progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
The enormous publicity recently given by the media to a report pronouncing in the name
of science on The Limits to Growth, and the silence of the same media about the
devastating criticism this report has received from the competent experts, must make one
feel somewhat apprehensive about the use to which the prestige of science can be put. But
it is by no means only in the field of economics that far‐reaching claims are made on
behalf of a more scientific direction of all human activities and the desirability of
replacing spontaneous processes by "conscious human control".
If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology, not to
speak about the so‐called philosophy of history, are even more affected by what I have
called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what science can achieve."
The Limits to Growth, the work written by the Club of Rome, was, in the period of the
early 1970s, a hubris beyond belief. This group had said they could model all of
humanities future and from their models they started to tell society what they had
determined was the best path. There is a fear here reflected in Hayek's words. This fear
can today be applied to many areas, from the global warming hysteria of some, to the
ability of some macroeconomists to give predictions within 1%!
5.3.2 Economics
Hayek was a critic of the economists who had their models when all too often not only
had not questions been answered but more importantly the key questions may not have
been asked. Economists all too often follow the example of simplifying for their resulting
ability to mode, thus saying "Assume a spherical elephant with wings." and then detailing
the aerodynamics of such a creature when in fact there is no such entity.
From Hayek's work, Economics and Knowledge we have 122 :
"I am certain there are many who regard with impatience and distrust the whole
tendency, which is inherent in all modern equilibrium analysis, to turn economics into a
branch of pure logic, a set of self-evident propositions which, like mathematics or
geometry, are subject to no other test but internal consistency.
But it seems that if only this process is carried far enough it carries its own remedy with
it. In distilling from our reasoning about the facts of economic life those parts which
are truly a priori, we not only isolate one element of our reasoning as a sort of pure
logic of choice in all its purity, but we also isolate, and emphasize the importance of,
another element which has been too much neglected.
My criticism of the recent tendencies to make economic theory more and more formal
is not that they have gone too far, but that they have not yet been carried far enough to
complete the isolation of this branch of logic and to restore to its rightful place the
122 http://www.econlib.org/library/NPDBooks/Thirlby/bcthLS3.html#Hayek
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