Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny (in Education)

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

The phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" refers to embryological parallelism, the idea that the development of any individual organism strongly parallels that organism's evolutionary history.  For example, in mammalian embryos, the backbone appears very early, followed by other neural developments in the order that they first appeared in mammalian macro-evolution.  The cerebrum is the last brain structure to develop in the individual human, as it is the newest structure in macro-evolutionary terms.  

If we look at whale embryos, legs begin to develop before retracting back into the body cavity.  Hair also develops briefly, but whale embryos lose this hair at further stages.  Birds have fingers at early stages of development, but these eventually fuse to form wings.  Birds also possess the genes for teeth, but these genes have been "turned off", and teeth never develop in birds.  Both human and monkey embryos briefly have tails to reflect our be-tailed common ancestor, but this tail disappears abruptly in humans, whereas it continues growing in monkeys.  This all correlates strongly with both genetic, mathematical models and the fossil record.

I find the parallelism between macro-evolutionary history, individual organismic development, and mathematically modelable genetic histories endlessly fascinating, and I am obsessed with reconciling and systematizing these phenomena.  But, I do not know enough about the subject right now; it is something that I would like to explore in depth in the future.  

For now, I'd like to see how such a model could be applied to education: that is, the educational development of the individual student recapitulates the macro-history of human knowledge.

Click to read more ...

Cutting the Gordian Knot Between Socialism and Libertarianism

Alexander cuts the Gordian Knot

It is popular within the libertarian blogosphere to label pejoratively any recommendation of the use of state power to achieve liberty as "statist", as if any policy suggesting the use of the state apparatus to solve problems of insufficient liberty is objectively evil and destined to lead us all down the road to totalitarianism.  Not only is this tantamount to mindless orthodox hackery, but it is also quite absurd.  

In a liberal regime, state power is best understood as what ultimately (I use this term in the sense of "finally" and not "fundamentally" as I generally support vigorous primary social restraint on undesirable behavior, i.e. shunning or boycotting) prevents the war of all against all.  Indeed, the present scope of state power can be best understood as the result of historical forces and individual aggregate self-interest operating within the liberal program.  In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville:

(In a democracy) no man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness. 

Of course, state power has tended to excess, and it must be controlled by the collective balancing forces of a bottom-up, democratically-conscious populace (which explains why democracy-building seldom works) and liberal, private institutions, but there are elements of state power which all citizens can (and have) agreed are for the best at least in principle if not in practice: proscriptions against murder for instance, the national defense, the police, even anti-trust regulations to prevent private institutions from subtracting from the general aggregate welfare (or challenging the government power monopoly).

Click to read more ...

Synthesis of Austrian and Distributist Economics via Information Science

From Timothy B. Lee's September Cato Unbound essay on Hayek:

Hayek’s point is not that the price system is superior to other decentralized social institutions. Rather, he’s pointing out that all successful large-scale cooperative efforts involve standardization, which necessarily means discarding some potentially relevant knowledge in the process of codifying other knowledge deemed more important. The important question is not whether to standardize in this way, it’s deciding how, and how much to standardize. Too little standardization means missing out on opportunities for economies of scale and the division of labor. Too much standardization means discarding information that consumers actually care about, leading to the infamous rubber tomatoes of standardized agriculture. And the wrong kind of standardization—discarding important information while preserving trivial information—is doomed regardless of the degree of standardization.

What makes decentralized economic institutions powerful isn’t standardization but the possibility for competition among alternative standardization schemes. Rubber tomatoes create an entrepreneurial opportunity for firms to establish a more exacting tomato standard and deliver tastier tomatoes to their customers. In real markets, you see competition not only among individual firms but among groups of firms using alternative standards. Markets gradually converge on the standards that are best at transmitting relevant information and discarding irrelevant information. In contrast, when standards are set by the state, or by private firms who have been granted de facto standard-setting authority by government regulations, there is no opportunity for this kind of decentralized experimentation. Then the market is likely to be permanently stunted by the use of a standard that does a poor job of transmitting the information consumers care about most. (emphasis mine)

Click to read more ...

Peter Boettke's Economic Meta-analysis

Termite cathedral = spontaneous orderFrom Peter Boettke at the Coordination Problem blog:

I often use a 2 x 2 matrix to communicate to students the different schools of thought in economics.  The rows reflect the problem situation we are find ourselves in (simple or complex), the columns reflect the outcome of our interactions (order or disorder).  Neoclassical economics is found in the simple/order cell; Keynesian and market failure theory is found in the complex/disorder cell; Marxism and critics of economics are found in the simple/disorder cell.  What does that leave?  The complex/order cell and that is the intellectual home of the Classical economists such as Smith-Say, the Austrian school from Menger to Mises to Kirzner, and the New Institutional school of Alchian, Buchanan, Coase, Demsetz, North, Olson, Ostrom, Smith, Tullock and Williamson, etc.

The Austrians occupy a central place in this cell because they emphasize not only the cognitive limitations of man, but also the complications of uncertainty, time, and I think importantly modifications to our core understanding of money and capital.  Money is non-neutral, and the capital structure in an economy consists of combination of heterogeneous capital goods that multiple-specific uses.  Once these propositions are included in the analysis, along with other messy aspects of the real world, our understanding of market theory and the price system shifts drastically.  Nothing can be treated as given.  Everything must fall out of the analysis of exchange and production.  Economic analysis is about economic forces at work, not the analysis of situations after those forces have done their job.

The traditional perfect market versus market failure debate is stale --- the perfect market folks don't tell us how the story of the market unfolds, and the imperfect market folks stop the story short right when it is getting interesting.  Journalist can understand this simple characterization of economic ideas, but economists should know better.  Back in the late 1940s, Kenneth Boulding (John Bates Clark Medal winner in 1949) actually raised this issue in his review of Samuelson's Foundations in the JPE.  Boulding wondered if the flawless precision of mathematical economics would prove impotent in terms of dealing with the real world in comparison with the literary vagueness of classical economics and economic sociology.  Not many listened to Boulding, and instead of doing messynomics in the sense of complex/order cell, we got a stale debate between simple/order and complex/disorder. And it still is going on today.

Click to read more ...

A Response to Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman, looking left

Paul Krugman's existence in the popular consciousness, mostly through his New York Times column and blog, the Conscience of a Liberal, largely rests on ideological antagonism.  Krugman's famous September, 2009 straw-man New York Times Magazine editorial, "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?", attacking University of Chicago economist John Cochrane and others, was the "Hit Em Up" of economic policy debate. 

Krugman's near-constant invocation of "saltwater" and "freshwater" economics suggests two irreconcilable and antagonistic schools corresponding to two irreconcilable and antagonistic political parties: one urbane and sophisticated, one backwoods and boorish.  In Krugman's world, neither heterodox economists nor heterodox politicians can work together to solve problems honestly.  This is hackery.  In reality, the economics discipline is a nuanced conglomeration of disparate ideas.  The unholy marriage of economics and politics which Krugman represents only threatens to undermine the credibility of economics as rational discourse on human behavior.

Click to read more ...

Why Should I Have to Defend Libertarianism?

This symbol of libertarianism represents an entirely consequentialist morality.Blogging is the rock 'n' roll of the information generation, and Ezra Klein is its Bob Dylan.  In a May 21st post, Three types of arguments over policy, Klein soberly reins in and classifies the noise of a drunken and whirling Washington:

Washington is home to two -- actually, three -- different types of policy debates. The first one, the one that we're used to, asks whether a policy will work. That's the one where I say health-care reform is likely to achieve its goals and cut costs and David Brooks says it won't do either thing and we both try to marshal empirical evidence in service of our points. In theory, whoever's evidence is stronger wins.

Then there's the second one, which is the one that (Rand) Paul is giving voice to, which asks whether a policy is philosophically acceptable. Paul isn't arguing that the Civil Rights Act was ineffective at desegregating Woolworth lunch counters. He's arguing that government shouldn't tell private businesses what to do, and when they do, that's not legitimate even if it achieves its stated policy goals. Or, more prosaically, a Republican argues that we shouldn't have more government involvement in health care because government involvement is bad, and that's true whether or not it's proved efficient in other countries. In theory, whoever's philosophy is more appealing wins.

Click to read more ...

Fake History in Texas

According to the New York Times, a group of ten socially conservative Texas Board of Education members have won a decisive victory for determining the content of the state's social studies and economics curricula for the next decade.  No historians or economists were consulted in making the changes, which will affect more than 6.5 million students over the next ten years

Click to read more ...

Our Obese Economy

Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works. - John Stuart Mill

David Leonhardt recently wrote a column for the New York Times in overwhelming praise of the stimulus.  Leonhardt goes to great lengths to castigate opponents as political opportunists, visceral reactionaries, or ideologues, but Leonhardt, and many other proponents of economic stimulus - including Paul Krugman - fundamentally misunderstands the nature behind the opposition; it's not about doubting the math or denying that government programs designed to create jobs create jobs.  Reasoned opposition relies on the idea of malinvestments contaminating the economy and the creation of moral hazard inevitably postponing a bigger collapse.

Click to read more ...

A Final Note on a Softer Economic Policy

There is a famous joke about the tendency of economists to consider their chosen field akin to the natural sciences: a physicist, a chemist, and an economist are stuck on a desert island.  A can of beans washes up on the beach.  The physicist devises a mechanism using twigs and rocks to attempt to force open the can, but after several hours with no results, during which the economist sits and smugly smiles, the physicist gives up.  The chemist attempts to extract some sort of substance from plants on the island to melt the can.  The economist continues sitting and smiling arrogantly as the chemist also fails in his efforts.  “What?” the physicist and chemist say, “do you have a better plan?”  The economist stands and walks proudly towards the can on the beach: “Let’s assume we have a can-opener.”

This joke is often told by economists to economists at economic conventions or by economics professors to economics students during economics class, which was where I first heard the joke.  Yet the same economists who make this joke forget their own lack of hard science credentials when they make predictions; and non-economists seem to forget the incorrectness of the last prediction when they hear the next prediction.  In times of trouble, the poor track record of economists at predicting the future is never called into question, and political leaders often blindly surrender national sovereignty to “experts.”

I undoubtedly believe that central economic planners are capable of coordinating and herding hundreds of millions of people to some greater economic purpose by simply printing money and increasing government spending, but I also believe that the negative consequences of these policies usually outweigh their beneficial effects.

Click to read more ...

Private vs. Privatization

The free market is understood to be the optimal delivery mechanism for most goods and services.  As competition intensifies, the weaker competitors are selected out and the stronger competitors are selected in.  The stronger competitors grow and evolve to meet the demands of a particular consumer base.  Friedrich von Hayek called this behavior of the market a "spontaneous order" and posited spontaneous order as a generalized Theory of Evolution.  Darwinian Evolution can itself be described as a special case of spontaneous order, as can language, memetics, pedestrian traffic, the popularity of music, the price mechanism, Wikipedia, and the order of the universe.  For his work on the price mechanism, Hayek won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Click to read more ...