems, a complex, well-ordered society arises from the existence of certain kinds of basic rules, norms, and institutions (societal DNA, if you will).
The critic may try in ad hoc fashion to reply that such institutions are “designed.” But this rejoinder misses the point. Once you start to argue about the development of institutions, it’s rather like arguing about how the laws of nature came to be. And these are rather separate discussions, ones that push the question of a Designer back to a point before evolutionary processes are set in motion. In any case, proper institutional rules obviate the need for central planners and technocrats to control the economy. And like any other ecosystem, the economy will always resist being bent to a designer’s will.
People on the political left, while characterizing conservatives as being flat-earthers, do believe in a form of Intelligent Design. For like their conservative counterparts who believe that nothing as complex as nature could possibly have emerged without being designed, Beltway bureaucrats and DNC Keynesians believe nothing as complex as an economy can exist without being shaped in their image.
What both fail to realize is that neither needs a planner. Markets (individual actors in cooperation) do a better job of self-regulation than any government official can do from on high. Ecosystems (complex flora and fauna interacting in complex ways) regulate themselves better than the most determined ecologist ever could.
In fact, the intersession of bureaucrats in the economy almost always make things worse -- as harmful unintended consequences follow from their actions. Because unlike the Intelligent Designer favored by Creationists, bureaucrats are neither omniscient, nor omnipotent.
A further, delicious irony in all of these quibbles about the relative merits of Intelligent Design comes in the fact that conservative proponents of ID may have borrowed their tactics directly from the left. According to philosopher Stanley Fish, writing in Harper’s:
“[The ‘teach the controversy’ battle cry] is an effective one, for it takes the focus away from the scientific credibility of Intelligent Design -- away from the question, ‘Why should it be taught in a biology class?’ -- and puts it instead on the more abstract issues of freedom and open inquiry. Rather than saying we’re right, the other guys are wrong, and there are the scientific reasons why, Intelligent Design polemicists say that every idea should at least get a hearing; that unpopular or minority views should always be represented; that questions of right and wrong should be left open; that what currently counts as knowledge should always be suspect, because it will typically reflect the interests and preferences of those in power. These ideas have been appropriated wholesale from the rhetoric of multiculturalism -- “
Of course, no self-respecting liberal will admit that his conceptual latticework is analogous to ID any more than he’ll admit that a minority view like ID should be protected from “hegemonic control by those in power” in the interests of “diversity.” I’ll leave it to the leftist intellectual to further plumb the depths of postmodernism and explain away the hypocrisy.
In the meantime, I’d like to know why, by the left’s own rationale, we should be teaching socialist economics – the economics of Intelligent Design -- in our public universities.
Max Borders is Managing Editor of TCSDaily.com. He is also founder of The Wingbeat Project
The author might be leaping to conclusions. Either that, or he's a monkey mind-reader.
Er, the invention of writing was part of evid dead white male plot. Try to keep up.
You could appear as a defense witness for this guy.
He says he was just 'pastoring'. And since we can't read his mind, who's to know what he intended?
(/OJ juror mode)
Do monkeys typically trade goods? If yes, such behavior should be commonly observed. If this behavior is unusual, how do you know that this is what the monkey was doing?
That bonobos trade food for sex has been known for years. I'm surprised you haven't heard of it. That monkeys do it is news to me, but I'm not surpised.
As usual, you are missing the point. As I wrote, the free market on a large scale is not based on anarchy. It most definitely requires a government of men to enforce the rules of fair play. That government is a central authority that must obviously posses some intelligence. If you are going to compare that government to the "laws of nature," you are profoundly confused, unless you are willing to concede that the "laws of nature" are intelligently designed.
King: Today, I think I'll invent market regulation.Market regulations attempt to impose design after the fact on a thing that just grew. Often, they aren't very intelligent.Minister: What's a market?
King: I was about to invent that, too.
It's not deliberate. Galbraith really is that ignorant of economics. A reading of any of his books will indicate such.
NEW The Left’s Intelligent Design Problem. Evolution is like Adam Smith's economics; ID is socialism.
"Free markets grew out of primitive barter relationships. They obviously antedate any effort to regulate them. It would be absurd to believe otherwise."
So what. Adam Smith's invisible hand applies to more than just "primitive barter relationships." Once the economy reaches a certain size (and we're about six orders of magnitude past that now), government regulation becomes necessary.
No, not to set prices or anything like that. Just establishing a common currency requires intelligent government intervention. So does contract enforcement. Your partner renigs on his contract, and what do you do? That's right: you sue him. Can you do that without government involvement? (Yes, I realize that frivolous lawsuits are out of control, but that does not mean that *all* lawsuits are frivolous.)
And what about equities markets? Do you suppose for a minute that they don't need any intelligent government regulation?
The bottom line is that drawing a comparison between evolution and free-market economics is fundamentally misleading if the purpose is to show that ID is not needed in economics.
My last post (#70) was directed to the wrong person. It should have been directed to you. Yes, you.
the economy isn’t a machine at all, but an ecosystem. And ecosystems aren’t designed, they evolve.
Unfortunately for the thesis of this article, economies aren't "blind, purposeless processes of trial-and-error, specialization, and complexity (the hallmarks of the Darwinian algorithm)."
Rather, among other things an economy is better described in terms of a large number of informed, purposeful decisions on the part of those who partake in the economy. Further, it's not possible to divorce an economy from the rules imposed upon it by politicians, among others -- another breakdown in the thesis.
I stopped reading at this point -- if he's wrong on this fundamental point, the rest of the article's gonna be headed off the cliff.
Only if you assume that there is no place for intelligent consideration and pursuit of specific goals in peoples' economic decisions. Once you factor in the influence of human intelligence on economic decisions, the whole thing falls apart.
"I think you're completely ignorant of the historical development of trade. It was not a government invention. That governments cannot leave it alone now does not demonstrate that it cannot exist without government. It only demonstrates that dung draws flies."
If you think that modern, global free trade could work with no "intelligent" government regulation, you are a genuine idiot.
If a hacker breaks into a company's computers and empties its accounts, do you suppose they will call someone in the government? Or do you think they would just say, "Hey, he outsmarted us, and we deserve to die. It's survival of the fittest, after all."
If you buy a car with a 100,000 mile warranty, and the car is a lemon but the car company just tells you to get lost, will you try to fight them through legal means (i.e., the governmnent), or will you just say, "Hey, I'm not going to buy a car from them again."
What if you sign a mortgage, and then find out that it contained a clause on page 43 that prohibits you from using your home? Would you say, "Well, I deserve it. I should have read the whole contract." I suspect you would assume that some *government* regulation prevents such a clause.
Use your brain, dude!
In his graphic style, Milton Freidman illustrated that principle on his television program, Free to Choose, with "The Pencil Story." Friedman held a common yellow #2 pencil in his hand and said:
"Nobody knows how to make a pencil. There's not a single person in the world who actually knows how to make a pencil.
"In order to make a pencil, you have to get wood for the barrel. In order to get wood, you have to have logging. You have to have somebody who can manufacture saws. No single person knows how to do all that.
"What's called lead isn't lead. It's graphite. It comes from some mines in South America. In order to make pencils, you'd have to be able to get the lead.
"The rubber at the tip isn't really rubber, but it used to be. It comes from Malaysia, although the rubber tree is not native to Malaysia. It was imported into Malaysia by some English botanists.
"So, in order to make a pencil, you would have to be able to do all of these things. There are probably thousands of people who have cooperated together to make this pencil. Somehow or other, the people in South America who dug out the graphite cooperated with the people in Malaysia who tapped the rubber trees, cooperated with, maybe, people in Oregon who cut down the trees.
"These thousands of people don't know one another. They speak different languages. They come from different religions. They might hate one another if they met. What is it that enabled them to cooperate together?
"The answer is the existence of a market.
"The simple answer is the people in South America were led to dig out the graphite because somebody was willing to pay them. They didn't have to know who was paying them; they didn't have to know what it was going to be used for. All they had to know was somebody was going to pay them.
"What brought all these people together was an enormously complex structure of prices - the price of graphite, the price of lumber, the price of rubber, the wages paid to the laborer, and so on. It's a marvelous example of how you can get a complex structure of cooperation and coordination which no individual planned.
"There was nobody who sat in a central office and sent an order out to Malaysia: 'Produce more rubber.' It was the market that coordinated all of this without anybody having to know all of the people involved."
That pretty well says it all.
"What brought all these people together was an enormously complex structure of prices - the price of graphite, the price of lumber, the price of rubber, the wages paid to the laborer, and so on. It's a marvelous example of how you can get a complex structure of cooperation and coordination which no individual planned."
O horrible man. How dare you deny the Intelligent Economy Designer?
I'd say it does. It should. Somehow, it won't. There's some reason it won't.
Almost the only economy I can remember that had anything like an identifiable designer was the Soviet economy from the time of collectivization through Stalin's death. Even then, a mostly underground and formally illegal black market--the residue of former capitalism--was the final resort for getting goods where they were needed.
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