Archive for September, 2007

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On Blinded by Hatred

Thursday, September 27th, 2007

Psychology is an interesting field of science that potentially can explain how people behave, why they behave that certain way and what triggered their action. In essence, psychology tries to map out the mental mechanisms of a human being’s brain, and thereby increasing our collective knowledge of who we are and what we could expect of ourselves as well as other people.

In this sense, psychology offers a framework for studying man that is not present in other social sciences, even though the basic assumption in economics covers the aggregate of these mechanisms in a formal and simplified way. Psychology should be interesting to us, since it strives to understand and explain why certain people develop a passion for justice whereas others have “no problem” with working as concentration camp guards. The mechanisms of the human psyche is the direct cause of such personalities and convictions, not genetics.

Whether psychology can explain and make us understand how and why people adopt certain political views we will find out. It is however likely that there are mechanisms in our minds that trigger certain beliefs and thus that these beliefs are products of something. My personal passion for justice, as a basis for my conviction that liberty and nothing but liberty is the natural right of all men and women, has to come from somewhere. To some extent it is a conscious choice, but it is presumably to a greater degree a product of my mind valuing logic over emotion and a certain sense of justice over other kinds of justice.

If psychology has the potential of explaining why people take on certain ideas and develop convictions and beliefs, it also has a potential of explaining how people in great numbers tend to adopt a single, aggregate view that does not necessarily fit with the principles held and championed by the individual.

In a new article published today on LewRockwell.com I discuss such a phenomenon: pro-war libertarians advocating a continued war on Iraq and even wars on other countries. As libertarians, they should have a distinctly individualist view of man as well as the world, yet pro-war libertarians tend to argue “we” have a responsibility to protect “our values” and “our way of life”.

Who are the people included in this “we”? Obviously, the pro-war libertarian includes him- or herself, but only in an indirect sense. When demanding that “we” do something about the threat to “our culture” by the peoples of the Middle East, they are not the ones signing up for service in the US army or navy. Rather, they invest their precious time to argue the importance of other people sacrificing their lives for the common good – a view naturally scarce among libertarians.

The fact that many of these pro-war libertarians are non-Americans yet call for the United States government to carry out their deeds, is interesting in many ways. These individuals adopt a rights-based-sounding argument, yet who are really rights-bearers and who are simply subjected to the rights of peoples, nations, or other aggregates?

The view expressed, and the arguments put forth, are in essence individualist reasoning applied on states, nations, and cultures. The “we” used in the arguments is but a trick to include the listener in the victim of the presumed conflict, and thus make him or her more prone to “understand” why it is important to “fight back”. In reality, this “we” means “I” but in the sense only a statesman uses it: meaning “I, the nation” in a very Louis XVI sense.

What is under attack, and thus needs to be protected by waging wars, is the concept of “our nation” or “our culture” – and this ultimately includes you and I, and makes us responsible for whatever is going on in the world. This point of view implicitly, but necessarily, subjects the individual to the collective and even makes the individual essentially worthless: the collective needs and values must be protected and fought for.

This is where psychology could really make a difference through finding the mechanisms in our brains causing some people, who are (or, at least, were) fully convinced libertarian individualists, to adopt a very opposite viewpoint yet keeping the principles intact through ignoring the inherent contradictions in the arguments put forth. Many pro-war libertarians have not changed their principles or convictions, but the fact that they identify a threat they find personally terrifying has made them adopt a contradicting set of arguments, which they incorporate in their libertarian set of values.

The pro-war libertarian, at least the ones who are symptoms of this phenomenon, embed their new nation- or culture-based convictions in a hard-core libertarian lingo so as to make them appear as true libertarian arguments. Whether this is a mechanism of the brain to protect itself and the person from identifying the conflicting views adopted, or whether it is a means for justifying a change of heart is yet to find out.

Read the article Blinded by Hatred? On So-Called Pro-War Libertarians. Comments on this blog post as well as the article are appreciated. Submit them on this blog or e-mail the author.

Posted in Published Articles | 7 Comments »

On Real and Fake Anarchism

Tuesday, September 25th, 2007

In a recent article published on Strike the Root called Real and Fake Anarchism I argue it is important to use the term “anarchism” to describe one’s ideals. (At least if one is an anarchist.) Because not doing so means distancing yourself and your personal interpretation of anarchism from other anarchists today and in previous times. There are many great anarchist thinkers throughout the anarchist tradition of thought who gladly - and proudly - used the term to denote their convictions.

Anarchism as an ideal is the very opposite to that which most people think of when hearing the word. As we know, people think of destruction, chaos, and war. But anarchism as an ideal has always been about the right for every individual to lead his or her life as he (or she) sees fit. Every man, woman and child has an inviolate right to self - life, liberty, as well as possessions - and that right needs to be respected. Since the state, by its very existence, violates the rights of individuals, the state must be abolished.

This destructive property of the state is inherent - it is an organization that by definition is based on the use of force, and it is hierarchical and seeks to centralize power in society. Force, hierarchies, and power are not compatible with individual freedom, and therefore the state as well as statism are examples of the very opposite of anarchism. Anarchism seeks peace and harmony through liberating people from oppression - force and power are the opposites of anarchism, and whoever has, seeks, or advocates such are thereby disqualified from being anarchists. Rather, they would be enemies of anarchists.

This definition of anarchism makes any attempt to label as “anarchists” people burning property or violating people nothing but ridiculous. But it is also, in a sense, a sad attempt by antagonists of the anarchist tradition to denigrate anarchism, to make anarchism seem like a (or the) bad alternative. It is nevertheless a widely used tool for those with power to work over anarchism.

How to best denigrate each individual’s right to life and liberty? To make it appear as the worst possible alternative.

“Lawlessness” is sometimes used to define anarchism. Even though it is true, at least in the sense that anarchism does not allow for government-enforced laws, there is nothing in the concept of lawlessness that without a doubt makes it chaotic, destructive, and war-like. Why would the lack of rules set and enforced by a centralized power entity mean chaos and destruction?

To draw such a conclusion one will have to embrace the thesis that man is inherently bad, and would willingly kill, rape, and plunder were it not for a superior power forcing him not to. Yet, the champions of this strange philosophy fail to show how a society of such bad people become a peaceful and orderly society when all are subdued by a single, centralist power - and how that power, run by men, does not degenerate into terror and destruction. After all, if man is inherently evil, there is nothing we can do about it - and it certainly rules out making some of those inherently evil folks the rulers of others.

Anarchism does not, however, claim that man is inherently good - that only harmony is possible. If this were true, then there would be no wars, no problems, no terror. But there are an awful lot of bad things happening in our world - and bad things have always happened, throughout history. Anarchism does not claim man is inherently good or bad, only that man is - and that is every man’s right to live his life as he sees fit.  The argument for anarchism is different depending on the individual anarchist’s perspective, but it always boils down to this: people have a right to be free, and that freedom is only limited by other people’s equal right to their freedoms.

How can this be chaotic, destructive, and a cause of terror?

Posted in Published Articles | 6 Comments »

“Comparative Statics” and Global Warming

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

A “naive” part of economic science is called “comparative statics”. It is simply a mathematical way to analyze optimums – optimal production through optimal inputs, optimal outputs, and optimal profits. Since we do not yet have the tools to understand and thoroughly take all dynamic parameters to account when making decisions, this branch of economics makes decisions based on reasoning as:

if all parameters and variables are held constant except xi, then what xi should we choose to reach the optimum?

As a tool this may very well be useful, simply because all alternatives are utterly useless.

The major shortcoming of comparative statics is that it, as a tool for analysis and decision-making, provides guidance in an inherently dynamic world through inherently static means. It should be obvious that whatever the results of a comparative statics analysis, it is never correct. It does, however, provide a sense of “knowing” what happens and thus it is a basis for believed certainty in the environment, business or government body, where decisions are to be made.

What is important in a world of constant change is to make decisions, and to be as well-informed as possible. Not making a decision can often be more costly than making a decision that is wrong but can be corrected at a later time. Most businesses cannot continue functioning without making decisions, and thus the non-making of a decision generates costs and uncertainty for the time until the decision is finally made. The decision, in other words, is unescapable.

Such unescapable questions may be difficult to imagine, but they are not in any way uncommon. Imagine a business not making decisions such as:

  • - What output should we produce?
  • - How much output should be produced?
  • - How much input should be used?
  • - How should the production process be organized?
  • - How should our mix of labor and capital in the production process be?

It is quite easy to imagine what would happen to a business (or, for that matter, a government agency) that does not make decisions as to what to produce and how to produce it. It is also clear that not making a decision means whatever fixed costs still need to be covered, while extra costs are generated simply as an effect of the uncertainty caused by the non-decision.

Making a decision is thus beneficial, even if the decision itself is not the optimal decision. A poor decision is better than no decision, and correcting a bad decision may very well be less costly than the state of non-strategy arising from no decision at all. In this situation, comparative statics provides a means to make decisions that are not totally out of the blue. Based on the (faulty) assumption that all but the choice variable(s) can be fixed, one can mathematically calculate the optimum.

Sometimes having something to aim for is more important than knowing the target.

But comparative statics should not be accepted as a tool to discover The Truth. Understanding the limitations and shortcomings of this tool is essential for making the best use of it. Sometimes a business decision based the decision-maker’s hunch, but perhaps taking the results of comparative statics analysis under consideration, is better than the “naked” comparative statics recommendation. The reason for this, as has already been mentioned, is the world being inherently dynamic, a fact that is reasonably a basis of the “hunch”.

Comparative statics is however not only a means used in economic science, it is in essence a tool used by all sciences to draw conclusions of data and make predictions about the future. This kind of analysis offers guidance, but does not deliver the truth about the world and should never be relied upon to 100%. It should rather be a tool used for assistance when other means for understanding the world are unavailable or provide nothing but absurd recommendations.

The problem of static models

Theoretically, a static model could approximate the real world if all important variables are considered and made part of the model. In the study of a well-demarcated business firm, for example, most parameters are already known. We know most of the variables that are important for the decision to be made, and they are all part of the analysis: prices of inputs and outputs, quantities of inputs and outputs, the technology used in the production process, etc.

What we do not know is the market for inputs and outputs, and so we make assumptions that it is always possible to get more inputs and sell more outputs. We also assume it is possible to throw away whatever outputs we do not need, so that making more than the optimum is not a problem in the production model. These assumptions are known to be only partly correct – we know, for instance, that the prices of inputs may go up or down if our demand for them increases, and we know that we might not be able to sell larger quantities of outputs without lowering the price.

But these assumptions, even though they are important and have known shortcomings, do more good than they cause harm to the analysis. There may be costs associated with throwing away outputs produced in excess of the optimum, but such costs may not have a great effect on our decision (after all, we do not want to produce excess goods anyway!).

The situation would be considerably worse if we did not know the landscape in which we are to navigate – if we didn’t know the major variables and parameters in the world of the business firm, we would not be able to make predictions. At all. In such a situation, in a dynamic world that we do not understand, comparative statics would not only be useless – it would be a tool causing nothing but destruction if relied on.

Comparative statics and climate models

The latter situation is in essence what we see in the climate research. Scientists in this field repeatedly assert that the climate system on earth is very advanced and that we do not yet fully understand it. Actually, we do not understand fully the basic mechanisms in the system – we cannot distinguish cause from effect, and we cannot identify which variables are more important. The sad truth is that we simply don’t know. But we are learning.

An obvious conclusion to be drawn about the study of climates is thus that models and tools sharing the characteristics of economics’ “comparative statics” method should prove worthless – potentially generating disinformation. Yet the climate hysteria and the alarmism about global warming and the “greenhouse effect” bases the predictions on such statistical models. The models, in turn, are based on unconfirmed assumptions and lack of understanding the basic mechanisms of the climate system.

This does not, however, mean that the study of climates is impossible in any way whereas economics is not. Climate change takes place in a system that is much more closed than the business firm – the climate system encompasses the Earth and the exogenous variables should be fairly known. Also, the climate system is in no way based on human beings acting, which – compared to economic science - should make climatology much less advanced and much more rule-based. What we study in a climate system are non-living automatic mechanisms, cause and effect nexuses.

The reason the climate system is not yet well-known is simply a result of the age of science. Whereas economics is a science that has literally been researched and pondered since the Ancient Greeks (if not before), the climate system has at best been studied for merely a century. The models predicting the climate system are based on temperature data collected only since the late 19th century – the models, methods, and predictions are therefore bound to include huge errors.

Actually, the climate debate supplies proof that this is so. We might think we know what is going on, but why then did people fear a “new ice age” in the 1970s and 30 years later they fear global warming? The global cooling bound to drag the world into another Ice Age was the scientific predicitons based on state of the art climate system models then, just like the predictions of floodings and a scorged Earth due to increased temperatures is what that very same field of research now claims is “true”.

Of course, we might consider the models now used much better than the models in the 1970s – we must, after all, have learned a lot in the three decades that have passed. And, indeed, we do know a lot more about the climate system today than we did 30 years ago. But the models still include quite a few blind spots. How does, for instance, magnetic radiation from the sun affect the climate system? This is a question not even asked just a few years back. But as anyone should know, the sun has a great effect on the habitability of this planet, the emergence and existence of life, as well as chronobiology.

Yes, the ices of the poles are melting. We know that. But we also know that the glaciers on the planet Mars are melting – and the melting on both planets seems to occur at the same time. That should tell us something.

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