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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Friday, December 09, 2005
I have to admit to being a little uncomfortable about this interview with John Searle:"Like every other undergraduate of my generation, when Hayek's book came out, I found it was treated as an object of ridicule. I remember a professor of economics saying, "Hayek is the last of the Mohicans of the classical economists. He's the last one left, holding this absurd view that's long since been refuted."...
If we're going to talk about the failure of socialism, an awful lot of the failures had to do with exactly what Hayek predicted. It would be interesting for somebody to analyze in a more scholarly vein to what extent he was right: that there wasn't any halfway point of democratic socialism, that it would naturally collapse into various forms of oppression, that however well-intentioned the setting up of the socialist bureaucracy was, it would be bound to have calamitous effects."
To some extent, the idea that a decentralised market system (i.e. a free market) is more adaptable and efficient than a centralised and planned economy seems self-evident now (though it hardly seems difficult to understand why it might have been thought that a centralised model would succeed through eliminating duplication and waste; it applies in a context where standardisation can easily be applied but not as ready to one where people have differing needs and requirements). Hayek took the view that since knowledge is limited and reason constrained, complex societies are not subject to prediction. In particular, attempting to predict social behaviour in advance of the individual decision is invalid since the the predicting agency may skew the results. This formed the backbone of Hayek's critique of communism. As a consequence of this epistemology Hayek defended conservatism, as against rationalistic reformers, and free markets against command economics.
The problems is that I'm far from persuaded that the current 'End of History' triumphalism isn't as shortsighted as the description of Hayek as the last of the Mohicans. Compare and contrast Searle's account with this snippet from a recent interview with John Gray:"He read Hayek in the late 1960s, and understood his essential point to be that markets in some sense know more than any of the people who operate in them. It followed that state planning, and social engineering based on rational discussion were always likely to go wrong. This much was common among Thatcherites in the 70s, but unlike most Thatcherites, he saw that ripping down communities to make way for a market was itself a form of social engineering, though an often anti-social one... "In the United States free markets have contributed to social breakdown on a scale unknown in any other developed country. Families are weaker in America than in any other country. At the same time, social order has been propped up by a policy of mass incarceration. No other advanced industrial country, aside from post-communist Russia, uses imprisonment as a means of social control on the scale of the United States. Free markets, the desolation of families and communities and the use of the sanctions of criminal law as a last recourse against social collapse go in tandem."
As matters currently stand, free market economics in Western countries persistently has the effect of creating substantial inequalities (where rising standards of living at the bottom end of the income spectrum have simply not compensated for the extent to which these have been dwarfed by increases at the upper end) and highly restricted social mobility. The European welfare states that are currently been dismantled were created in the first place (often by social conservatives) as a means of addressing these issues and assuaging the risk of unrest that flowed from them. Put bluntly, none of this really strikes me as offering an especially attractive social model, regardless of Anglo-Saxon triumphalism.Labels: Politics
posted by Richard 7:51 pm
