Posted on 05/15/2007 9:10:23 PM PDT by jazusamo
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Radically different conclusions about a whole range of issues have been common for centuries. Many have tried to explain these differences by differences in conflicting economic interests. Others, like John Maynard Keynes, have argued that ideas -- even intellectually discredited ideas that political leaders still believe in -- trump economic interests.
My own view is that differences in bedrock assumptions underlying ideas play a major role in determining how people differ in what policies, principles or ideologies they favor.
If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.
If no one has even one percent of the knowledge currently available, not counting the vast amounts of knowledge yet to be discovered, the imposition from the top of the notions favored by elites convinced of their own superior knowledge and virtue is a formula for disaster.
Sometimes it is economic disaster, which central planning turned out to be in so many countries around the world that even most governments run by socialists and communists began freeing up their markets by the end of the 20th century.
That is when the economies of China and India, for example, began having rapidly increasing growth rates.
But economic disasters, important as they are, have not been the worst consequences of people with less than one percent of the world's knowledge superimposing the ideas prevailing in elite circles on those subject to their power -- that is, on the people who together have the other 99 percent of knowledge.
Millions of human beings died of starvation, and of diseases related to severe malnutrition, when the economic ideas of Stalin in the Soviet Union and Mao in China were inflicted on the population living -- and dying -- under their iron rule.
In both cases, the deaths exceeded the deaths caused by Hitler's genocide, which was also a consequence of ignorant presumptions by those with totalitarian power.
Many on the left may protest that they do not believe in the ideas or the political systems that prevailed under Hitler, Stalin or Mao. No doubt that is true.
Yet what the political left, even in democratic countries, share is the notion that knowledgeable and virtuous people like themselves have both a right and a duty to use the power of government to impose their superior knowledge and virtue on others.
They may not impose their presumptions wholesale, like the totalitarians, but retail in innumerable restrictions, ranging from economic and nanny state regulations to "hate speech" laws.
If no one has even one percent of all the knowledge in a society, then it is crucial that the other 99 percent of knowledge -- scattered in tiny and individually unimpressive amounts among the population at large -- be allowed the freedom to be used in working out mutual accommodations among the people themselves.
These innumerable mutual interactions are what bring the other 99 percent of knowledge into play -- and generate new knowledge.
That is why free markets, judicial restraint, and reliance on decisions and traditions growing out of the experiences of the many -- rather than the groupthink of the elite few -- are so important.
Elites are all too prone to over-estimate the importance of the fact that they average more knowledge per person than the rest of the population -- and under-estimate the fact that their total knowledge is so much less than that of the rest of the population.
They over-estimate what can be known in advance in elite circles and under-estimate what is discovered in the process of mutual accommodations among millions of ordinary people.
Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.
The ignorance of people with Ph.D.s is still ignorance, the prejudices of educated elites are still prejudices, and for those with one percent of a society's knowledge to be dictating to those with the other 99 percent is still an absurdity.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.
“What things are others duty-bound to impose, through government, on the rest of us?”
That’s almost a quote, and I believe Sowell wrote it.
“Question for my Socialist friends:
Why are others bound to do for you that which you will not do for yourselves?”
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THOMAS SEWELL shared the 2 greatest dangers America faces in this new time of war with us last week on Conservative Talk Radio.
The GULLIBILITY of the American People has them once again being led by the nose by the very same people who long ago gave us:
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Pictures of a vietnamese Re-Education (SLAVE LABOR) Camp
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1308949/posts
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..”JOURNEY from the FALL”.. MoviePremieres = Fall of Saigon CLARITY..
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1806248/posts
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Indeed, our GULLIBILITY could well be the End of us.
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Sowell likely knows that he is not well suited for electoral decision making. He has thus specialized in ideas on political economy where he has a comparative advantage and has had much more influence than he would have if he had tried to branch out into electoral politics where his influence would be diluted by having to make practical political compromises.
Sowell is a great writer, but does anyone else wonder why his paragraphs are so short? I get the impression he is trying to spoon-feed the ignorant, at least in his op-ed pieces. Unfortunately, as always, the ignorant who need most to read his articles won’t ever see them, and he is preaching to the choir here at FR.
bttt
Excessive power in the hands of one or a few individuals will always be a problem. Just look at your own workplace. How many petty tyrants does the average person run across in a lifetime of work? Quite a few in my experience. I could easily picture the damage a few of my past and present co-workers and supervisors could do if given much more power than what they held or currently hold. If you know any persons who refuse to admit to ever making mistakes, you just might have a future Stalin or Mao if given that much power.
read “Vision of the Anointed”. That is one of his best.
I have always loved this man’s thinking.
Fred Thompson/John Bolton 2008
“LOL! A lot of his statements he comes up with I already knew but I had no idea how to really express it and he does it so easily.”
SO easily! Look at his essays-AMAZING! He uses just the words needed-no more no less. Just try to add or remove a single word from his writings-it can’t be done...
No one has even one percent of all the knowledge in a society, because knowledge is not all articulated rationally (as Sowell would say, and has).When my daughter was little she had an operation in a NY city hospital, and I found myself travelling daily on an otherwise unfamiliar route to visit her. After I had done so for a few times, I noticed myself driving in the left lane when it would have seemed more appropriate to stay in the right lane. So I swung over into the right lane - and was rewarded with a rough patch in the highway which was unpleasant to subject my undercarriage of my car to. Apparently I had subconsciously learned that, but didn't consciously know it until I consciously overrode my subconscious "knowledge" and consciously found out why I was doing what I was doing.
Any time you make a mistake, you have to ruefully realize that the chances are excellent that somebody somewhere was already so familiar with that particular trap that they wouldn't be caught dead falling into it. Look at the tables of stock prices: those represent the best current estimate of the values of those stocks, but time will show that nearly all of them are wildly inaccurate. All you have to do is know one stock which is wildly undervalued, and buy it on margin - or know one stock which is wildly overvalued, and sell it short. But do you do know one? If you do, you have bet the farm on it. If you haven't done so, then you don't know, do you? (That point came from Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell "Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare...").
It's shocking to me that any FReeper can read Thomas Sowell's columns and confess to having only read a paltry three of his books. The man has written dozens of books - and most of them are gems.
The elitism of liberalism is its most illiberal feature. It is intensified by their tendency to glom together in certain places, so that they are certain never to hear contrary opinions, ignorance reinforcing ignorance.
Very good read, and how very true. Amen.
This seems to be almost universal in opinion columns. I think it's a factor of the distribution over the internet, rather than every writer's using one-sentence paragraphs.
Good Lord. I hope that is not an indictment of ME reading a “Paltry” three of his books...I would presume having done that, I am in the upper five percent of nearly any demographic slice you would make!!!
“Why are others bound to do for you that which you will not do for yourselves?””
That’s close. But what I’m wondering is what do others have a duty to IMPOSE on us, rather than do for us?
I think it has to do with writing for newspapers, which have very narrow columns. People are used to seeing 5-10 line paragraphs, which is what these are if you narrow the article to newpaper column width.
Oh, good point! I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll have to look at my newspapers to see if they’re doing just that.
Indictment? Of course not - more of an incitement to get you to take a trip to the library and see what else Sowell has written besides the three titles you mentioned. Those three are among his best, but there are numerous others which can be compared with them and some might even be better. When I first tumbled to how insightful Thomas Sowell was, I went to the library and got as many of his books as I could - and back then he hadn't written half as many as he now has to his credit.
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