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
But I did no such thing..... Milton Fiedman did; I merely reposted his illustration of the principle of designer-less complexity.
Speaking of Friedman, he was interviewed by Charlie Rose, and during the course of the hour long interview, CR asked MF is he had changed his mind about anything. MF thought for a moment and replied: "Why, yes! I used to think that there was some good that came from the anti-trust laws, but I have since come to the realization that they do more damage than good."
From the context of that comment during the interview, I got the impression that the anti-trust law was just about the only form of government intervention in the market that Freidman had entertained as being possibly positive, and having realized that he was mistaken, the last remaining edifice of the state interfering in the marketplace was at last swept from Friedman's view of the ideal market.
I've seen published CIA reports from those days (for what they're worth) that the small private plots allowed on collective farms, where the slave workers were free to grow what they wanted and to sell the results at market prices, provided about 30% of the food grown in the USSR. And those private plots occupied about 5% of the land allocated to the collective farms. Shows what ID can do.
"The economy is not intelligently designed. That is the question before us. Use your integrity, dude!"
Let's try one more time. The very freedom that is a prerequisite of a free economy is "intelligently" designed. Adam Smith was no moron! And the very guarantee of voluntary exchange and freedom from coercion is backed by the *government*. In fact, that is one of the primary legitimate functions of government.
And do you suppose that computers are needed for today's global economy? Do you think those computers evolved with no intelligent design? Use your brain, man! Oh, wait ...
Funny how international trade works, then, with no world government.
"Funny how international trade works, then, with no world government."
You *have* heard of the WTO, I presume. No, it is not a government per se, but it certainly has the backing of the governments involved. And the currency used in international trade is obviously backed by the governments involved too. The days of bartering for animal skins with the Indians are over.
"Liberals have hijacked science for long enough. Now it's our turn -- Tom Bethell"
Just out of curiousity, were these sentences preceded by another sentence? Oh, isn't that interesting. And what was that sentence?
So, it appears that you have quoted Bethell out of context, eh? Oh, and that quote was a *draft* that did not appear on the final version of the book, did it. Oh, I see.
Are you aware, sir, that publishers, rather than authors, commonly write titles and subtitles for books?
So what you are doing is quoting Bethell out of context for the draft of a subtitle that he may not have even written himself.
Do you have any idea what that says about your integrity, Sir?
Unregulated, troll-free placemarker.
No, they weren't preceded by anything. You're wrong.
Are you aware, sir, that publishers, rather than authors, commonly write titles and subtitles for books?
No, I'm not aware of that. Did you just make it up?
International trade preceded the WTO by thousands of years. Nor does the WTO do anything except montion tariffs and other restrainst on trade. It doesn't enforce contracts.
And the currency used in international trade is obviously backed by the governments involved too. The days of bartering for animal skins with the Indians are over.
Your argument seems to be that if governments do anything, however minor, to facilitate markets, the markets are government controlled.
So much for RussP's economically ignorant contention that markets require governments.
A further example -- and perhaps the best -- is the Law Merchant (or or Lex Mercatoria for those who want a touch of class). It was a spontaneous, self-organized, and non-governmental mechanism for the conduct of markets.
See above.
Back in the early 70s I read an article by Noam Chomsky ridiculing the idea that human language could be the product of evolution. At the time I had no knowledge of Chomsky's politics. I wrote him off as a sophisticated creationist.
It's interesting to examine the parallels between ID and socialism. On one hand you have people who deny that undirected events can produce use biological features, and on the other hand you have people who deny that an undirected economy can produce wealth.
Or that planets can move without being pushed by angels.
Apparently, you can't stop trying even though the refutations of your nonsense are obvious. The existence of intelligently designed organizations and objects in the modern world economy does not mean that the modern world economy had a designer. If it did, who was said designer, God?
What is the matter with you people that you can't ever even once even in the most obvious instance say, "Whoops! Good point! I probably shouldn't have claimed what I did!?"
"Your argument seems to be that if governments do anything, however minor, to facilitate markets, the markets are government controlled."
No, that's not my point at all. That's just another example of your incorrigible missing of the point.
The point here is not that government "controls" anything. The point is that, simply by using government-backed currency, the trading involves a government-based "intelligent design" that is explicitly ruled out in purely naturalistic evolution.
But I don't expect you to get it because that would require honest, objective thinking.
"I'd just like to make one more point about markets and governments. When I was a teenager, my family lived for a couple of years in Tanzania. This was, at the time, a formally Marxist state with tight economic controls. As a result, there were shortages of almost anything. The result was a flourishing hard currency black market, which the government did little to persecute but nothing to encourage. So, if you wanted to buy soap, you paid dollars (which you weren't supposed to own) to a guy who smuggled the soap into the country; and if he cheated you, going to the police was not an option. So much fro government's role in a market economy."
They used what? Oh, dollars, eh.
Gold and other precious materials were used as a medium of exchange long before there were government backed currencies. In fact, early governments (e.g. the Roman Empire) frequently debased previously reliable mediums of exchange.
But I don't expect you to get it because that would require honest, objective thinking.
No, to 'get it' would require complete ignorance of the history of economics.
So you're claiming the US Government has juridiction in Tanzania?
You don't need a government to have a medium of exchange.
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