In the future, everyone will be CEO for 15 minutes
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
- Louis Brandeis
I experience vicarious pain so vividly that I was having trouble breathing while reading this article.
No one who built these systems was corrupt, or evil. They were simply frail humans, unable to comprehend the complexity of what they were trying to achieve. So they built a big system that attempted to be the “optimal solution” for the problem of “patients in a hospital”, and they failed miserably And “patients at a hospital” are a tiny portion of the “world system”.
But yet people still feel like the world’s systems can be managed.
Why are they renaming Countrywide to sound like a single-state newspaper?
Phillip Lord calls for, I kid you not, a kind of Butlerian Jihad.
Yes, let’s get rid of automation. While we’re at it, let’s cut out one of our eyes, chop the toes off of one of our feet (to simulate the industrial accidents that will occur), and fill our streets with horse poop, pour sewage into our water supply and incinerate 3/4ths of the food in our supermarkets.
This guy is apparently a teacher. Woe unto his students
This is a very interesting story. It supports my current belief structure, so it must be correct! We are irrational, not only in “markets” but in votes, in life choices, in everything. Humans are fundamentally irrational beings.
Yet another reason we should never be in charge of anything!
Best part:
“I once told a story about this: We once traveled from New York to Boston on a Sunday night, and we saw a car on fire on the side of the road. A week later, again on a Sunday night, we were traveling and again saw a car on fire in the same place. The fact is, we were less surprised the second time than the first because we had learned a rule: Cars burn at this spot.
“We find this everywhere – the speed at which people create rules, norms and expectations, even when they know it’s ridiculous. This is the intuitive method at work. It remains true that whenever I travel, I always look for burning cars at that spot.”
Matt Steinglass, a smart guy with whom I disagree about many things, says, regarding Karl Marx:
And DeLong is also right to find here the roots of Marx’s sense that markets are fundamentally tools of unfreedom rather than of freedom, with all the needless suffering and poverty that misconception would entail through the next century-plus
I find this as gobsmackingly bewildering as if he had said “evolution is fundamentally a tool of unfreedom with all the meaningless death that would follow without an omniscient diety to manage the animal populations and ensure they did stayed pure to Creationist doctrine.”
Yes, I’m going there – if you think that Marxism would have worked better than the free market at ameliorating poverty and suffering, you’re not much different from a Creationist, in terms of your faith in a higher power, and its ability to form a “plan” for the universe.
The evidence of capitalism’s benefit to the poor is considerable. (There’s another, recent story about this as well, but I can’t find it right now).
If the world were ruled by super-intelligent, benevolent AIs, Marxism might work as a doctrine, since the corruption that plagues our genes would not be present. But as long as humans can be corrupted, they will be, making the world immeasurably worse off.
Free Markets are a very, very flawed way to solve problems. They are inefficient, susceptible to betrayal and scams, and prices usually fail to reflect the full societal cost of an item.
Alas, as bad as free markets are, every other option is worse. Every other doctrine is built on an assumption that non-corruptible intellects can make well-informed and unbiased decisions to pursue some ideal result. Alas, we humans are very corruptible, extremely biased and very poorly informed (and generally in denial about that fact), and thus the schemes fail, and lead to far more suffering in the aggregate.
*edit* – removed an unnecessary “with”.
Update
Matt indicates in the comments that I misunderstood what he was trying to say – that it was Marx who believed these things, not Matt. My mistake.
If only there was some way to make people pay for the electricity they use to power those “energy guzzling TVs”. I mean, it seems only fair that their usage of electricity be metered, and that they should have to pay more when they use more electricity.
But, as we all know, it’s not a good idea to let people choose for themselves how much electricity they should consume. We need the benevolent hand of government to guide us to righteousness. Because people in government aren’t morally weak humans like the rest of us. They’re incorruptible, angelic beings, with no longing for power or status. And they know what’s best for us.
I’ve noticed an obnoxious trend lately, where liberals claim that free markets are perfectly rational. (MY isn’t the only perpetrator, but he’s the one that pushed me over the edge).
While Rational Choice Theory does say that “often”, the models assume perfect information or unbounded time to consider alternatives, the teachings of the Chicago School are not semantically equivalent to the concept of a “Free Market“.
Now, if Matt was arguing that a perfect market would prevent people from living in Dubai and making financial mistakes, I would have no quarrel. But no one is claiming that we live in a world with a perfect market. Heck, from my perspective, at this point, given the government’s ability to mandate the behavior of large corporations, what we have now doesn’t even qualify as a free market under the official definition, and it barely qualifies under a “normal person’s” definition.
I am shocked! Shocked! To discover that the people who work in government have different incentives than the people they represent. It’s as if they think that voters are uninterested in any government actors’ policy decisions, as long as they don’t rise to the level of outright corruption.
*sigh*
