Charles Brass wrote,
>However, the real dilemma for me is that people who have "formed a view" are
>apparently blind to the fact that many others (on this list for example) do
>not share their view . . .
Ed Weick wrote,
>However, my point was not about whether we are or are not defining things
>properly, but about whether we have a proper understanding of the situation
>we are, ever so often, ranting and railing against.
What both Charles and Ed are talking about sounds to me a lot like 'hubris'.
Hubris is a widespread character trait (or behaviour) affecting members of
this list and the general population of ranters and railers alike. But,
taking a cue from the Greeks, it is the hubris of the rulers that inflicts a
plague on society.
Further down, Ed wrote,
>I'm sure that up-to-date economists have developed the cybernetic approach
>into a theory and have written textbooks about it with titles such as
>"decision-making under conditions of extreme uncertainty" or "how to keep
>playing even though you don't know what will hit you or when", perhaps as an
>extension of game theory.
If hubris is the hypothesis, Daniel Ellsberg constructed an experiment to
test that hypothesis. The results of Ellsberg's experiment suggest that the
differences between uncertainty and "extreme uncertainty" are qualitative
rather than quantitative. The title of an Ellsberg article is as close to
"decision-making under conditions of extreme uncertainty" as you'd want to
get. The paradox investigated by Ellsberg casts doubt on the reliability of
cybernetic models.
Cybernetic models are only as good as their assumptions about the nature and
goals of the system and the validity and accuracy of their information. In a
market economy, profits and prices are the signals supposedly informing the
self-correction of the system. This is the point that lies at the heart of
von Mises' and von Hayek's critiques of socialism: a system of centrally
administered prices can never accumulate as much or as good information as
provided in the market.
The Austrian school's critique of socialism was extremely elegant -- as was
Marx's critique of capitalism. Both critiques succumbed to the same
political fate. They became wedded to embarrassingly stupid stories. The
Stalinist "worker as hero" and the Thatcherite "nation as grocer" scripts
are less than fables, they are cynical commercialized rip-offs of a fable.
But a powerful critique wedded to a stupid story can do a lot of damage.
What the stupid stories obscure is that a critique, in order to be valid,
must use terms that apply equally to one's own position as to one's
opponents'. It simply isn't valid to compare one's own system "in theory"
with an opponent's system "in practice". In practice, market economies are
as guilty of the sins of administrative distortion of price and profit
signals as any socialist economy anywhere ever was. There is not a dime's
worth of difference between them.
Here's the surprise: we're not as far apart in our thinking as we imagine
and sometimes pretend. A simple machine for "de-hubrification" can be
described as a figure of two lines intersecting at right angles. Call the
lines "A" and "B". Opposing points of view occupy points at the positive end
of each line: point +A and point +B. Each point of view projects an
antagonist at the opposite pole of their own line. Point of view +A projects
its antagonist at -A and point of view +B projects its antagonist at -B. In
truth, however, "-A" and "-B" are empty places. Diagrammatically, this is
how it looks:
+A
*
|
|
|
+B *------------------- -B
|
|
|
-A
A dialogue is possible within the entire quadrant +A+B, while "debate" along
either line A or line B will inevitably prove futile and misleading.
Sometimes it can feel almost as futile trying to initiate a dialogue,
because any "non+A" statement can be taken by A as a -A statement.
Regards,
Tom Walker
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