71–80 of 125 posts
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There's nothing wrong with an appeal to authority in response to an appeal to authority.
Why not? How does a logical fallacy become okay if it is in response to the same logical fallacy?
Ah, we have the Adam Smith article again. As somebody interested in these for many years, there is a periodic rewriting of this article. The beats are always the same, Smith not actually like evil neoliberals (whoever that is) think. He also wrote 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments' and so on. Admittedly this is by far the best one I have seen in many years. Nothing in the article is really wrong, and it is completely c…
Just like with the beatitudes, if Freedom Market™ cultists read Adam Smith for themselves, maybe we'd have somewhat more productive discourse.
FWIW, what I gleened from this "rewriting" is Adam's warnings about 'spirit of the system'. Rings true. As a recovering methodologist and self-proclaimed agent of change, humiliated by repeated failures (a la Alistair Cockburn), I wish younger me had grasped this sooner.
http://alistair.cockburn.us/Characterizing+people+as+non-lin...
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From Paul Sagar's bio (the author of this article): "i am lecturer in political theory in the department of political economy, king’s college london i completed my doctorate at the university of cambridge (2014), after receiving an ma in intellectual history and the history of political thought from the university of london (2010), and a ba in politics, philosophy, and economics from the university of oxford (2008).…
Everybody has a bias, his interpretation where it goes away from his words does so too. His own opinions color his view of Smith, as does mine. My point was that his text was not wrong, but it played to people who interpret it in certain ways. A naive reading of his article would lead one to conclude that Treacher and Stalin were the same in the eyes of Smith. I was just point out that just because they are the same…
Given that The West adopted private capitalism whereas the Warsaw Pact adopted state capitalism:
This article's interpretation of Adam's warnings about the failings of both the merchants (chartered monopolists) and politicians directing allocation of resources, against the interests of the citizenry, is spot on.
I took the comparison of Thatcher and Stalin to be more about their top-down efforts to remake society based on some unattainable ideal, vs something about economics.
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>"I have never met a Neoliberal" That's because neoliberalism is not an ideology, but a label used to try to understand a historic period. Neoliberalism would be the bastard child of neoclassic economics and liberal ideology and it can be defined by events and people that definitely exist. The intellectual parents would be the economist in the orbit of Milton Friedman and the 'Chicago school' and the political parent…
> That's because neoliberalism is not an ideology, but a label used to try to understand a historic period. No its not. Its a term that is used by pretty much anybody for whatever they felt like. > The intellectual parents would be the economist in the orbit of Milton Friedman and the 'Chicago school' and the political parents would be Reagan and Thatcher. That is just false. Friedman never called himself a neolibera…
Lack of self-identification with the term doesn't necessarily matter. The terms "mercantilism" and "capitalism" were popularized by their critics (Smith, Marx) without anyone calling themselves a "mercantilist" etc.
Otherwise, yea "neoliberal" just seems to mean "the parts of more or less mainstream economics that I am feeling cranky about at the moment and would feel validated if it were reified into a bogeyman that we should all be outraged at."
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I think there's an increasingly compelling argument to be made at this moment in history, with the rise of powerful increasingly intelligent software that can 1) rigorously shape policy to ensure that ends are met and that 2) the means to those ends employ minimal bias, and 3) do so adaptively, shifting policy dynamically as circumstances evolve. I believe it's time to start planning for the day when we shutter the v…
I agree with your analysis of the problem. However, I deeply distrust your solution. Two problems: One, do we really get unbiased software? Or do we get software that's claimed to be unbiased, but has actually been quietly biased according to the authors' prejudices (and all attempts to criticize it get shot down because "it's really unbiased, so the problem is with you")? Or do we really get a good-faith attempt to…
What I'm worried about is this: technology has always been a force multiplier for those who wield it. For now it's us (maybe in the future it will be a superintelligent AI, maybe not). Even if we manage to write a pretty unbiased governing software, how are we going to ensure that it isn't subtly manipulated by some interested party? And can we ensure that while also making the system extensible, so that it can cope with the demands caused by the impact of ever-progressing technology on our societies? It seems to me that the two goals - a system above humans and a system that can evolve with us - are fundamentally incompatible.
Nice article – gives a bit more background on Smith's ideas and why it's wrong to flag him as an absolute free market advocate. TL;DR – The invisible hand doesn't symbolise the problem of state intervention, but of state capture (i.e. merchant elites lobbying governments to protect their monopolies). On the other hand, merchant elites are a "necessary evil" and the art of good governance is balancing over- and under-…
The second sentence is 100% true and completely in line with Adam Smith's thinking and the overall Scottish Enlightenment.
The first sentence is an accurate summary of the article, but the article is slightly but profoundly wrong. Smith and his ilk probably would think that the (modern) idea of "state intervention" vs "state non-intervention" to be silly. By the time of Ricardo, JS Mill and Marx, "moral philosophers" like Smith were referred to as "political economists" because they understood that the state was the base layer on which the rest of society was built. After all, even if someone is a complete "market fundamentalist" today, he or she still depends on the state enforcing property rights, enforcing general criminal laws against theft, murder, rape, etc., and enforcing private causes of action like torts against neighbors who cause a nuisance, pollute, etc. Were Adam Smith alive today, he would be in favor of all of those "state interventions" in the market, as he seems to have been in his own time. (As a parallel, the concept of "civil society" has followed a similar arc: Originally, Aristotle meant a community bound under a common set of norms and the rule of law. Over time, the concept came to mean groups that exist "outside" or exclusive of the state.)
At the same time, he would have likely been against some of the more heavy-handed regulatory approaches that modern states use from agricultural planning to zoning rules, and he would be against them for the same reason that he disliked the Mercantile System in the 18th century: they give huge advantages to incumbents, they often fail to solve the problems they are organized to solve, and they depend on effectively arbitrary rule by the state.
In my opinion, modern thinking has overzealously accepted black-and-white dichotomies like "for or against state intervention" or defining huge enumerations of incontrovertible "rights." In reality, the intelligent question would be (and the one Smith, Hume, et al. seemed interested in), as your second sentence suggests, "How much should the state intervene so that outcomes are better than the alternative?"
From the man himself:
> All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society. According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expence to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.
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There is a difference between a state and a corporation: one of those is a monopoly by definition.
> There is a difference between a state and a corporation: one of those is a monopoly by definition. There is another difference: one of those grants voting (and other) rights to all its members.
this describes the current "capitalist" system we have today, where powerful individuals can lobby the state to create laws favouring them directly. the problem is, of course, the existence of the state.
Of course. Maybe you can point us to some examples, current or historical, where human societies thrived without the existence of the state.
this describes the current "capitalist" system we have today, where powerful individuals can lobby the state to create laws favouring them directly. the problem is, of course, the existence of the state.
There's no "of course" about it. If you're going to claim that the problem is the existence of the state, you need a lot more evidence than "of course". Certainly you cannot claim the support of Adam Smith in your assertion.
I'm surprised it didn't mention an obvious difference from modern conceptions of the free market: he thought landownership was a monopoly privilege that could be taxed without harm, so long as you are taxing only the land rent itself, not the improvements. "Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses. A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altog…
Today, Krugman, Stiglitz and Milton Friedman agree on land value taxes.
The economic consensus on this topic was achieved long ago. Its a political issue , not an economic one.