Difference between revisions of "Economic Decision Making and Libertarianism"

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Here are a few historical facts that I consider to be both true and contrary to what most economists (and libertarians) think. All have substantial historical evidence behind them, whereas I find the opposing case generally relies on just so stories. All 3 cast considerable doubt on pro-capitalist stories about trade and development. (I would use bullet points but wordpress seems to be in a mood. You’ll have to imagine them):
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I’ve touched briefly before on how behavioural economics makes the central libertarian mantra of being ‘free to choose’ completely incoherent. Libertarians tend to have a difficult time grasping this, responding with things like ‘so people aren’t rational; they’re still the best judges of their own decisions.’ My point here is not necessarily that people are not the best judges of their own decisions, but that the idea of freedom of choice – as interpreted by libertarians – is nonsensical once you start from a behavioural standpoint.
  
Rich countries did not get rich through free trade, but through the use of protectionism and other state interventions such as capital controls and subsidies. This includes but is not limited to: the UK, US, Germany, Japan and Scandinavian countries. Furthermore, more recently developed countries got rich by doing something similar, and in the case of the Southeast Asian ‘Tigers,’ the intervention was even more explicit, with state employees working inside the infant industries. There are a couple of exceptions such as the Netherlands, but even in their case their initial rise was characterised by large state backed monopolies in order to overcome transaction costs. Finally, supposed bastions of free trade such as Singapore and Hong Kong are both characterised by various public provisions, and Singapore has a large GSE sector. The go to accessible source on this is Ha-Joon Chang, though others are also available.
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The problem is that neoclassical economics, by modelling people as rational utility maximisers, lends itself to a certain way of thinking about government intervention. For if you propose intervention on the grounds that they are not rational utility maximisers, you are told that you are treating people as if they are stupid. Of course, this isn’t the case – designing policy as if people are rational utility maximisers is no different ethically to designing it as if they rely on various heuristics and suffer cognitive biases.
  
Money did not arise as a solution to the ‘double coincidence of wants,’ a highly improbable concept that begs a lot of questions (such as ‘how exactly does the cow farmer get all his inputs?’) Money primarily arose as a form of credit, and this was intertwined closely with social relations and kept communities bound together. Credit only became ‘exact’ once it was enforced by force rather than social pressure, and evidence suggests the use of coins and notes primarily followed the introduction of taxation. Before this, the overwhelming majority of barter was rare and between different tribes/nations, and often accompanied by feasts, sex and violence (sometimes all at the same time!) The primary source on this is, of course, David Graeber. I have not seen a convincing critic, though not for want of trying (‘it might have happened even if there’s no evidence!’ and ‘but debt is just delayed barter’ respectively).
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This ‘treating people as if they are stupid’ mentality highlights problem with neoclassical choice modelling: behaviour is generally considered either ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’. But this isn’t a particularly helpful way to think about human action – as Daniel Kuehn says, heuristics are not really ‘irrational’; they simply save time, and as this video emphasises, they often produce better results than homo economicus-esque calculation. So the line between rationality and irrationality becomes blurred.
  
Peasants did not freely move from their land into 12+ hour days in factories because it was ‘better than the alternative.’ In many cases they had their land taken by foreclosure acts and their hunting severely restricted by game laws. Prior to the industrial revolution they had plenty of problems – they were particularly susceptible to disease and famine but evidence suggests they had a far greater degree of leisure and control over their working conditions than wage labourers. Michael Perelman’s book gives an in depth treatment of this, and similar arguments can be found throughout marxist writings.
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For an example of how this flawed thinking pervades libertarian arguments, consider the case of excessive choice. It is well documented that people can be overwhelmed by too much choice, and will choose to put off the decision or just abandon trying altogether. So is somebody who is so inundated with choice that they don’t know what to do ‘free to choose’? Well, not really – their liberty to make their own decisions is hamstrung.
  
The conclusion is clear, and something I have said before: western capitalism is neither harmonious nor natural. It is a product of specific historical circumstances, some of which were incredibly brutal. Any libertarian who accepts this (and some do) presuming they adhere to a broadly Nozickean conception of justice – should take a deeply skeptical stance of everything that followed (e.g. the modern world). In fact, most libertarians should probably be revolutionaries.
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Another example is the case of Nudge. The central point of this book is that people’s decisions are always pushed in a certain direction, either by advertising and packaging, by what the easiest or default choice is, by the way the choice is framed, or any number of other things. This completely destroys the idea of ‘free to choose’ if people’s choices are rarely or never made neutrally, then one cannot be said to be ‘deciding for them’ any more than the choice was already ‘decided’ for them. The best conclusion is to push their choices in a ‘good’ direction (e.g. towards healthy food rather than junk). Nudging people isn’t a decision – they are almost always nudged. The question is the direction they are nudged in.
  
P.S. This post is partially inspired by Robert Vienneau’s similarly formatted post on economist’s misinterpretation of the history of thought, worth a read.
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It must also be emphasised that choices do not come out of nowhere – they are generally presented with a flurry of bright colours and offers from profit seeking companies. These things do influence us, as much as we hate to admit it, so to work from the premise that the state is the only one that can exercise power and influence in this area is to miss the point.
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The fact is that the way both neoclassical economists and libertarians think about choice is fundamentally flawed – in the case of neoclassicism, it cannot be remedied with ‘utility maximisation plus a couple of constraints’; in the case of libertarianism it cannot be remedied by saying ‘so what if people are irrational? They should be allowed to be irrational.’ Both are superficial remedies for a fundamentally flawed epistemological starting point for human action.
 
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Revision as of 17:58, 13 February 2018