As a teenager I was very impressed with the profundity that began Bret Easton Ellis's novel Less Than Zero: "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." It's so metaphoric or something. Everyone is atomized and isolated in their technologically fashioned death machines, and they can't achieve togetherness anymore. Not only that, they fear it. They no longer trust that they will let each other in; instead they are expecting a crash. An incisive commentary on our contemporary predicament.
This somewhat overwrought NYT Magazine article by Cynthia Gorney about merging reminded me of Ellis's gambit, though the metaphoric implications are somewhat submerged, replaced instead with straightforward lessons about human behavior that can be drawn from traffic etiquette. There are two types of drivers, aggressive and polite, and they have the tendency to stalemate one another. When two lanes are forced to merge, some rush to the merge point, others get in line as soon as they can and seethe as the others pass them by and merge in front of them. Gorney is one of the latter, and she inexplicably expects New Yorkers to sympathize. You don't have to spent to much time in New York City traffic to realize that the only rule of etiquette is that there are none, and you will be wasting a lot of emotional energy if you stubbornly expect other drivers to behave as if they are queued up to curtsy to the queen. Replacing deferential politeness on New York's roadways is the predictability of aggressive action, the assurance that any perceived advantage will be seized. This clarity about what to anticipate from other drivers makes traffic move as best as possible in a near-impossible situation of overburdened roads.
But Gorney doesn't seem to want to hear it when told by a California Highway Patrol officer that traffic is “not a matter of fairness or unfairness.” But the police officer is completely right. The road is not the place to stand stubbornly on ethical peccadilloes; it's not wear you wage your private war against what you consider to be rudeness. It is a place where you respect everyone else's right to be in a hurry by acting like you are in a hurry too.
Showing posts with label spontaneous order. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spontaneous order. Show all posts
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Instilling the fear of success (26 December 2006)
Few people in America experience the direct application of power -- in other words, they generally don't have people telling them what to do without some semblance of a voluntary contract being in place. Instead power seems distributed throughout society and tends to work without anyone being responsible; everyone seems to be getting their orders from somewhere else, forming a never-ending chain, or they are operating by instinct or from what seems like common sense. This can seem like freedom and may perhaps be a necessary precondition for what we understand as freedom: being left alone by our neighbors and our government.
But it would be wrong to conflate our inability to perceive the ways in which power circumscribes our lives (or to recognize the forces responsible for these limitations) with autonomy. Autonomy, in a culture that fetishizes independence and individuality, is less an ontological condition than an experiential good. Much of our interactions in consumer society involve our attempts to buy the feeling of control; we shop so that we may exercise our freedom of choice, our consumer sovereignty. This compensates for the ways in which our social mobility is, in practice, limited and how class hampers our judgment and dictates the behavior we then assume complete responsibility for.
Foucault's historical studies are basically about this process -- how power comes to reside in social institutions (hospitals, prisons, universities) and concepts (sexuality, gender, mental health) and then exercise itself with no particular agent directing the process. Reading these works tends to leave me heavy with doom, hopelessly trapped in invisible prisons that no one builds and no one can tear down. However, capitalist ideologues usually portray diffused power positively, locating it in the market, which is then virtually deified as a near-flawless system for aggregating and distributing information about what a society wants collectively. Hayek depicts this as spontaneous order, which has the nonpareil benefit of preventing bureaucrats from telling you what you must think and do. And capitalism yields not a iron-clad status system girded with the additional insult of making your class seem like your own fault, but "creative destruction" that allows each generation to remake the social order new, with nothing but merit and efficiency to guide it. If only. Actually the market can be rigged to conserve privilege, to protect class prerogatives that assure that more of what goods and opportunities society produces go to a select few elites, who then retrospectively justify their rewards with specious claims of merit, tradition or divine right. With the market responsible, the beneficiaries can feel as though they have clean hands, while the victims begin to look in the mirror for who to blame for failure in a quasi-meritocracy.
In The Hidden Injuries of Class Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb delineate this process by looking at the aspirations of working-class immigrants in America in the mid 20th century, concluding that workers are both propelled and held back by an ideology of individualism. Being recognized as an individual is a classic positional good; you can only have it and enjoy it if your peers don't. But by claiming it, by making a case for why one should stand out from the mediocre mass and assuming dignity can come only from being recognized as such (for Sennett and Cobb this is the essence of how class societies function), one alienates himself from his peers, depriving oneself of the solace of community without really securing admission to another receptive community. Instead social climbers find themselves out on the limb, alienated and isolated in their aspirational nuclear family unit, taking consolatory pride in their apparent independence or self-sabotaging as they try to reconcile the contradictions foisted on them by a hereditary status system that pretends to be egalitarian.
As Cobb and Sennett argue, this self-sabotage -- the feelings of guilt or confusion or insecurity or inadequacy -- is how class society manages to wound and cripple the lower orders without anyone higher up in the social hierarchy seeming directly responsible. No one intentionally prohibits you from finding success; we end up excluding ourselves, as this proves easier to live with than a rigged system. (Better to feel like you lost the game than to think the refs threw it.)
One way in which this plays out is in the pursuit of meaningful work, glamour jobs that provide status and allow you to indulge your individual talents. Because these jobs often have to do with generating "original" and "creative" product, it's easy to imagine they are distributed according to merit -- the people who do the best work inevitably get the jobs. But this is obviously false; these jobs are scarce and our educational system generates far too many qualified candidates. (Our educational system is perhaps too egalitarian, or from the other perspective, state-supported schools are diploma mills that perpetuate their own existence and funding by lowering standards and processing more and more students.)
When I was getting a graduate degree in English, it became all too apparent to me, going to conferences and seeing all the other eager competitors for those ultrarare tenure track jobs at universities, that there were going to be a lot of unhappy and unemployable PhDs, overqualified for anything but the one job they were acutely trained to perform. It also occurred to me that society almost certainly didn't need this many literature professors, and something had gone horribly wrong in society's allocation of educational resources to produce so many people like me. I probably should have been discouraged from my course at a much earlier juncture than two years into a dissertation. Perhaps I should have listened to the inner voices of failure sooner.
One way to disqualify candidates is to require them to work for free in unpaid internships or to live on subsistence stipends while accruing the necessary certifications in graduate school. This rules out anyone who doesn't have another source of income (inherited from parents, say) to fall back on. Another disqualification method is to require social capital -- make sure they know someone who can recommend them and vouch for them. This requires having the kind of connections that elites take for granted, knowing someone in admissions at this elite school or in HR at this elite employer. Or you have to have the wherewithal to be in the pipeline for job openings (or elite unpaid internships) that aren't publicly advertised but instead are announced through established grapevines. Access to these networks stems from class advantage, and keeping these networks exclusive is how a class polices its borders. But when all that fails to discourage applicants for prestige jobs, society falls back on what sometimes is known in self-help books as "the fear of success" -- we sabotage ourselves because we internalize the belief that we don't deserve to advance.
Cobb and Sennett argue that in a putative democracy with an open social structure, the makeup of the various classes is more or less preserved by baiting lower class people to engage in a zero-sum game for dignity (never seen as secure, a given by virtue of being human), doled out by higher-ups for reasons we can never fully apprehend (Sennett and Cobb write, "What is in you that commands the approval of others? You can't know this, but someone can.... Power in the organization, like the God of Weber's early Protestants, knows about you what you do not know about yourself"). This competition, whose rules continually change and render contestants passive and fatalistic, cripples people with self-doubt and encourages them to remove themselves from the running for high-status positions that are technically open to all, positions they end up feeling they somehow inherently don't deserve. "The psychological motivation instilled by a class society is to heal a doubt about the self rather than create more power over things and other persons in the outer world," Sennett and Cobb assert. Consequently, the idea of agency beyond the boundaries of one's own psyche becomes ever more remote. Passivity becomes common sense, which intensifies the pleasures of spectatorship that make advertising and entertainment function, reinforcing their appeal and the passivity itself in a feedback loop.
This passivity spills over into self-doubt, which further fuels the fear of success -- the unwillingness to assume greater responsibilities, which seem capable of being met by the application of one's natural talents but are actually a matter of class habitus, having a familiarity with social mores and conventions and access to social networks. Combine that confusion of means and ends with the contempt other competitors from their class -- their former friends -- will feel for them if they succeed and you can see why workers disqualify themselves and don't even try for advancement. Instead they try to deflect attention and struggle along independently, while subsisting as spectators of real life, what is going on in celebrity land or in the pages of the newspaper.
It's not hard to imagine scarce goods other than prestige jobs being preserved in this fashion -- consider health care, which is getting scarcer (more expensive) all the time. Society wants to preserve the illusion of universal care it can't afford to provide, so it can enlist the class system and the injured dignity it produces to convince lower class people that they don't deserve the same kind of singled-out attention from their doctors that their betters are accustomed to. Instead they will be treated in second-rate clinics staffed with overworked, underpaid health care providers, and processed as though they were faulty machines in for assembly-line repair. And they will be grateful that they didn't attract unsavory attention from anyone along the way. If I had more time, I could bring this back to Foucault's Birth of the Clinic and suggest this self-defeating class strategy masquerades as elusive independence, skirting the repressive mechanisms of power by losing oneself in the margins, but you get the idea.
But it would be wrong to conflate our inability to perceive the ways in which power circumscribes our lives (or to recognize the forces responsible for these limitations) with autonomy. Autonomy, in a culture that fetishizes independence and individuality, is less an ontological condition than an experiential good. Much of our interactions in consumer society involve our attempts to buy the feeling of control; we shop so that we may exercise our freedom of choice, our consumer sovereignty. This compensates for the ways in which our social mobility is, in practice, limited and how class hampers our judgment and dictates the behavior we then assume complete responsibility for.
Foucault's historical studies are basically about this process -- how power comes to reside in social institutions (hospitals, prisons, universities) and concepts (sexuality, gender, mental health) and then exercise itself with no particular agent directing the process. Reading these works tends to leave me heavy with doom, hopelessly trapped in invisible prisons that no one builds and no one can tear down. However, capitalist ideologues usually portray diffused power positively, locating it in the market, which is then virtually deified as a near-flawless system for aggregating and distributing information about what a society wants collectively. Hayek depicts this as spontaneous order, which has the nonpareil benefit of preventing bureaucrats from telling you what you must think and do. And capitalism yields not a iron-clad status system girded with the additional insult of making your class seem like your own fault, but "creative destruction" that allows each generation to remake the social order new, with nothing but merit and efficiency to guide it. If only. Actually the market can be rigged to conserve privilege, to protect class prerogatives that assure that more of what goods and opportunities society produces go to a select few elites, who then retrospectively justify their rewards with specious claims of merit, tradition or divine right. With the market responsible, the beneficiaries can feel as though they have clean hands, while the victims begin to look in the mirror for who to blame for failure in a quasi-meritocracy.
In The Hidden Injuries of Class Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb delineate this process by looking at the aspirations of working-class immigrants in America in the mid 20th century, concluding that workers are both propelled and held back by an ideology of individualism. Being recognized as an individual is a classic positional good; you can only have it and enjoy it if your peers don't. But by claiming it, by making a case for why one should stand out from the mediocre mass and assuming dignity can come only from being recognized as such (for Sennett and Cobb this is the essence of how class societies function), one alienates himself from his peers, depriving oneself of the solace of community without really securing admission to another receptive community. Instead social climbers find themselves out on the limb, alienated and isolated in their aspirational nuclear family unit, taking consolatory pride in their apparent independence or self-sabotaging as they try to reconcile the contradictions foisted on them by a hereditary status system that pretends to be egalitarian.
As Cobb and Sennett argue, this self-sabotage -- the feelings of guilt or confusion or insecurity or inadequacy -- is how class society manages to wound and cripple the lower orders without anyone higher up in the social hierarchy seeming directly responsible. No one intentionally prohibits you from finding success; we end up excluding ourselves, as this proves easier to live with than a rigged system. (Better to feel like you lost the game than to think the refs threw it.)
One way in which this plays out is in the pursuit of meaningful work, glamour jobs that provide status and allow you to indulge your individual talents. Because these jobs often have to do with generating "original" and "creative" product, it's easy to imagine they are distributed according to merit -- the people who do the best work inevitably get the jobs. But this is obviously false; these jobs are scarce and our educational system generates far too many qualified candidates. (Our educational system is perhaps too egalitarian, or from the other perspective, state-supported schools are diploma mills that perpetuate their own existence and funding by lowering standards and processing more and more students.)
When I was getting a graduate degree in English, it became all too apparent to me, going to conferences and seeing all the other eager competitors for those ultrarare tenure track jobs at universities, that there were going to be a lot of unhappy and unemployable PhDs, overqualified for anything but the one job they were acutely trained to perform. It also occurred to me that society almost certainly didn't need this many literature professors, and something had gone horribly wrong in society's allocation of educational resources to produce so many people like me. I probably should have been discouraged from my course at a much earlier juncture than two years into a dissertation. Perhaps I should have listened to the inner voices of failure sooner.
One way to disqualify candidates is to require them to work for free in unpaid internships or to live on subsistence stipends while accruing the necessary certifications in graduate school. This rules out anyone who doesn't have another source of income (inherited from parents, say) to fall back on. Another disqualification method is to require social capital -- make sure they know someone who can recommend them and vouch for them. This requires having the kind of connections that elites take for granted, knowing someone in admissions at this elite school or in HR at this elite employer. Or you have to have the wherewithal to be in the pipeline for job openings (or elite unpaid internships) that aren't publicly advertised but instead are announced through established grapevines. Access to these networks stems from class advantage, and keeping these networks exclusive is how a class polices its borders. But when all that fails to discourage applicants for prestige jobs, society falls back on what sometimes is known in self-help books as "the fear of success" -- we sabotage ourselves because we internalize the belief that we don't deserve to advance.
Cobb and Sennett argue that in a putative democracy with an open social structure, the makeup of the various classes is more or less preserved by baiting lower class people to engage in a zero-sum game for dignity (never seen as secure, a given by virtue of being human), doled out by higher-ups for reasons we can never fully apprehend (Sennett and Cobb write, "What is in you that commands the approval of others? You can't know this, but someone can.... Power in the organization, like the God of Weber's early Protestants, knows about you what you do not know about yourself"). This competition, whose rules continually change and render contestants passive and fatalistic, cripples people with self-doubt and encourages them to remove themselves from the running for high-status positions that are technically open to all, positions they end up feeling they somehow inherently don't deserve. "The psychological motivation instilled by a class society is to heal a doubt about the self rather than create more power over things and other persons in the outer world," Sennett and Cobb assert. Consequently, the idea of agency beyond the boundaries of one's own psyche becomes ever more remote. Passivity becomes common sense, which intensifies the pleasures of spectatorship that make advertising and entertainment function, reinforcing their appeal and the passivity itself in a feedback loop.
This passivity spills over into self-doubt, which further fuels the fear of success -- the unwillingness to assume greater responsibilities, which seem capable of being met by the application of one's natural talents but are actually a matter of class habitus, having a familiarity with social mores and conventions and access to social networks. Combine that confusion of means and ends with the contempt other competitors from their class -- their former friends -- will feel for them if they succeed and you can see why workers disqualify themselves and don't even try for advancement. Instead they try to deflect attention and struggle along independently, while subsisting as spectators of real life, what is going on in celebrity land or in the pages of the newspaper.
It's not hard to imagine scarce goods other than prestige jobs being preserved in this fashion -- consider health care, which is getting scarcer (more expensive) all the time. Society wants to preserve the illusion of universal care it can't afford to provide, so it can enlist the class system and the injured dignity it produces to convince lower class people that they don't deserve the same kind of singled-out attention from their doctors that their betters are accustomed to. Instead they will be treated in second-rate clinics staffed with overworked, underpaid health care providers, and processed as though they were faulty machines in for assembly-line repair. And they will be grateful that they didn't attract unsavory attention from anyone along the way. If I had more time, I could bring this back to Foucault's Birth of the Clinic and suggest this self-defeating class strategy masquerades as elusive independence, skirting the repressive mechanisms of power by losing oneself in the margins, but you get the idea.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Vanity activism (14 December 2006)
The Economist takes on the notion of socially responsible food shopping, attempting to debunk notions that buying organic or fair trade or locally grown foods in any way helps accomplish anything other than making yourself feel better. I'm actually extremely sympathetic to this position -- shopping activism seems a bogus proxy for actually political power (as the editorial writer also points out) and it seems mainly a product of vicariously projecting oneself into some helpless other (a peasant farmer, a migrant worker, an animal bred for slaughter, an indigenous tribesman, etc.) in alien, complex situations created and driven by many different factors and then acting as though one's emotional response yields all the relevant facts. One is led through moral vanity to believe that one's own personal emotions are superior to and more significant than historical reality and the social systems that reproduce it and the conscious decision making of all those people whose lives we have no wherewithal to be making assumptions about. And our consequent actions are ultimately only about making ourselves feel good, and more powerful and influential perhaps than any individual can be, absent the tools of political power. Our own deeply felt good intentions don't make out individual piecemeal actions free of perverse, unintended consequences (Albert O. Hirschman's warning about reactionary rhetoric notwithstanding).
Neverthess I'll try to temper my gullibility for this species of right-wing argument in the following summary. (Brad Plumer has a nice corrective here as well.) The editorial argues that organic food, because it is produced less efficiently, consumes more land and has the perverse consequence of destroying more of the natural environment via deforestation. (I liked this bald statement: "Farming is inherently bad for the environment: since humans took it up around 11,000 years ago, the result has been deforestation on a massive scale."
I don't think, however, The Economist is advocating a return to hunting and gathering.) Fair-trade arrangements distort the price system and encourage farmers to produce goods for which there is insufficient demand, rather than diversify into viable crops. (Whether that option exists for many of these third-world farmers is not addressed -- but if they must be wrung out in the market's creative destruction processes as agribusiness consolidates, so be it.) And locally-grown food can't help change the finding that most of the miles food travels (in England, anyway) from farm to plate occur in our cars as we drive it home from the grocery store. The editorial also points out the futility of working against comparative advantages available in food being raised the locale where it can be achieved with greater efficiency -- we waste resources if we insist on ignoring those possible gains.
So in lieu of these solutions, the editorial proposes carbon taxes to address energy waste (Harvard economist and Pigovian tax crusader Greg Mankiw surely agrees) and the eradication of agricultural subsidies of all kinds (i.e. ensure real free trade in agriculture, which would be fairer -- though perhaps not for some individual farmers who would be driven out of business and have nothing else to do -- than matching subsidies with more subsidies in protectionist tariff wars).
Mark Thoma at Economist's View links to an essay from the journal Democracy that asks a related question: "Can progressives really change Wal-Mart–or any other company, for that matter?" Authors Aaron Chatterji and Siona Listokin argue that working to make corporations behave in a socially responsible way independent of binding, state-backed law is a futile endeavor. Corporations, due to their fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders, will always do what is most profitable. If that course also happens to also socially responsible, then so much the better. But they won't surrender big profits for lesser ones simply because they want to be considerate, even if they wanted to -- the hierarchical organization and the spontaneous order in the economic system that distributes decision making militates against it. That's where government can step in and let us all off the hook by reigning in the profit motive in certain instances when, unfettered, it demonstrably harms the public good. Thus we must engage with the political process to push government to achieve these goals, and dismantle governments that put forward corporate interests at the expense of the public good.
Neverthess I'll try to temper my gullibility for this species of right-wing argument in the following summary. (Brad Plumer has a nice corrective here as well.) The editorial argues that organic food, because it is produced less efficiently, consumes more land and has the perverse consequence of destroying more of the natural environment via deforestation. (I liked this bald statement: "Farming is inherently bad for the environment: since humans took it up around 11,000 years ago, the result has been deforestation on a massive scale."
I don't think, however, The Economist is advocating a return to hunting and gathering.) Fair-trade arrangements distort the price system and encourage farmers to produce goods for which there is insufficient demand, rather than diversify into viable crops. (Whether that option exists for many of these third-world farmers is not addressed -- but if they must be wrung out in the market's creative destruction processes as agribusiness consolidates, so be it.) And locally-grown food can't help change the finding that most of the miles food travels (in England, anyway) from farm to plate occur in our cars as we drive it home from the grocery store. The editorial also points out the futility of working against comparative advantages available in food being raised the locale where it can be achieved with greater efficiency -- we waste resources if we insist on ignoring those possible gains.
So in lieu of these solutions, the editorial proposes carbon taxes to address energy waste (Harvard economist and Pigovian tax crusader Greg Mankiw surely agrees) and the eradication of agricultural subsidies of all kinds (i.e. ensure real free trade in agriculture, which would be fairer -- though perhaps not for some individual farmers who would be driven out of business and have nothing else to do -- than matching subsidies with more subsidies in protectionist tariff wars).
Mark Thoma at Economist's View links to an essay from the journal Democracy that asks a related question: "Can progressives really change Wal-Mart–or any other company, for that matter?" Authors Aaron Chatterji and Siona Listokin argue that working to make corporations behave in a socially responsible way independent of binding, state-backed law is a futile endeavor. Corporations, due to their fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders, will always do what is most profitable. If that course also happens to also socially responsible, then so much the better. But they won't surrender big profits for lesser ones simply because they want to be considerate, even if they wanted to -- the hierarchical organization and the spontaneous order in the economic system that distributes decision making militates against it. That's where government can step in and let us all off the hook by reigning in the profit motive in certain instances when, unfettered, it demonstrably harms the public good. Thus we must engage with the political process to push government to achieve these goals, and dismantle governments that put forward corporate interests at the expense of the public good.
"Economic calculus" and the end of curiosity (4 December 2006)
As someone who occasionally complains about free-market ideology and economists' traditional assumptions about rationality -- that it operates universally and consists of individuals' maximizing utility by unerringly choosing among a variety of alternatives to yield the most satisfactory outcome -- I found Hayek's short essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society" interesting. It seems to implicitly acknowledge that the view is ideological (rather than an empirical observation of human nature) while insisting on its profound usefulness upon being widely adopted.
The essay is a concise explanation of how markets can be seen as a system for distributing knowledge via the medium of prices, which are simple and straightforward enough for any participant in an economy to understand. By responding predictably to price changes, individuals can pass along critical information -- "the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place" -- without ever having to comprehend it or explain its overall significance.
But the possession of such knowledge is not necessarily earned by careful study or diligent habits or admission into prestigious educational institutions but by sheer good fortune; it seems unmerited, its distribution seems random and hence unfair. (Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling refers to this deploringly as the "managerialist bias" -- the assumption that only those specially trained and certified should be entrusted to make economic decisions that affect us all.) But Hayek insists that knowledge is valid only when it is distributed arbitrarily rather than centralized in the hands of planners (or bureaucrats or educators or whomever), who more likely than not, in his opinion, are corrupted by their power (this is the gist of The Road to Serfdom).
So if knowledge is distributed among people who don't ultimately have enough of it to do any real structural damage with the information -- a happy consequence of democratic societies -- what remains necessary is a mechanism that transcends human agency to aggregate that knowledge and make it socially useful. Enter the market, which allows the semi-informed person to make decisions based on price. As far as Hayek is concerned, when one is making decisions, "It is always a question of the relative importance of the particular things with which he is concerned, and the causes which alter their relative importance are of no interest to him beyond the effect on those concrete things of his own environment."
That almost seems tautological to say decisions are a matter of choosing between the relative importance of things, but actually this is where the economist's assumptions about rationality are imported into the scheme. (Hayek calls it "economic calculus.") Prices think through the importance of information for us so that we don't have to, and it has the added benefit of being unerring at least in the sense that it is impersonal. In other words, prices don't tell us the inherent value of an object but an unbiased accounting of an object's overall significance to society -- and this information, divorced of the reasons behind the number, is all we really need as individuals. "The problem is precisely how to extend the span of out utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do." We receive our marching orders from prices, which in this view reflect society's best interests or at least its collective inclinations, rather than Big Brother. Consequently, all we need to learn from society during our schooling is a proper respect for prices, for always trying to get the most for less (a lesson that, incidentally, is endlessly reinforced in advertisements). This plays out in the inculcation of "rational" behavior, always being concerned with maximizing utility, which is essential to making the entire system able to coherently communicate anything. If people behave in a wasteful way (destroying the accursed share, as in Bataille's theories, perhaps?) what the price system communicates may have less and less to do with what is socially useful and necessary.
This suggests why the market, conceived in these terms, can seem so objectionable -- it obviates the need for human understanding and reduces decision-making to a mechanistic response to a single figure. It suggests that all other considerations are not just misguided but are in fact harmful obfuscations. Extrapolate from this and you yield a worldview that has no regard or use for curiosity -- and a very cursory look at America's chain stores and passive entertainments would seem to support the idea that we already live in that world.
UPDATE: See this Blood and Treasure post for an analysis of Hayek's fondness for "liberal dictatorship". Writes Jamie K.: "I’ve argued before that many of China’s anti subversion laws – like those against 'causing turmoil' or 'disturbing social order' - have a Hayekian feel to them. They’re essentially designed as measures to stop people exercising the conceit of reason."
The essay is a concise explanation of how markets can be seen as a system for distributing knowledge via the medium of prices, which are simple and straightforward enough for any participant in an economy to understand. By responding predictably to price changes, individuals can pass along critical information -- "the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place" -- without ever having to comprehend it or explain its overall significance.
To know of and put to use a machine not fully employed, or somebody's skill which could be better utilized, or to be aware of a surplus stock which can be drawn upon during an interruption of supplies, is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques. And the shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp-steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others.Hayek pretends to find it strange that this exploiting this kind of knowledge, which is typically the basis of entrepreneurial opportunity, is scorned.
But the possession of such knowledge is not necessarily earned by careful study or diligent habits or admission into prestigious educational institutions but by sheer good fortune; it seems unmerited, its distribution seems random and hence unfair. (Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling refers to this deploringly as the "managerialist bias" -- the assumption that only those specially trained and certified should be entrusted to make economic decisions that affect us all.) But Hayek insists that knowledge is valid only when it is distributed arbitrarily rather than centralized in the hands of planners (or bureaucrats or educators or whomever), who more likely than not, in his opinion, are corrupted by their power (this is the gist of The Road to Serfdom).
So if knowledge is distributed among people who don't ultimately have enough of it to do any real structural damage with the information -- a happy consequence of democratic societies -- what remains necessary is a mechanism that transcends human agency to aggregate that knowledge and make it socially useful. Enter the market, which allows the semi-informed person to make decisions based on price. As far as Hayek is concerned, when one is making decisions, "It is always a question of the relative importance of the particular things with which he is concerned, and the causes which alter their relative importance are of no interest to him beyond the effect on those concrete things of his own environment."
That almost seems tautological to say decisions are a matter of choosing between the relative importance of things, but actually this is where the economist's assumptions about rationality are imported into the scheme. (Hayek calls it "economic calculus.") Prices think through the importance of information for us so that we don't have to, and it has the added benefit of being unerring at least in the sense that it is impersonal. In other words, prices don't tell us the inherent value of an object but an unbiased accounting of an object's overall significance to society -- and this information, divorced of the reasons behind the number, is all we really need as individuals. "The problem is precisely how to extend the span of out utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do." We receive our marching orders from prices, which in this view reflect society's best interests or at least its collective inclinations, rather than Big Brother. Consequently, all we need to learn from society during our schooling is a proper respect for prices, for always trying to get the most for less (a lesson that, incidentally, is endlessly reinforced in advertisements). This plays out in the inculcation of "rational" behavior, always being concerned with maximizing utility, which is essential to making the entire system able to coherently communicate anything. If people behave in a wasteful way (destroying the accursed share, as in Bataille's theories, perhaps?) what the price system communicates may have less and less to do with what is socially useful and necessary.
This suggests why the market, conceived in these terms, can seem so objectionable -- it obviates the need for human understanding and reduces decision-making to a mechanistic response to a single figure. It suggests that all other considerations are not just misguided but are in fact harmful obfuscations. Extrapolate from this and you yield a worldview that has no regard or use for curiosity -- and a very cursory look at America's chain stores and passive entertainments would seem to support the idea that we already live in that world.
UPDATE: See this Blood and Treasure post for an analysis of Hayek's fondness for "liberal dictatorship". Writes Jamie K.: "I’ve argued before that many of China’s anti subversion laws – like those against 'causing turmoil' or 'disturbing social order' - have a Hayekian feel to them. They’re essentially designed as measures to stop people exercising the conceit of reason."
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