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January 16, 2007

Tracinski on the population bomb

In the second part of his What Went Right? essay, Robert Tracinski begins to formulate an explanation for why he believes civilization has not collapsed. Of course in my first essay, I was unwilling to concede Tracinski's rosy picture of the world. I would not go so far as to say that civilization has indeed collapsed, but I like Secular Foxhole's characterization: civilization is "hanging by a thread."

In any case, here is the first component of Tracinski's explanation for why things are not as bad as some Objectivists allegedly allege:

The evidence of the current state of the world tells us that every thinking man who does honest work in his own field is our ally and is helping to move civilization forward. The work of such men is not mere cultural "momentum" from a previous era, but an active addition to human knowledge and achievement. And whatever their philosophical errors, in their professional work these men are creating valid and important ideas that do change the course of events.

As before, there are elements of truth and falsehood in Tracinski's approach here, and in this post I will tease them apart.

To begin with, let me pause to ask if Tracinski really thinks that every thinking man who does honest work in his own field is "our ally." Surely he is being imprecise here. If John Smith is an excellent accountant, but also a serial killer in his spare time, surely he is no ally. Likewise for any economists who murder. Probably Tracinski is conflating the evaluation of a man's work with that of his character. But these are distinct issues, and most of the evidence he presents in his essay is only relevant to the first, not the second.

(I would not have mentioned this, except that elsewhere in his series Tracinski confuses the two issues in his interpretation of the Objectivist theory of history. He discusses important cultural achievements that were not inspired by the work of any particular philosopher. But of course Objectivism doesn't say that philosophers are the fundamental movers of history, but that philosophy is--and philosophy can be an agent of change through means other than the ivory tower.)

So I will charitably assume that what Tracinski means is that honest work in any field is a contribution to the advance of civilization, a contribution that is not overridden by the philosophic errors of the contributor.

As evidence for this claim, Tracinski offers examples of two economists who he argues have helped to "save the world" through their theoretical work, work that has proceeded without positive philosophic influence. The first is Julian Simon, whom Tracinski credits with having refuted Malthusian concerns with overpopulation and inspired confidence in the "ultimate resource" of the human mind left free to produce. The second is the current premiere of India, Manmohan Singh, who was instrumental in having deregulated India's economy.

One question to ask is whether these theorists really had the kind of impact Tracinski claims they had. I have questions in particular as regards Julian Simon. Without intending to trivialize the significance of his work, it is important to note that refuting the Malthusian doomsayers should not have required and probably did not require a lot of sophisticated economic theory. Malthus' original predictions were clearly refuted by the rising standard of living accompanying the Industrial revolution, and modern Malthusians (like Paul Ehrlich) consistently and famously proffered false predictions of doom and gloom. So just as the spread of free markets was a default consequence of the collapse of Marxist theory, so too could economists come to accept population growth as a consequence of the collapse of Malthusian theory.

Now it is true that there have been more positive developments in economics than simply the refutation of false theories. Tracinski notes some of them in his reference to David Warsh's Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations a history of how modern economists came to recognize knowledge and ideas as factors of production, in the same way as Simon came to see human beings as a the "ultimate resource." But--and admittedly I am speaking here as an amateur about economics--it seems that this should have been obvious.

Ayn Rand herself claims that she needed to know about the Industrial Revolution to formulate her principle that reason is man's fundamental means of survival. It is shameful that economists have only in recent decades admitted knowledge as a factor of production--and even then only as one factor among many. It seems likely that it took the "Information Age" for economists to realize this, and then perhaps only because the kind of intelligence implemented in modern computer technologies is so rarefied and abstract that they could scarcely excuse it as genuine knowledge, in the way that some might have excused the theoretical knowledge needed for the Industrial Revolution. If I knew more about economic history, I might even propose that it was a philosophic bias--from Marxism and behaviorism--that prevented economists from considering factors like ideas as scientifically respectable in the first place.

So of course this point regarding population is not deduced from philosophy--Ayn Rand's or anyone else's. I don't know any longtime Objectivist who would claim it. Indeed it is Leonard Peikoff who has, more than anyone else, trumpeted the inductive basis of philosophy, and reminded us about the role of the Industrial Revolution in Ayn Rand's discovery of her philosophic principles. Yet it is Peikoff whom Tracinski is implicitly targeting: it seems quite likely that it is Peikoff's DIM hypothesis about the role of philosophy in history that Tracinski wishes to offer an alternative to, given that this hypothesis was one of Peikoff's reasons for objecting to the election of a man who "who holds a mixture of American individualism and Christian altruism."

So yes, economists working without a proper philosophy can discover important truths of economics. The fact that knowledge is a factor in production is, after all, an economic point. Without a proper philosophy, however, they cannot discover the truth when irrational philosophies (like Marxism and behaviorism) rule out certain types of inquiry a priori. If those irrational philosophies collapse, economists still cannot apply their discoveries properly or consistently. Let me elaborate on this last point.

Consider the fact that economists still do not seem to appreciate that the intellect is the fundamental factor of all production. If they did understand this, there would be more support for the strict enforcement of intellectual property rights among economists. Yet many economists today see patents and trademarks as forms of "monopoly power" that depart from the ideal model of "perfect competition" and hinder growth and innovation. They are unaware of the faulty philosophic premises behind the concept of "perfect competition," and of the philosophic package-deal involved in the modern concept of "monopoly." More broadly, they do not appreciate that long-term innovation is guaranteed by the kind of capital accumulation made possible when companies like Microsoft dominate marketshare, and that this innovation is threatened by antitrust laws. More broadly still, they do not appreciate the full relevance of the principles needed to assess long-term consequences, because of widespread acceptance of utilitarianism and pragmatism.

At one point in his essay, Tracinski writes "there is a certain temptation to declare that the bad ideas cancel out and make irrelevant the good ideas." He implies that this is false, but never shows exactly why it is false. Yet the above considerations show, I believe, that it is true. We need philosophy to apply and integrate the discoveries of the specialized sciences. And this has implications for the theory of history. Insofar as special sciences make concrete discoveries that can improve human life, civilization will move forward in concrete ways. But insofar as greater and greater abstractions are needed to apply knowledge of concretes to new and difficult situations, there is greater and greater room for error, either because of ignorance or because of the influence of bad philosophy. So as the discoveries of science become more abstract, philosophy is needed more and more. If a rational philosophy is not present, the fundamental course of history will not be positive, or if it is, it will be so only by accident.

At present, any progress in civilization continues by grace of three important accidents: the accident of our history (the fading rays of the Enlightenment), the accident of the collapse of Marxism, and the accident of the continuing incompetence of Islamic barbarians. Economists who discover some important concrete facts will only be able to go so far with them, particularly when the field of economics itself is so beset by mathematical formalism (another problem it inherits from very bad philosophy of yore, logical positivism) as to discourage some of the most promising students of economics I've known to alienate themselves from the field.

Having mentioned the Islamic barbarians, let me mention one last way in which philosophy is needed to apply the discoveries of economics. Consider Simon's view that human beings are the ultimate resource, as presented in the Wall Street Journal editorial referenced by Tracinski: "More bodies means more minds, more innovation, more dynamism, and more progress." More bodies does mean more minds, but does more minds necessarily mean more innovation? It depends. What are these people doing with their minds? Are they choosing to think, or are they evading the facts and living in the mystical fantasy world of religion? Is the growth of population an unqualifiedly good thing if only the Islamic population grows while Western innovators find themselves in a "birth dearth"? How long can a growing population sustain itself if the mystics parasitize and later destroy the innovators?

All of this, once again, makes me think that all of the population growth and economic discovery doesn't help the advance of civilization in a fundamental way if it is done in a philosophic vacuum. If economists endorse the shackling of capitalists with antitrust laws, the crushing of industry with emissions caps, and meanwhile occupy themselves with mathematical formalism likewise practiced by their colleagues in physics, such that all scientific theories become further and further detached from the facts--and all the while the philosophers are unable to persuade them to return to the facts, much less to defend themselves proudly against the Islamic hordes--then the spread of free markets in India will not be enough to save the world. The fundamental course of history will not have been changed, not until the thinkers of the world begin to consider facts well beyond the narrow facts in their particular fields. Not until they learn how to integrate facts from disparate fields, and how to use fundamental principles to do this. Not until, that is, they appreciate the power of philosophy.

Posted by admin at January 16, 2007 12:29 AM

Comments

Posted by: johncaseyl at January 16, 2007 08:40 PM

Posted by: noumenalself at January 16, 2007 09:00 PM

Posted by: JT at January 23, 2007 07:56 AM

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