Chapter 4 Knowledge Fallacies
“For many social issues, the most important decision is who makes the decision. Both social justice advocates and their critics might agree that many consequential social decisions are best made by those who have the most relevant knowledge. But they have radically different assumptions as to who in fact has the most knowledge.”
-social justice advocates have radically different conceptions of what is defined as knowledge
-these differences of opinion as to what constitutes knowledge goes back for centuries
Conflicting Visions of Knowledge:
-many people do not regard all information as deserving to be called knowledge
-many people do not regard the possessors of some other kinds of information
-knowledge, however, doesn’t exist in a simple hierarchy with the special knowledge taught in schools and colleges at the top and the more mundane knowledge at the bottom
***mundane information and special kinds of information have both been called knowledge
Consequential Knowledge:
-knowledge affecting decisions with meaningful consequences in people’s lives
-the presumably higher knowledge does not automatically encompass the more mundane knowledge
-each can be consequential in particular circumstances
-this means that the distribution of consequential knowledge in a given society can be very different, depending on what kind of knowledge is involved
-information of a sort not taught in schools or colleges can play major roles in the migration decisions of millions of human beings
Examples: 19th Century
-67% of Spanish immigrants to Argentina
-when immigrants arrived in Argentina clustered together in particular neighborhoods in Buenos Aires
-90% of Italian immigrants in Australia
-by 1939, there were more people from some Italian villages living in Australia then remained behind in Italy
-immigrants in general tend to go to some very specific place in the destination country where people from their home country —people known to them personally and trusted
-provides newcomers with very specific information about the particular places where these earlier immigrants live
-can give valuable knowledge about such basics: a job, affordable place to live, and numerous other mundane by consequential things in a new country with unknown people
-help with many unknown things about the way of life in a society that is new to the immigrants
-Contrary to implicit assumptions of random behavior by some social theorists
Ex. people didn’t emigrate randomly from Spain in general to Argentina in general, from Italy in general to Australia in general, Germans to United States
-Germans migrated to rural Missouri
-Frankfort, Kentucky was founded by people from Frankfort, Germany
-Grand Island, Nebraska was founded by Schleswig-Holsteiners
-Lebanese migrated to Columbia
-Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe settled in parts of New York’s Lower East side slum neighborhood
***these patterns of very specific ties to very specific places based on very specific mundane but consequential knowledge of particular people in those places–extended into the social life of immigrants after their arrival and settlement
Relationships: 19th Century:
-New York’s Irish neighborhoods were marriages between people from the same county in Ireland
-Australian city in Griffith–same
-Italians married each other in Australia
***People sort themselves out based on very specific information
-these patterns are called “chain migration”
-the chain of personal connections involved
-this is consequential knowledge, valued for its practical applications, rather than intellectual challenge or elegance
Knowledge:
-highly specific knowledge used by highly specific people and places
-these are surrogate decision-makers like policy experts who have to gain knowledge taught in schools and colleges
***this is regarded as higher knowledge
-But, no matter how high this knowledge is regarded it does not encompass nor supercedes what is regarded as lower knowledge
-how much knowledge this is in a given society, and how it is distributed, depends crucially on how knowledge is conceived and defined
Prof. John Rawls of Harvard re: Knowledge:
-a social justice advocate referred to how “society” should “arrange” certain outcomes
-he refers to collective decisions as the kind that a government makes
-it uses knowledge available to surrogate decision-makers more
-use this more than the kind of knowledge known and used by individuals in the population at large, when making their own decisions about their own lives
***”Whatever is the desirability of the goals sought by social justice advocates, the feasibility of achieving those goals through surrogate decision-makers depends on the distribution of relevant and consequential knowledge.”
-it also depends on the nature, purpose and reliability of the political process through which governments act
***in the 20th century there was a fervent crusade for idealistic goals is a painful record of how often the granting of great powers to governments, in pursuit of those goals, led instead to totalitarian dictatorships
F.A. Hayek’s, Nobel Prize-winning economist:
-conception of knowledge would encompass both the carpenter’s information and the physicist’s information
-this put him in direct opposition to various systems of surrogate decision=making in the twentieth century, including the social justice vision
-consequential knowledge included not only articulated information, but also unarticulated information, embodied in behavioral responses to know realities
Ex. simple consequential: putting warm clothing on children before taking them out in the cold
-moving a car over to the side of road when you hear the siren of an emergency vehicle
“Not all knowledge in this sense is part of our intellect, nor is our intellect the whole of our knowledge. Our habits and skills, our emotional attitudes, our tools, and our institutions–all are in this sense adaptations to past experience which have grown up by selective elimination of less suitable conduct. They are as much an indispensable foundation of successful action as is our conscious knowledge” (Hayek).
-this sweeping definition of knowledge radically changes how the distribution of knowledge is seen
-consequential knowledge if far more widely spread among the population at large
-it is coordinated by people’s individual interactions with each other in order to achieve mutual accommodations like economic market transactions
Leonard Read, Economist:
-pointed out that no individual possesses all knowledge required to produce all the components of a simple, inexpensive lead pencil
-market transactions brought together from different parts of the world
Ex. graphite, rubber, wood, metal band, etc..
-no given individual is likely to know how to produce all these very different things
-each part may originate in a different place and uses different technology
-inexpensive pencils are produced through chains of information and cooperation, in market transactions based on condensed but consequential knowledge
-prices are based on competition between a variety of producers of each component
-a manufacturer brings all these components of the pencil together at a cost that consumers are willing to pay
“Implications of all this for the social justice vision depend not only on the desirability of the goals of that vision but also on the feasibility of using particular kinds of institutions through which such goals might be pursued.”
-Rawls said that “society” should “arrange” to produce certain outcomes somehow
-the choices of institutional mechanisms matter
“From the standpoint of economic efficiency, but even more so for the sake of preserving the freedom of millions of people to make their own decision about their own lives as they see fit, rather than have surrogate decision-makers preempt their decisions, in the name of noble sounding words, such as “social justice.”
-the convenient vagueness of referring to “society” as the decision-maker to “arrange” outcomes
-Rawl’s vision of social justice—was preceded by Progressive-era philosopher John Dewey
-Dewey had vague references to “social control” to replace “chaotic” and narrowly “individualistic” decisions in market economies
18th Century:
-Rousseau’s vague “general will” for making decisions for the sake of “the common good”
-very different conceptions of decision=making processes reflect very different beliefs about the distribution of consequential knowledge
***key: people have different conceptions of knowledge and its distribution of very different conclusions and which kinds of institutions produce better or worse outcomes for human beings
-society should arrange certain outcomes
-social justice advocates = collective decisions = government surrogate decision makers
Opposite Visions:
-F.A. Hayek, as a landmark figure, in the development of an understanding of the crucial role of the distribution of knowledge in determining which kinds of policies and institutions were likely to produce what kinds of results
-Milton Freidman applied Hayek’s analysis in
-consequential knowledge is concentrated in intellectually more advanced people
-Question: What constitutes knowledge?
William Goodwin:
-wrote a two-volume 1793 treatise titled Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
-his conception of knowledge was very much like that prevalent in today’s writings on social justice
-the word “political” in the title of the book was used in a sense common at that time referring to the polity or governmental structure of society
-the word was used in a similar sense at that time in the expression “political economy” meaning what we call “economics” today
-the economic analysis of a society or polity (decisions made in home, business, or other individual institution)
-the source of knowledge and understanding is “just views of society”
”the minds of the liberally educated and reflecting members of society will enable them to be the people who guide and instruct.”
***here the assumption of superior knowledge and understanding did not lead to casting an intellectual elite in the role of surrogate decision-makers as part of a government, but as influencers of the public who in turn were expected to influence government
John Stuart Mill, 19th Century:
-depicted these intellectual elites as “the best and wisest” and the “thinking minds” and “the most cultivated intellects in the country” and “those who have been in advance of society in thought and feeling” and “the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool”
-he saw the population at large as having more knowledge than the government, but he also saw the population needed guidance from the elite intellectuals
***he stated that democracy can rise above mediocrity, only where “the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few
-he called universities to “send forth into society a succession of minds, not the creatures of their age, but capable of being its improvers and regenerators
-this presumed indispensability of intellectuals for human progress was asserted at a time and in a place
Ex. 19th century Britain–were an industrial revolution was taking place in Mill’s own lifetime that would change whole patterns of life in many nations around the world
Industrial Revolution:
-led by men with practical experience in industry rather than intellectual or scientific education
-revolutionary industrial giants like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford had very little formal schooling
-Wright brothers never finished high school, but made the first airplane to lift off the ground with a human being on board which was invented by two bicycle mechanics
Superiority:
-John Mill’s Superior vision of the indispensable role of intellectual in human progress has been one shared by many intellectuals over the centuries (disregarding the “practical experience” knowledge)
-these intellectuals leading crusades for more economic equality, based ironically on assumptions of their own superiority
-Rousseau said in the 18th Century that he considered “the best and most natural arrangement for the wisest to govern the multitude”
***variations on this theme have marked such movements against economic inequality as Marxism, Fabian socialism, and Progressivism and social justice activism
Intellectual Elites = Thinking Minds
Liberty = the Sovereign many have let themselves be guides
-Rousseau’s “the general will” left the interpretation of the will to the elites
-he likened the masses of the people to “a stupid, pusillanimous invalid”
-William Goodwin and Marquis de Condorcet also expressed their contempt for the masses
-Karl Marx said “the working class is revolutionary or it is nothing”
-meaning that millions of fellow human beings mattered only if they carried out the Marxian vision
-Fabian socialist pioneer George Bernard Shaw regarded the working class as being among the “detestable” people who “have no right to live”
“I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves” (Shaw).
-legal scholar Professor Ronald Dworkin of Oxford University declared that “a more equal society is a better society even if its citizens prefer inequality”
-French feminist pioneer Simone de Beauvoir said “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have a choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one”
-Ralph Nadar said “the consumer must be protected at times from his own indiscretion and vanity
-Reminder: we have already seen how similar attitudes led genetic determinists casually advocated imprisoning people who committed no crime and denying them a normal life on the basis of unsubstantiated beliefs that were then in vogue in intellectual circles
-given the conception of knowledge prevalent among many elite intellectuals, and the distribution of such knowledge implied by that conception so not surprising they reach the kinds of conclusions that they do
-one’s own great achievements and competence are confined to a narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns
-this could be a major impediment to promoting social crusades that preempt the decisions of others
-the beneficiaries of such crusades as the quest for social justice
-Hayek regarded the assumptions of crusading intellectuals as “the fatal conceit”
-opposed presumed superiority of intellectuals as guides or surrogate decision-makers for other people
-opposed presumed concentration of consequential knowledge in intellectual elites
“It is a tribute to the worldwide repute of the Nobel awards that the announcement of an award converts its recipient into an instant expert on all and sundry…Nevertheless to say the attention is flattering but also corrupting” (Friedman).
Prof. George J. Stigler:
-observed: “A full collection of public statements signed by laureates whose work gave them not even professional acquaintance with the problem addressed by the statement would be a very large and somewhat depressing collection.”
-such presumptions of omnicompetence have by no means been confined to the Nobel laureates
Points:
-Friedman pointed out that such beliefs are common among prominent individuals and institutions promoting social crusades currently in vogue
-groups of academia, media, and financial have an unbelievable degree of intellectual homogeneity
-a set of acceptance of standard set of views complete with cliche answers to every objection
-a smug self-satisfaction at belonging to an in-group
-intellectual elites feel so superior to other people
***assumptions about the distribution of consequential knowledge are more than incidental social curiosities but influences the nature and distribution of the consequential knowledge
Facts and Myths:
***Remove decision making out of the hands of the victims for their own good
“Policies based on social justice vision tend to assume not only a concentration of the causes of socioeconomic disparities in such other people as heads of business, educational and other institutions.”
-social justice agenda tends to focus its attention on correcting institutional and social defects
-having government empower surrogate decision-makers to rescue victims of various forms of mistreatment by taking many decisions out of other people’s hands
-this had included taking some decisions out of the hands of the supposed victims themselves
-transferring those decisions to elite surrogates, whose supposedly greater knowledge could better protect their interests
-these preemptions of other people’s decision for their own good
-ranged from decision about employment and personal finance to housing and the values to be taught to their children
Employment Issues:
Walter E. Weyl, PhD:
-progressive who was clearly on of the intellectual elites
-he devoted his talents to crusading for a “socialized democracy”
-called for employees to be protected from the “great interstate corporations” among other hazards and restrictions
“A law forbidding a woman to work in the textile mills at night is a law increasing rather than restricting her liberty, simply because it takes from the employer his former right to compel her through sheer economic pressure to work at night when she would prefer to work by day.”
-Weyl saw the employer as taking away this woman’s liberty and people like himself as wanting to restore it to her
-even though the employer who offered her an option and surrogates alike
-for intellectual elites who see society’s consequential knowledge concentrated in people like themselves this all makes sense
-but people who see consequential knowledge widely diffused among the population at large could reach the opposite conclusion
“A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him.”
-minimum wage laws as surrogate decision-makers, preempting the decision of both employers and employees
Reminder:
-in 1948 there was virtually identical unemployment rates for black and white teenage males that existed when the minimum wage law was ineffective
-2009, Obama’s administration, the annual unemployment rate of black teenage males as a whole was 52%
-half of all black teenage males looking for a job could not find any, because the surrogate decision-makers made it illegal for them to take jobs at wages that employers were willing to pay
-preempting their options left black teenage males the choice of doing without pay in legal occupations or making money from illegal activities, such as selling drugs
-an activity with dangers from both the law and rival gangs
-unemployed black teenage males just hung around idle on the streets
-no community of any race is made better off when many adolescents hanging around with nothing useful to do
***none of these facts has made the slightest impression on many people advocating higher minimum wage rates
Points:
-”friends” and “defenders” of the less fortunate are oblivious to the harm they are doing
New York Times Columnist, Nicholas Kristoff
-depicted people who oppose minimum wage laws as people with “hostility” to “raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation” because of their “mean-spiritedness” or “at best, a lack of empathy toward those struggling”
***fact free moralizing is a common pattern among social justice advocates
-fundamental problem is an institutional problem, when laws allow third-party surrogates to preempt other people’s decisions and pay no price for being wrong, no matter how hush the price paid by others, whom they are supposedly helping
-facts about the effects of minimum wage laws on employment can find such facts in innumerable examples from countries around the world and in different periods of history
Ex. Switzerland unemployment in 2003 was 3.9%, no minimum wage laws
-2013 Singapore’s unemployment rate was 2.1%
-1991 Hong Kong was still a British colony unemployment was under 2%
-U.S. under Coolidge administration in the 1920s was between 1.8%-4.2%
“While some social justice advocates may think of minimum wage laws as a way to help low-income people, many special-interest groups in countries around the world–perhaps more experienced and informed about their own economic interests–have deliberately advocated minimum wage laws for the express purpose of pricing some low-income people out of the labor market.”
Payday Loans:
-presumptions have led to many local social justice crusaders to outlaw so-called “payday loans” in low-income neighborhoods
-these are short-term loans of small amounts of money charging $15 per hundred dollars lent for a few weeks
-low-income people, facing some unexpected financial emergency often turned to such loans as the banks would not loan to them
-an emergency might need to be paid for prior to the next paycheck
-paying $15 to borrow $100 until the end of the month may be one of the few options available
-that could work out mathematically to an annual interest rate of several hundred percent—and social justice advocates consider that “exploitation”
-payday loan interest rates have been denounced by the New York Times
BUT:
-under this reasoning, denouncing payday loans interest rates as being several hundred percent on an annual basis would be equivalent to renting a hotel room for $100 a night is paying $36,500 rent annually
-which seems exorbitant for renting a room, but most people are very unlikely to rent a hotel room for a year at that price
-based on annual annual interest rates, some states have imposed interest rate caps
-which has meant that many payday loan businesses have shut down
Problem:
-among the other flaws in the social justice crusaders’ reasoning is that the $15 is not all interest, as economists define interest
-that sum also covers the cost of processing the loan and covers the inevitable risks of losses from any kind of lending
-it also covers the common business expenses such as employee salaries, rent, etc…..
-such costs are a higher percentage of all costs when a small amount of money is borrowed
-it does not cost a ban a hundred times as much to process a $10,000 as it costs a payday loan business to process a $100 loan
***intellectual elites and social justice crusaders go away feeling good about themselves as they justify preempting the decision of low-income people faced with a financial emergency but really depriving poor people one of the very few options for dealing with that financial emergency
-”exploitation” is not always easy to know what some people mean specifically when they use that word, other than as an expression of their disapproval
***businesses close if they can’t make a profit to pay its own bills
-legislated limits on what is called “interest” force payday loan businesses to go out of business
-social just reformers may go away feeling good about having ended “exploitation” of the poor
-but in fact it simply denied the poor one of their very few options in an emergency by preventing the businesses supplying that option from earning a rate of return common in other businesses
Housing Disparities:
-even such basic individual decisions as where to live, in what kind of housing, and in what kind of neighborhood have been preempted by surrogate decision-makers
-social reformers have used the power of government to force low-income people to abandon the homes in which they have chosen to live, and move to places the reformers consider better
-these policies have gone by a variety of names, such as “slum clearance, “urban renewal” or whatever name happens to be in vogue politically at various times
-surrogate decision-makers did not merely advise the tenants to leave, nor did the government provide places to which they could move
-government officials ordered the slums to be torn down, and used the police to evict tenants who did not want to leave
-surrogate decision-makers simply assumed that their own knowledge and understanding were superior to that of the low-income people they had forced out of the tenements
-their choice, when they had one, was to stay where they were
-often the better housing that was built as replacements was also more expensive
Immigration:
-Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had their fares paid for by family members already living in America even though Jews at that time were still poor living in slums
-Italian immigrants lived in slums but had family who were poorer back in Italy
-these immigrants often slept many men to a room in order to save money
-men skimped on food in order to save up money so they could return to Italy or bring their families to America
-Irish immigrants lived in the worst slums in America
“A tenement house law increases the liberty of tenement dwellers” (Walter E. Weyl).
-the resistance of slum dwellers who had to be forced out by police suggests that they saw things differently
Children:
-an even deeper penetration into the lives of other people has been preempting parents’ role in raising their own children
-the decision as to whom and how parents want their children to be informed and advised about sex was simply preempted by surrogates who introduced “sex education” into the public schools in the 1960s
-social crusades by intellectual elites’ “sex education” agenda was presented politically as an urgent response to an existing “crisis”
-the problems to be solved were said to include unwanted pregnancies among teenage girls and venereal diseases among both sexes
-A Planned Parenthood representative testified before a Congressional subcommittee on the need of such programs
“To assist our young people in reducing the incidence of out-of-wedlock births and early marriage necessitated by pregnancy.”
***the “crisis” supposedly in urgent need of a “solution” by preempting the role of parents
-after “sex education” was widely introduced into public schools, the rate of teenage gonorrhea tripled between 1956-1975
-during the 1970s, the pregnancy rate among females from 15-19 years old rose from approximately 68 per thousand in 1970 to approximately 96 per thousand by 1980
Pregnancy Data: 15-19 year olds
1950: 12.6% per household
1960: 15.3% per household
1970: 22.6% per household
1980: 27.6% per household
***1980 births to unmarried females = 47.6%
***2000 births to unmarried females = 78.7%
-the percentage of unmarried teenage females who had engaged in sex was higher at every age from 15-19 by 1976 than it was just five years earlier
-nor is it hard to understand why, when specifics of what was called “sex education” is exposed to youth
“A popular sex instructional program for junior high school students, aged 12 and 14, shows film strips of four naked couples, two homosexual and two heterosexual, performing a variety of sexually explicit acts, and teachers warned with a cautionary note from the sex educators not to show the materials to parents or friends: many of the materials of this program shown to people outside the context of the program itself can evoke misunderstanding and difficulties.”
-when parents in Connecticut learned of the specifics of such “sex education” programs and protested, they were denounced as “fundamentalists” and “right-winged extremists”
–any issue involving the social crusades of intellectual elites, arguments against their positions are too often answered by ad hominem denunciations rather than by counter arguments with facts
***comments from “experts” was that “sex and sexuality have become far too complex and technical to leave to the typical parent, who is either uninformed or too bashful to share useful sexual information with his child”
-across a broad spectrum of issues, people who see themselves as possessors of superior consequential knowledge, lacking in other people, see not problem in preempting other people’s decisions
-nor are consequences that are the opposite of what was predicted necessarily chastening
-many advocates of “sex education” in public schools used these dire consequences as showing an even more urgent need for additional “sex education”
-progressive-era genetic determinists were prominent supporters of “sex education” in public schools
Patterns and Consequences:
-in electoral politics or ideological politics-the word “crisis” often means whatever situation someone wants to change
“Far more automatically indicating some dire condition threatening the public, it often means simply a golden opportunity for surrogates to use the taxpayers’ money and the government’s power to advance the surrogates’ interests, whether these interests are political, ideological or financial.”
-intellectual elites crusading for their ideological goals have, for centuries, seen children as a special target for their messages
William Godwin:
-stated that children—other people’s children “are a sort of raw material put into our hands.” Their minds “are like a sheet of white paper.”
Education:
-this vision of teaching other people’s children as a golden opportunity for intellectuals to shape society, by controlling what is inscribed on these young and presumably blank minds
-this has remained a key feature of social crusades to remake the world to fit the preconceptions of intellectual elites, who see themselves as key possessors of consequential knowledge
-this same conception of the educational role of crusading intellectual elites was central feature of the Progressive era
Prof. John Dewey:
-Progressive at Columbia University
-he saw schools as places to help “eliminate obvious social evils” through the schools’ “development of children and youth but also of the future society of which they will be constituents.”
-Schools “train the State of to-morrow” could be instrumental in “overcoming the present defects of our system”
“It is the business of the school environment to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing environment.”
-”weeding out” undesirable “dead wood from the past”
-Dewey had a major influence on the role of American public school
-Dewey’s many writings on education seldom focused on such mundane concerns as how to get students to better understand mathematics, science, or language
-he clearly sought a more expansive role for educators as promoters of a Progressive vision of society
-Dewey created the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, its goals were ideological
-reflecting Dewey’s own passionate feelings about political issues of the time
-promoting a more democratic society, when they preempt other people’s decisions
-their conception of democracy seems to be equalization of outcomes, but intellectual elites
-this would confer benefits on the less fortunate, at the expense of those whom these surrogates consider less deserving
****”This is very different from democracy as a political system, based on free choices by members of the voting public, to determine what laws and policies they want to be governed by-and which individuals they want to put in charge of the government, to administer those laws and policies.”
Progressive icon Woodrow Wilson:
-before becoming President of the United States, he was president of Princeton University
-he saw his role as an educator to be “to make the young gentlemen of suggestion of who gave him such a mandate–or even whether parents would tolerate, much less pay for, such a usurpation of their role, if they knew about it
***his point was that parents will pay to have themselves as parents removed
-no prominent American more openly declared his rejection of democracy as political control by the voting public than President Woodrow Wilson
-he rejected “popular sovereignty” as a basis for government because he saw it as an obstacle impeding what he called “executive expertness”
-he saw consequential knowledge concentrated in elite “experts”
-he saw “the many, the people” as “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish”
-he deplored what he called “that besetting error of ours, the error of trying to do too much by vote”
***he favored government by surrogate decision-makers, armed with superior knowledge and understanding–”executive expertness”--and unhindered by the voting public
-his response to objections that this would deprive the people at large of the freedom to live their own lives as they saw fit, was to redefine the word “freedom”
***redefine the word “freedom”
-he used the new phrase “new freedom” when running for President in 1912
-he simply depicted government-provided benefits dispensed by surrogate decision-makers as an additional freedom for the recipients
-he made an issue of people’s loss of freedom disappear, as if by verbal slight of hand
-whether the supposed beneficiaries of this policies would consider a trade-off of personal freedom for government benefits worthwhile was a question kept off the agenda by this redefinition of the word “freedom”
-Wilson’s book was subtitled “A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People”
-it was dedicated, “with all my heart,” to the people who would go into “unselfish public service”
***people were being emancipated, rather than losing freedom
Lyndon Johnson:
-during this time the vast expansion of the American welfare state happened in the 1960’s
Ex. the administration used the redefinition of freedom as increases of the kind of things that governments could provide, rather than a personal autonomy in one’s own decisions and behavior:
“Only when he can support himself and his family, choose his job and make a living wage can an individual and his family exercise real freedom. Otherwise he is a servant to survival without the means to do what he wants to do.”
-some years later, a book by two Yale professors, “Politics, Economics, and Welfare”
-it defined freedom in terms of things received, rather than autonomy preserved
-they expressed it, “we shall try to unravel some of the complexities in the theory and practice of freedom”
-their conception of freedom was “the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires”
-the more sophisticated or “complex” redefinition of freedom has continued on into the twenty-first century
In the book titled, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
“In this book, when I speak of freedom, it is the freedom to live a good life and to do the things that make life worth living. The absence of freedom is poverty, deprivation, and poor health–long the lot of much of humanity, and still the fate of an outrageously high proportion of the world today.”
-back in the day of the early Progressive movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, John Dewey questioned whether most people even cared much from freedom, in the sense the word meant for centuries before Woodrow Wilsom redefined it.
“Does freedom in itself and in the things it brings with it seem as important as security of livelihood; as food, shelter, clothing, or even as having a good time?” (Dewey)
-Dewey asked, “how does the desire for freedom compare in intensity with the desire to feel equal with others, especially with those who have previously been called superiors?”
-Dewey said, “as we look at the world we see supposedly free institutions in many countries not so much overthrown as abandoned willingly, apparently with enthusiasm.”
-Dewey was a professor of philosophy
-he knew his theories should be regarded as hypothesis to be subjected to actions which test them, so that they are not to be accepted as “rigid dogmas”
-so such tests or evidence accompanied his own sweeping pronouncements about such things as "obvious social evils” in contemporary American society
-not tests were ever applied to other sweeping pronouncements about “our defective industrial regime”
***his claim that “Industrial entrepreneurs have reaped out of all proportions to what they sowed,” or that schools needed to offset “the coarseness, blunders, and prejudices of their elders” that children see at home
-this casual contempt for ordinary people and their freedom was by no means confined to John Dewey, or to educators
Roscoe Pound, Dean of the Harvard Law School:
-the law has had the same disregard of other people’s rights and values by intellectual elites
-leading legal scholars promoting an expansive role for judges in “interpreting” the Constitution to loosen its restrictions on government power
***Roscoe Pound invoked words “science”, scientific,” “science of politics,” “science of law,” “social engineering,” and “social justice,” as far back as 1907
-”social engineering” refers to as if other human beings were to be like inert components of social machinery, to be constructed by elites into a society with “social justice”
Pound lamented, “we still harp upon the sacredness of property before the law” and approvingly cited the “progress of law away from the older individualism” which “is not confined to property rights.”
-1907 & 1908, Pound set forth principles of judicial activism
-going beyond interpreting the law to making social policy that will become dominant more than 100 years later
-Dean Pound simply dismissed as “dogma” the Constitution’s separation of powers, because the separation of powers would “limit the courts to interpretation and application” of the law
-Pound’s own conception of the role of judges was far more expansive
***Pound referred to the desirability of “a living constitution by judicial interpretation”
-he called for “an awakening of juristic activity” for “the sociological jurist,” and declared that the law “must be judged by the results it achieves”
-what he called “mechanical” jurisprudence was condemned for “its failure to respond to vital needs of present day life
-when law “becomes a body of rules,” and “is the condition against which sociologists now protest, and protest rightly”
***why judges and sociologists should be making social policy, instead of people elected as legislators or executives, was not explained
-one of the rationales for such an expanded role for judges has been the claim that the Constitution is too hard to amend, so judges must amend it by “interpretation,” to adapt it to the changing times
***this has been repeated endlessly by elites with the social justice vision, this rationale is contradicted by readily available facts
-from 1913-1920, during the heyday of the Progressives, who claimed that it was nearly impossible to amend the Constitution
-when the elites wanted it amended, but the people did not, that was a “problem” to be “solved”
-that was democracy, even if it frustrated the elites convinced that their superior wisdom and virtue should be imposed on others
-the elite intellectuals’ seeking to preempt other people’s decision whether on public policy or in their private lives
-a reliance on unsubstantiated pronouncements, based on elite consensus, treated as if that was equivalent to documented facts
Pattern:
-one revealing sign is how often arguments of people with other views are not answered with counter-arguments, but with ad-hominem assertions instead
-this pattern has persisted for more than a century
-not only in discussions of social justice issues, but also in other issues–and not only in the United States, but also among other intellectual elites in countries on the other side of the Atlantic
Progressive Era in the United States:
-Progressives’ conceptions of advanced social thinking was that automatic punishment of criminals should be replaced, or at least supplemented, by treatment of the criminal
-as if crime were a disease
-a disease whose “root causes” could be traced back to society, as well as the criminal
-the “rights” for criminals is the modern “social science” celebrated among intellectual elites
1960’s:
-the Supreme Court of the United States began to “interpret” the Constitution as providing newly discovered “rights for criminals that had apparently escaped notice before
Ex. Mapp vs. Ohio (1961), Escobedo vs. Illinois (1964), and Miranda vs. Arizona (1966)
-the Supreme Court majority, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, were undeterred by bitter dissenting opinions from other justices, who objected to both the dangers of creating and the lack of legal basis for the decisions
Consequences:
-prior to 1960, the homicide rate in the United States had been going down for 3 consecutive decades
-in 1960, just under half of what it has been in 1934
-but almost immediately after the Supreme Court’s creation of sweeping new “rights” for criminals, the homicide rate reversed
-It doubled from 1963 to 1973
-no one found this positive, especially the mothers, widows, and orphans of homicide victims
-although this was a nationwide trend, it was especially severe in black communities
-places supposedly being helped by social justice advocates, who were often also advocates of a deemphasis of law enforcement and punishment, seeking instead to treat the “root causes” of crime
-bother before and after the 1960s sudden upsurge in homicides, the homicide rate among blacks was consistently some multiple of the homicide rate among whites
-in some years there were more black homicides than white homicide victims
-even though the size of the black population was only a fraction of the size of whites population
-this meant the upsurge of homicides took an especially heavy toll in black communities
***Supreme Court Justices with lifetime tenure are classic examples of elites who institutionally pay no price for being wrong no matter how wrong and no matter how high the price is paid by others
-Chief Justice Earl Warren did not even pay the price of admitting a mistake
-he rejected critics of the Supreme Court’s criminal law decisions
-he blamed crime “in our disturbed society” on “the root causes” of crime citing such examples as “poverty.” “unemployment,” and “the degradation of slum life”
-he offered no factual evidence that any of these things had suddenly gotten worse in the 1960s
Implications:
-intellectual elites steer the ignorant
-the distribution of consequential knowledge is crucial for deciding what kinds of decisions make sense, through what kinds of policies and institutions
-we each have our own island of knowledge in a sea of ignorance
-As Hayek conceived it, the enormously vast amount of consequential knowledge dispersed among the population of a whole society makes the differences in the amount of such knowledge between some people and other people “comparatively insignificant”
-this conclusion provides little basis for intellectual elites to engage in wholesome preemption of all people’s decisions
-these are decisions about how they live their own lives
-decisions about the kinds of laws the voting public want to live under
-the people they want in charge of carrying out those laws
-intellectual elites with outstanding achievements within their own respective specialties may give little thought to how ignorant they may be on a vast spectrum of other concerns
***even more dangerous than ignorance, however, is a fallacious certitude, which can afflict people at all educational levels and all IQ levels
“In a world of inevitably fallible human beings, with inevitably different viewpoints and different fragments of consequential knowledge, our ability to correct each other can be essential to preventing our making fatally dangerous mistakes as individuals, or as a society.”
-the fatal danger of our times today is a grown intolerance and suppression of both opinions and evidence that differ from the prevailing ideologies that dominate institutions, ranging from the academic world to the corporate world, the media and governmental institutions
***A high IQ and low information can be a very dangerous combination, as a basis for preempting other people’s decisions
-especially when this preemption takes place in circumstances where there is no price for surrogate decision-makers to pay for being wrong
***stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe
***before joining their latest stampedes, led by self-congratulatory elites, deaf to argument and immune to evidence