Next book: Systems of Survival

I couldn't bring myself to finish Hayek's Counter-Revolution in Science.  I got his point dozens pages ago, and he mostly went into tedious intellectual history after that.  Mind you, intellectual history can be fun, but he was zeroing in on individuals without saying anything terribly interesting or revealing.

After that I read some fiction and wrote some fiction.  Some of the fiction writing is still ongoing, but one story was submitted.  We'll see what happens.

The next non-fiction book that I'll blog here is Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs.  I actually read it several years ago, but it's worth re-reading.  She wrote it as a dialogue between several characters discussing the ethical ideas underpinning societal structures.  She contrasts commercial endeavors with "Guardian" institutions.  Obviously police and the military are guardian institutions, but so are all other government offices, as well as educational and artistic institutions dependent on patronage.  The concept of duty comes up a lot, and since I believe that a dilution of the concept of duty is one of the problems with American higher education, I think this book is worth re-reading.

Hayek, Chapter 10

All I have to say is that Hayek knows precious little about engineers.  Yes, they can be somewhat obtuse about things outside their technical interests, but generally their jobs require them to pay attention (even if more attention than they would like) to human factors, costs, uncertainties, etc. Rarely is the task as well-specified as he thinks, and rarely is the entire design under one person's control. I share his dislike of social engineering, but engineering is not what he thinks it is.

On the other hand, chapter 11 opens with a sentence that I can appreciate:

"Never will a man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success."

I look forward to reading the rest of it.

Hayek, Chapter 9

Having talked about the difficulty in getting people to see emergent order in chapter 8, in chapter 9 he talks about the belief in the superiority of planning over emergent order.  This is definitely a thing, especially among the educated classes.  I find it funny that technocratic liberals also tend to like "natural" food.  It's generally believed that if there is emergent order in an institution then there must be missed opportunities, because resources are not being directed.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how modern this is.  Central authorities have always banged their heads against emergent orders, determined to rule rather than go with the flow.  I doubt that they put it in the same technocratic language as their modern counterparts, but the ability to let go and steer on the margins has never been a strong suit of rulers.

Sadly, this chapter is somewhat jumbled (he took the opposition to planning a bit too literally), and not always well-argued.  Steps and connections are left out.  I did manage to parse out, eventually, what he meant when he talked about people trying to plan the progress of the human mind:  I don't think he was talking about engineering the human mind like geneticists in Orphan Black, but rather plans for scientific discoveries, technological progress, and the progression of ideas in other scholarly endeavors.  The problem is that you can't plan where you will go when you engage with the unknown.  Things almost always turn out to be harder than you planned, and sometimes serendipity happens.  Hayek's point was that if we knew what we could/would discover next then we would have already made the discovery, so there's a logical impossibility.  I just wish he had organized his thoughts more clearly.

After arguing that, Hayek quickly leaps to arguing against the idea that truth is not determined by deduction from observations, but from hidden causes which have determined the thinker's conclusions, and thus truth or falsehood can depend on the social position (race, class, etc.) of the person making the argument. It seems that he's arguing against ideas of implicit bias, but I don't really see how he got there from his previous point, unless he's making a very subtle argument against the idea that all of our knowledge is already in our minds (hence the possibility of planning) but some of it is fake (hence the possibility of bias or distortion).  It's a big leap of the argument.

Also, while I have no doubt that modern political correctness has plenty of antecedents (remember, one of the main themes of this blog is that all of this has happened before and will happen again), I'm mildly surprised that 1952 had substantial numbers of people arguing that implicit bias is a huge thing, or that the privileged cannot know certain things.  I suppose it's possible that the Marxists might have made the second point (I don't know, I'm just speculating) but that's the sort of argument that could easily be wielded by peasants against planners.  (Unless he's arguing against the idea that only the top of the ladder has the proper perspective.)

Near the end of this chapter, Hayek does offer one point that I like very, very much:  It is dangerous when people abandon religion but see no reason to submit to anything that they do not rationally understand. If people respect neither God nor arbitrary moral codes (and ultimately all "ought" statements are rooted in assertions rather than logic, a point that I spent this afternoon making to a colleague) then they could engage in great hubris.  If this comes at the same point in historical evolution as the rise of great technological capabilities (e.g. nuclear weapons) and a belief in the superiority of planning over emergent order then the unguided might create upheavals that lead to disaster.

I think we have the nuclear genie more-or-less controlled (arguably less, right now, with North Korea rattling the saber) but in higher ed I think we have undermined too many principles, leaving only short-term thought about individual selfishness.  Hayek might be greatly sympathetic to the good that can emerge from selfishness in market economies (and I am, as well) but institutions need rules (even for-profit companies require a certain amount of coordinated sacrifice for greater benefit down the road--it's the whole concept of investment in a project that involves more than one person!), and non-profit educational institutions supposedly offer a chance be supported while indulging one's passions via creative pursuits, in exchange for work that benefits students.  However, when the concept of duty collapses, when the quasi-monastic sacrifice inherent in academic work is regarded as an oppressive norm feasible only for men of a certain class and era, when pervasive and unfair bias is seen as driving every decision, then what is left but short-term selfishness?

Hayek, as a man of ideas, is less of a capitalist than he'd ever admit.  He wanted people to submit to duty and purpose without a clear answer to "Why do I have to listen and what is in it for me?"

Hayek, Chapters 6-8

To be honest, Hayek could trim a lot of his prose.  (OK, I could too, but a blog is basically a rough draft.)  That said, a few observations:
1) In chapter 6, I think Hayek is to some extent right to critique technocrats for treating social organization as a variable to play with for the purposes of optimizing some other measure, e.g. optimize productivity or learning or whatever.  What if people want to use their land for something other than the most profitable function?  What if people want to organize their region into small suburbs instead of subjecting their infrastructure to region-wide governance?

I can think of good reasons to optimize many things and ask people to re-organize in many cases, but are my reasons "good enough"?  That's a value judgment, and different people will reach different conclusions in different cases.  Technocrats treat people and their interactions as means rather than ends unto themselves.

2) In chapter 7, Hayek gets into the social scientist's assumption that outside observation is at least as good as inside knowledge.  I think that when it comes to operational details of a business, Hayek has a very valuable point.  That said, the detached view also has value, and you probably learn the most from a combination of perspectives.

However, I find it rather amusing to see a defense of local knowledge against detached outsider scientists coming from the right flank of the economic/political spectrum, because it comes quite close to "Westerners could never understand a non-Western society" arguments that you get more from the cultural left.  In fairness, honest libertarians have always combined economic views from the right with socially liberal views and respect for self-determination.  Hayek does not lack for self-consistency, but it's still funny to see a social justice argument from him.

I should add that in some ways Hayek and the social justice arguments for marginalized groups are the opposite of post-modernism.  PoMo types tend to (maddeningly) argue "You can see nothing because you are stuck inside the power structures that color your perspective", leaving unanswered "OK, but you're also spouting off while standing inside the power structures, so how do you know anything?"

I think the better PoMos have answers, but not the typical dilettante spouting off to be contrarian.

3) In chapter 8, Hayek talks about the possibility of an institution serving a purpose for which it was not designed.  I find this to be one of the hardest points to make in talks with colleagues.  As long as, say, the latest idiotic "Strategic Planning" or "Assessment" exercise has some ostensibly good justification, I'm supposed to focus on that rather than the fact that it never works but does serve the self-interests of bureaucrats disconnected from the stated mission of the university.  If people could better understand how patterns of action (or inaction) can be self-sustaining while running counter to earnestly-stated (and even honestly-believed) proclamations then maybe we could do a better job of fixing things.

Or maybe it would all devolve into cynical looting when people allowed themselves to discuss how things actually work.

Chapters 1-2 of _The Counter-Revolution in Science_

Hayek spends much of the first chapter arguing that bringing science to social questions has done little to bring insight.  I already gave my general critique of Hayek as an ideologue in the previous post; here I want to focus on the nature of social science, and what I think Hayek gets right and wrong.

The biggest difference between natural science and social science is that natural science is more about discovery while social science is more about testing.  Yes, natural and social scientists both make discoveries and they both test hypotheses, but human experience provides us plenty of ideas about social issues, and in some sense most social ideas are right within a certain domain of applicability.  You don't need a double-blinded, properly-controlled, statistically rigorous study to know that standardized tests cannot tell you the entirety of a person's abilities, that humans have biases, that people often manage to rise above their prejudices, that people also fall short of their ideals, and that small changes in policy can have large or small effects in difference circumstances.  As basic ideas, I think that casual observation of the world is sufficient support for all of them.

What social science can do at its best is answer questions like "When? Under what circumstances?"  Social science can take us from "People have many biases, but they don't always control our behavior" to "Unconscious biases measured by this instrument have demonstrable effects in these settings but not those other settings."  Social science can take us from "Sometimes policy changes matter, sometimes they don't" to "Raising the minimum wage by $0.25/hour from a baseline of $10/hour will have little effect on unemployment in a city with a high cost of living, but raising it by $2/hour in a locale with a low cost of living could have measurable effects on unemployment."  Social science can take us from "Standardized tests don't tell you everything" to "Due to the narrow range of scores, the quantitative section of the GRE has little predictive power for PhD students in such-and-such field, but the relevant subject test explains X% of the variance in outcomes as measured by the following instrument."

So social science does not necessarily tell us much that we don't know on SOME level, but it tells us much about when our intuitions are valid and what their limitations are.  Hayek, being interested in grand social questions and large "Ought" issues missed that, on some level.  Ironically, though, Hayek's grandest hypothesis was falsifiable by casual observations (Western Europe is not a hellhole) without fancy statistical methods.  He railed against a harder enemy than he was actually taken down by.

Natural science operates in domains where we have much less intuition, and much less prior experience from which to develop ideas.  By the time we know enough to even frame a precise hypothesis about certain topics, we're often on our way to testing it.  That's not to say that wrong ideas never take off, and that there's never a contest of hypotheses, but we're definitely operating in realms where we have (comparatively) fewer preconceptions to cling to.

Ironically, the people who most abuse social science are probably closest in practice to Hayek's approach to social questions.  They run with a few findings that flatter their preconceptions and ignore contrary findings.  They love "ought" more than "is."  The only difference is that they flatter themselves with a pretense of empiricism, whereas he is openly critical of the excesses of empiricism.

Next reading: Hayek's _The Counter-Revolution of Science_

I couldn't bring myself to read Dewey.  He's just too boring.  Now I understand progressive educators a bit better:  Reading Dewey would be enough to make anyone hate reading.  I'll try again, after I've had a bit more summer vacation to recover, but for now I need a break.

Instead I'm reading The Counter-Revolution of Science by F. A. Hayek.  I picked it up on a whim, while browsing the science section of a used bookstore.  Honestly, two chapters in, I think I'm going to be pretty critical of this book, but since it's a book that says a lot of things I'm inclined to agree with I suppose that my negative commentary on it will be a useful corrective.

This book is quite critical of social science as science, arguing that it's a mistake to approach social questions with the methods of natural science.  On the surface, I may be primed to agree, for a number of reasons.  First, as I've noted many times, the technocrats of the modern managerial classes like to derive their "ought" statements from news reports in the "According to a recent study..." genre.  They want the world to be simple. They want neat theories that avoid the complexities of human nature, and they want policies that people will comply with rather than either game it or push back.   Well, people aren't like that, but I work in a system where many try to pretend that people are or ought to be like that. So I ought to like a Hayekian critique.  Also, Hayek was very much a libertarian, and I lean libertarian in my non-academic politics, and to a certain extent that bleeds over into my academic politics. (Though only to an extent; in the end I still like the authority of the sage on the stage, and a true libertarian has to distrust authority.  In my defense, I like the authority of the sage who analyzes complex questions from many angles, not the authority of the well-funded technocrat who holds forth on Best Practices.)

In order to understand my ambivalence about Hayek's writings here, we first have to understand a bit about where Hayek was coming from.  Hayek wrote much on economics and politics, and won a Nobel Prize for his economics work.  However, while he did economics work that earned praise from the wider profession (I'm not qualified to judge it myself, I can only surmise that it must have been respected if he won a Nobel), he also produced a lot of political and ideological commentary that was much more controversial.  He argued quite forcefully that the modern Western administrative state will lead to tyranny as surely as the 20th century Marxist states did.  Indeed, among non-academic audiences The Road To Serfdom is arguably his most popular work, and in there he argues that the complexity of managing an economy will inevitably require a more and more comprehensive administrative state that ultimately takes away human freedom.

As much as I disdain managerial liberals, it is an empirical fact that Western Europe didn't turn into Eastern Europe.  That's just a fact.  There are numerous reasons for that, reasons that I won't pick apart in gory detail here, but surely we must include among those reasons the fact that managerial liberals tend to balance their well-meaning obsessions with a bit of selfish laziness.  They might want to make the world into a particular image, but they also want to see good things happen while carving out a comfy and self-flattering niche for themselves.  One easy way to do that is to let market-driven processes do their part in society (and thereby do some good), while also administering some programs that can be made to look like they are doing some good.  It's a win-win for everyone.  Western managerial liberals don't need the total domination that Russian rulers (and their viceroys) need.  Culture matters, and Western managerial liberals have ways of making themselves feel like they are doing good without the total domination that Eastern Europeans require.  So we simply haven't seen Western societies with mixed economies turn into Eastern European tyrannies.  I certainly won't defend everything that Western social engineers have done, but Hayek's prophecies failed badly.

Also, managerial liberals are ill-suited for true tyranny, because true tyranny requires that somebody be able to say "You!  Against the wall!  Now!"  Western liberals would  never do that.  They'd say "You!  Report to this place with the following forms filled out!  Within 60 to 90 days or as summoned!"  There have been plenty of abuses by Western authorities, plenty of individual-scale human rights violations that are as appalling as anything out of the East, but it isn't the managerial liberals who want to scale it up.  When they see those things they feel terrible and say "This calls for an immediate investigation and evaluation process, followed by a top-to-bottom review and retrospective analysis for the formulation of reform guidelines!"  That bureaucratic process might not do anybody any good, but it also won't entrench the abuses that they're responding to.  Mostly it will entrench ineffectual responses to abuses, while sending a message that abuses need to be kept on a level of "plausible deniability."

There's a ton that's wrong with it, but it doesn't give you Eastern Europe.  It gives you a modern US city, where the police can get away with a lot but they also can't scale it up.  What scales it up is political cover for the police, and that (mostly) comes from a different segment of the political spectrum than managerial liberalism.

Mind you, the tools created by managerial liberals can and will be abused by illiberal authorities of other mindsets, but the point is that the modern mixed economy isn't enough to give you the sort of illiberal regime that Hayek feared.  You need other elements.  Venezuela is as close as we've seen to a left-liberal state sliding into tyranny gradually rather than overnight, and Venezuela had elements beyond left-liberal administrative types overseeing a mixed economy.  It had an openly Marxist and populist demagogue.

But I'm getting far afield from The Counter-Revolution of Science.  I think I'll just stop this post here, with my critique of Hayek's most famous prophecy, and take up the current reading in the next post.