Per Bylund

Business Scholarship with a Swedish-Austrian Twist

Per Bylund

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On the Peace Prize and Politics

In my recent Strike the Root article I discuss the true nature of the Nobel Peace Prize. Apart from an apparent error in the beginning of the article (Nobel dedicated most of his fortune to the Prize, not all of it), the article truthfully tells a story of the Prize based on simple economic analysis based on investigating “who benefits”. In a way, the analysis is based on Public Choice, since it necessarily, however indirectly, includes analyzing the Norwegian national parliament and how its interests (rather than those of Alfred Nobel) affect the appointing of members to the Peace Prize Committee.

The problem stressed in the article is general, even though it uses an explicit example: the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former US Vice President Al Gore. The generality of the problem lies in the fact that politics tend to make things worse rather than guarantee an emphasis on the public good as opposed to private goods (if there is such a conflict at all). Actually, politics always act degenerating while most people tend to believe in political rather than private solutions. Why is this so?

One obvious reason is the common myth of democracy: that the people “rule themselves” and that public officials thus are public servants. There is however no reason to believe this is the case, and there are no empirical facts confirming that guardianship (with respect to individual citizens’ rights and interests) is what guides individual action in the political apparatus or the bureaucracy. It is however prevalent in the rhetoric, which seems to fool even some scientists that there is an unselfish dedication to what is right inherent in public bailieship.

It should be interesting to point out that the latter is a conscious mechanism or means in politics to cause the former. Guardianship rhetoric is often used by public officials in order to make the state appear as a guardian of the common interest, since that is clearly in the interest of the official. (This is however not considered a very interesting fact to analyze in political science.)

Back to the point. What does political action inherently bad as a means compared to any other possible means? It is not the fact that individual interests in the contemporary administration that makes politics itself a bad solution, even though such interests and actions [when not controlled] add costs to the solution. We know that government solutions are often or always more costly than any private enterprise, but that doesn’t necessarily mean all solutions are bad. And it also doesn’t sufficiently show or explain how this is so.

We need to accept the fact that politics is not essentially a construct to achieve certain societal ends, even though many theorists in history, as well as currently, desperately line up unfounded claims that this is in fact the case. Politics is not a means to structure a body so that it efficiently can create value. Politics is also not an arrangement to provide a basis for action or change in an organization. Rather, politics is a construct to satisfy a need for some to control, constrain, and command.

In political science speak, politics has the purpose and ability to concoct and superficially “create” a common interest from aggregating the interests of many.

As we know, it isn’t possible to measure interests or values and it also isn’t possible to satisfy two distinctly different interests through offering a “middle way” solution. In such a solution both interests are left essentially unsatisfied, rather than only one of them in a winner-takes-it-all game. (In a market solution, of course, no interest need be left unsatisfied, since the market can offer multiple solution to a problem. But this is not the topic of this post.)

The interests that always lose in a game of politics is the the interests of the public. The reason for this is that “the public” isn’t a whole and thus does not ever have one distinct interest in any issue. There are multiple interests, often as many as there are individuals, and they cannot be satisfied at once in the legal framework of a state.

One could argue the duty of public officials is to find the solution that is “best” according to a certain set of values arranged hierarchically. The best way of doing this would of course to simply enforce majority rule: satisfy the interests of the majority in every issue and thus maximize the number of satisfied interests in society.

The problem of this approach is of course the well-known problem of utilitarianism: what if interests are not equally valued by the individuals holding them? Utilitarianism cannot be subjected to a game of statistics since a person could feel very strongly about a certain issue whereas a lot people may have a slight disinterest in that very issue. Do you judge in favor of the single person at the “expense” of the others? Or do you add the “slight disinterest” of many people together and claim this is “more” than the “strong interest” of the individual? What ration needs to be satisfied in order to make this conclusion? And perhaps more importantly:

How do you measure interest?

The utilitarian solution is simply not a solution, which leaves us with the “middle way” solution. In a two-interest world the task should be fairly simply; just document the interests and offer a solution where parts of both interests are satisfy, and make sure advocates of both parties accept the solution as “better than status quo.”

But the simplicity of this solution is deceiving. Even if we assume that the interests can easily be documented and measured (which is a requirement here too!), the solution doesn’t apply to politics. Many great minds have mistakenly assumed the state takes on the role of objective negotiator between interests, and that the state’s [negotiator’s] job is simply to find a “best fit” solution. This is not the case.

In a real negotiation the parties generally agree on who is to negotiate for them. Also, the parties pay the negotiator(s) for his or her services – they might even pay him or her for successfully suggesting a solution acceptable to both parties. This is certainly not the case for the state: it doesn’t get paid for taking on certain conflicts of interest and it also doesn’t have an interest in being objective.

Also, the state shouldn’t be denoted “it”- it is not a person or a tight organization dedicated to achieving a certain goal. Rather, “it” consists of a number of people with interest in satisfying their own interests first, be it the power of their formal position or their personal wealth. Thus, adding the state in this case simply adds an interest to the equation – our two-interest game is suddenly, in the simplest possible case, a three-interest game after adding the state!

It should be much more difficult finding an acceptable solution to a three-interest conflict, especially if the third interest is added after the conflict already exists! Adding to this that the third interest gets veto power to any suggested solution, and that it effectively has the power to force all other interests to comply with the solution of its choice, makes it impossible to find a winner among the original conflicting parties.

And what about the incentives of payment? The state, again talking of it as “an it,” has the power to charge whatever it wants actually supplying whatever it wants. This is called taxation – there is no connection between payment and delivery.

This is a major reason why the state tends to make things worse rather than offer a solution to problems. A market solution would presumably offer a wide range of negotiation and arbitration services (in fact it already does) by companies and individuals that make profits through supplying non-biased solutions to conflicting interests. And it isn’t difficult to assume some of them may even choose to charge the parties only for accepted solutions.

The Norwegian parliament represents 169 individual sets of interests (not counting interests of parties, special interest groups, etc.) that will affect who will be appointed to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, and the individuals in the committee will have further opportunities to satisfy their own interests when awarding the Prize.

As is asked in the article, Is there really no one in the world who has done a better job for peace during the last year? There should be many. But the right question to ask is: who can be awarded the Prize in order to maximize the satisfaction of the interests of the individuals in the committee and the Norwegian parliament? The choice to award the IPCC and Al Gore suddenly makes a lot more sense.

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Finding the Neutral Arbiter

Discussing how to solve conflict people generally tend to search for a “third party” that can approach the issue causing the conflict from without, an external “power” that does not have anything to do with the involved parties. The logic is essentially correct if the aim is to minimize corruption. In a dispute between A and B, anyone working directly or indirectly for B cannot be a neutral arbiter. And the same goes for anyone with ties to A. Only someone who doesn’t personally, directly or indirectly, have a relation to A or B, and who doesn’t personally gain from the outcome of or a solution to the conflict, can be trusted to settle the dispute.

The logic is equally applicable when there is a conflict between a person and an organization, as is the case when a person is involved in a contractual conflict with for instance the government. Only someone, a person or institution, without ties to the person or the government can be trusted to provide a solution that is truly neutral, a solution that thus doesn’t give one of the parties benefits at the cost of the other. This makes true justice a difficult task in most state societies, since government not only upholds a monopoly of the use of force – but also claims the monopoly of setting rules for justice as well as defining what is justice in government courts.

This problem has been well-known to theorists and politicians alike for centuries, which is why we expect to find some sort of safeguard in most political and state systems. For instance, the United States government has the monopoly to settle disputes in the court system – but the courts are a power in the government that is essentially “separate” from other powers (the executive and legislative). Of course, such a system cannot truly provide neutral arbitration, especially not when government is one of the parties in the conflict, but most people tend to agree it is “close enough.”

This “close enough,” which is often falsely described as a guarantee, is sometimes taken as an argument for the state. In essence, it is not so much an argument for the state but against the market’s possibility of supplying such goods and services. This is a false argument, even if we accept the assumption that the “close enough” solution to the arbitration problem is, as advertised, a guarantee.

The reason it is false is that it is based on system thinking. The market, it is claimed, cannot supply neutral arbitration simply because there are interests in the market that have interests in the conflict and how it is settled. The fallacy, of course, is to see the market as a system. Were it a system, then it would certainly have interests in the conflict, the parties, as well as the solution to the conflict.

On the other hand, were the conflict really a problem in the market, accepting for a moment the assumption that the market is a system, then there is no reason to assume the market cannot internally find a solution to the problem. After all, the reasoning is based on the assumption that both parties are “parts” of the market and that the market, therefore, is not neutral to the case. If this were true, then the market should be able to settle any dispute between two of “its” actors. An “internally” settled dispute must be better than any dispute involving external parties, especially when the case is that both parties in the conflict are parts of the same “system.”

Not many would agree that this is a real response to the critique, however, even though it does essentially follow the line of thinking of most – if not all – of the criticism of market arbitration.

A couple of truths following this statement of market as a system and arbitration should be noted. If accepted, a solution is not very difficult to imagine. Actually, an “internal” solution is likely to occur and the problem would, in most cases, simply vanish. If rejected, we must also reject the notion of the market as a system. The only reason an “internal” solution, as mentioned above, can be rejected in the case when it is obvious that the parties in conflict are “parts” of the market is to state the parties are not parts of the same system. Thus: they are not actors in the market or the market is not a system.

A premise for the problem discussed is usually that the parties involved in conflict of some kind are actors in the marketplace. After all, if the argument is used as an argument against anarchism (which is, by definition, the alternative to the state) the parties cannot be anything but actors in the market. Hence, the market cannot be “a system.”

This conclusion does however not prove that the alternative to state arbitration must have an interest in one of the parties or one of the possible outcomes of the conflict. It proves only that the market is not a system, and thus that the parties in the conflict are actors that are acting in the market but not as parts of a market system. The parties are thus not parts of a homogeneous whole and must therefore be essentially independent.

There is nothing in this statement saying another actor in the market cannot also be independent of other actors, and there is also nothing saying a third party – an actor in the marketplace – cannot be equally independent with respect to both parties in the conflict. Such a party, even though it is an actor in the market, perhaps even the same niche market as the parties in the conflict, must theoretically be able to take a position between the conflicting parties and arbitrate!

Yes, there might be problems with such a third party’s independence, but such problems do not arise because there is no one in the market that can be independent of both parties – they arise because it is difficult, perhaps very costly, to find someone who is truly independent (or: equally dependent) of both parties. Nevertheless, this rules out the criticism that “the market” cannot supply arbitration in conflicts “in the market” without necessarily being unfair and unjust. “It” certainly can supply such services, the argument against this is invalid.

Looking back at the alternative, that the State – an actor that no doubt has interest in the outcome of conflicts (even if “only” to enforce its own laws) – has a monopoly of arbitration between parties in conflict, it should be obvious which alternative is superior. The state system offers the monopoly product arbitration and can only supply “close” to just solutions to conflicts. The market can supply such services that are essentially, if not fully, neutral enjoying the fruits of competition in supplying the best services for arbitration.

The latter may be costly, but the cost should be nothing compared to the coercive system of a state monopoly. The problem of arbitration in effect boils down to whether one believes products, in this case justice, are best supplied by a monopoly or by a market with multiple actors supplying a variety of products.

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Power and the Death of Man

When writing this it is exactly one year since the murder of the outspoken Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. It is also the 55th birthday of the Russian former KGB agent and current dictator-calling-himself-president Vladimir Putin. The events seem to be the perfect set of contradictions, not in any sense supplying grounds for a Hegelian synthesis.

Rather, we get the feeling that evil has not only prevailed, it has essentially won. At least in Russia. Putin seems, judging from western reporting, to have had something to do with the murder of Politkovskaya. At least, he had a lot to gain from her death. She was essentially what made the Russian army’s slaughter of innocent people in Chechnya look like a slaughter rather than, as Putin would have preferred, a heroic and patriotic yet merciless hunt for the people posing a “threat” to the unity of Great Russia.

Whereas the Russian “campaign” in Chechnya was done openly and therefore was condemned in global news media, the slaughter is but one example of many. It is one clearly recognizable symptom of a disease having haunted humankind for millennia: the mercilessness of power, and the death and suffering it inevitably leads to.

Another such example has been going on for years now, but it is obviously not as easy to recognize. As a matter of fact, many of the people condemning the slaughter in Chechnya are whole-heartedly supporting the same kind of slaughter in another country. The difference? Rhetoric.

The Russian slaughter in Chechnya was clearly a matter of David being attacked by the horrible Russian Goliath. David wanted his freedom, and for this reason he was slaughtered. “Goliath has no right,” we heard in the media.

People tend to identify with the less powerful in a fight, and this is exactly what happened in the Russia vs. Chechnya case. If there is no reason to directly identify with either of the parties – and for the western public this was the case in this conflict – people support the one they “feel sorry for.” Goliath has no right if people feel sorry for David.

An example of the opposite is the ongoing American war on Iraq. Literally thousands of innocent people have been slaughtered in the now occupied territory, by both state mercenaries and private Blackwater USA “law enforcement,” but this slaughter is justified by so-called libertarians in Europe and so-called conservatives in America. The United States’ occupation of Iraq, after the dethroning of Saddam Hussein, is a clear case of Goliath assaulting David. But in this case the people slaughtered are “not like us” whereas the guy in the White House looks kind of like “us.”

Both cases, even though they are approached and assessed in completely different ways, are symptoms of the same thing. Especially in taking the violations of domestic rights in the United States as an effect of the ongoing occupation, it is obvious that these are symptoms of power and the struggle for more power.

“Freedom” is in these cases only a word used for propaganda purposes (and it obviously works), but has nothing to do with what is really going on. If freedom is really the driving force behind the American occupation of Iraq (NB, the occupation) it doesn’t make sense to kill innocent civilians. It also doesn’t make sense to use the occupation as an argument to increase the state’s ongoing confiscation of people’s private properties in the United States and further restricting American citizens’ “constitutionally guaranteed” rights.

One has to be ignorant of reality to believe freedom has anything to do with it, unless we are talking of the freedom of the ruler to use his (or her) powers. One also has to be ignorant of how the people of power has acted throughout history – always at the cost, often the death of the people, only for the aim to increase and consolidate power.

Randolph Bourne wrote in an essay by the turn of the 19th century that “war is the health of the state.” That is certainly the case, and it has been proved frequently throughout the 20th century and it seems to continue in the 21st. The reason war is the health of the state can easily be shown using the Hegelian triad thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

The triad suggests conflict between two contradictory theses can be solved through reconciling their common truths in a new proposition. War and the State obviously seem to be contradictions through war generally being waged by one state on another. War, it thus seems, means, apart from the destruction, that one of the states in a conflict will be defeated and thus it should be in the interest of states to not engage in war unless victory is guaranteed (which, of course, never is the case). And people generally turn to the state in order to avoid war – the state offers protection and defense against foreign aggressors.

Trying to find a synthesis between the State and war we quickly find that the difference between the two is but an illusion. There seems to be an overlap in their definitions; the State being a system of aggression with a monopoly of violence, and war being the use (by states) of such aggression directed at foreign peoples and states.

When investigated in detail we realize war is the essence of the State. Or, if you like, the State is the essence of war. Both are means for power and both rely solely on physical and psychological violence as well as the use of aggression, force, and merciless killings to achieve certain aims:

The purpose of the State is to secure power through a war on the people. The purpose of war is to defeat a people in order to establish a [new] State.

Trying to find the synthesis, in this case, removes the “veil of ignorance” under which we have been hiding, and allows us to see what is the true nature and purpose of the State. And what is the true nature and purpose of war. The two are inseparable and the same; they are two sides of a coin – two names for the same thing. They differ only in how the enemy is defined, a definition itself necessarily based on state-enforced artificial “nationalities,” and in their temporal stretch. The State is a never ending war on the domestic population; war is a temporary aggression on a foreign people.

In the light of this “Bournian” truth, the differences vanish between the Russian attack on Chechnya, as well as the murder of Politkovskaya, and the American war on, and occupation of Iraq. They are essentially the same, they share both motive, means, and aim. The difference is but the name of the murderer-in-charge and how well he (or she) manages public opinion through propaganda.

What we are seeing is truly a David vs. Goliath, but we fail to realize who is who. And we fail to see that the Davids are dying by the thousands. If we recognize this fact we might be able to do something about it. And then the illusion is no more.

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On Blinded by Hatred

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.

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On Real and Fake Anarchism

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?

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“Comparative Statics” and Global Warming

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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On the Art of Writing – and Science

I am currently reading Joseph Schumpeter‘s wonderful The Theory of Economic Development. It is wonderful not only in substance, but in style. Science simply isn’t presented in such beautiful prose anymore.

The tender softness of Schumpeter’s writing brings to mind a sentence from Murray N. Rothbard‘s critical comments on Samuel Edward Konkin III’s New Libertarian Manifesto. Rothbard seems to disagree with Konkin on most of his points, but he still welcomes Konkin to partake in the discussion:

“…especially because he cares deeply about liberty and can read and write, qualities which seem to be going out of style in the libertarian movement.”

The last point, that Konkin “can read and write,” is interesting. Rothbard obviously had the same feeling in the 1970s as I get when reading Schumpeter. The context is different, but both of us identify the decreasing quality of writing. How come the skill to write, i.e., to use the language to communicate knowledge and feeling in an easy-to-understand and attractive text, has not only gone out of style – but is also beyond the reach of contemporary writers and scientists? (I will here discuss mainly scientific writing.)

Part of the reason good writing is no longer a desired quality, I claim, is due to over-dividing of sciences into fields and subfields. Part of it is also the faulty belief that real science must necessarily be mathematical.

Division of science

When Adam Smith wrote about the division of labor and how the individual actions of people doing essentially different things come together to create change in a unified direction as by “an invisible hand”, it made sense. In rural society, where most people were working on the family farm, dividing chores meant increasing efficiency. This is even more true for the industrialization, where the division of labor could increase productivity by enormous numbers.

But does this mean division of labor always makes for increased production? Certainly not. History proves only the fact that division of labor was more productive (or, maybe, less unproductive) than the immature market production processes available at that time.

The same lesson can be learned from science, which used to be a field for thinkers who proudly tried to find an all-encompassing theory to explain everything, natural and social sciences alike. These theories were necessarily abstract, but the writings of these great men (I’m afraid there were almost no women) throughout history did provide bases for continued research and thought.

Around the time of the Enlightenment science started to become specialized. Scientists, who were previously nothing but philosophers (in the broad sense), specialized in different fields, and the differences between these fields started to become apparent. Physics, biology, and chemistry became different fields of study, as did economics, political science, and history.

The division of sciences, just like the division of labor, acted as a catalyst, providing focus for the individual scientist (or group of scientists) and thereby elucidating the means for identifying and studying specific phenomena. In this sense, productivity in science increased – but so did the differences between the fields.

One might think that differences between fields of study aren’t necessarily a bad thing. This is true, of course. But it is also true that the fields of study (or disciplines) are arbitrary divisions of science made by scientists to create an environment where one’s work is not “disturbed” by competing theories and worldviews. Also, the differences between disciplines were set a couple of centuries ago – it isn’t obvious that the fields of study would be the same if science was divided today. So a problem might be that different disciplines are implicitly competing with each other.

Also, the different disciplines now have different history and different “gods” (thinkers and scientists considered important in the individual field of study). This means there is a great difference as how economists think of a certain social phenomenon and the way sociologists or political scientists think of the same phenomon. Is this a good thing?

It could be a good thing, but only if the disciplines are open to other ways of thinking, i.e. that they embrace the opportunity of using other perspectives and theories in their work. But this is hardly always the case. Rather, we are seeing a lot of territorial battles between the disciplines even though there are some inter-disciplinary research projects.

Being specific could thus be a problem – sociologists lack the economists’ view of the world and are therefore unable to make use of this perspective. And vice versa. The real problem here is that most fields of study have already done quite a lot of specific research – the scientists know their fields, even though there are quite a few problems yet to be solved. What is needed is consolidation, science as a whole cannot go forward without getting rid of the artificial borders between disciplines and sub disciplines.

And since science tends to be less general and more specific, this also affects scientific writing. Each discipline has its jargon and way of expressing things, which effectively keeps non-scientists as well as scientists of other disciplines out of the discussions. Also, the problems get smaller and more detailed, and thus the study of them takes less notice of the context. Scientific writing thus becomes very technical – and hard to read.

Math as the [only] language of science

The last point made in the previous section is important: science has become very technical. Studying the details rather than getting the big picture requires a use of language that is very specific and unambiguous. This is, of course, a good thing – there is no reason science should be vague and ambiguous. However, this eventually (and, indeed, it has) leads to scientists disqualifying language as a means for communication – instead, math is used as the only possible way of describing and explaining a phenomenon.

Math has a lot of advantages, no doubt: it is clear, unambiguous, and it is expressed in essentially the same way no matter what is your native language. But being clear and “pin-pointing” is also problematic – especially in the social sciences. When one studies the social phenomena, i.e., humans acting, one cannot be mathematically exact. There is no way one can describe the actions of a human being in such exact terms – the value of exactness thus becomes a vice, since it leaves out part of the picture and makes the scientist unable to i) describe the width and depth of the situation, and ii) communicate understanding (cf. Weber’s terms Verstehen vs. Erklären) of the phenomenon.

Also, and this is a sad truth, a scientist used to the mathematically exact language will find him- or herself unable to study the real situation. If the language used for absorbing knowledge is mainly mathematics, then it is no longer possible to interpret the why’s, how’s and what’s. The value of social science, an extremely important part of scientific research, could thus be decreasing simply because social scientists wish to be deemed more “scientific” through using mathematics.

On the writing of scientists

What has been mentioned in rather vague terms in the previous two sections have implications for how science is presented. The “old style” essayist writings of great scientists does not only tend to go away – it might become extinct. Many scientific journal articles today are too concise and too technical to make sense – many theories presented contradict common sense, and sometimes have nothing to do with the real world. The latter is true even though the theory presented is based on real world data!

The scientists are simply blinded by their desperate need to make a clear case, that they forget (or are unable) to ponder on whether it makes sense. The big picture is necessary for detailed science – but the opposite isn’t necessarily true.

So what we have here is a scientific community that has been overly divised and that is self-enforcing the differences between the disciplines at the expense of science. This does not, of course, make sense – but in order to identify this fact one needs to shift perspectives for a minute, from the microscope to the binoculars, and ask the question in real language: does this make sense.

The “old style” scientific reports were not as detailed and did not use math as extensively. That is not necessarily a bad thing – one can make very rigorous scientific research, even math-based, without having to present every detail in a scientific paper. Good research generates new theories to explain and understand phenomena – the theory itself doesn’t have to rely on mathematically exact language. Actually, any theory about a social phenomenon is probably better if it has been developed through good research (perhaps using math), but is stated in general terms – and thus could, and should, be discussed using language and sensible examples.

General theories provide a great basis for further research: such theories are easier to dispute and prove wrong, and they are easier to apply on different sets of data – and they are communicable to out-of-the-discipline scientists. What we need is a revolution in science, a backwards revolution. We need to start writing again, and combine rather than divise.

This is what is so great with Schumpeter in the work cited above: he combines knowledge of different scientists, presumably from different disciplines, and he presents it in common language – he provides a combined scientific theory that people can understand. And thus: he provides the means for further research – and automatically welcomes any attempt to prove him wrong. In other words, he provides good science.

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On the Old Right and Neo-Conservatism

My latest article on Strike the Root discusses the philosophical roots of the two warring factions in the GOP. The point is not to make an in-depth analysis of the real opinions expressed by the proponents of each side, but rather to analyze the fundamental moral conviction of the so-called Old Right, on the one hand, and the “neocons,” on the other.

What is interesting about the GOP is that these two factions are so different, yet both of them seem to feel they belong in the republican party. As I write in the article:

A political party based on a certain kind of ideology shouldn’t be able to attract people with views fundamentally contradictory to the ones expressed in the party program. So we should be able to assume that the Old Right and Neo-conservative factions of the party must agree on a majority of the fundamental points, however not necessarily on the political agenda, the priorities, perhaps not even the end goals.

This should be the assumption people tend to make; it is the assumption that is closest at hand when discussing one single political party – the political party currently enjoying the presidency – since a party has a common set of values and a common program. Politics in some kind of democracy, after all, is a quest for enough of the people’s support to gain power and realize the political program.

This should mean that if you have ideas that are fundamentally contradictory to the ones proposed by the party in its program and by its leaders, then what are you doing in this party? Yet people tend to stick around – this has been the case in the GOP for the last three decades, as well as for the last decade or so in British New Labour, and for only a few years in the Swedish conservative party Moderaterna.

In the three parties mentioned the fundamental ideas championed by the party apparatus has changed. The GOP and Moderaterna have accepted an accepting, efficiency-seeking pragmatic view of politics. The republican party after Ronald Reagan has become “neocon,” which essentially means they have adopted a completely new way of seeing the State and the individual – and the inherent conflict arising between them.

Moderaterna has done the exact same thing, even though it is a process that started some 25 years later. Sweden, of course, is not a super power and therefore imperialistic waging of wars is not on the agenda. But ideologically the party, under Fredrik Reinfeldt, has accepted the legacy of the hegemonic Social Democratic party and thereby erased most of the individualist values previously cherished. The new government under Reinfeldt consists solely (almost) of apparatchiks following whatever orders are issued by headquarters. The old ideology and set of values that created and united the party have suddenly evaporated.

The New Labour has made a journey in the opposite direction if we accept the left-right dimensions of party politics – from the left to the right. In their case, the situation was to some degree the same as it had been for the Swedish Moderaterna. The conservative party of the UK had had power for a very long time, and the conflict-laden Labour party simply didn’t have power within reach. Something needed to be done.

I am not sure to what degree this scenario of political futility experienced in a situation where the greatest competitor is a hegemonic power is applicable on the GOP. But something has made the neocons rise after the rather successful presidency of Ronald Reagan. Or it could simply be the evil legacy of the presidents Bush…?

These three parties are great examples of how warring factions within a political party seeking power of government tend to stay in the party long after the battle would reasonably seem lost. The libertarians in Moderaterna, the socialists in New Labour, and the Old Right in the GOP all share the same fate: they quickly became minorities and approached extinction, at least as far as representation in the party goes.

Ron Paul, previously discussed on this blog here and here, has managed to in some sense awaken the people of the Old Right in the GOP, and that makes it a very interesting situation. If he is successful he might very well create a renaissance for the old-style conservatism of people like Albert J. Nock, just like Gösta Bohman was able to successfully make somewhat libertarian ideas and ideals a natural part of Moderaterna in the 1970s.

Perhaps charismatic people like Bohman and Paul are able to create ideological tipping points within parties. This is a very interesting issue to study, at least if one is interested in organizations and institutions in society. What makes it so extraordinarily interesting is the fact that these tipping points, if they exist and are generated, seem to be “tipping” the core values of a political party from one end to another.

As is discussed in the article mentioned above, the difference between the Old Rightism and Neo-Conservatism – as well as between the factions in both New Labour and Moderaterna – is fundamental. As I summarize the differences in the article:

The Old Right is a conservatism that begins and ends with the individual – from this follows that whatever government “needed” is a necessary evil to protect the individual’s rights. Neo-conservatism claims universalist principles and subjects the means as well as the individual to what is necessary to get there.

The differences in real politics might not be as great as I describe them here, but that is a matter of inconsistency among the champions of both sets of values. The “old righters” might be able to get along with the “neocons” in most issues, but that is simply an effect of people generally being ignorant of the values they cherish – and what they really mean.

From a moral-philosophical point of view there is no common ground on which the people of the Old Right can accept the Neo-conservatives, and vice versa. The former have a deontological worldview which supplies them with arguments for the individual and against the State. From their point of view it isn’t conceivable to wage war in order to spread an ideal, since that would necessarily violate individual rights of both the attacked and the attackers.

From the neocon perspective, the goal is of greater value than the means and thus it is not only possible – but desirable – to enforce their superior way of life. At the barrel of a gun, if necessary.

Read the article here.

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On an Article’s Valid Arguments

I have received a lot of criticism from numerous anonymous Internet criticizers. As is often the case with the Internet and elsewhere, “anonymous” means people can say whatever they want without risking having to argue a point in defense. Most of these comments on my articles have been submitted to various billboards and discussion forums (google “per bylund” and you’ll see) where the commenters probably think they can get away with anything.

Anyway, even though these people don’t seem interested in a discussion on the real points they are supposedly making, I would like to discuss a few important things about article criticism on a general level. In doing this, at least I have commented on the criticism and somehow defended myself against this particular kind of attack. Also, the argument in this blog post is generally applicable and would thus be of interest even if you haven’t read any of my articles; it is not a personal defense but rather a discussion on what writing an article really means.

The kinds of criticism I intend to discuss here are:

“The author hasn’t covered all the arguments”

and

“This is just the author’s opinion – there is no real argument”

As you can probably see, the two points are not at all the same. The first one is a criticism of the content not being sufficiently argumentative – there are more arguments that the commenter thinks should be part of the article. The second simply says that there are no arguments at all and that the article should therefore not be considered by anyone seriously interested in the issue at hand.

The former thus accepts that there are arguments in the article discussed, whereas the latter does not. But for some reason most people interested in offering criticism use both arguments at the same time, thinking they have really nailed the author. I believe the only thing they have done is to prove they are really not worth listening to, and thus that reading their comments is a complete waste of time.

Nevertheless, let’s take a look at the two kinds of criticism one by one and analyze their implications.

1. The author hasn’t covered all the arguments

This seems like a valid criticism and should be taken seriously at most times if the commenter is serious. After all, if the author really hasn’t covered the main arguments, the article really doesn’t have the effect the author intended or the effect the article could have had.

But it isn’t clear what “hasn’t covered all the arguments” really means. There are many ways of interpreting this comment, for example these:

  1. The author hasn’t covered the main argument
  2. The author hasn’t covered the full extent of the argument discussed
  3. The author has left out one or many of the possible arguments

These interpretations are very different. The first one says the author of the article discusses the wrong point. A better argument is at hand and should be chosen if one intends to discuss this particular issue. This kind of criticism could point to a commonly used argument that is better and more obvious than the one used in the article, or it could supply a new argument that is much better att proving the point made.

It should be obvious that if the point is to criticize the author of the article for not having made the best (or one of the better) arguments, the criticism must include or at least reference the better arguments. Otherwise the criticism is simply taken out of the blue without any real claims of substance. This is why this kind of criticism in most discussion forums fail to really criticize the article in a very way.

The second point is somewhat similar to the first point, but here the criticism is not that the main argument is left out – but an important part of the argument used has simply been left out. This is, in a way, a much more serious critique, since it means the author of the article really has made use of [one of] the best arguments available – but he or she has obviously not understood the extent of the argument. Or, in other words, the author has used an argument even though he or she obviously didn’t understand either what it is about or how to make use of it.

What we’re really saying here is not that the author of the article is ignorant (which is what we are saying in the first point above), but that the author does not understand. This is thus a criticism of the author’s intellect and intelligence. Such a serious criticism must of course supply proof of the point made – any example of a better point would do. However, this is very seldomly the case in discussion forums. It is of course much easier to simply say “the author is stupid” without mentioning why or in what way.

Supplying a real argument with examples and perhaps even real reasoning means exposing oneself for the same kind of criticism. Most people are not interested in doing this, especially not in Internet forums – even though they are anonymous – and thus they intentionally avoid the real argument.

The third point is the least valid of the three. As we have seen, the first two could very well be valid points if used wisely (and they need to be used wisely in order to work as criticisms at all). This third point, as I will show below, cannot be valid no matter how it is used and thus it should always be avoided. Nevertheless, this is probably the most frequently used criticism in this category, at least judging from the discussion forums I’ve encountered on the Internet.

The reason “leaving out one or many of the possible arguments” is utterly invalid as criticism lies completely in the last two words: possible arguments. An article (or even a book) cannot ever cover all the possible arguments – it simply isn’t possible. One reason for this is the constraint in size: it isn’t possible to cover all arguments in a limited-length text. Another reason is the availability of knowledge: there will always be someone coming up with another argument that the author simply has never thought of!

It doesn’t really matter if this argument has already been expressed in writing, or if thinking of it is simultaneous to writing the article or happens after the article is written and/or published. The reason for this is that an author cannot know of everything that has ever been thought of, and he or she also cannot include arguments or ideas that weren’t thought of when writing the article even though such arguments could be available for readers of the article at a later time.

We simply have to face it: all arguments cannot be covered.

Even if most valid points could be covered in a lengthy book, when writing an article it simply isn’t possible. Sometimes another valid and rather important argument has to be left out because there is no way of discussing it in the article – the text would simply be flooding over its limits and no one would i) read it or ii) publish it.

This is a very valid reason for not covering all main points. I do this myself very often: I write an article with the sole purpose of discussing one of the best arguments, leaving the other arguments aside (these can then be covered in other articles). So claiming “there are other arguments” cannot ever be a valid criticism unless it fits into one of the previous two categories: that the author has left out the better argument while “pretending” it doesn’t exist, or that the argument supplied is supplied in a bad way.

“This is just the author’s opinion – there is no real argument”

There are two important aspects to this criticism: it could be that the commenter has a problem with the article being simply a statement of opinion or that the article argues in a way that the commenter finds unsatisfactory. These are really two different points, even though they are very often mixed and made into a “bundle criticism.”

Since the criticism is really two different kinds of criticism it is better to treat them separately. Also, the latter part of the statement is really part of the former kind of argument and we have already discussed this at length. I will thus analyze only the validity of claiming that an article is nothing but “the author’s opinion.”

If this kind of criticism was directed at an article published in a scholarly journal it would be nothing short of Ragnarok for the author and very close to the end of his or her academic or scientific career. However, such opinion pieces aren’t ever published in such journals – they wouldn’t make it through peer review without being thrashed completely. (At least, I hope this is the case.)

But the kind of articles I’m discussing here, and the kind of articles commonly commented with this kind of criticism, aren’t journal articles. They are rather opinion editorials in newspapers or articles on web sites or e-zines. In the libertarian “world” such e-zines would be sites such as Strike the Root, LewRockwell.com or Center for a Stateless Society, sites on which I tend to publish most of my “opinion” articles.

The reason I mention this is that an important part of the article and how it should be assessed is what audience the author had in mind when writing it. The important question to ask here is: what is the purpose of the article? This is where most commenters go wrong – they criticise an article from the point of view of someone who is not at all in the intended audience.

Of course, if the criticism is of real arguments supplied in the article it should be taken seriously. But if it is really an article published in an e-zine to express an opinion, claiming “this is just the author’s opinion” does not really cut it. It is the author’s personal opinion, but it is supposed to be.

However, a good article does not express an opinion without discussing the opinion and making a statement – or some kind of claim that this is the “best” opinon. So most articles should include some kind of reasoning, and this is clearly subject to analysis and criticism. But this really means the other kind of criticism (as discussed above) should be used, since it is really an assessment of the arguments.

The problem here is that an article in a political or philosophically oriented e-zine might very well be an opinion piece with arguments, or at least reasoning, that to a bystander might not seem to cut it even though it does. The reason for this is that many opinion pieces on such sites as the ones mentioned above assume the reader is already aware of and shares a basic set of values. For instance, an anarchist libertarian writer might very well criticize a standpoint of minarchist libertarians leaving out arguments for constitutionalism, assuming the reader already has this kind of knowled. Any social democrat reader would find the fundamental arguments either lacking or unsufficient, or perhaps he or she simply gets lost in the special terminology used.

The article thus might not seem to supply arguments that the author, writing for a certain audience, assumes the reader already knows. Opinion pieces are, in this sense, not different from articles written for scholarly journal – they too assume the reader has already a certain level of knowledge in the field. A biologist or physicist would not be able to follow the reasoning in an article published in an economics journal, and vice versa, simply because they lack the basic knowledge assumed by the author (and the editors).

But this doesn’t mean the criticism of “this is just an opinion” automatically fails. It does not. Opinion articles need to supply some kind of reasoning or argument in order to be valid – if they do not they should not be published. But as a commenter it is important to understand what audience the article was written for and take that into account when criticizing. Arguments or facts may very well be left out of the article if it is assumed the reader already has this kind of knowledge, which makes criticism such as “hey, what about the facts?” misplaced.

What is the conclusion of all this, then?

The conclusion is that it is as difficult, or perhaps even more difficult, to write valid criticism of an article as writing the article itself. The commenter needs either advanced skills in reasoning or argumentation analysis, or sufficient knowledge of the article context.

Sadly most commenters on the Internet lack both of these, and they also lack the necessary humble approach of a serious commenter. Most criticisms, at least when considering discussion forums and e-mail lists, are at best rather puerile attempts to make the author look bad. I am not saying this to get even, but considering the points I have discussed above most commenters on the Internet seem to have no clue what they are doing.

Criticism is very important – it is the way forward – but a lot of people on the Internet simply don’t take role as commenters seriously enough.

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Studying the Differences: Libertarian Paradigms

In a recent blog post I elaborated a little on the fundamental philosophical difference between minarchism and anarchism. I also claimed the two philosophies, even though they often go together as distinct parts of the same movement, are really not two different expressions of the same fundamental conviction – they are parts of different philosophical and political paradigms.

The interesting thing about paradigms is that there really is no way of being part of both – the existence of paradigms is generally a situation of mutual exclusivity. Simply put, paradigms are “either–or” – not both. So you cannot really be part of both ways of thinking, you have to belong to one of them, and that will make you quite unable to understand the other point of view.

Another interesting thing about paradigms when applied on statism vs. anarchism is the fact that statism is very obviously normality. No one, at least in the western world, is born anarchist – we are all born in statist societies with statist people having nothing but statist agendas. So movement between the two paradigms, which might be called “individual paradigm shifts” (or rather: cross-paradigm travel), is necessarily from one to the other – not the other direction.

Of course, we shall not claim there is no one who is now minarchist but used to be anarchist. Those people do exist, and they might for all I know be many (it is just that I haven’t met very many), but following the fact that they were born in a statist society, presumably by statist parents, they must have traveled from statist to anarchist first. Traveling back isn’t half as difficult as taking the first step, at least I don’t think it is.

What this really means in the minarchist vs. anarchist debate is that there really are no minarchists who can fully understand the anarchist position, while every anarchist presumably has been a minarchist!

This should not be interpreted to mean that I claim minarchists cannot possibly fully understand the anarchist position (even though it is unlikely), and it also doesn’t mean that all anarchists understand the minarchist position. It is however less unlikely that any random anarchist libertarian would fail to understand the minarchist position in such a way that this failure exceeds the failure of any random minarchist to understand the anarchist position.

We need thus assume that it is more likely that any random anarchist would understand the minarchist position better than any random minarchist would understand the anarchist position, than the opposite. This is a very interesting conclusion – especially if we use it as a tool for analyzing a political-philosophical discussion between an anarchist and a minarchist. What do we get?

Well, the first conclusion we must come to is that the frequent misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and misconceptions between a minarchist and an anarchist should be mainly the result of minarchist ignorance. It is highly unlikely that the anarchist in such a discussion would be totally misunderstanding the minarchist position – the probability of the anarchist failing utterly to understand the minarchist’s use of terms and concepts must, judging from the arguments supplied above, be much, much less than the probability of the minarchist doing the same. Thus, most misconceptions and misunderstandings are likely the product of the minarchist not being able to understand the anarchist position.

What does this teach us? Except for the many deep problems of paradigmatic differences in philosophy, it doesn’t really tell us much. We cannot claim the anarchist is automatically right and the minarchist automatically wrong, but we can safely assume that the misunderstandings that are so common in anarchism vs. minarchism debates are mostly the result of the minarchist being unable to change mindset from the statism into which he (or she) was born rather than the inability of the anarchist to understand his own former position.

What you should learn from this is not for me to tell you, but one should be able to draw quite a few conclusion based on this preliminary analysis. I believe it should be somewhat comforting for the libertarian anarchist, while the minarchist might want to consider a more humble approach.

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