voluntaryXchange

Hayek On Exhaustible Resources

The ultimate resource is human ingenuity:*

The "fixed" character of minerals has been a siren song to economists who saw less when there was really more. The mineral economist should never forget that what resources come from the ground ultimately depend on the resources in the mind.

Hayek via Bradley via David Henderson of EconLog.

* This is why Paul Romer made the point that 40,000 years ago we were painting (cave walls) with iron oxides, while today we are painting (hard drives) with iron oxides. The capital in the raw material is the same, but technology has augmented the productivity we get out of it.

Cross-posted from SUU Macroblog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

Technorati Tags: hayek,mineral,resource,scarcity,technology,human

Tweeters Flamed

Sometimes I forget about posts I’ve drafted. I wrote this a couple of years ago. The quote is still good, but check out the footnote. Can I call ‘em or what?

Megan McArdle:*

Oscar Wilde who once referred to fox hunting as "the unspeakable pursuing the inedible".  Julian Sanchez savagely dissects the 21st century version:  the unbearable tweeting the unremarkable.

Of course, I suspect this is what the vXspouse thinks of this blog.

* Not sure if she’s adopting her new husband’s last name. I’m guessing she won’t.

Technorati Tags: wilde,tweet

A Little More SUU Snark

Relating to the post below, in another classroom, my colleague left the same quote by Sophocles:

Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.

Underneath, an anonymous student had added:

Well, I’m failing Dr. Rees’ class. With honor!

Technorati Tags: sophocles,quote,rees,class

SUU Snark

Dave Christensen is our accounting chair. His current research is on moral courage: how do you get accountants who know what the ethical thing to do is, to actually have the courage to do it. One method that has some success is to push ethical thinking frequently, and on a small scale.

Lately, he’s taken to writing quotes or aphorisms on classroom whiteboards, and leaving them there. Stuff like this:

Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.

                                                 Sophocles

A few weeks ago, I walked into my room, and one of them was mildly and artfully defaced/modified. I said nothing.

The same thing happened the next day. I made light of it.

When it happened a third time, I began to say something a little more forceful.

And the student who was defacing these quotes turned out to be in my class. And he objected because they were an imposition.

Now he’s written an op-ed for the school paper (quoted in full):

David Christensen, I have written this editorial because I care about you. That is why I want you to seek help for your abuse of posting inspirational quotes by philosophers of old upon the white boards and bulletins of various classrooms in the Dixie Leavitt Business Building. That is why I have scheduled this intervention.

You are the distinguished Chair of the Accounting Department. You have published over 50 peer-reviewed academic articles. You are an accomplished and highly-skilled expert and educator, who is respected by both faculty and students. The habit of posting inspirational quotes, however, has brought about unhappiness to the people who frequent the classrooms you have visited.

Ever since you have been posting quotes about success and its negative correlation to academic fraud, it has made my time in the business building marginally less enriching than before. I have been taxed by my concern, and the concerns voiced by my fellow students, about how the quotes seem pretentious and passive-aggressive in the context in which they have been featured.

Emotionally, the quotes have been distressing. I have put away some unretainable few minutes, which I might have spent learning, worrying about the potential guilt that I wasn’t feeling over the honor that I didn’t not have after being addressed by the quotes. Mentally, the quotes that have been posted over my classes have made it difficult to concentrate, as I have had to listen to my fellow students complain about the precious natural resources that have been wasted to provide the paper on which Sophocles’ thoughts about excellence and honor have been printed.

I am concerned should the onslaught of inspiration continue, that myself and others of the student body will face unfortunate consequences. I fear that students will become disillusioned with any discourse on academic integrity after having been bombarded with anecdotes about honesty. I also fear that it will create a discord with the business, finance, accounting and economics students and their future dealings with Sophocles and his peers. Sophocles is a staple to the canon of Greek tragedian playwrights, and seeing students being negatively preconditioned to the genius of his work fills my heart with despair. It would truly be a tragedy if students hated the implications of Oedipus the King not for the usual revulsion they have toward its incestuous relationships, but instead because they discover a latent distaste after their honor was impugned on a whiteboard.

Please consider a different approach in your desires for students to pursue excellence through integrity and defer them from cheating. I hope you will respond favorably to the sentiments that have been offered today.

Technorati Tags: sophocles,quote,honor,succeed,fraud

Quote 40 from Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions"

Sowell's A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles sums up the constrained visions focus on process:

A social process has freedom to the extent that it refrains from interfering with the choices of individuals-whether or not the circumstances of those individuals provide them with many options or few. A social process has justice to the extent that its rules are just, regardless of the variety of outcomes resulting from the application of those rules. Power is exerted in social processes ... to the extent that someone's existing set of options is reduced - but it is not an exertion of power to offer a quid pro quo that adds to his existing options. Equality as a process characteristic means application of the same rules to all ...[pg. 247]

But, this now highlights how those with that vision are viewed by the unconstrained:

In the unconstrained vision, in which man can master social complexities sufficiently to apply directly the logic and morality of the common good, the presence of highly educated and intelligent people diametrically opposed to policies aimed at the common good is either an intellectual puzzle or a moral outrage, or both. Implications of bad faith, venality, for other moral or intellectual deficiencies have been much more common in the unconstrained vision's criticism of the constrained vision than vice versa. [pg. 248]

...

... Historic evasions of evidence are a warning, not a model. Too often the more fact that someone is known to disagree widely on other issues is considered sufficient reason not to take him seriously on the issue at hand ("how can you believe someone who has said?") In short, the fact than an opposing vision has much consistency across a range of issues as one's own is used as a reason to reject it out of hand. [pg. 253]

Enough already. This concludes my 6 weeks of quotes from Sowell.

Quote 39 from Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions"

I love this quote from Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles :

It is precisely the correctness or incorrectness of particular beliefs about social causation that requires scrutiny - a scrutiny arbitrarily barred by the phrase "value premises." ("Value premises" are, ironically, a sort of property right in conclusions, not to be trespassed on by evidence or logic.) [pg. 238]

So cool: "a property right in conclusions". Too common though: isn't this really what the OWS supporters were claiming when they boycotted Greg Mankiw's class without even listening to what he had to say?

What It Means to Have Been a Progressive

Reagan himself told David Horowitz in 1990, “I had second thoughts before you.”

Honorable mention to George Will describing Reagan: “He does not want to return to the past; he wants to return to the past’s way of facing the future.”

Via Newmark’s Door, via a fantastic Ed Driscoll piece about why young progressives turn into old curmudgeons.

I get accused of being an old curmudgeon quite a bit, but anyone who pays attention will see that I usually tend to be on the side of the young as I patiently wait for them to come around.

 

Technorati Tags: progressive,liberal,conservative,reagan,quote

Quote 38 from Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions"

Next, Sowell moves on in A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles to characterize how weak theories can get a life of their own under the unconstrained vision:

... In short, ideas originating in one vision may be adapted to another. But, for the Malthusian population theory to last long enough for this to happen, it first had to survive more than a century of contradictory evidence. Its success in doing so suggests that evasions and tautological formulations may protect a theory against evidence as effectively as outright falsification. [pg. 229]

... Theories may persist because the difficult task of bringing them to confrontation with evidence has simply not been performed with sufficient skill and care. This may be especially so when the person testing the theory has a different vision of his own, and reads the opposing vision in his terms, rather than in its own terms. [pg. 229-230]

...

A recent example of this phenomenon has been the oft-repeated assertion that higher rates of broken homes and teenage pregnancy among black Americans are a "legacy of slavery." Only after decades of widespread repetition of this assertion was a comprehensive factual study done-revealing that broken homes and teenage pregnancy were far less common among blacks under slavery and in the generations following emancipation than they are today. Again, the point is not that a particular conclusion was mistaken but that a sweeping and unsupported assertion went unchallenged for many years because if fit a particular vision. The ability to sustain assertions without any evidence is another sign of the strength and persistence of visions. [pg. 232]

The contemporary example of this is anthropogenic global warming: evidence that warming has stopped, and that supporters were in a panic about how to cover that up, hasn't changed the viewpoint of many ... because it fits into an unconstrained vision that only the best and the brightest can save us from ourselves. Poppcock!

Quote 37 from Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions"

Sowell paraphrases Hayek in A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles to make the point that much of what passes for social justice is merely a smokescreen:

Hayek treats much of the rhetoric of social justice as a confused evasion of harsh realities inherent in the processes required to move toward such goals. To Hayek, those things commonly modified by the adjective "social"-justice, conscience, democracy - are by their very nature inherently social, so that this adjective is meaningless by reason of redundancy, if the word is used in an honest and straightforward way. It is "incredibly empty of meaning," according to Hayek, so that "to employ it was either thoughtless or fraudulent."

Although Hayek found the concept of "social justice" to be devoid of specific meaning, he found it fraught with insinuations which he considered both erroneous and dangerous. Many "who habitually employ the phrase do not know themselves what they mean by it," he said but others who have used it were not simply engaging in "sloppy thinking" but "intellectual dishonesty." According to Hayek, "the phrase 'social justice' is not, as most people feel, an innocent expression of good will towards the less fortunate," but has become in practice "a dishonest insinuation that one ought to agree to a demand of some special interest which can give no real reason for it." The dangerous aspect, in Hayek's view, is that "the concept of 'social justice'�has been the Trojan Horse through which totalitarianism has entered". Nazi Germany being just one example. [pg 212-3]

Just last month, Dan Henninger pointed out that < a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204603004577267632224945836.html?KEYWORDS=santorum">people were putting up with Rick Santorum's weirder beliefs because he kept hammering this position, and it was working.

38. 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. [pg. 215]

Quote 36 from Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions"

Sowell's A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles then argues that the definition of power in the unconstrained vision, as evidenced by consitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe, is about results:

According to Tribe, if the government refuses to pay for abortions by indigent women, then it causes "coerced childbirth," acting in effect to conscript women (at least poor women) as "involuntary incubators," thereby "denying women power over both their bodies and their futures." This is consistent with the general logic of defining power in terms of the ability to change someone else's behavior, though inconsistent with the definition of power as the reduction of [others'] pre-existing options. [pg. 180]

Note that Tribe is concered with the "ability to change". This is not saying that someone else's behavior does change, just that you can influence the choice. To Tribe, this is power. In the constrained vision, this is not power because people still have options; and it is only in reducing options that one is powerful.