While Hayek regarded some advocates of social justice as cynically aware that they were really engaged in a concentration of power, the greater danger he saw in those sincerely promoting the concept with a zeal which unconsciously prepares the way for others—totalitarians—to step in after the undermining of ideological, political, and legal barriers to government power makes their task easier.
This is one of the key dangers of centralizing power, and why I’m always interested in how people pursue goals versus what specifically they’re after. If, to achieve your objective, you have to bash down existing separations of power to get the work done, you have to be prepared for a successor (with whom you don’t agree) to deploy the same overconcentration of power to pursue ends you dislike. If you approve of presidential executive orders and the executive branch overriding legislative controls to “get things done”, you shouldn’t be surprised when your enemy does the same in the next term. But it’s less important whether you feel bad about or disagree strongly with a successor using the hammer. The lesson is to avoid centralizing authority as much as possible.
A system designed with constraining barriers — like the American system of checks and balances — optimizes for something many people don’t realize. It’s not about enabling us to pursue maximum upside at all costs. Bureacracy is meant to slow things down, sometimes idealistic ends take decades. It’s about limiting catastrophic downsides: the tyranny of the majority, the slide into totalitarianism.
Sowell’s constrained vs. unconstrained vision model describes a framework for thinking about how certain psychologies will approach a problem solving or policy decision. The “constrained” has just that, a constrained view of what’s possible — of the innate intractability of the universe, of human fallibility. An environment defined by trade-offs. The “unconstrained” sees trade-offs as in our way, things to be disposed of or ignored to pursue our optimal path. Limited appreciation for the fact that we have no idea if what we think is optimal is actually so.
Constrained = seek first to explain the encountered Chesterton Fence.
Unconstrained = get annoyed by said fence, declare it an irritating obstruction, bulldoze.
The collapse of trust in our leading institutions has exiled the 21st century to the Siberia of post-truth. I want to be clear about what this means. Reality has not changed. It’s still unyielding. Facts today are partial and contradictory—but that’s always been the case. Post-truth, as I define it, signifies a moment of sharply divergent perspectives on every subject or event, without a trusted authority in the room to settle the matter. A telling symptom is that we no longer care to persuade. We aim to impose our facts and annihilate theirs, a process closer to intellectual holy war than to critical thinking.
A good summary of Hayek’s famous 1974 address, “A Pretence of Knowledge.” Thinking you can “figure everything out” with expertise is dangerous.
If we truly wish to improve society, we must be humble and realize the bounds of what is possible with social science. Rather than attempting to shape society directly like a sculptor shapes a statue, we must seek instead to understand and to create the right environment for progress, like a gardener in a garden. Overconfidence in the use of science to control society will make a man a tyrant, and will lead to the destruction of a civilization which no brain has designed, but which has instead grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.
I’ve been reading some of Hayek’s famous articles this week. This one is all about what he probably considered one of the most important concepts, since these basic ideas form a central thesis for most of his works. His argument was for bottoms-up, decentralized systems of decision-making instead of centralized, top-down systems:
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
This short film of drone footage showcases the amazing, almost-alien, landscapes of Iceland. This guy’s channel has a lot of interesting quick films like this.
A fuzzy finder for the command line. Just install it from Homebrew with brew install fzf and improve your file searching on the shell. No more having to remember find command syntax.
