The road to serfdom before Hayek (Knight, Lippmann, and a note on Weber today) — Eric Schliesser

So, here's my hypothesis. The road to serfdom thesis was if not inspired by Lippmann, at least prompted, in part, by him. But Lippmann did not hold the thesis; it is articulated by Knight in his review of Lippmann and (mistakenly) ascribed to Lippmann. Knight, however, thinks there is nothing inevitable about the thesis because he thinks the future is still very much open. I cannot prove that Hayek read Knight's review of Lippmann. (Knight was later a somewhat ambivalent referee for The University of Chicago Press of Road to Serfdom.) But Knight articulated several major challenges to liberal self-reflection in his review of Lippmann. And some of Hayek's major contributions to the liberal self-imagine, for good and ill, can be fruitfully interpreted as responses to that review.

Digressions&Impressions
The road to serfdom before Hayek (Knight, Lippmann, and a note on Weber today)
Eric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

According to parasite stress theory, we should see higher levels of collectivism in situations of higher pathogen stress, but not in response to other kinds of material insecurity. 

According to the material insecurity or institutional hypotheses, we should expect people to exhibit less collectivism and in-group loyalty when state-level institutions successfully meet people’s basic needs and guard against material threats.

Finally, the asocial life history hypothesis suggests that in situations where people have fewer opportunities to control risk, for example, in situations of greater mortality and economic uncertainty, they will avoid investments in anything but their own immediate reproduction (and thus eschew commitments to relationships and other social investments).

Another important distinction between these different theories is the feedbacks they posit.

Parasite stress and asocial life history theories both assume a relatively fixed environment to which individuals adapt.

The material insecurity or institutional hypothesis, on the other hand, assumes positive co-evolutionary feedbacks, whereby the existence of beneficial institutions can lead people to make further investments in those institutions to render them even better investments in the future. Thus, the material insecurity or institutional hypothesis can lead to novel social trajectories which are not purely driven by initial conditions—such as parasite levels—in a setting.…

Suggestive rather than conclusive, but interesting nevertheless.

Evonomics
A New Theory That Explains Economic Individualism and Collectivism
Daniel Hruschka | Associate Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University

Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Gérard Roland — The role of culture on democratisation

Heresy! Economics professors bringing in sociology. The horror of it. Who knows where this could lead. And look where it led Kenneth Boulding, who left economics to participate in the development of general systems theory.

Social science studies usually explain democratisation of countries with the increase in incomes. In contrast, this column argues that culture is a neglected but important determinant of democracy. The findings show that countries with individualist culture democratise earlier than collectivist cultures that may remain stuck for a long time with relatively efficient autocracies.....

We compare decisions of collective action under an individualistic culture, giving social status reward to standing out and innovativeness, and a collectivist culture emphasising conformity and embeddedness in large groups (tribes, clans).

• Individualistic culture tends to create a demand for democracy, as individual freedom is fundamental for self-achievement. Equality before the law and limited government provided under democracy help protect individual freedom.
• Collectivist culture instead focuses more on the necessity of a benevolent ruler to create stability between different clans and groups. The emphasis is more on hierarchy and order, and freedom can be seen as endangering stability.

As I have mentioned previously, the categories of the vertical axis of the Political Compass would be more accurately labeled "law & order" at the pole now labeled "authoritarian" and "freedom" for the pole now labeled "libertarian."

Because of these cultural differences, when there is a window of opportunity for collective action in an individualistic society, however infrequent, revolt against autocracy will always occur, independent of the quality of autocracy, and will lead to democracy. In contrast, in a collectivist society revolts against good autocrats will be rarer. Windows of collective action will thus lead either to democracy or to the establishment of a higher quality autocracy. Collectivist societies may thus remain ‘stuck’ with a relatively high quality autocracy. In the long run, individualist societies will thus end up with a democratic regime, whereas collectivist societies will end up either with democracy or with a high quality autocracy. The implication is that individualist societies will end up more often having democratic regimes than collectivist societies, even if collective action occurs less often than in collectivist societies that might be better in coordinating collective action.

The problem with this analysis is cognitive bias toward individualism and therefore "democracy." The authors focus too much on the poles and thereby creating an excluded middle range that include most political systems today. There is no government on earth today that is a true democracy as a government of the people, by the people and for the people. However, there are still some absolute (despotic and nepotistic) autocracies like Saudi Arabia. The so-called democracies are republics that are actually oligarchic plutocracies. What the authors call "democracy" is actually plutonomy, or as US founding father John Jay, the first chief justice of the US Supreme Court, is reputed to have said, "Those who own the country should govern the country." This was largely the view of the other founding fathers and the US Constitution as well as the discussion around it reflect this bias.

Another matter that the authors overlook is the fact that freedom assume security, whereas security can exist independently of freedom. Therefore, individualism alone is not a sufficient condition for democracy.

Again, societies rarely have become successfully democratic in other than a minimal way of holding period elections without the development of institutions that support law and order in a democratic society. The United States was an anomaly in that it was a new nation, on one hand, and secondly, most of the people involved at the beginning were British. Britain has a long history of power gradually being devolved from the crown to powerful feudal lords, beginning with the Magna Carta, and then from the landed aristocracy to include an upper class of landed gentry under the manor system and then the owners of capital. As result institutions were already either in place or patterns available for adoption by the new government. Imposing democracy on countries without such an institutional heritage and developmental process has generally not worked as well as hoped for.

My conclusion is that since the authors are economists, they have a strong cognitive bias toward methodological individualism that has shaped their thinking on this matter. They need to think it through more deeply. Culture has many more factors that individualism and collectivism, and even though terms are biased in that they carry a connotative charge instead of being purely denotative. Conversely, some sociologists who do not operate under the cognitive-affective bias of individualism might see what the authors call "collectivism" as "tribalism," which implies a strong emphasis on social fabric and social capital, whereas "individualism" implies a weak emphasis on social fabric and social capital. Psychologists might see he individualism of homo economicus as implying alienation and detachment, and the holism of homo socialis as implying adjustment and connectedness.

Interestingly, the only real democracy was evidenced by so-called primitive people. Even Athens, the so-called cradle of democracy, was based on a slave economy that gave the Athenian (male) citizens the leisure to debate the issues. Some time ago, I saw a documentary of a tribe of about two hundred people in Panama that made decisions collectively by consensus sitting in a circle with all members of the tribe, even very young children. Everyone had their turn and the youngest children, who obviously didn't know what was going on yet, were encouraged to say something, which everyone listened to intently, too. As far as I know, the closest we got in the US  was the New England town meeting.

But I am glad to see economists venturing off the reservation.

vox.eu

The role of culture on democratisation

Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Associate Professor in the Department of Economics, University of California – Berkeley, and Gérard Roland, E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley; and CEPR Research Fellow

Heather Cox Richardson — It’s Worse than Scott Walker and Ted Cruz: Secrets of Conservatives’ Decades-Long War on Truth

Deep on page 546 of his 1,839-page budget, Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker tucked in a crucial idea. He proposed to strip a principle from the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin, a school that attracts students from all over the nation and from 131 foreign countries. From the core philosophy that has driven the university since the turn of the last century Walker wanted to hack out the words: “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.” Rather than serving the people of the state by developing intellectual, cultural and humane sensitivities, expertise, and “a sense of purpose,” Walker prefers that the state university simply “meet the state’s workforce needs.” In the face of scathing criticism, the governor backtracked and, despite a trail of emails that led to his office, tried to claim the new language was a “drafting error.”

But Walker’s attempt to replace the search for truth with workforce training was no error. Since the earliest days of Movement Conservatism in the 1950s, its leaders have understood that the movement’s success depends on destroying Americans’ faith in the academic search for truth. For two generations, Movement Conservatives have subverted American politics, with increasing success, by explicitly rejecting the principle of open debate based in reasoned argument. They have refused to engage with facts and instead simply demonized anyone who disagrees with their ideology. This is an astonishing position. It is an attack on the Enlightenment principles that gave rise to Western civilization.

Make no mistake: the attack is deliberate....

In 1951, a young William F. Buckley, Jr. articulated a strategy for opposing the consensus that supported New Deal policies. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’” was a sophomoric diatribe by the Catholic son of a wealthy oil magnate, published by the small right-wing Henry Regnery Press. In it, Buckley rejected the principles that had enabled social progress for centuries and laid out a mind-boggling premise: The Enlightenment, the intellectual basis of Western Civilization, was wrong.
Rational argument supported by facts did not lead to sound societal decisions, Buckley claimed; it led people astray. Christianity and an economy based on untrammeled individualism were truths that should not be questioned. Impartial debate based in empirical facts was dangerous because it led people toward secularism and collectivism—both bad by definition, according to Buckley. Instead of engaging in rational argument, Buckley insisted, thinkers must stand firm on what he called a new “value orthodoxy” that indoctrinated people to understand that Christianity and economic individualism were absolute truths. Maintaining that faith in reasoned debate was a worse “superstition” than the Enlightenment had set out to replace, Buckley launched an intellectual war to replace the principle of academic inquiry with a Christian and individualist ideology..

In 1960, a new voice added anti-intellectual populism to Buckley’s rhetoric. Political operative Phyllis Schlafly wrote “A Choice Not an Echo” to support Barry Goldwater’s quest for the presidential nomination. In her world, correct political decisions were simple: The nation was engaged in a great struggle between good and evil, and educated Eastern Elites who insisted on weighing the realities of a complicated world had enlisted on the wrong side. Elites complained that Goldwater “had one-sentence solutions” for complicated problems, she wrote, but simple solutions were the answer. Communism was bad, so anyone advocating government activism was evil. Elites arguing for government action were parasites. All they really wanted was money from government contracts, paid for by hardworking regular Americans..

By the time of the George W. Bush administration, Movement Conservatives had constructed a post-modern political world where reality mattered far less than the popular story of Conservatives standing firm against the “Liberal agenda” of godlessness and communism. As a member of the Bush administration [Karl Rove] famously noted to journalist Ron Suskind, “the reality-based” view of the world was obsolete. It was no longer viable to believe that people could find solutions to societal problems by studying reality. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” this senior advisor to the president told Suskind. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”.

When Governor Walker replaced “the search for truth” with “meet the state’s workforce needs” in the charge to the University of Wisconsin, he did not make an error. He was articulating the principle that has driven Movement Conservatives since their earliest days: Facts and arguments can only lead Americans toward a government that regulates business and supports working Americans, and they must be squelched. The search for truth must be replaced by an ideology that preserves Christianity and big-business individualism. Religion and freedom for mega-business, Movement Conservatives insist, is what America is all about.

AlterNet
It’s Worse than Scott Walker and Ted Cruz: Secrets of Conservatives’ Decades-Long War on Truth
Heather Cox Richardson, Salon

Izabella Kaminska — The tendency towards cartelisation

Cartelization v. voluntary collectivism. Covers a lot of ground implicitly concerning the relationship of capitalism, socialism and communitarianism, the role of value and incentives in motivation, and many other matters that are key to differentiating socio-economic systems based on distribution of power and wealth.

Dizzynomics
The tendency towards cartelisation

Izabella Kaminska

Steve Randy Waldman — Ersatz individualism makes the American collective strong

Here’s a statement that I don’t think will be too contentious, across the ideological spectrum:
"The American way is to draw sharp distinctions between winners and losers, in order to encourage people to hustle." ...

But, in the lingo of economics, consider the “social welfare function” embedded in this story. The claim is emphatically not that this system maximizes some measure of aggregate utility that could be decomposed to a sum of individual welfares. On the contrary, it celebrates as necessary large costs in individual welfare for the sake of impersonal characteristics of the aggregate: “prosperity”, or “strength”. It is an entirely collectivist justification for policies that are deeplyharmful at an individual level, if you take seriously at all the idea of diminishing marginal utility. The individualist approach to maximizing welfare would be to redistribute. If we (contentiously but commonly) assume people share comparable utility functions, aggregate utility is maximized by taking from the rich and giving to the poor. At least in a methodological sense, it is socialists who are the individualists, attending to the sum of individual welfares, while unsympathetic capitalists rely upon collectivism to justify their good fortune and the policy apparatus that magnifies and sustains it.

As SRW observes, there is a divergence on the right between Libertarians and conservatives on this matter. Libertarians deny any collective influence, whereas the most important factor for conservatives is the strength of the nation, especially relative to other nations. Conservatism pretends to be liberal, being based on individualism, but it is inherently Tory, holding that political and economic strength arises from rule by the best for the good of the nation, and not necessarily the people. What's good for America is not necessarily good for all or even most Americans.

This post is sure to spark an interesting philosophical and historical discussion over there. I suggest reading de Tocqueville's chapter on enlightened self-interest along with it: How The Americans Combat Individualism By The Principle Of Self-Interest Rightly Understood, Democracy in America, Chapter VIII.

Interfluidity
Ersatz individualism makes the American collective strong
Steve Randy Waldman

Washington's Blog — Ayn Rand Was NOT a Libertarian

Many people assume that Ayn Rand was a champion of libertarian thought.

But Rand herself pilloried libertarians, condemning libertarianism as being a greater threat to freedom and capitalism than both modern liberalism and conservativism.

Washington's Blog
Ayn Rand Was NOT a Libertarian
WashingtonsBlog