Right Reason

Capitalist Peace?

 

What problem could there possibly be with a data set choosing 1940 as its origin?

 

 

In an interview with Vox , Steven Pinker, the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, argues that the world has been safer than it has ever been in the last hundred years, with the two main causes being capitalism and an Enlightenment morality. According to Mr. Pinker, capitalism has reduced the benefits of war since people can know get things from their neighbors without having to steal them. Rather than people generating their wealth through conflict, they now generate it through mutually beneficial specialization and trade. In turn, the Enlightenment morality, which has come hand-in-hand with capitalism, has helped to reduce violence by changing the way that people have calculated the costs and benefits of foreign policy. As Mr. Pinker explains:

In the 19th century, there was this cliché from [Carl] von Clausewitz that war was just the continuation of politics by other means: you consider whether to go to war [like any other policy option]. Now that's just not something decent leaders do.

Finally, cost-benefit calculations depend on what counts as a "cost." If you lose several tens or hundreds of thousands of your own citizens, is that a cost? And how big a cost is it? Now, increasingly, that counts as a cost: leaders are less likely to see their young men as cannon fodder, which means countries are willing to endure other costs to avoid that one. That's a result of the rise of humanistic sentiments, as opposed to nationalistic or ideological ones.

The problem with Mr. Pinker’s thesis, at least the most obvious problem, is that the data used to argue for a seventy-year long peace since the Second World War ended is horrifically biased and, as rigorously demonstrated by Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Mr. Pinker’s naïve statistics don’t exactly hold up. The graph for the interview, produced by Vox and reproduced above, is close to fraudulent in the way that it cherry picks a starting date that has little to do with capitalism.

 

I won’t go deeply into Mssrs. Cirillo and Taleb’s argument. Instead, I will exhort any reader to at least skim it themselves. In short, the article demonstrates how cautious we have to be in talking about the trend of violence across human history and how critical assumptions are made if we were to simply look at the sample mean, as the observed mean is not an estimator of the true mean. On Twitter, Taleb also did what Vox’s hacks didn’t do and that is to graph more than mere battlefield casualties, as the destruction of war isn’t constrained to where the battles happen:

 

 

Getting back to my main target: Vox’s biased graph skews our entire understanding of the 20^th century by cutting out almost half of the pertinent data. Although the Second World War is generally the apocalyptic conflict that captures the imagination of contemporary commentators, its predecessor is the conflict that really set the stage for the 20^th century’s hot and cold wars. Furthermore, in the beginning of 1914, people could freely trade and move between borders to a much higher degree than they could now, so any argument for the capitalistic peace hypothesis needs to be able to address why the argument doesn’t hold for 1914. The world was, after all, interconnected in trade. Even Krupp, the supplier of most of Germany’s arms, had a business relationship with the British government, whose subjects would soon enough bleed out due to weapons produced by Krupp. 

Interconnectedness is, therefore, not a sure panacea to conflict, nor is the cosmopolitan attitude that comes along with interconnectedness. Indeed, the high degree interconnectedness of nations may very well have affected the statistical properties of war in the past century or so, since an interconnected world would probably have less small wars, yet there will always be a small chance of an apocalyptic war. Power laws are everywhere. Had Vox chosen, say, 1800 as the starting date for the graph, the graph would have told a story about how apocalyptic wars are very much possible in a capitalistic world. It would have been a story more compatible with a power-law world than a world made safe by the international division of labor. 

 

As a bit of an aside, one way I like thinking about the capitalistic peace hypothesis is with a basic thought experiment: Would a liberal Englishman reading a newspaper article about the ascent of Kaiser Frederick III, the liberal emperor, to the German throne, drinking his tea from China, his clothing made from Egyptian cotton spun in a Manchester mill, and with a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations upon his bookshelf have imagined the slaughter that would define the political lives of his successors? I doubt it. 

Depending on his naïveté, he would have probably thought that the worst atrocities of human history were behind the population. If he were a child of the Enlightenment like Pinker, I really doubt that he could have foreseen the purposeful starvation of the Ukrainian population, by the government to follow the Tsarist régime to boot, and he would have never imagined the industrial slaughter of the central and eastern European Jewish population. 

Of course, as a thought experiment, this thought needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt. Nevertheless, I think it gets to a fundamental truth: The expounders of progress in the 19^th century would have been very disappointed with the fruits of the 20^th century. That, in turn, means that we should treat the notion of ‘progress’ with some caution. The broad pronouncements of the capitalistic peace hypothesis should ring a bit utopian to our ears.

 

Whatever philosophical problems I may have with Pinker’s narrative about Enlightenment morality, the most pressing problem with his view of history is statistical. Without a doubt, Vox’s data is biased. It cherry picks a starting date to create a graph that seemingly perfectly corroborates his hypothesis. Despite the seeming corroboration, starting a graph to illustrate capitalistic peace at 1940 is fraudulent and should be called out for being so. The commercial society didn’t emerge in the forge of the Second World War—indeed, the war did more to make a world safe for socialism than liberalism. Instead, the war broke out in a world where the international division of labor, innovation, and the pursuit of honest income was already apart of the daily lives of most belligerents. 

When we correct for the biased starting date and use more sophisticated statistical tools than a journalistic average, what we see is that the 20^th violent has been just as violent as many other periods of human history and even more violent than others. That’s certainly no argument for a fundamental change in the way that violence is treated in human society.

Are Imagined Communities Real?

 

In the aftermath of Scotland's decision to remain in the United Kingdom, Daniel Hannan defends British nationalism as a source of harmony in the debates over Scottish independence in in "The positive case for nationalism". He argues that that nationalism led to the best in human nature revealing itself in people's acquiescence to the outcome of the election.

At the end of the post he takes aim at the view that nations are simply made up lines on a map:

Most ordinary people – that is, people who are not literati or politicians – take feelings of national belonging for granted, and see patriotism as an unalloyed virtue, like honesty or courage. Yet the prevailing intellectual fashion is that patriotism is artificial. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn popularised the idea that nations depend on “invented traditions”.  A.C. Grayling held that they were synthetic creations, “their boundaries drawn in the blood of past wars”.

What was once Marxist critique is now academic orthodoxy. Virtually every political science postgraduate who passes through my office has been taught the same bilge about nations being “imagined communities”. And so, technically, they are, in the sense that they exist largely in people’s minds. But this is true of lots of perfectly real things. Why is a £20 note worth £20? Because we agree that it should be. Why is David Cameron prime minister? Because we agree to treat him as such.

Those who disparage or detest nationhood are guilty of an old Marxist conceit: the notion that people can be reconstructed, purged of the “wrong” ideas, cured of “false consciousness”.

As usual when talking about the nature of nations, Mr. Hannan is right, and very much so - even if the cosmopolitan sentiments within us may wish otherwise.

The idea that nations are simply imagined communities, and therefore may be discarded by an Enlightened era isn't a sound argument. The conclusion simply doesn't follow from the premises. Nations may be imagined communities, but that doesn't imply that they are unreal. Here a metaphysical point needs emphasis: Mental objects exist just as extended ones do. (All of you who think that metaphysics isn't necessary take heed. We actually need to know a thing or two about what kinds of substances exist to talk coherently about the world.) Nor are those mental objects necessarily arbitrary.

It's the peccadillo of an adolescent to think that simply because something, such as tradition, exists only in the minds of its adherents that it is therefore made up and arbitrary. As David Sloan Wilson has shown in Darwin's Cathedral, the human mind can develop such objects because such objects have helped our far-off ancestors in their struggle for existence. Imagined communities and other mental objects have biologically evolved because they are useful adaptations.

Adaptations, in turn, have some form that reflects the problems they help solve. One can go as far as to speak of them as embodied knowledge. That embodied knowledge must in some sense be complex and in being complex. Culture's reality as a set of mental object is betrayed by the complexity of those adaptive structures no less than the tactile properties of some sand in one's hands would prove the reality of that sand. If imagined communities and other traditions were simply made up, they would be random in their form. Instead, though, they are adaptive. Britannia, Rule the Waves! tells us something about the problems which have faced British society in the past just as a polar bear's lush fur would tell someone about the environment it inhabited. 

There is also an underlying biological explanation of of patriotism that Mr. Hannan doesn't touch on when he writes:  "Patriotism, as this blog never ceases to argue, is what makes us behave unselfishly." That explanation is that, as a cooperative species, Homo sapiens has evolved an innate desire to belong to a band. Nature has left Homo sapiens a distinctly cooperative species, and that propensity to cooperate is reflected in a desire to belong to a community because without such a sense of belonging cooperation to a human degree would be impossible. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin argued that traits such as "sympathy, fidelity, and courage" evolved to such a degree in human beings because "selfish and contentious people will not cohere" (Darwin 1989[1877]: 134-135[129-130]).

Even though human society has greatly changed since the conditions of our band-ancestors, human instincts have remained comparatively constant, and so the same instincts that would lead someone to desire the solidarity of a band compel them to find a first-person plural in the nation. In a sense, patriotism is atavistic because it reflects our desire to belong to bands even though patriotism's object is a much wider civilization. There shall always be a human desire to belong impelling people's patriotism, what matters is how culture directs that emotional impetus. 

 

Everyone Wants Peace on Their Terms

 

As for me, I cease not to advocate peace. It may be on unjust terms, but even so it is more expedient than the justest of civil wars.

-Marcus Tullius Cicero, Letters to Atticus

 

In “Does anyone really want a settlement in the Middle East?”, Daniel Hannan asks the question of what anyone has to gain from the current flare up of the conflict in Gaza:

What is Hamas trying to achieve by firing rockets into Israel? I’m not asking about its right to do so, or what the alternatives are, or the pros and cons of the whole 70-year-old dispute. I’m asking a narrower strategic question. What are the people who run Gaza trying to achieve by lobbing ordnance across the border?

…

The most rational explanation I can find for Hamas’s renewal of hostilities is that it’s trying to shore up its support in Gaza. The Syrian civil war and the Egyptian coup have deprived the paramilitaries of, respectively, their chief sponsor and their most immediate sympathiser. Isolated and bankrupt, unable even to pay the salaries of their 40,000 government employees, Hamas leaders seem to have decided to stake everything on a military campaign. Possibly, like Galtieri’s junta in 1982, they feel they have little to lose. At best, a new ceasefire might result in concessions, such as prisoner releases or – the big prize – a reopening of Gaza’s borders. At worst, the conflict should rally people to their regime.

 

Pareto efficiency is an important concept here. Less important as a positive standard for policy as much as a via negativa for eliminating policies we think shouldn’t work.

The world is Pareto-efficient when no one can be made better off except at the expense of somebody else. Or, as Andreu Mas-Colell and Michael D. Whinston express the idea in their text book Microeconomic Theory: “(A world) that is Pareto optimal uses society’s initial resources and technological possibilities efficiently in the sense that there is no alternative way to organize the production and distribution of goods that makes some consumer better off without making some consumer worse off” (Mas-Colell and Whinston 1995, 313). 

Pareto efficiency is a standard which conforms very much to how we would like politics done in a liberal democracy. After all, would not benevolent citizens choose to vote to avoid a world in which somebody can be better off without hurting anybody else? If Jim could be given a new home without hurting Jill or Bill, wouldn’t Jill or Bill let that happen? So clearly Pareto efficiency does conform to the ethos of a liberal democracy, and expresses the basic sentiment motivating liberal democracy (especially of the social democratic variety) that people can come together through the voting booths in order to solve their problems in an amicable fashion. Yet, though Pareto efficiency is interesting in speculations about policy, it absolutely fails in being a useful standard for guiding policy, and the reason for that is that Pareto efficiency is so weak a condition that pretty much every conceivable state of the world beyond economists’ models is already Pareto efficient. 

  

At this point, somebody who looks at the world from the point of view of economics alone can point out how much is being wasted over the struggle between the two nations and how much their citizens could gain by living in peace with each other. However, politics is about identify as much as about policy, and so for the political situation between Palestine and Israel to change, somebody’s identity has to lose, and so somebody has to be made worst off. Maybe not in profane terms (in fact, they might be made better off from the Max-U point of view), but certainly in the sacred terms of identity. 

Indeed, I can’t even find a neutral term to describe the region inhabited by the two nations without giving off signs of non-existent bias between either faction. If I call the region, Palestine, I imply that the Palestinians should win the conflict (whatever that means) and vice versa for calling the region Israel. Even importing the Latin word Judea or the Greek Παλαιστίνη doesn’t work. There’s just no way of talking about the situation without hurting somebody’s identity, which implies that the entire situation is some weird equilibrium, and kept there because changing it would require pain that no one wants to feel.  

 

We are all tethered by history in a world of utility maximizers, both in terms of the sacred and the profane, and that is felt no more strongly in Israel/Palestine/Judea/Παλαιστίνη/whatever-you-want-to-call-the-region. For there to be peace in the region, because of the initial endowment given to us by history, somebody will have to walk away from the negotiating table unhappy; yet, because we live in a world of utility maximizers, that won’t happen. 

Budgets and Budget Constraints: David M. Primo's "Making Budget Rules Work"

 

The Mercatus Center has published a new piece by David M. Primo titiled "Making Budget Rules Work." The job of political economy is generally to point out rules which can yield good results without reference to the virtue of the agents within the system. Primo continues that tradition by arguing for a set of rules which could result in a better fiscal situation. The article is neatly summarized in the ten rules he proposes for budget designers:

1. Use budget rules to change the terms of the debate.
2. Apply rules permanently and to the entire federal budget.
3. Focus on spending.
4. Build flexibility into rules by “smoothing.”
5. Build flexibility into rules by incorporating limited, carefully constructed
emergency provisions.
6. Be precise to prevent loopholes and gimmicks.
7. Pay careful attention to “starting points.”
8. Fight against faux fiscal discipline and resist the temptation to compromise
on rule design.
9. Use a commission as a supplement to, not a replacement for, a budget rule.
10. Incorporate well-designed budget rules into the US Constitution.

 

I think one of the principle problems with politics is that politicians get to act without strong fiduciary budget constraints. Politicians surely don't operate within a world of plenty. They still face the problem of scare means for their limitless ends, but the force of scarcity at work are more bureaucratic and intrigue-based than economics. I would like to see politicians be forced to fit their plans within a given budget, and thus to have their rhetoric conform to a budget constrait.

 

The chances of that happening are slim, and not just politicians are to blame. Politicians aren't an evil breed of monsters - orcs out of Mordor; instead, they are merely human beings acting within a given situation, and that situation results in different propensities in human nature showing themselves. Everyone generally envisions more than their budget constrain would allow them, but politicians get the ability to borrow without ever having to plan to repay what they've borrowed. Really, what we see in the budgets of most Western democracies over the past couple decades is the manifestation of human wants without the discipline budget constraints force upon people. 

Neither Angel nor Devil

 

 

 

 

 

For those who haven't seen the Season 4 trailer:

 

 

 

I don't know what I should think about Pedro Pascal as Oberyn Martell. He just doesn't look anything like I pictured the Red Viper in the books. I look forward, though, to see if he proves my initial reactions wrong.  

Edge's Scientific Ideas Ready for Retirement

 

Edge recently published a roundtable of contributing authors arguing for what scientific idea they think should be abandoned in 2014 in “2014: What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?”  Definitely worth at least skimming. Reactions to a few are below:

 

 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that we need to retire the concept of standard deviation, which is both inferior to mean deviation and has been masquerading as that more sound concept ever since Karl Pearson introduced it in 1893:

The notion of standard deviation has confused hordes of scientists; it is time to retire it from common use and replace it with the more effective one of mean deviation. Standard deviation, STD, should be left to mathematicians, physicists and mathematical statisticians deriving limit theorems. There is no scientific reason to use it in statistical investigations in the age of the computer, as it does more harm than good—particularly with the growing class of people in social science mechanistically applying statistical tools to scientific problems.

Say someone just asked you to measure the "average daily variations" for the temperature of your town (or for the stock price of a company, or the blood pressure of your uncle) over the past five days. The five changes are: (-23, 7, -3, 20, -1). How do you do it?

Do you take every observation: square it, average the total, then take the square root? Or do you remove the sign and calculate the average? For there are serious differences between the two methods. The first produces an average of 15.7, the second 10.8. The first is technically called the root mean square deviation. The second is the mean absolute deviation, MAD. It corresponds to "real life" much better than the first—and to reality. In fact, whenever people make decisions after being supplied with the standard deviation number, they act as if it were the expected mean deviation.

Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen T. Ziliak’s The Cult of Statistical Significance is another compelling criticism of the problem of the mechanistic application of statistics to problems of society. When statistics are going to be used, the practitioner cannot simply apply cookbook formulas if he is going to get the soundest conclusions; instead, he must understand the way in which statistics manipulates data in order to make statements about wider phenomena. The difference between standard and mean deviation is an example of where practitioners need to get a best grasp of the tools they use. The advent of every practitioner being able to have a powerful computer has also alleviated the need for statisticians to rely on simpler means of calculation - one possible reason why the frequentist view of statistics won out against the Bayesian - and has made it possible for practitioners to integrate more demanding calculations within their statistics.

 

 

 

Peter Richerson, a biologist who is emeritus at the University of California, Davis, argues that the concept of human needs to be abandoned this year for an understanding based on variance:

The concept of human nature causes people to look for explanations under the wrong rock. Take the most famous human nature argument: are people by nature good or evil? In recent years, experimentalists have conducted tragedy of the commons games and observed how people solve the tragedy (if they do). A common finding is that roughly a third of participants act as selfless leaders, using whatever tools the experimenters make available to solve the dilemma of cooperation, roughly a tenth are selfish exploiters of any cooperation that arises, and the balance are guarded cooperators with flexible morals. This result comports with everyone's personal experience, some people are routinely honest and generous, a few are downright psychopathic, and many people fall somewhere in between. Human society would be entirely different if this were not so. The human nature debate on the topic was sterile because it did not attend to something we all know if we stop to think about it.

The problem with Richerson’s argument here is that, in course of making an argument against the notion of human nature, he makes claims which strongly resemble claims about human nature. The assertion that a third of people are saints, a tenth of devils in disguise, and the rest somewhere in between looks very much like an answer to the essentialist question of whether people are either good or evil. The assumption that such a question must be answered on a binary scale of either yes or no is simply a caricature of the study of human nature. 

At its best, the study of human nature is the study of certain propensities within humanity which are universal across human societies, like the Westermarck effect and a concern for purity. Even though Richerson’s criticisms of a naïve view of human nature which conceives of human nature as “causally prior to nurture both in evolutionary and developmental time,” its insights simply do not apply to more nuanced approach, like that within Edward O. Wilson’s book On Human Nature. 

 

 

Adam Waytz argues against the idea that humans are by nature social animals: 

Despite possessing capacities far beyond other animals to consider others' minds, to empathize with others' needs, and to transform empathy into care and generosity, we fail to employ these abilities readily, easily, or equally. We engage in acts of loyalty, moral concern, and cooperation primarily toward our inner circles, but do so at the expense of people outside of those circles. Our altruism is not unbounded; it is parochial. In support of this phenomenon, the hormone oxytocin, long considered to play a key role in forming social bonds, has been shown to facilitate affiliation toward one's ingroup, but can increase defensive aggression toward one's outgroup. Other research suggests that this self-sacrificial intragroup love co-evolved with intergroup war, and that societies who most value loyalty to each other tend to be those most likely to endorse violence toward outgroups. 

Even arguably our most important social capacity, theory of mind—the ability to adopt the perspectives of others—can increase competition as much as it increases cooperation, highlighting the emotions and desires of those we like, but also highlighting the selfish and unethical motives of people we dislike. Furthermore, for us to consider the minds of others in the first place requires that we are motivated and possess the necessary cognitive resources. Because motivation and cognition are finite, so too is our capacity to be social. Thus, any intervention that intends to increase consideration of others in terms of empathy, benevolence, and compassion is limited in its ability to do so. At some point, the well of working memory on which our most valuable social abilities rely will run dry.

Again, a problem that I have with Wytz’s argument is that he isn’t very generous to what people are talking about when they speak of humans as social animals. He says that the concept “has lent credibility to numerous significant ideas: that humans need other humans to survive, that humans tend to be perpetually ready for social interaction, and that studying specifically the social features of human functioning is profoundly important.” It seems that Wytz equivocates the claim that human beings have a propensity towards forming social relationships with the claim that human beings are altruistic, ever extroverted saints. Anybody who has read Darwin’s Descent of Man knows that that is not true, and that social propensities are often parochial propensities. Nevertheless, they are still there, and human beings have the biological capability to be social in a way otherwise unseen in the animal kingdom. 

 

Rev. Sirico on Pope Francis

 

From Rev. Robert A. Sirico’s “Pope Francis, Without the Politics”: 

If one wants to understand Francis’ thinking about the poor, it would be good to look objectively at his much talked about, but little-read Apostolic Exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel.” It soon becomes apparent that much of this Exhortation is an extension of a keen insight that Jorge Bergoglio had when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires:

We cannot respond with truth to the challenge of eradicating exclusion and poverty if the poor continue to be objects, targets of the action of the state and other organizations in a paternalistic and aid-based sense, instead of subjects, where the state and society create social conditions that promote and safeguard their rights and allow them to be builders of their own destiny.

As one who has promoted a free economy as a normative way to assisting people out of poverty, I find two innovative challenges in these words which could go a long way to depoliticizing the debate about wealth and poverty.

Imagine if all of those presently engaged in the debate on these matters began to ask questions such as, “What excludes the poor from the process of prosperity?” or “What would a society look like that no longer considers the poor as objects of paternalistic aid but rather as potential shapers of their own destiny?”

The particular details of policy prescriptions are not the heart and soul of Francis’ incredible attraction on the part of people throughout the world. It is not his political motivation that moves us as we witness his embrace by — and of — frail human life. 

More than worth reading in full. The topic of non-overlapping magisteria is just as true for the Catholic Church and biological evolution as it is for the Catholic Church and economics. What ought to be emphasized from Pope Francis’ teachings is therefore not a discussion of the cause-and-effect explanation of current poverty, but how we morally view the person within that cause-and-effect explanation. Pope Francis cannot teach us whether cutting the corporate tax rate would be a good thing for, say, the American economy, but he can teach us about how we can appreciate dignity of a human being, and how institutions should respect that. The point of Catholic social teaching is not to provide technocratic advice for accomplishing political goals, but to provide a witness for the Gospel within the context of human interactions within society at large. 

Liberty, and Prudence in Policy: The Case of Marijuana

 

 

In a post responding to the severe criticism David Brooks has received on his own unfortunate column arguing against the legalization of marijuana, T.N., a blogger at The Economist’s “Democracy in America” blog, comes to his defense in “Marijuana Legalisation: Sort of In Defense of David Brooks.” There he argues that while Brooks’ point certainly could have been better argued, that Brooks certainly had a point which is often neglected in the tide of increasing support for legalization.  

The most noteworthy part about the blog post, though, does not have to do with the topic of cannabis, or David Brooks. It is that T.N.’s post is paradigmatic of a certain mentality about policy. That mentality is the belief that policy is about a matter of utilitarian calculus. A good piece of legislation is therefore one that encourages the general welfare while a bad piece of legislation, vice versa, is one that diminishes the general welfare. T.N. advocates for such an understanding when in writing:

The point is that however the cost/benefit formula is constructed, there are factors on both sides of the equation. Lives have been ruined by marijuana as well as by its prohibition. It may be facile to lament the legalisation of the drug while ignoring the damage wrought by prohibition, but it is equally silly to assume that there will be no losers from the unprecedented experiments in Colorado and Washington.

 

According to this view, a politician’s craft is a matter of prudence - defined by Aristotle as being “about human concerns, about things open to deliberation” (Nicomachean Ethics 1141b). When legalizing marijuana, then, politicians have to weigh the benefits of its legalization compared to those of its prohibition, and if those benefits outweigh the costs, then the legislation should be passed.

Completely lacking from T.N.’s  account of legislation, though, is any voice for the presumption of liberty. The idea that the prudential decision ought to, by principle, be left to the person who shall serve to reap the decision’s fruit is not be to found there. Nowhere in T.N.’s appraisal of legalization does the columnist seem to consider the idea that people ought to be free to destroy themselves. Instead, politicians stand above their citizens, to ensure their happiness. When the columnist addresses the choices of individuals, it is only with respect to either minimizing or maximizing their utility: “Moreover, lots of people smoke marijuana because they like it; the drug therefore has a ‘utility function’ that ought to be factored in to any cost/benefit analysis.”  

That is a dim view of human free will. A cost/benefit analysis from on high simply looking at people as utility maximizers fails to capture the full tapestry of human motivations across society, and it fails to consider the multiplicity of motivations for why people would make their own prudential choices. The presumption of liberty, though, acknowledges that, and in acknowledging it, respects human beings as free to their own prudence lest a grave concern overwhelm that presumption.

 

The presumption of liberty alone, not the politician’s prudence, should be the reason for the legalization of cannabis. It is not that marijuana does no more harm than alcohol, or that marijuana might even have positive effects across societies, but that people should be given the respect that they deserve, and that no one should claim to make the prudential decision to partake in drugs for them. There is simply no scope for a superior in politics to interfere with that decision, and so there is no reason why politicians need to deliberate about it. It simply should not be their decision to make.  

Humanity is, at heart, a species with a deep impulse towards self-destruction, and if someone desires it, he will be able to achieve it through one means or another. Talk about the political prudence of legalizing marijuana does nothing to address that.  Prudence is a matter of proper deliberation, but there is no strong reason for why the choice of whether to smoke marijuana should not be made by politicians, especially when it comes to the well being of individuals.  

 

The fact shall always remain that if people are to be free to choose virtue, they must be free to choose vice. Whether it is the case of the problem of evil or the legalization of drugs, people are free agents whom need to be respected as free agents. Ensuring the integrity of  what Adam Smith called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” which liberals should be the primary concern of politicians, matters of prudential legislation only following after that. As far as the legalization of marijuana, it would be one small way forward towards ensuring the existence of that system of liberty. It isn’t for no reason that The Economist named Uruguay its country of 2013 for enacting such an “obviously sensible” change.

The Political Economy of Knowledge in "Breaking Bad"

 

So you do have a plan! Yeah Mr. White! Yeah science!

- Jesse Pinkman

 

The difference between techne and episteme as well as the concerns which come from the in the popular show “Breaking Bad.” 

 

In the first episode of that show, when the two protagonists, Walter White, a brilliant chemist, and Jesse Pinkman, a drug dealer down and out on his luck, first meet to cook meth, Pinkman is dismissive of White’s systematic approach to the process. Pinkman is confident that his well-practice techne is sufficient, and is dismissive of the procedure that White creates to synthesize the meth. Objecting to White’s assertion that they won’t be adding chile pepper to their method, which was his specialty before teaming up with White, Pinkman asserts that cooking meth is art, and that he is an artist. Unimpressed, White responds that it’s all chemistry, all episteme. Once White finishes, though, Pinkman is astonished at the quality of the meth that White created, praising him as a great artist. Once again, White asserts that it’s all science; everything he did could be broken down to episteme, a system of principles, chemistry, which his knowledge of enabled his action. 

 

The differences between the techne, cooking meth, and episteme, synthesizing it, are further emphasized later on in the show during the first episode of the fourth season. In that episode, White is being held hostage by a local meth kingpin, Gus Fring, and White is arguing that he is needed because of his scientific skill. An assistant to Frings’s operation angrily argues that neither White nor his episteme are needed for Fring’s operation, saying: “It’s called a cook, because everything comes down to following a recipe.” White, once again the scientist, retort’s that assertion that everything can be reduced to art by peppering the assistant with questions about what to do given certain scenarios. “What happens when you get a bad barrel of precursor? How would you even know?” “What happens in the summer when the humidity level rises and your product goes cloudy?” An artist working simply off of his craftsmanship would not know the answers to such scenarios, which would ruin the batch of meth he is cooking. Someone working from the systemized knowledge of chemistry like Walter White, though, would be able to deduce the proper responses based on his knowledge of the principles involved.  Whereas techne, cooking, is concrete, and context dependent and thus cannot deal with situations it has no familiarity with, episteme is able to overcome such adversities because it is manipulating the world according to universal if-then statements. 

 

Walter White’s experience in the criminal underworld is illustrative of the the use of episteme in society. Of concern to studying how people cope with knowledge in society is how the episteme is stored and transmitted. In “Breaking Bad,” it is quickly apparent to those who meet him that White is a man who has innate access (by that I mean he doesn’t need reference to books or the internet) to knowledge about chemistry that no one else around him does. Those who decide to work with him can thus incorporate his knowledge of chemistry into their business models by having him be in charge of their meth production and by having White advise on such concerns. In addition, since White’s episteme is so unique, there are no close substitutes to him, and so whereas a lesser chemist may have been a disposable asset, White is essential because without White the organization wouldn’t be capable of producing meth of the purity he ensures. 

 

Thanks to Walter White, his business partners are able to act as if they had his knowledge of the general principles of chemistry. Within those associations, White is the store, so to speak, of that episteme, and cooperation with him is the means by which his episteme is transmitted in society. As long as White’s knowledge is unrivaled, White was able to create a sustainable specialization for himself within the criminal underworld of methamphetamine as a source of episteme, and is able to trade that knowledge for what he wants, be it money or security, with others. All-in-all, a division of labor is created which enables those ignorant of the principles of chemistry to benefit from it through cooperation with Walter White.  

 

The story of Walter White in “Breaking Bad” is also illustrative to why episteme alone cannot generate economic growth and material prosperity. With his episteme, Walter White is able to synthesize meth which is, by the end of the series, demanded across the world and makes him no small fortune., that he is in a position to provide as-if access to that knowledge to others is a matter of institutions and trade. When a meth head on the street is able to get an unparalleled high with the use of White’s special blue meth, they are able to act as if they had knowledge of how to create meth of that purity themselves. The precondition for this is a division of labor in which those meth heads are able to cooperate, though indirectly, with White in order to have access to his episteme. A division of labor, in turn, has preconditions of its own if it is exist, and there are rules of the game that have to be set to ensure that self-regarding cooperation is possible such as punishing transgressors and negotiating contracts. Since the meth trade goes on in the black market, institutions evolve within it, independent of the courts, which ensure the operation of this business and the division of labor which supports it. This division of labor, in turn, allows for White to be able to offer his episteme to society, or at least to those on the black market. 

 

  That people across society would put their episteme to use in order to satisfy the wants of other people in an impersonal division of labor, though, is itself that needs explaining. It seems obvious to us that people would use the episteme they have about certain topics in the division of labor in order to exploit their knowledge to gain a money income. When someone watches “Breaking Bad,” the ethical question which comes to mind is why is White using his knowledge of chemistry in the criminal underworld to get money not why is White using his knowledge of chemistry to get money. That White would also be alert to the opportunity of using his knowledge to sell specialized products to others is itself something not universal to human nature. Simple entrepreneurship may be, everyone may be an entrepreneur in a loose connotation of the world when acting as to better their situations, but not everyone is even aware of the opportunities to be an entrepreneur on the market. For Walter White to specialize as a meth synthesizer and for a division of labor to emerge with that as one of it’s important nodes, then White would have had to be alert (and willing) to that opportunity for specialization. Such a frame of mind is something that economics, whose basic organon is to explain all human behavior as instances of the maximization of an objective, well-defined function with only income and prices as its arguments, cannot explain. 

 

“Breaking Bad” is thus a distinctly bourgeois story. Walter White is neither using his knowledge of chemistry to get favors from a local prince nor is he using that knowledge in hope for seeing God in the geometry of creation as part of a perceived journey towards ultimate salvation. Both of those are very real possibilities,  Su Song (1020- 1101) built an immensely complicated water clock for the Han emperor in the 1090s that served the bureaucratic purposes of managing the Chinese state and Roger Bacon (1214-1294) was a Franciscan monk who pursued empirical research of the world throughout his life to better man’s understanding of God’s creation. Walter White created meth so pure that is purity became a mark of his work and sold it on the black market in order to get enough money to support his family after he receive a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. Three different premises for the use of episteme in society, and only one corresponds to a scenario where there could emerge a society-wide division of labor that enables anybody who has enough cash to act as-if she knows White’s knowledge about chemistry. The profit-maximization in terms of money and income that explains so much of modern society is behavior which happens in context of a bourgeois society, and the emergence of that bourgeois society over history has involved phenomena not amendable to analysis simply in terms of indifference curves and budget constraints.

 

Others in society are able to benefit from the episteme of a few specific experts by cooperating in a division of labor which provides them as-if access to that knowledge. Within the grand system of human cooperation that is the market, someone is able to enjoy the benefits of a Coca Cola as if he had the knowledge of how to create it by buying it from a convenience store. Through self-regarding trade, the episteme of one is made available to another, and thus the knowledge of a few is made to service the many. The creation of this grand system must be understood within both institutional and cultural contexts that enable to emergence and continuation of the division of labor. Institutions are important because not all strategies of action are compatible with its maintenance, and if strategies that deny others their property titles are able to proliferate in society, then the division of labor will break down. Culture, all of whose aspects cannot be broken down as institutions understood as rules of the game, enables the enlargement of the division of labor by making people more alert to entrepreneurial opportunities on the market. 

Good, Evil, and Human Capability

 

 

 

 

The best and worst specimens of humanity are two sides of the same coin. Heroes and villains are not categories that are divided by the expansive sea of morality never to have their shores meet. To the contrary, both the most exalted heroism and diabolical villainy are manifestations of a human spirit that has become capable of great things. And great things need not be good things. Alexander the Great, a man whose accomplishments helped to create the very foundation of the Hellenistic world, was given the epithet “Gujastak”, “Accursed”, by the Zoroastrian tradition in the Ardā Wirāz Nāmag for the great destruction his army wreaked marching on a war-path through Persia. Despite what evil he may have inflicted upon the world in his prideful thirst to conquer the world, Alexander the Great was still someone who activated the human potential within him for greatness.

A tragedy it is then that such a person would dedicate his efforts to the ultimately destructive and evil desire for conquest and deification. That it is even a tragedy shows that villainy and heroism are both channels of human capability, and that those who unlock that human excellence within them may become some of the worst monsters to walk the Earth. Excellence in capability is then the coin and both heroism and villainy, the capability of great good and evil, are the opposing sides. Both are united by the necessity of being capable of great things, but the two are distinguished by the paths that the person decides to channel that capability towards. Some create businesses that will make possible the use of a revolutionary product, become great teachers of morality, and inspire others to do good as well while others will become conquerors, and harbingers of other great evils upon the world.

Those who have done the greatest good in the world and those who have committed the great evil have both activated the human potential within them for greatness. Those who do not have the capability for great evil thus do not have the capability for great good. The best and worst of humanity are thus manifestations of the same human spirit and testaments to the power of human choice in the world.