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

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The Telmarc Group 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 Page 116
The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL investigation of causal processes, using formal economic theory as a tool in the same way as mathematics." Thus Hayek is not saying that the economist should shy away from his models. Indeed he embraces them. Yet he is saying that we must understand the causes, not the models. Hayek in the same work makes a final observation: "There is only one more point in this connection which I should like to mention. This is that if the tendency towards equilibrium, which we have reason to believe to exist on empirical grounds, is only towards an equilibrium relative to that knowledge which people will acquire in the course of their economic activity, and if any other change of knowledge must be regarded as a 'change in the data' in the usual sense of the term, which falls outside the sphere of equilibrium analysis, this would mean that equilibrium analysis can really tell us nothing about the significance of such changes in knowledge, and would go far to account for the fact that pure analysis seems to have so extraordinarily little to say about institutions, such as the press, the purpose of which is to communicate knowledge. And it might even explain why the pre-occupation with pure analysis should so frequently create a peculiar blindness to the role played in real life by such institutions as advertising". We now want to look at a couple of his specific works. 5.3.3 Road to Serfdom The Road to Serfdom was Hayek's most famous book, and as a result his most important. There are two points to be made initially. First Hayek was opposed to the principles and applications of central planning as promulgated by the socialists. Second, Hayek was not a proponent of laissez faire, he believe there were proper reasons for certain restraints. Central planning, as it was proposed then and as practiced by the Soviet Union eschews the free market as the arbiter of supply and demand. The Central Planner decides how much to make of what based upon "studies". A classic example of a centrally planned sector of the US economy was the telephone business prior to 1982 when divestiture was enacted. You could get a black rotary phone, period. One could see the same now happening to health care as the Government takes more and more control. A socialist to Hayek is one who not only wants government ownership but more importantly government control, the control is the critical factor. For Hayek he says 123 : 123 Hayek, Serfdom, p 37. Page 117
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progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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