Hayek III: Free Will and Freedom to Choose
Screenshot from Dr Strangelove (Sony Pictures)
Not freedom of choice, but freedom to choose. Sounds minor, but there is a functional difference, beyond the obvious abortion discussion. I have mentioned multiple times here that I am a Hayekian. Let me finally answer why.
Hayek was the most prominent member of the Austrian School of Economics but did teach in London, where he sparred with Keynes, and in Chicago, where Milton Friedman would crib off him. That sounds harsh, but Milton Friedman was a supply-side economist of a macro mold. Macroeconomics will always be the preferred school of thought in politics because the meddlers, the Karens, love using data to think everyone can be nudged to do one thing that they, just by coincidence I’m sure, liked before they “found” data to support their position. While I do not think supply-side economics is “voodoo economics,” as HW would claim during the 1980 GOP primary (and y’all wonder why he was a bad successor to Reagan,) it has a major problem all schools of macroeconomics have: People.
What? Yes, people. Just because the most logical response to a given incentive is X action, doesn’t mean all people will respond to said incentive by doing X. The problem with government on a federal level is that the meddlers want everyone to do X. I can bring up loads of examples of this failure, from communism to Michelle Obama’s disaster of a school lunch program, but it is a tale as old as time. People always have a choice, even if that choice is illegal. Free will exists; human nature exists! America is a melting pot of competing ideas and ideologies. That’s what makes us strong. Europe is filled to the brim with people who all largely think the same, and usually have an absurd respect for authority. And they hate rehashing history. You can find an American on every street who will talk your ear off about their least favorite president. Just see what’s been happening in Princeton the last few years. One for you history buffs out there. But get a German to talk about Hitler. Or a Brit to talk about Neville Chamberlain or King George III. They’ll pretend that Thatcher was terrible, but she likely saved the country, so come off it then.
Most people do not enjoy being proven wrong. I thrive on conflict and chaos. My desire for conflict has led me to embrace Twitter for what it does best and worst: Discussion. Anyone can respond to anyone about anything. Unbridled chaos means the bad can easily outweigh the good, but the good is still there. I crave intellectual stimulation most waking hours of the day. Twitter is a powder keg, and I’m givin’ off sparks. I try, as much as possible, to be dispassionate when discussing anything. But, as it so happens, people read into my text (usually the mood they’re currently in) an emotion I did not intend.
Freedom to choose is the idea of free will. Humans, as individuals, control their own thoughts and are responsible, in most cases, for their own actions. It is the commies and the tankies and the Neo-Keynesians who wish to deny the right people (in their minds) agency. In other words, it can’t be their fault they got addicted to drugs and robbed that liquor store. We can quibble all we like about the concept of free will (Hell, Loki did,) but the issue at hand is fatalism. The “right side of history” crowd. Human history does not arc towards justice by itself. It takes great men working as individuals to make justice so. The collective inevitably becomes a mob led by a polemic who will punish his or her enemies by convincing the easily manipulated that those targets are bad for some reason. Witches, enemies of the state, etc. Marx was a fatalist. He was wrong on economics, human nature, human interaction, and loads of other topics. His theories sound nice, but are straight up evil in practice. His system depends on the very same people he decries as evil. There is no perfect man, so no perfect system can ever be fully implemented perfectly. Because of people!
I am an individualist. Capitalism succeeds largely because it assumes human nature and the individual. Capitalism isn’t perfect because humans are not enlightened. The system, built around liberty and natural rights, will leave us the best off as opposed to all other systems we currently have. Being free to do what you want means you are responsible for both the slings and the arrows. You fail, your fault. You succeed, you built that. Obama and others tried to pretend the social contract is actually responsible for Bezos or Gates or Jobs or whatever, but those people are small-minded, petty authoritarians. It is individuals who change the world, not the collective. Yes, they got help along the way, but it was their thoughts, their ideas, that they risked and saw that risk through, no matter what small-minded people told them to do. It is not being discouraged that leads to billionaires, not a random teacher. That teacher might have helped, but that same teacher might have discouraged others. Whiplash makes the argument that the true geniuses would not be discouraged, but this is nonsense. Being smart doesn’t make you strong. Tesla did not understand business and failed because Edison and Westinghouse did.
Your ideas depend on other people implementing them. Practically speaking, your system must leave free will alone to have any chance to succeed. Let people decide what they want to do and the world will be chaos, but a spontaneous order will emerge eventually.
I’ve criticized my fellow liberals often for having an overly romantic view of spontaneous order, that Bastille moment when The People just all spontaneously rise up and take action without a leader or party or organized group shaping and disciplining the action.
We saw it with the hippies, or with Occupy or with BLM. We see it in how people love to invoke Rosa Parks as merely a tired woman who suddenly decided that she would refuse to comply, when in actuality she was a highly trained activist in a carefully scripted and planned action.
The thing is, history has demonstrated repeatedly that nothing is a greater threat to human dignity and freedom than unorganized action and spontaneous order is most often tyranny.Report
It works far more often than it fails.Report
Great comment, Chip.
My take on the issue is that you are perhaps drawing a black and white line on planned vs unplanned action. When it comes to something as large and complex as society, the plans and scripts of a civil rights group are pretty much a clear example of decentralized action as Hayek saw it (I have no idea how Russell sees it). We have myriads of people and groups across 50 states, in one of a hundred plus countries. The actual civil rights legislation was indeed fairly top down. It was planned order.
I agree that most spontaneous activity will tend to result in chaos, decay and disorder. What order we do get will largely tend to be tyranny. History makes a pretty strong case that this is the case.
Similarly, virtually all mutations are dysfunctional. Most entrepreneurial ideas are absurd. Most hypotheses are wrong. The power of emergent order is in creating an environment which stimulates novelty in a fairly safe and well contained way, but that also creates systems to select the rare diamond in the tough and then propagate that while letting go of all the trash. Lots of people and organizations had lots of plans and schemes in the pre-civil rights era. A few were good, and were promoted up to state and federal law.Report
Who or what is creating the environment?Report
The environment can be emergent or planned or some combo of both.Report
Gates became a billionaire, not because he’s a unique genius, but because IBM was too short-sighted to buy DOS instead of licensing it. But it’s true that Gates’s real talent is for business, in particular the ability to turn garbage like DOS and WIndows into near-monopolies.
Likewise:
https://sports.yahoo.com/news/remember-yahoo-turned-down-1-132805083.html
That little startup? Google. (Altavista, if the name is unfamiliar, was a search engine built by DEC. It had the most advanced indexing and search technology until you know who came along.)Report
History is written by the winners.Report
Very true. Except for the Civil War, of course.Report
Free will is largely an illusion according to science. It might be an illusion we need to pretend exists because the alternative is a lot worse. Very few people want to totally live in a society where a self-appointed elite makes each and every decision. At the same time, we shouldn’t pretend that the brain is essentially hackable by images and chemicals when we know better. Some people have more self-discipline than others, but nobody has total self-discipline. It’s like how the law is determined to treat memory as being essentially reliable when scientifically we know it is not. What debates about freedom means is really just how free should people be to make bad decisions.Report
If it is an illusion, humans have yet to find a way to truly capitalize on it. Free will does exist. My response to you was not pre-determined. That’s the fatalism trap, which is the subject of an article I’ve already written.Report
I’m pretty sure Lee knew what your response would be before he posted. I knew what it would be when I read it. You didn’t disappoint.Report
This comment is very very VERY funnyReport
Ah yes, the great libertarian trope. Order emerges. Society will work. Humans can’t fail to ultimately get it right.
Cr@p. Total Cr@p. History makes it clear, as does economics, surprisingly. Yet libertarians, and a good many economists, soldier on as if its all infallible.
Even nature is more random then predictable. At least the natural sciences have acknowledged this through the use of statistical confidence intervals and uncertainty discussions – which bedevil managers, policy makers and politicians who all crave ordered certainty.Report
In one sense it is true, trivially true.
The current order IS the order that spontaneously arose out of chaos.
I just dont see why this is meaningful.Report
Its not, but its all Russell has. Economic theory is all about making sense of the irrational actions of humans. SO of course you have to cling to some sort of floating log. This is his log.Report
The entire COVID-19 pandemic provides quite a bit of evidence that spontaneous order is just bull. A good chunk of the online Libertarian world just went into a big head the sand denial regarding the magnitude of the pandemic. They started off semi-reasonably by advocating voluntary mitigation measures but quickly turned to denying the pandemic is happening, downplaying how lethal COVID-19 is, and pushing for heard immunity and not doing anything about it. If we followed spontaneous order, millions more would be dead.Report
This.Report
You don’t know what spontaneous order is.Report
The people being fed up enough with the chaos that they’ll put a strongman in power to re-establish order by any means necessary?Report
I’ve read several summaries of it. And I gotta say its a great concept that has absolutely no basis in real life. The necessity of predicating EVERYTHING on individual actions is where it fails, in as much as humans aren’t rational, and common good rarely arises from individual actions. in other words rarely, if ever, does self interest lead to social well being or orderly constructs. Markets don’t actually dispersed individual decisions or actors. Thats a schema that has to be imposed, and markets have never been up to that imposition.
And Lee’s case in point about the Covid response is actually a great example of this failure. Self interest has not prompted the vast majority of the Right, much the vast majority of the libertarian right, to avail themselves of the mechanisms that would stamp out Covid. There is a vast amount of anti-societal good being peddled from there, in the misguided name of “freedom” and “Liberty.” Contra my own governor, people are not being reasonable, they are not informing themselves and making informed decisions, and they are not choosing to protect the vulnerable.Report
Spontaneous order has the same problems as communism or theocracy. The system only works if either everybody believes in it sincerely and/or you can force conformity to the system. There will always be people who disagree with any system and will propose alternatives that are entirely contradictory. Perpetual Hayekianism is an illusion, not possible.Report
“We are all individuals!
Who will nevertheless somehow simultaneously arrive at the same decision in unison!”Report
I say my can of soup is worth $50. You say it’s worth $10. No sale.
If you say it’s worth more than I say it’s worth, we make a sale.
This does not require simultaneous arrival at the same decision in unison.
Spontaneous order is merely the result of creating rules that make an interesting game. Market Ladies are one result of “spontaneous order.” — you spent most of the game trying to get the Market Ladies to do what you wanted.Report
In fairness to Hayek, his concept of spontaneous order, while you would not know it from these posts, has little to do with what people believe. He sees spontaneous order as a fact of the world, not merely of human groups but of basic physical systems, so that even planned orders are spontaneous orders in a sense. It is more of a metaphysical claim than a sociological or psychological one, though he obviously believes it has normative implications for how we govern society.
Obviously we could quibble with his metaphysical claim, but Hayek is no different in his metaphysical positions than the 19th century positivists (and I guess 20th century positivists, though he differs from them greatly in other ways).Report
Eh, freedom has always been a sucker’s game. What is Hayek’s Theory of Will?Report
Excited for the answer to this question.Report
All of humanity through the ages of ages is excited for the answer to this question. 🙂Report
Ha.Report
Liberty, not freedom. I have covered this in Hayek I or Hayek II, both of which are linked in this article.Report
“Practically speaking, your system must leave free will alone to have any chance to succeed. Let people decide what they want to do and the world will be chaos, but a spontaneous order will emerge eventually.”
I am not really sure what you are suggesting or arguing for or against.
Like several other comments, above, I believe that if we just allow people to decide what they want to do, we will get a lot of chaos and exploitation. I am fairly certain Hayek would agree too.
My take on Hayek is that he argued for the value of bottoms up, decentralized, emergent order. The type of order which is exhibited in language, evolution (and life itself), social insect colonies, much of technology, much of culture, and markets (what he calls “catallaxy “).
However, part of the emergent order is itself the rules, conventions, mores and protocols that we need to follow to restrain exploitation and free riding. These need to be discovered via a system of trial and error, which is intrinsically emergent and at least partially decentralized. But some of these discovered rules clearly limit freedom and choice (you are not free to rape my children or take property which conventions determine as mine).
I believe that the value of the spontaneous order argument isn’t that it is the only way to get order and design. It is that we are intrinsically blind to this way of thinking. We tend to default to top down thinking and design, and to ignore the obvious defects of imposed order.
There are benefits in both approaches, and drawbacks. Sometimes the best systems and institutions are a blend of both. And a top down system can be designed specifically to encourage, stimulate and reward bottoms up problem solving and order.Report