WEBVTT NOTE The Era of Deadly Error 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.620 That philosophic ideas count is no news to Austrians whose economic theories rest on 2 00:00:05.620 --> 00:00:12.860 conceptual analyses of action and value. But philosophy can confuse as well as guide. This 3 00:00:12.860 --> 00:00:17.980 morning I will discuss two philosophical mistakes that in recent times have supported dangerous 4 00:00:17.980 --> 00:00:24.220 idiocy and while undermining the market. I begin with the more familiar mistake, that 5 00:00:24.220 --> 00:00:27.200 of Reifying Society. 6 00:00:27.200 --> 00:00:33.300 This is the belief that society names an entity with its own causal powers, and that people 7 00:00:33.300 --> 00:00:37.140 are the way they are because society makes them so. 8 00:00:37.140 --> 00:00:42.520 Like a mother ship sending out smaller versions of itself on specific missions, the treatment 9 00:00:42.520 --> 00:00:48.860 of society as a thing over and above its component individuals leads to more specific abstract 10 00:00:48.860 --> 00:00:56.100 Nouns such as crime, wealth, poverty, savings and peer pressure, being treated as names 11 00:00:56.100 --> 00:01:01.980 of real factors. Unlike most fallacies, which are committed when people do not heed what 12 00:01:01.980 --> 00:01:08.820 they are saying, reification is taken by its devotees not as a blunder, but a major sociological 13 00:01:08.820 --> 00:01:18.140 discovery. Analytically speaking, the worst effect of reification is to give rise to pseudo-explanations. 14 00:01:18.140 --> 00:01:24.740 People to entities like society or crime appeases the appetite for understanding without supplying 15 00:01:24.740 --> 00:01:30.700 genuine intellectual nourishment. An hour later, you're still curious. Slum youths 16 00:01:30.700 --> 00:01:36.180 commit so much crime, we are told, because they are affected by peer pressure. Yet what 17 00:01:36.180 --> 00:01:42.060 is peer pressure but other slum youths committing crimes and inviting their friends along? Peer 18 00:01:42.060 --> 00:01:47.540 pressure is just another name for the phenomenon we are asked about in the first place. Criminal 19 00:01:47.540 --> 00:01:55.940 Examples of this sort of thing can be multiplied without end. 20 00:01:55.940 --> 00:01:59.740 In my book, I cite some Connecticut residents complaining, quote, 21 00:01:59.740 --> 00:02:09.060 We were bypassed by the wealth that surged through Fairfield County in the 1980s. 22 00:02:09.060 --> 00:02:13.580 Then there is this priceless sentence from the New York Times, quote, 23 00:02:13.580 --> 00:02:19.820 The Carter family is being stalked here by what the Klan's 54-year-old matriarch Regina 24 00:02:19.820 --> 00:02:26.860 calls a monster, crack cocaine. She has watched it swallow her daughter, and now she is fighting 25 00:02:26.860 --> 00:02:32.220 for her grandson's soul. Another one I came across recently when Alex Haley was caught 26 00:02:32.220 --> 00:02:40.300 for plagiarism, the Washington Post reported that he had been bitten by the virus of plagiarism. 27 00:02:40.300 --> 00:02:45.900 As these examples show, reification relieves the guilt of responsibility. 28 00:02:45.900 --> 00:02:50.800 Don't blame unproductive reckless behavior on the tiny cog, but on the big social machine 29 00:02:50.800 --> 00:02:53.000 of which it is a helpless part. 30 00:02:53.000 --> 00:02:57.760 But the flip side of absolution for vice is disrespect for virtue. 31 00:02:57.760 --> 00:03:02.380 Tiny little cogs can hardly be autonomous or have rights to be free. 32 00:03:02.380 --> 00:03:05.740 What individuals think of as their own decisions are forced on them. 33 00:03:05.740 --> 00:03:11.940 Thus, the only way to improve society is by tinkering with the big machine on gross, sweeping 34 00:03:11.940 --> 00:03:15.140 individuals along in the process. 35 00:03:15.140 --> 00:03:21.140 Such systematic intervention, of a sort only government can undertake, seems to conflict 36 00:03:21.140 --> 00:03:25.580 with individual liberty, but hey, individuals are not free anyway. 37 00:03:25.580 --> 00:03:30.700 They are slaves to their social role, so in forcing them to act in new ways, giving them 38 00:03:30.700 --> 00:03:37.240 From New Roles, the state does nothing worse than society has done to them already. 39 00:03:37.240 --> 00:03:41.500 This mode of thought is at work in a tax, for example, on the use of cheap overseas 40 00:03:41.500 --> 00:03:43.980 labor by American firms. 41 00:03:43.980 --> 00:03:49.760 Juanita in the Philippines makes running shoes for 50 cents an hour, a good deal all around. 42 00:03:49.760 --> 00:03:54.140 The finished product is less expensive than if manufactured domestically, and Juanita 43 00:03:54.140 --> 00:03:57.540 is better off than she would be without a job. 44 00:03:57.540 --> 00:04:02.440 Of course, 50 cents is less than an American would get, mainly because so many other members 45 00:04:02.440 --> 00:04:09.140 of Juanita's labor pool are willing to accept that wage, but many people find this scandalous. 46 00:04:09.140 --> 00:04:15.340 Juanita, you see, is exploited, forced to work for 50 cents by the, quote, poverty of 47 00:04:15.340 --> 00:04:18.620 the, quote, third world she is mired in. 48 00:04:18.620 --> 00:04:24.620 The solution, of course, is to attack the entity poverty itself by making Nike pay higher 49 00:04:24.620 --> 00:04:35.020 Interventionists scorn Hobbes' words that, quote, 50 00:04:35.020 --> 00:04:41.020 the value of all things contracted for, like Juanita's labor, is measured by the appetite 51 00:04:41.020 --> 00:04:47.260 of the contractors, and therefore the just value is that which they be contented to give. 52 00:04:47.260 --> 00:04:51.780 The interventionist's response is that Juanita does not contract voluntarily, for she is 53 00:04:51.780 --> 00:04:54.980 is caught in a system, and blah, blah, blah, blah. 54 00:04:54.980 --> 00:04:57.840 Here is where the reification comes in. 55 00:04:57.840 --> 00:04:59.660 Having treated the Philippine labor 56 00:04:59.660 --> 00:05:04.700 pool as a thing external to Juanita, Carlos, and Corazon, 57 00:05:04.700 --> 00:05:07.820 which makes them accept relatively low wages, 58 00:05:07.820 --> 00:05:11.460 interventionists don't bother to ask why the Philippine labor 59 00:05:11.460 --> 00:05:13.260 pool is that way. 60 00:05:13.260 --> 00:05:16.800 It is that way because, in fact, for reasons having 61 00:05:16.800 --> 00:05:19.540 to do with education, ability, and training, 62 00:05:19.540 --> 00:05:23.020 Most Filipino labor is not worth more. 63 00:05:23.020 --> 00:05:26.340 Perhaps Filipinos do not know how to bargain collectively. 64 00:05:26.340 --> 00:05:28.460 That, too, is a reflection of the ability 65 00:05:28.460 --> 00:05:32.060 of individual Filipinos to cooperate with each other. 66 00:05:32.060 --> 00:05:35.580 Quote, the economy doesn't make anyone do anything. 67 00:05:35.580 --> 00:05:38.580 It is just a name for individuals exchanging goods 68 00:05:38.580 --> 00:05:40.100 and services. 69 00:05:40.100 --> 00:05:42.500 The character of an economy is explained 70 00:05:42.500 --> 00:05:45.020 by the interaction of its constituents. 71 00:05:45.020 --> 00:05:49.020 Once this is clear, intervention in, quote, the economy 72 00:05:49.020 --> 00:05:56.020 is seen for what it is namely pushing people around. Belief in collectives rests on a confusion 73 00:05:56.180 --> 00:06:02.860 between two kinds of traits of individuals. First there are the traits people have when 74 00:06:02.860 --> 00:06:09.300 they are taken in isolation such as height, weight, age and health. Obviously these individual 75 00:06:09.300 --> 00:06:15.320 properties cannot explain how people behave in social groups. Watch Robinson Crusoe on 76 00:06:15.320 --> 00:06:20.260 on his desert island as long as you please and you will never learn what sort of conversationalist 77 00:06:20.260 --> 00:06:26.000 he is. If social holism, this is a very popular view, is the claim that the properties of 78 00:06:26.000 --> 00:06:32.880 groups cannot be reduced to the individualistic properties of their members, it is true. However, 79 00:06:32.880 --> 00:06:38.040 people also have relational traits. Crusoe's tendency to tell jokes to anyone who will 80 00:06:38.040 --> 00:06:44.240 listen, for instance, is one such. Now, even though that trait involves reference to other 81 00:06:44.240 --> 00:06:50.520 of the People. It still pertains to Crusoe the individual. Thousands of miles from another 82 00:06:50.520 --> 00:06:55.580 soul, Crusoe is still a good conversationalist in the sense that he would tell jokes if he 83 00:06:55.580 --> 00:07:02.000 had an audience. The big point is that the properties of a group can be reduced to the 84 00:07:02.000 --> 00:07:07.700 relational properties of its individual members. Once you know how these members react to each 85 00:07:07.700 --> 00:07:13.680 other, how garrulous they are, how cooperative, how keenly they negotiate, you can predict 86 00:07:13.680 --> 00:07:21.960 and Holism is false. Just keep these two kinds of traits distinct and you will never reify. 87 00:07:21.960 --> 00:07:28.980 As I say, most Austrians already know of the aid and comfort reification lends to collectivism 88 00:07:28.980 --> 00:07:35.440 and socialism. I now turn to what I regard as a much more consequential error. It is 89 00:07:35.440 --> 00:07:42.720 also very little discussed, so its destructive effects largely escape notice. It gets a bit 90 00:07:42.720 --> 00:07:51.240 I refer to the notion that things are never what they seem, or to put it more abstractly, 91 00:07:51.240 --> 00:07:56.240 that science always explains away appearances in terms of their opposite. 92 00:07:56.240 --> 00:08:03.440 Let me get specific, this all gets back to our common worry, but I want to tell about 93 00:08:03.440 --> 00:08:08.880 four familiar but genuinely epical discoveries in the history of science, which have been 94 00:08:08.880 --> 00:08:23.680 In 1573, Copernicus demonstrated that the earth revolves around the sun. The sun and 95 00:08:23.680 --> 00:08:29.960 the stars are in fact fixed relative to the earth. 96 00:08:29.960 --> 00:08:35.440 A century later, Robert Boyle revived the corpuscular theory of matter, which takes 97 00:08:35.440 --> 00:08:40.580 It takes the physical world to consist of numerous minute particles whose interactions 98 00:08:40.580 --> 00:08:46.840 explain the properties of macroscopic objects. Two corollaries learned by most of us by high 99 00:08:46.840 --> 00:08:53.420 school were drawn from this view. First, ordinary objects like this lectern are mainly empty 100 00:08:53.420 --> 00:09:00.340 space. Remember when they told you that? Not solid. And second, color is not a feature 101 00:09:00.340 --> 00:09:12.140 Color is an effect of these little particles on the nervous system and resides in the mind. 102 00:09:12.140 --> 00:09:17.620 The corpuscular theory did not gain firm empirical support until the 19th century, but it quickly 103 00:09:17.620 --> 00:09:25.220 persuaded Newton, John Locke, and other luminaries. It has been part of our intellectual heritage 104 00:09:25.220 --> 00:09:31.560 for Hundreds of Years 3. Jumping to modern times, puzzles about radiant 105 00:09:31.560 --> 00:09:38.320 energy and electron orbits led physicists early in the century to propose that the energy 106 00:09:38.320 --> 00:09:45.180 possessed by bodies does not vary continuously but comes in discrete amounts. Fully worked 107 00:09:45.180 --> 00:09:50.620 out, this so-called quantum theory implied that the more definite a body's momentum, 108 00:09:50.620 --> 00:09:56.900 the fuzzier its position. Thus, at any time, this hand is spread by waves of probability 109 00:09:56.900 --> 00:10:02.940 over the entire universe. It only seems to occupy a sharply bounded region because that 110 00:10:02.940 --> 00:10:09.100 is where the probability waves peak. Incredible as this sounds, it had better be true since 111 00:10:09.100 --> 00:10:15.500 it is the theory on which transistors are based and all our VCRs and computers, so it 112 00:10:15.500 --> 00:10:26.220 4. Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity denies that there are such things as space 113 00:10:26.220 --> 00:10:32.500 and time, as ordinarily understood. You may think the Mars Pathfinder, the taxpayer's 114 00:10:32.500 --> 00:10:38.860 latest gift to scientists, is doing something right now, at the very moment I am speaking. 115 00:10:38.860 --> 00:10:45.480 Not so. Two events that are simultaneous for you are not simultaneous for observers moving 116 00:10:45.480 --> 00:10:51.440 Everything Relative to You. What is more, the distance from here to Mars also varies 117 00:10:51.440 --> 00:10:58.480 with the speed of the observer. Absolute simultaneity and distance do not exist. As if that weren't 118 00:10:58.480 --> 00:11:04.320 weird enough, Einstein later announced that objects falling in a massive body's gravitational 119 00:11:04.320 --> 00:11:11.320 field do not actually pick up speed. Mass warps space, and what we perceive as gravitational 120 00:11:11.320 --> 00:11:19.720 Acceleration is Uniform Motion in Curved Space-Time. Well, these cases are so fascinating 121 00:11:19.720 --> 00:11:25.760 because in each one, what we believe based on ordinary observation is completely overturned. 122 00:11:25.760 --> 00:11:31.240 The sun seems to move across the sky, but it really doesn't. Lecturns seem to be solid 123 00:11:31.240 --> 00:11:36.100 and brown, but they really aren't. Hands seem to occupy definite positions, but they 124 00:11:36.100 --> 00:11:42.100 Something seems to be going on right now, but it really isn't. 125 00:11:42.100 --> 00:11:44.820 Some of these inferences, of course, are open to challenge. 126 00:11:44.820 --> 00:11:48.980 To call something solid, may be argued, means that I can't put my hand through it, and 127 00:11:48.980 --> 00:11:53.780 I can't put my hand through this lectern, whether or not it is mostly empty space. 128 00:11:53.780 --> 00:11:58.540 It can also be argued that color refers to whatever it is about an object, including 129 00:11:58.540 --> 00:12:03.300 the arrangement of atoms at its surface, which causes certain sensations in me. 130 00:12:03.300 --> 00:12:08.460 Since the arrangement of atoms at this lectern surface does cause the requisite sensations, 131 00:12:08.460 --> 00:12:10.700 the lectern is brown, period. 132 00:12:10.700 --> 00:12:12.740 Still, the message is clear. 133 00:12:12.740 --> 00:12:18.620 In four striking cases, scientific investigation showed the world to be the reverse of how 134 00:12:18.620 --> 00:12:20.380 it appears. 135 00:12:20.380 --> 00:12:24.980 And what has happened, I believe, is that historians of science who should know better 136 00:12:24.980 --> 00:12:31.740 have radically overgeneralized these cases into, in the jargon of the prime offender, 137 00:12:31.740 --> 00:12:38.520 a paradigm. Science always shows that things are the reverse of how they seem. Deep scrutiny 138 00:12:38.520 --> 00:12:44.300 of virtually any phenomenon will reveal that everyday convictions about it are wrong. In 139 00:12:44.300 --> 00:12:50.700 fact, taking things at face value betrays naivete, or readiness to debunk is the mark 140 00:12:50.700 --> 00:12:55.140 of the sophisticate, what David Riesman called an inside dopester. 141 00:12:55.140 --> 00:13:00.740 At one point in Gilbert and Sullivan, Gilbert and Sullivan's pinafore, Little Buttercup 142 00:13:00.740 --> 00:13:06.580 Things, Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream. 143 00:13:06.580 --> 00:13:09.900 So I'll call this jaundiced view the skim milk fallacy. 144 00:13:09.900 --> 00:13:13.180 If anybody can think of a better name, I'm open. 145 00:13:13.180 --> 00:13:18.060 Skim milking, I believe, looms large among the factors that have opened the floodgates 146 00:13:18.060 --> 00:13:20.380 to oceans of nonsense. 147 00:13:20.380 --> 00:13:24.700 The skim milk presumption that things are seldom what they seem was not given currency 148 00:13:24.700 --> 00:13:30.300 by any one writer or group, although Thomas Kuhn's work on the irrationality of science 149 00:13:30.300 --> 00:13:35.740 has no doubt helped. So did Freud's doctrine that the reasons from which people think they 150 00:13:35.740 --> 00:13:42.020 act usually rationalize less savory motives they are unaware of. No, it took hold mostly 151 00:13:42.020 --> 00:13:47.300 because of the inordinate attention given these four celebrated discoveries of things 152 00:13:47.300 --> 00:13:53.100 not being what they seem. I have no quarrel with the discoveries themselves, but they 153 00:13:53.100 --> 00:13:59.420 cannot be taken as typical of science because they all concern phenomena on non-human scales. 154 00:13:59.420 --> 00:14:05.300 It is no wonder that common sense does not register quantum or relativistic effects. 155 00:14:05.300 --> 00:14:10.260 They happen too fast, on too great or small a stage, where velocity is not reached in 156 00:14:10.260 --> 00:14:12.520 normal experience. 157 00:14:12.520 --> 00:14:16.260 Evolution had no reason to prepare us for what happens in nanoseconds at astronomical 158 00:14:16.260 --> 00:14:19.100 distances or near the speed of light. 159 00:14:19.100 --> 00:14:24.380 However, evolution did shape our faculties to work reliably at the dimensions at which 160 00:14:24.380 --> 00:14:27.580 economic and social phenomena take place. 161 00:14:27.580 --> 00:14:33.980 A creature poor at recognizing food or anticipating what his fellow beings will do is apt to leave 162 00:14:33.980 --> 00:14:40.820 fewer descendants than more insightful competitors, and we descended from those competitors. 163 00:14:40.820 --> 00:14:46.260 About matters at the scale of human behavior, how things seem to us is an excellent guide 164 00:14:46.260 --> 00:14:48.220 to how they really are. 165 00:14:48.220 --> 00:14:50.500 That is why skim milking is a fallacy. 166 00:14:50.500 --> 00:14:53.020 Well, okay, this is all very interesting. 167 00:14:53.020 --> 00:14:58.220 Now to connect it to modern left-wing liberalism and socialism. 168 00:14:58.220 --> 00:15:05.000 One of the most vexing aspects of liberal conventional wisdom is its extreme perverseness. 169 00:15:05.000 --> 00:15:10.200 Why do so many intellectuals believe such insane nonsense as the following? 170 00:15:10.200 --> 00:15:12.600 Punishment does not deter. 171 00:15:12.600 --> 00:15:15.240 Marriage is like prostitution. 172 00:15:15.240 --> 00:15:18.640 Males are innately like females. 173 00:15:18.640 --> 00:15:21.400 Homosexuals are just like heterosexuals. 174 00:15:21.400 --> 00:15:26.400 People's freely contracting to exchange goods are being coerced, but buying the only make 175 00:15:26.400 --> 00:15:31.000 of shoe from the Soviet State department store is freedom. 176 00:15:31.000 --> 00:15:33.920 Intelligence is irrelevant to life outcomes. 177 00:15:33.920 --> 00:15:38.040 Any student can perform at gifted levels if his teacher believes he can. 178 00:15:38.040 --> 00:15:44.440 Giving money to women who have illegitimate children discourages illegitimacy. 179 00:15:44.440 --> 00:15:47.040 Taxing something leads to more of it. 180 00:15:47.040 --> 00:15:50.200 Look-say is better than phonics. 181 00:15:50.200 --> 00:15:57.260 Idiocy is strength. It's the latest one. Joseph Stalin was a nice guy. Why, we constantly 182 00:15:57.260 --> 00:16:02.600 ask at conferences and in private conversations. I mean, after all, Peter Klein was asking 183 00:16:02.600 --> 00:16:11.160 this. Why would anyone believe such demented idiocy? Liberals are anti-experts. They can 184 00:16:11.160 --> 00:16:20.040 be depended on to be wrong. What they think is a trusty guide to what isn't so. Why? 185 00:16:20.040 --> 00:16:25.880 Of course there are many specific causes, and we've heard some already, envy, guilt, identification 186 00:16:25.880 --> 00:16:31.160 with the underdog, the prospect of running the state's coercive machinery, but something 187 00:16:31.160 --> 00:16:36.960 must prepare the mind to accept what contradicts experience and common sense. 188 00:16:36.960 --> 00:16:39.240 This is where skim milking enters. 189 00:16:39.240 --> 00:16:45.440 I suggest that things are believed, these things, these crazy nutty things that most 190 00:16:45.440 --> 00:16:53.440 Most of my 140 IQ colleagues believe, are believed because they contradict observation and common sense. 191 00:16:53.440 --> 00:16:59.440 For the theme uniting the tenets of conventional liberal wisdom, that is, left-wing liberalism, 192 00:16:59.440 --> 00:17:03.440 is that they all run exactly counter to experience. 193 00:17:03.440 --> 00:17:10.440 I think they are arrived at from experience via the assumption that experience always misleads. 194 00:17:10.440 --> 00:17:15.440 For imagine yourself, for imagine that you fancy yourself a deep thinker. 195 00:17:15.440 --> 00:17:20.440 You want to distinguish yourself from the herd by knowing things they don't. 196 00:17:20.440 --> 00:17:27.440 Being scientific is also good, and you've picked up the impression that the aim of science is to overthrow popular prejudices. 197 00:17:27.440 --> 00:17:34.440 Remember, left-wingers tend to be more educated so they have heard about those discoveries that I've been talking about. 198 00:17:34.440 --> 00:17:43.440 You may well then reason about human behavior like this. The sexes seem to differ, so they must be the same. 199 00:17:43.440 --> 00:17:49.440 Men and women seem to bond from profound emotions, so their association is commercial. 200 00:17:49.440 --> 00:17:55.440 A desire for sex with another man is utterly alien and repulsive to heterosexual males, 201 00:17:55.440 --> 00:17:59.440 so the homosexual personality must be just like the heterosexual. 202 00:17:59.440 --> 00:18:05.440 English is a phonetic language, so it should be taught as if it were ideographic, as if it was little Chinese pictures. 203 00:18:05.440 --> 00:18:10.440 Capitalism leads to prosperity wherever it has been tried, so it must be bad. 204 00:18:10.440 --> 00:18:13.440 Socialism never works, so it must be good. 205 00:18:13.440 --> 00:18:17.440 Nobody forces market interactants to do anything, so they aren't free. 206 00:18:17.440 --> 00:18:22.440 Under socialism, you are not allowed to do anything, so you are free. 207 00:18:22.440 --> 00:18:28.480 Everyone fears death, pain and loss of property, so threats of death, pain or confiscation 208 00:18:28.480 --> 00:18:30.560 do not affect behavior. 209 00:18:30.560 --> 00:18:34.700 Some individuals do well in school from the earliest grades, master difficult material 210 00:18:34.700 --> 00:18:40.120 that leaves the rest of us behind, and are counted on as the problem solvers in the workplace. 211 00:18:40.120 --> 00:18:43.120 Therefore intelligence has nothing to do with success. 212 00:18:43.120 --> 00:18:47.960 Some people can't grasp simple ideas no matter how patiently we explain them. 213 00:18:47.960 --> 00:18:50.600 Therefore their failure is our fault. 214 00:18:50.600 --> 00:18:55.600 People become demoralized when what is theirs is taken from them, so raising taxes makes 215 00:18:55.600 --> 00:19:02.760 them work harder. I've actually had people tell me that. Sort of a reverse Laffer curve. 216 00:19:02.760 --> 00:19:09.360 People feel most comfortable with others like themselves, so they will love ethnic diversity. 217 00:19:09.360 --> 00:19:14.520 Stalin accepted a messianic creed whose Armageddon is a confrontation with capitalism. He possessed 218 00:19:14.520 --> 00:19:20.160 atomic bombs. He was willing to kill millions of his own countrymen in pursuit of his aims. 219 00:19:20.160 --> 00:19:25.880 So his truculence was our fault. Only a fully committed skim-milking liberal could dream 220 00:19:25.880 --> 00:19:31.660 up reasoning like this. But it all too easily gulls the average person, rightly impressed 221 00:19:31.660 --> 00:19:37.680 by science while wrongly convinced that science and common sense are at odds. Once again, 222 00:19:37.680 --> 00:19:43.720 there are many reasons why Joe Sixpack acquiesces in liberal absurdities. But one, I suggest, 223 00:19:43.720 --> 00:19:48.720 and I throw this out because I haven't seen it discussed, is the skim-milk fallacy. The 224 00:19:48.720 --> 00:20:04.720 The paradoxes of liberalism are widely accepted by the public because it too is under the vague impression that science shows us what is really going on as opposed to what seems to be going on. 225 00:20:04.720 --> 00:20:08.720 That's why so many people don't believe the evidence of their senses. 226 00:20:08.720 --> 00:20:14.720 Let's scrutinize the invidious relation of skim milking to economic liberty. 227 00:20:14.720 --> 00:20:21.120 All forms of socialism come down to the belief, in Orwell's phrase, that freedom is slavery. 228 00:20:21.120 --> 00:20:25.200 Beneath the skin of bourgeois rights to non-interference, this is the kind of 229 00:20:26.560 --> 00:20:30.400 Marxist line that's still popular, lurks the skull of bondage. 230 00:20:31.120 --> 00:20:35.680 Recall that Marx impressed generations of intellectuals by calling his socialism 231 00:20:35.680 --> 00:20:41.200 scientific. Earlier brands had been touted as morally superior to the market, 232 00:20:41.200 --> 00:20:44.200 But moral superiority is hard to prove empirically. 233 00:20:44.200 --> 00:20:47.200 Here was socialism deduced from laws of history. 234 00:20:47.200 --> 00:20:49.200 That also has a very nice ring. 235 00:20:49.200 --> 00:20:54.200 What conception of science encouraged the revolutionary Marx? 236 00:20:54.200 --> 00:20:59.200 Then as now, the paradigm of a scientific breakthrough was the Copernican, 237 00:20:59.200 --> 00:21:02.200 where appearances were denied. 238 00:21:02.200 --> 00:21:07.200 Well, the one thing obvious about trade, employment and other commercial transactions 239 00:21:07.200 --> 00:21:09.200 is that they are voluntary. 240 00:21:09.200 --> 00:21:13.780 And a scientific theory should assert that they are not. That, for instance, employment 241 00:21:13.780 --> 00:21:19.660 is wage slavery. The worker is forced to accept a pittance for wages because there are other 242 00:21:19.660 --> 00:21:25.200 workers bidding for his job in the, quote, economic system. Notice, by the way, how skim 243 00:21:25.200 --> 00:21:31.200 milking works hand-in-hand with reifying here. On the other hand, progressive taxation, on 244 00:21:31.200 --> 00:21:38.080 its face coercive, enhances freedom by reigning in plutocrats. So does the minimum wage law, 245 00:21:38.080 --> 00:21:45.640 despite seeming to curtail a range of bargains. A novel invention or service so desirable, 246 00:21:45.640 --> 00:21:50.720 everyone wants to exchange goods for it as a monopoly, which forces itself on helpless 247 00:21:50.720 --> 00:21:56.440 consumers. Gotta fight that. Prices set by the government, which seem to be uninitiated, 248 00:21:56.440 --> 00:22:02.760 coercive, liberate consumers from monopolistic schemes. The pattern of the old Marxist left 249 00:22:02.760 --> 00:22:08.280 to construe what looks free as enslavement and what looks coercive as liberating, continues 250 00:22:08.280 --> 00:22:10.900 with Marx's New Left Children. 251 00:22:10.900 --> 00:22:15.000 You might think you could see by looking, as Yogi Berra would say, that men and women 252 00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:20.080 pair up because they want to, that in all societies women care for the children because 253 00:22:20.080 --> 00:22:25.040 they want to do so more than the men, and that men achieve more high status positions 254 00:22:25.040 --> 00:22:28.760 because they choose to pour more of their energy into doing so than women. 255 00:22:28.760 --> 00:22:31.520 Ah, but you would be wrong. 256 00:22:31.520 --> 00:22:36.060 Men and women act this way because they are brainwashed by patriarchy. 257 00:22:36.060 --> 00:22:40.940 Only affirmative action role models created by judicial fiat, jaw-boning of colleges to 258 00:22:40.940 --> 00:22:46.320 get rid of men's wrestling in favor of women's field hockey, and total war on stereotypes 259 00:22:46.320 --> 00:22:49.220 will free men and women to be themselves. 260 00:22:49.220 --> 00:22:52.620 And we would never have known any of this had we relied on appearances. 261 00:22:52.620 --> 00:22:55.180 Isn't sociology wonderful? 262 00:22:55.180 --> 00:23:00.500 Ironically, Marx and his followers have overlooked another scientific revolution, which also 263 00:23:00.500 --> 00:23:05.760 also overthrew a few appearances, but which, properly understood, deepens appreciation 264 00:23:05.760 --> 00:23:07.220 of the market. 265 00:23:07.220 --> 00:23:13.020 The theory of evolution showed the appearance of design in nature to be misleading. 266 00:23:13.020 --> 00:23:19.440 That most features of living organisms display goal-directedness and the efficiency of artifacts 267 00:23:19.440 --> 00:23:26.060 led mankind for many ages to think the natural world was planned. 268 00:23:26.060 --> 00:23:31.760 As Darwin explained, however, design can be mimicked by randomly generated variations competing 269 00:23:31.760 --> 00:23:37.240 to reproduce under environmental constraints. The world may be an artifact in some ultimate 270 00:23:37.240 --> 00:23:46.400 theological sense, but so far as natural processes go, it merely simulates one. Unplanned goal-directedness 271 00:23:46.400 --> 00:23:51.920 of the sort we see in nature calls to mind the spontaneous, uncoordinated order that 272 00:23:51.920 --> 00:23:55.920 that emerges as goods compete to survive in the market. 273 00:23:55.920 --> 00:23:58.960 Animals must absorb energy and attract mates. 274 00:23:58.960 --> 00:24:03.080 Goods must absorb factors of production and attract buyers. 275 00:24:03.080 --> 00:24:06.800 Complex ecosystems evolve as only those organisms survive, 276 00:24:06.800 --> 00:24:09.680 which can find sufficient food, and only those goods 277 00:24:09.680 --> 00:24:11.960 and services survive, which can be transported 278 00:24:11.960 --> 00:24:13.520 to a sales point. 279 00:24:13.520 --> 00:24:17.000 Both the wild and the market witness progressive refinement 280 00:24:17.000 --> 00:24:19.440 as variations of surviving designs 281 00:24:19.440 --> 00:24:21.880 are generated and themselves culled. 282 00:24:21.880 --> 00:24:25.080 Leaving the Hardiest Variance of Variance 283 00:24:25.080 --> 00:24:32.880 Early models, dinosaurs, the Rio, give way to later ones, horses, the corvette, and crude 284 00:24:32.880 --> 00:24:40.760 methods of reproduction, mitosis, piecework, to more elegant, sex, the production line. 285 00:24:40.760 --> 00:24:43.600 Liberals fret about the unplannedness of the market. 286 00:24:43.600 --> 00:24:48.880 They call a healthcare non-system of private doctors, private insurers, and private hospitals 287 00:24:48.880 --> 00:24:50.720 a hodgepodge. 288 00:24:50.720 --> 00:24:57.380 Other appearances really do deceive. Undesigned order is perfectly possible. Research illuminating 289 00:24:57.380 --> 00:25:02.820 not only the processes I've mentioned, but also the more mysterious properties of socioeconomic 290 00:25:02.820 --> 00:25:09.140 systems like the emergence of morality. The market depends on good faith. But why do people 291 00:25:09.140 --> 00:25:14.020 keep their word when they can get away with profitable deception? Why do we tend to punish 292 00:25:14.020 --> 00:25:19.800 greed when colluding with it would be advantageous? For reasons, it turns out, not far from those 293 00:25:19.800 --> 00:25:24.660 for which animals will not pursue combat to the death, and the ratio of males to females 294 00:25:24.660 --> 00:25:31.660 in a population remains 50-50. At the same time, as you can see, this research also helps 295 00:25:31.660 --> 00:25:36.520 reduce large-scale system features to the behavior of competing individuals, driving 296 00:25:36.520 --> 00:25:41.940 another nail into the coffin of reification. In this, it is pursuing the true and permanent 297 00:25:41.940 --> 00:25:48.060 aim of science, the explanation, not the poo-pooing, of what we observe. Science, properly understood, 298 00:25:48.060 --> 00:25:55.060 is pretty nifty after all. Thank you.