Results for “road to serfdom” 39 found
How sociologists are studying economists
1. Fabio reports.
2. New blog on academic productivity, via Teppo.
3. There is a new edition of Road to Serfdom out, here are the original referee reports, by Knight and Marschak.
4. The contributions of Milton Friedman.
5. The essential John Nash, a new book.
Hayek and the Reconstruction of Germany
At first, the U.S. POW camps for captured Germans were dominated by Nazi’s who threatened and even killed anti-Nazi “traitors.” But as American thoughts turned to the post World-War II era the camps were cleaned up and a reeducation plan was begun. In other countries, this might have been a euphemism for torture and forced labor but in the U.S. camps it meant libraries filled with books that the Nazi’s had banned and open discussion sessions led by professors from Harvard, Brown, Cornell and elsewhere. The story is told in The Washington Post Magazine article, Learning Freedom in Captivity.
Here is one interesting quote:
By mid-1944, new leadership had been installed at Concordia and many of the worst Nazis had been removed. Concordia’s canteens and library were filled with books that had been banned by the Nazis. Treichl read and reread the American bestseller The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, which detailed the flaws in socialism and contrasted it with democracy.
Treichl went on to become head of Austria’s largest bank and honorary president of the Austrian Red Cross. To this day he has kept his beloved copy of The Road To Serfdom.
I find this story heart-warming and a fascinating tidbit of history but it also troubles me. What are we to make of a reeducation camp with The Road to Serfdom as text? Clearly, we cannot dismiss such a thing as a contradiction in terms because apparently it did some good. More broadly, Hayek warns against the hubris of social engineering – yet what was the post WWII reconstruction of Germany and Japan but social engineering on a grand scale? How do these lessons apply to Iraq? Could we fail in Iraq precisely because we do not have the power to reeducate?
How economists became so timid
From Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl, that was then:
Self-styled American and European radicals, for example, helped end monarchy and expand the franchise. The free-labor ideology of European radicals and American Radical Republicans helped abolish serfdom and slavery and establish a new basis for industrial labor relations. The late 18th and 19th centuries also witnessed the liberal reformism of Jeremy Bentham, Smith, James and John Stuart Mill, and the Marquis de Condorcet; the socialist revolutionary ideologies of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Marx; the labor unionism of Beatrice and Sydney Webb; and, influential at the time but now mostly forgotten, the competitive common ownership ideology of Henry George and Léon Walras. This ideology shaped the Progressive movement in the United States, the “New Liberalism” of David Lloyd George in Britain, the radicalism of Georges Clemenceau in France, even the agenda of the Nationalist Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-Sen. The Keynesian and welfare-state reforms of the early 20th century set the stage for the longest and most broadly shared period of growth in human history.
And this is now:
So where are the heirs of the political economists? Political economy has fragmented into a series of disparate fields, none of which has the breadth, creativity, or courage to support the reformist visions that were crucial to navigating past crises.
…Yet even as economists retreated from visionary social theory, the power they wielded over detailed policy decisions grew. A notable feature of this policy guidance was that it shared the narrowness of economists’ research methods. Policy reforms advocated by mainstream economists were almost always what we call “liberal technocratic” — either center-left or center-right. Economists suggested a bit higher or lower minimum wage or interest rate, a bit more or less regulation, depending on their external political orientation and evidence from their research. But they almost never proposed the sort of sweeping, creative transformations that had characterized 19th-century political economy.
How to explain this timidity? As with many professions endowed with power (like the military), economics developed strict codes of internal discipline and conformity to ensure that this power was wielded consistent with community standards…
The upshot is that economics has played virtually no role in all the major political movements of the past half-century, including civil rights, feminism, anticolonialism, the rights of sexual minorities, gun rights, antiabortion politics, and “family values” debates.
There is much more at the link. I am not sure I have a single endorsement or criticism in response, other than to say that I view MR as, among other things, a fifteen-year running commentary on the economics profession and its ups and downs. In any case, beware complacency!
And do not forget about the authors’ new and stimulating book Radical Markets.
Hat tip goes to Bonnie Kavoussi.
Books on liberty-oriented economics for young people
I receive requests for recommendations in this area fairly often. I don’t feel I am qualified to judge the outputs, but here are three that have come across my path as of late and seem to me very good:
Connor Boyack, illustrated by Elijah Stanfield, The Tuttle Twins and The Road to Surfdom. Recommended ages 5-11.
I.M. Lerner and Catherine L. Osornio, The Secret Under the Staircase, and The Hidden Entrance. Here the age range seems to be higher, maybe 10-12? I feel I could have read them younger than that, however.
Someone should write a bibliographic essay on the books in this category. What else can you recommend?
F.A. Hayek, *The Market and Other Orders*
That is the new University of Chicago Press volume of Hayek’s collected works, this time volume 15. It is the best single-volume introduction to Hayek’s thought, if you are going to buy or read only one. It has the best of the early essays, as you might find in Individualism and Economic Order, and then the best later essays which build upon those earlier insights.
Here is Bruce Caldwell’s introduction to the volume, for e-purchase. The book’s table of contents is here. Here is our MRU course on Friedrich Hayek.
David Henderson on Medicare price controls
It is often debated whether a cut in Medicare reimbursement rates should be counted as a “price control.” David Henderson adds a valuable point:
…a year or two after I left the Council, the Reagan administration took the next step of imposing price controls on doctors under Medicare. Doctors were no longer allowed to do what was variously called “extra bill” or “balance bill.” They couldn’t charge even a penny more than Medicare paid. That’s what made it a system of price controls. Moreover, under later regulations, if a doctor takes even one Medicare patient, then he has to charge Medicare rates to all his Medicare patients even if those patients would rather ensure access by paying the whole bill (Medicare plus a doctor’s additional charge) out of their own pocket. It is this system of price controls that is causing many doctors to take no Medicare patients.
Here is more. Bryan Caplan comments, and Greg Mankiw’s recent post is relevant too.
Assorted links
2. Pavement (pdf, and not the band).
3. New purple octopus. And sneezing snub-nosed monkey.
4. Dave Weigel on Randy Barnett.
5. Update on the Wolfers-Price NBA referee bias paper.
6. Controversial RCTs for social welfare programs.
7. Law and the Multiverse, a blog about superheroes.
The Shape of Things to Come and Not to Come
Here is a very good post from Matt Yglesias, who gets to keep his name on the Yglesias Award. I am reluctant to pull any bit out of context (do read the whole thing), but here is one excerpt:
Get 40 Senators together to filibuster everything and that’s what you get. And when you add in state and local government, that’s a pretty healthy big government agenda right there, especially when you consider that states are shouldering a health slice of the Medicaid bill. Realistically, does anyone think we’re going to increase the overall size of the government faste than that? I sure don’t.
…So the future of American politics is necessarily going to be about things like making the tax code more efficient, finding areas of government spending to cut relative to projection, and thinking of policy measures that will help people that don’t involve spending more money.
I've arrived at somewhat similar conclusions, though from a different direction. Here is an alternative version of What is Not to Come:
1. Obamacare won't be repealed or declared unconstitutional, nor will Republican candidates be running against it six years from now. Trying to repeal parts of it would likely backfire and destroy the private insurance industry, given that the process would be ruled by public choice considerations rather than rational technocracy. We still would end up with a larger public sector role in our health care institutions.
2. I don't view "$200 billion a year to redistribute what is for this purpose a largely fixed supply resource" as an especially good investment, but it won't bring this country to its knees. The policy won't do much for fiscal responsibility.
3. Social Security won't much change, keeping in mind that the number of elderly voters is growing larger every day. Given all their elderly white voters, the Republicans are already "the party of Medicare." The Democrats have become "the party of Medicaid." That locks three major programs into place, more or less. I don't hear serious talk of major cuts in defense spending.
4. Taxes won't be raised much (do the Dems seem to have great love for reversing the Bush tax cuts?), spending won't be cut enough (the recent Republican document is extremely weak), and within twenty years we will have a sovereign debt crisis in the United States, as one day a Treasury auction won't go well. I'll predict, but not favor, the emergency passage of a VAT, a' la TARP, which will restore fiscal stability but lower the long-term rate of growth. When that time comes, the VAT will indeed be necessary, though ex ante I would opt for less social protection and a higher rate of economic growth.
5. The most important changes will come from aging, how other nations in the world fare especially China and India, the rate of technological progress, and foreign policy events which are exogenous from the point of view of economic policy. Overall it will be more interesting to follow other nations than the United States. Get ready for this and pick a few countries.
6. We should try to take back many of our vanquished civil liberties. Such a fight may or may not succeed, but at least fiscal considerations won't rule out this counterblow for liberty.
7. On issues such as drug legalization and gay rights, I see a more cyclic than melioristic pattern. We will see marginal improvements but we won't enter a new age of reason, in either the public sector or the private sector. The Netherlands is backing away from its very liberal social policies, including on drugs, and the cause of gay rights could as easily fall back as progress. I believe that many people are broadly programmed to be prejudiced in this area.
8. We will tweak financial regulation, but whether this is for better or worse, the link between reforms and final outcomes will continue to be opaque, to say the least.
9. More and more laws will be frozen in place. This already seems to be the case with immigration policy. More and more expenditures will be frozen into place. Politics will become more symbolic, and in some ways more disgusting, in response to the absence of real issues to argue over.
10. Climate change will remain an important yet insoluble issue. Even major legislation (which seems unlikely) would not change this much, not for a long time at least.
11. People will write profound books and papers on how and why "status quo bias" has strengthened, and then one day some new technological development will change everything. It's an open question whether this will happen before or after the sovereign debt crisis.
12. In the meantime, the United States will experience an ongoing "late" period of cultural blossoming, driven by the proliferation and democratization of new electronic media.
That's all for now!