Browsed by
Tag: markets

How Collectivism Leads to Violence: Examples from India (2003) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

How Collectivism Leads to Violence: Examples from India (2003) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 28, 2014
******************************
Note from the Author: This essay was originally written in 2003 and published on Associated Content (subsequently, Yahoo! Voices) in 2007.  The essay earned over 1,500 page views on Associated Content/Yahoo! Voices, and I seek to preserve it as a valuable resource for readers, subsequent to the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices. Therefore, this essay is being published directly on The Rational Argumentator for the first time.  
***
~ G. Stolyarov II, July 28, 2014

**

A devastating effect of the collectivist mindset is the emergence of massive societal turmoil and heinous crimes. Collectivists often unleash brutal force against people who are not of “their” kind and instead belong to some “inferior” group.

In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, an untouchable man once slapped a higher-caste thief for stealing beans from his field. The self-righteously offended community responded by stripping the man’s mother and parading her through the village amid a hail of stones and mud hurled in her direction.

In a society which upholds the collectivist premise, even when a hierarchically-designated inferior is legitimately wronged, he will not be dealt justice, and his attempt to obtain it on his own accord will be met with vehement reprisal.

This tragic event also portrays another element of collectivist perception: the delusion that all members of a group are accountable for an alleged misdeed of one, with no link of those individuals to the “crime” but the accident of their birth or relation. Since one untouchable had “wronged” a higher-caste member, thought the villagers, all untouchables must be seditious vermin. Hence the fact that the brutal punitive humiliation was directed at the man’s mother instead of the man himself.

More widespread turmoil based on caste occurs throughout modern India. In Bihar state, skirmishes between lower-caste peasants and landlords have resulted in over one hundred deaths on both sides in 1998. The peasants involved considered themselves perpetually oppressed by the merciless group on top, and hence perceived no means of resolving their land dispute peacefully.

Likewise, the landlords involved approached the peasants in arrogant contempt, perceiving every single one of them as unintelligent vermin whose grievances are to be suppressed rather than addressed. The economic antagonism between the two groups was not irreconcilable, but the caste-based antagonism, so long as it festered in their minds, was. When one is viewed as inherently evil due to circumstantial characteristics, naught but the brute employment of force can be directed toward one.

Yet some grounds exist for the hope that the menace of collectivism might play less of a role in India’s future. In modern India, individuals involved in high-tech urban professions are beginning to act on the profit motive instead of age-old stereotypes and to regard caste as irrelevant in a marketplace where professional skills and a dedicated work ethic are the overwhelming considerations. Where institutional compulsion does not prohibit individuals from associating across circumstantially erected lines or damage their livelihoods for doing so, courageous persons of sound moral premises will rise to dethrone the behemoth of collectivism and lead to a more peaceful, tolerant society.

Meaningful and Vacuous “Privilege” – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Meaningful and Vacuous “Privilege” – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
December 3, 2013
******************************

Sanford Ikeda’s concise and insightful lists of 14 common fallacies about the free market (available in two installments from The Freeman here and here) motivate careful thought about the commonly used and misused term “privilege” and the conflations in which it can result. In discussing the second fallacy regarding the free market, that it is identical to a system where the government grants special privileges to businesses, Dr. Ikeda writes that “People sometimes define ‘privilege’ as any advantage a person or group may have over others. Certainly such advantages exist today and would exist in a free market—you may be born into a wealthy family or have superior drive and resourcefulness—but these advantages are consistent with the absence of privilege in the libertarian sense, as long as you acquired such advantages without fraud or the initiation of physical violence against the person or property of others.”

Indeed, the increasingly common usage of the term “privilege” to mean any advantage whatsoever eviscerates it of any genuine meaning it once had. This problem in today’s discourse spreads far beyond discussions of connections between businesses and governments.

Certainly, the very fact that one individual is different from another – with a different set of experiences, different physique, different knowledge, and even different standing room at any particular time – provides that individual with opportunities that the other lacks, while rendering him or her limited in ways that the other is not. Unfortunately, this trivial fact is increasingly being misconstrued in some circles to suggest vile inequities arising out of innocuous human differences. People who have not aggressed against, or even demeaned or ridiculed, anyone are increasingly being identified as “privileged” simply for belonging to broadly and crudely defined groups – be it all people of European descent, all males, or even all non-overweight people (witness the pseudo-concept of “thin privilege”) or people who are not disabled. (“Ableism” is apparently an emerging sin in the vocabulary of the increasingly militant and vitriolic collectivistic “social justice” movement – which is about neither true individual-oriented justice nor the preservation of a civilized and tolerant society.)  Such a vacuously expansive view of privilege is a tremendous insult to the true victims of coercive privilege throughout history – from slaves in all eras, to women who in prior eras were denied suffrage and property rights, to the freethinkers and forbears of liberty and reason, whose voices were too often snuffed out by the arbitrary power of absolute monarchs and theocrats in the pre-Enlightenment world.

Thomas Jefferson, an opponent of privilege in its meaningful sense, put it best when he expressed in his 1826 letter to Roger C. Weightman “the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride legitimately, by the grace of god.” Jefferson was a staunch opponent of the coercive privilege that enabled some to gain artificial advantages by restricting others from pursuing life-improving courses of action. Accidents of birth, or special lobbying skills, should not, in a just system, enable a person to acquire prerogatives which could not be earned through the free, peaceful exercise of that person’s abilities. Jefferson saw the future and strength of the American republic in the hoped-for emergence of a “natural aristocracy of talent and virtue” – people who, when allowed the liberty to flourish through honest work and competition, would become role models for others solely through their examples. This natural aristocracy would not need force to maintain its prominence, because the traits of the most knowledgeable, most industrious, and most virtuous people will be emulated by any who earnestly seek to improve their own lives and who have the freedom to acquire knowledge and make their own decisions.

Yet Jefferson’s natural aristocracy would be denounced as an example of horrid “privilege” by the “social justice” types – simply due to the necessarily unequal distribution of outcomes on a free market of open and honest production, competition, and cooperation. After all, not everyone can originate the same ideas at the same time. Not everyone can take advantage of the same opportunity for entrepreneurial profit, whose attainment, as economist Israel Kirzner demonstrated in Competition and Entrepreneurship, arises out of alertness to opportunities that others have missed. Kirzner writes that “Because the participants in [a] market are less than omniscient, there are likely to exist, at any given time, a multitude of opportunities that have not yet been taken advantage of. Sellers may have sold for prices lower than the prices which were in fact obtainable… Buyers may have bought for prices higher than the lowest prices needed to secure what they are buying…” (43). Would it be an example of unacceptable “privilege” for an alert entrepreneur to remedy such an arbitrage opportunity and thereby bring otherwise-unrealized value to consumers?

Yes, the free exercise of human abilities will produce outcomes where some people will have some advantages over some others (while, of course, leaving fully open the possibility that those very others will have their own distinct advantages, obtained through hard work, knowledge, or sheer luck). But, as long as coercion is not involved in securing and maintaining those advantages, the people endowed with them are not “booted and spurred” to ride the rest of us. As Dr. Ikeda points out, the differences among people are a source of strength harnessed by the free market: “The free market gives you an incentive to profit from associating with and learning from others who might be very different from you, who operate outside your normal social networks.” By incentivizing and facilitating these interactions, the free market encourages greater tolerance, understanding, and visible societal heterogeneity of the sort that constitutes the best safeguard against truly heinous oppressions based on collectivistic stereotypes. Instead of condemning others as being too “privileged” simply on account of innocuous differences, it is far more productive to think about how those differences can help one achieve one’s own values through honest, peaceful, and productive interaction, cooperation, and exchange.

Dead Models vs. Living Economics – Article by Sanford Ikeda

Dead Models vs. Living Economics – Article by Sanford Ikeda

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Sanford Ikeda
November 23, 2013
******************************

Since 2008, straw-man versions of free-market economics have popped up whenever someone needs an easy villain. Keynes roared back to prominence, and it looks like this reaction might be gaining steam.

According to an article in The Guardian, students at a few British universities, prompted by “a leading academic,” are demanding that economics professors stop teaching what they refer to as “neoclassical free-market theories.”

Michael Joffe, an economics professor at Imperial College, said, “The aim should be to provide students with analysis based on the way the world works, not the way theories argue it ought to work.”

Joffe is right on that point. But his target is wrong: It’s not free-market economics that’s the problem, it’s the model of perfect competition that often gets conflated with free-market economics. A commenter on my recent columns addressing falsehoods about the free market (here and here) suggested I discuss this conflation.

I was thinking of putting it into a third “falsehoods” column. But the Guardian story makes me think the issue deserves more attention. Here’s the key passage:

The profession has been criticised for its adherence to models of a free market that claim to show demand and supply continually rebalancing over relatively short periods of time—in contrast to the decade-long mismatches that came ahead of the banking crash in key markets such as housing and exotic derivatives, where asset bubbles ballooned [emphasis added].

Why Do You Support the Free Market?

“Free-market economists,” on the other hand, typically have confidence in free markets owing to our understanding of economics, although we often (notoriously) disagree on exactly what the correct economics is. A number of free-market economists base their confidence on what is known as the model of “perfect competition.” Briefly, that model shows how in the long run the price of a good in a competitive market will equal the additional cost of producing a unit of that good (i.e., its marginal cost), and it shows that no one has the power to set prices on her own. How do you get those results? By making something like the following assumptions:

  1. Free entry: While buyers and sellers may incur costs to consume and to produce, there are no additional costs to enter or leave a market.
  2. Product homogeneity: From the point of view of any buyer in the market, the output of one seller is a perfect substitute for the output of any other seller.
  3. Many buyers and sellers: No single buyer or seller is large enough to independently raise or lower the market price.
  4. Perfect knowledge: All buyers and sellers have so much information that they will never regret any action they take.

From these assumptions you can derive not only marginal-cost pricing but also nice efficiency properties as well: There is no waste and costs are minimized. Which is why people like the model.

Moreover, for some important questions the analysis of supply and demand under perfect competition is quite useful. Push the legal minimum wage too high and you’ll generate unemployment; push the maximum rent-control rate too low and you’ll get housing shortages. Also, financial markets sometimes—though as we have seen, not always—conform to the predictions of perfect competition. It’s a robust theory in many ways, but if you base your support for the free market on the model of perfect competition, you’re on shaky ground. The evidence against it is pretty devastating.

Free Entry, Not Perfect Knowledge

In fact, it doesn’t even take the Panic of 2008 to shake up the model; any comparison of the model with everyday reality would do the job. Assumptions two and three about product homogeneity and many buyers and sellers are pretty unrealistic, but it’s the last assumption about perfect knowledge that’s the killer. (I’m aware of Milton Friedman’s “twist” (PDF), which argues that this is irrelevant and only predictions matter, but it’s a methodology I don’t agree with.) Markets are rarely if ever at or near equilibrium, and people with imperfect knowledge make disequilibrating mistakes, even without the kind of government intervention that caused the Panic of 2008.

When the institutions are right, however, people learn from the mistakes that they or others make, and there’s a theory of markets—certainly neither Keynesian nor Marxist—that fits the bill better than perfect competition.

It’s Austrian theory. Its practitioners argue competition is an entrepreneurial-competitive process (PDF). This theory not only says that competition exists in the presence of ignorance, error, and disequilibrium, it explains how profit-seeking entrepreneurs in a free market positively thrive in this environment. The principal assumption that the theory rests on, besides the existence of private property, is No. 1: free entry.

As long as there are no legal barriers to entry, if Jack wants to sell an apple for $1 and Jill is asking $2 for that same quality apple—that is, there is a disequilibrium here in which either Jack or Jill (or both) is making an error—you can profit by buying low from Jack and selling high to Jill’s customer, Lucy. If another entrepreneur, Linus, spots what you’re doing, he can bid up the price you’re giving Jack and bid down the price at which you’re selling to Lucy. Bottom line: A process of entrepreneurial competition tends to remove errors. There is no need to assume perfect knowledge to get a competitive outcome; instead, competition itself improves the level of knowledge.

So Joffe and the critics are wrong about the theory. You don’t knock out the theoretical legs from under the free market by “debunking” the model of perfect competition. He is also wrong about the history. As I’ve referenced many times, economists Steve Horwitz and Pete Boettke have documented how a government-led, interventionist dynamic, and not the free market, led to the Panic of 2008.

Joffe, the Imperial College professor, “called for economics courses to embrace the teachings of Marx and Keynes to undermine the dominance of neoclassical free-market theories.” He also complains that “there is a lot that is taught on [sic] economics courses that bears little relation to the way things work in the real world.” I agree. But that complaint would apply at least as much to the Keynesian and Marxian economics he hypes as to the static, equilibrium-based models of competition he slams.

Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.
***
This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.
Bookstore Wars: Creativity versus Scale – Article by Sanford Ikeda

Bookstore Wars: Creativity versus Scale – Article by Sanford Ikeda

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Sanford Ikeda
August 22, 2013
******************************

Independent bookstores appear to be making a comeback after several years of decline. As reported by MSNBC, the number of independent bookstores has risen significantly.

Some 1,000 independent bookstores went out of business between 2000 and 2007, according to the American Booksellers Association (ABA), as consumers turned to online buying, downloading e-books, or flocking to Barnes & Noble and (now defunct) Borders. But the ABA said that since 2009, the number of independent bookstores has risen 19 percent, to 1,971.

If my arithmetic is right, that still means the industry hasn’t rebounded to where it was in 2000 (about 2,600 stores), but it’s not bad. Meanwhile e-book sales, which had been rising at triple-digit rates, have evidently lost a bit of steam, last year growing at about 5 percent overall.

These facts perhaps illustrate two important lessons:  First, the scale of a business’s operations is not the same thing as its competitiveness; and second, the kind of competition that counts in free markets has much less to do with efficiency than with creativity.  Selling books and digital media in massive volume seems to make firms sluggish in addressing customer preferences for more personalized service and responsiveness.

Efficiency and Scale Are Important

Free-market economists are typically painted by friends and foes alike as cheerleaders for efficiency. Indeed, many economists do tout efficiency as the prime virtue of the free market, keeping prices low and employment high. In standard economics, efficiency refers to using the lowest-cost means to reach a given end.

If Jack is in New York and wants to be in Philadelphia, then among the alternative means available to him—walking, boating, flying, driving, or taking the train—efficiency implies that Jack chooses the one that minimizes the cost to him of getting to Philadelphia. In manufacturing, the production process that, other things equal, produces a given rate of output at the lowest cost is the efficient one.

(Note:  Cost, like benefit, always refers to the cost to someone of doing something.  Sometimes the chooser experiences the costs, sometimes someone else does, but neither costs nor benefits are ever disembodied.)

One form of efficiency is economies of scale. Economies of scale occur when using more of all inputs (scaling up) increases output so much that the cost per unit of output falls. (In econ-speak that’s when the long-run average-cost curve slopes downward.) Critics pick up on this and argue that the free market therefore necessarily favors big businesses over small businesses because the bigger a firm is, the more efficient in terms of unit costs it tend to be, and that allows it to charge lower prices and drive smaller firms out of the market.

But Not as Important as Competition

That story, however, only looks at the relative efficiencies of existing firms and markets. If the fundamental goal is to improve the well-being of people as they see it, then you have to pay more attention to competition, particularly entrepreneurial competition. In that sense, competition trumps efficiency (as Israel M. Kirzner has explained).

That’s because, again, efficiency means choosing from among given alternatives the one that achieves a given goal at the lowest cost. Where the standard economic concept of efficiency falls short is that in the real world neither ends nor means are simply given to anyone. Ends and means, outputs and inputs, have at some point to be discovered by someone. Yes, efficiency is a good thing, like having a clean and orderly workplace, but it’s entrepreneurship in the competitive process that does the heavy lifting of finding the work to be done and putting you in a position to do it.

The resurgence of independent bookshops in the face of book megastores, I think, is an example of how creative competition overcomes the scale efficiency of providing a particular product. There’s nothing inherently wrong or uncompetitive about megastores or inherently virtuous about small businesses. Big and small businesses have their niches, whether online or in brick-and-mortar shops. But central to the competitive process is the ability, whatever your size, to be aware of changing circumstances and to adjust appropriately to them. The MSNBC article quotes an independent bookseller as saying, “We learned how to get books that people couldn’t find online, and to cater as much as we could to the customer. When a customer walks in, we try to make them feel wanted and at home.”

Scale economies in both the online and brick-and-mortar parts of the industry do little to win over customers who prefer personalized service or the intangibles of local businesses. Independent bookstores are more flexible, for example, at staging readings of local authors and other neighborhood events. The giant bookseller Borders Books, one of the pioneers of book retailing, apparently didn’t do a good job adjusting and closed a couple of years ago (I wrote about it here). Today Barnes & Noble scrambles to cope with competition from the e-book, Amazon.com, and, it seems, local bookshops.

While the diminished growth of e-book sales is hardly a harbinger of decline—5 percent is nothing to sneeze at—it does suggest that sometimes the demand side of the market doesn’t change quite as fast as the supply side—that is, a lot of innovation is just discovering better ways to satisfy fairly stable tastes. Still, it’s competition—for new markets, new techniques, new resources, and yes, new tastes—and not efficiency that drives, and is driven by, the creative discovery of ends and of means.

The Lesson Applied

The other day a friend told me that, when she told her fiancé she couldn’t understand why a mildly alcoholic beverage called “Chu-hi,” which is very popular in Japan, isn’t sold in stores here, his response was something like, “If there were a demand for it, it would be.” Knowing that I write this column she then said to me, “That’s the free market, right?”

Okay, class, what do you say?

Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.
***
This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.
Hacking Law and Governance with Startup Cities: How Innovation Can Fix Our Social Tech – Article by Zachary Caceres

Hacking Law and Governance with Startup Cities: How Innovation Can Fix Our Social Tech – Article by Zachary Caceres

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Zachary Caceres
July 16, 2013
******************************

Outside of Stockholm, vandals and vines have taken over Eastman Kodak’s massive factories. The buildings are cold metal husks, slowly falling down and surrendering to nature.  The walls are covered in colorful (and sometimes vulgar) spray paint. In the words of one graffiti artist: It’s “a Kodak moment.”

After its founding in 1888, Eastman Kodak became the uncontested champion of photography for almost a century. But in early 2012, the once $30-billion company with over 140,000 employees filed for bankruptcy.

Kodak was the victim of innovation—a process that economist Joseph Schumpeter called “the gales of creative destruction.” Kodak could dominate the market only so long as a better, stable alternative to its services didn’t exist. Once that alternative—digital photography—had been created, Kodak’s fate was sealed. The camera giant slowly lost market share to upstarts like Sony and Nikon until suddenly “everyone” needed a digital camera and Kodaks were headed to antique shows.

How does this happen? Christian Sandström, a technologist from the Ratio Institute in Sweden, argues that most major innovation follows a common path.

From Fringe Markets to the Mainstream

Disruptive technologies start in “fringe markets,” and they’re usually worse in almost every way. Early digital cameras were bulky, expensive, heavy, and made low-quality pictures. But an innovation has some advantage over the dominant technology: for digital cameras it was the convenience of avoiding film. This advantage allows the innovation to serve a niche market. A tiny group of early adopters is mostly ignored by an established firm like Kodak because the dominant technology controls the mass market.

But the new technology doesn’t remain on the fringe forever. Eventually its performance improves and suddenly it rivals the leading technology. Digital cameras already dispensed with the need to hassle with film; in time, they became capable of higher resolution than film cameras, easier to use, and cheaper. Kodak pivoted and tried to enter the digital market, but it was too late. The innovation sweeps through the market and the dominant firm drowns beneath the waves of technological change.

Disruptive innovation makes the world better by challenging monopolies like Kodak. It churns through nearly every market except for one: law and governance.

Social Technology

British Common law, parliamentary democracy, the gold standard: It may seem strange to call these “technologies.” But W. Brian Arthur, a Santa Fe Institute economist and author of The Nature of Technology, suggests that they are. “Business organizations, legal systems, monetary systems, and contracts…” he writes, “… all share the properties of technology.”

Technologies harness some phenomenon toward a purpose. Although we may feel that technologies should harness something physical, like electrons or radio waves, law and governance systems harness behavioral and social phenomena instead. So one might call British common law or Parliamentary democracy “social technologies.”

Innovation in “social tech” might still seem like a stretch. But people also once took Kodak’s near-total control of photography for granted (in some countries, the word for “camera” is “Kodak”). But after disruptive innovation occurs, it seems obvious that Kodak was inferior and that the change was good. Our legal and political systems, as technologies, are just as open to disruptive innovation. It’s easy to take our social techs for granted because the market for law and governance is so rarely disrupted by innovations.

To understand how we might create disruptive innovation in law and governance, we first need to find, like Nikon did to Kodak, an area where the dominant technologies can be improved.

Where Today’s Social Techs Fail

Around the world, law and governance systems fail to provide their markets with countless services. In many developing countries, most of the population lives outside the law.

Their businesses cannot be registered. Their contracts can’t be taken to court. They cannot get permission to build a house. Many live in constant fear and danger since their governance systems cannot even provide basic security. The ability to start a legal business, to build a home, to go school, to live in safe community—all of these “functions” of social technologies are missing for billions of people.

These failures of social technology create widespread poverty and violence. Businesses that succeed do so because they’re run by cronies of the powerful and are protected from competition by the legal system. The networks of cooperation necessary for economic growth cannot form in such restrictive environments. The poor cannot become entrepreneurs without legal tools. Innovations never reach the market. Dominant firms and technologies go unchallenged by upstarts.

Here’s our niche market.

If we could find a better way to provide one or some of these services (even if we couldn’t provide everything better than the dominant political system), we might find ourselves in the position of Nikon before Kodak’s collapse. We could leverage our niche market into something much bigger.

Hacking Law and Governance with Startup Cities

A growing movement around the world to build new communities offers ways to hack our current social tech. A host nation creates multiple, small jurisdictions with new, independent law and governance. Citizens are free to immigrate to any jurisdiction of their choosing. Like any new technology, these startup cities compete to provide new and better functions—in this case, to provide citizens with services they want and need.

One new zone hosting a startup city might pioneer different environmental law or tax policy. Another may offer a custom-tailored regulatory environment for finance or universities. Still another may try a new model for funding social services.

Startup cities are a powerful alternative to risky, difficult, and politically improbable national reform. Startup cities are like low-cost prototypes for new social techs. Good social techs pioneered by startup cities can be brought into the national system.

But if bad social techs lead a zone to fail, we don’t gamble the entire nation’s livelihood. People can easily exit a startup city—effectively putting the project “out of business.” If a nation chooses to use private capital for infrastructure or other services, taxpayers can be protected from getting stuck with the bill for someone’s bad idea. Startup cities also enhance the democratic voice of citizens by giving them the power of exit.

Looking at our niche market, a startup city in a developing nation could offer streamlined incorporation laws and credible courts for poor citizens who want to become entrepreneurs. Another project could focus on building safe places for commerce and homes by piloting police and security reform. In reality, many of these functions could (and should) be combined into a single startup city project.

Like any good tech startup, startup cities would be small and agile at first. They will not be able to rival many things that dominant law and governance systems provide. But as long as people are free to enter and exit, startup cities will grow and improve over time. What began as a small, unimpressive idea to serve a niche market can blossom into a paradigm shift in social technologies.

Several countries have already begun developing startup city projects, and many others are considering them. The early stages of this movement will almost certainly be as unimpressive as the bulky, toy-like early digital cameras. Farsighted nations will invest wisely in developing their own disruptive social techs, pioneered in startup cities. Other nations—probably rich and established ones—will ignore these “niche market reforms” around the developing world. And they just might end up like Kodak—outcompeted by new social techs developed in poor and desperate nations.

The hacker finds vulnerabilities in dominant technology and uses them to create something new. In a sense, all disruptive innovation is hacking, since it relies on a niche—a crack in the armor—of the reigning tech. Our law and governance systems are no different. Startup cities are disruptive innovation in social tech. Their future is just beginning, but one need only remember the fate of Kodak—that monolithic, unstoppable monopolist—to see a world of possibility.

Those interested in learning more about the growing startup cities movement should visit startupcities.org or contact startupcities@ufm.edu.

Zachary Caceres is CIO of Startup Cities Institute and editor of Radical Social Entrepreneurs.

This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.

The Extraordinary Business of Life – Article by Sanford Ikeda

The Extraordinary Business of Life – Article by Sanford Ikeda

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Sanford Ikeda
May 25, 2013
******************************

I heard it again from this year’s commencement speaker: the common mistake of thinking economics is just about business and making money. I know I’m not the only economics teacher who every year has to disabuse his students (and many of his own colleagues from other disciplines) of that same error.

Economics is not business administration or accounting. Economics is a science that studies how people interact when the means at their disposal are scarce in relation to their ends. That includes business, of course, but a whole lot more as well.

Where Does That Notion Come From?

Well, for starters, perhaps from one of the greatest economists in history, Alfred Marshall. He opens his highly influential textbook, first published in 1890, with this statement:

“Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing.” (Emphasis added)

This definition more or less prevailed until 1932, when another British economist, Lionel Robbins, defined economic science as being concerned with an aspect of all human action insofar as it involves making choices, not with a part of individual action. Economics, in other words, is the science of choice. Its starting point is not the “material requisites of wellbeing” but a person’s subjective valuation of her circumstances. Ludwig von Mises got it, which is why he called his magnum opus, simply, Human Action.

Similarly, Libertarianism Isn’t Pro-Business

An equally common mistake is to think that supporters of the free market are “pro-business” and favor so-called crony capitalism. But a consistent free-market supporter is neither pro-business nor anti-business, pro-labor nor anti-labor. A free market to us is what happens when you safeguard private property, free association, and consistent governance and then just leave people alone.

Part of the misunderstanding here might stem from the term “free market” itself. Since people tend to associate markets with buying and selling, jobs, and making (and losing) money, it’s perhaps understandable that they would think that advocates of the free market must be concerned mainly about business-related stuff: profits and losses, efficiency, and creating and marketing new products.

Indeed, I’ve met quite a few who claim to favor “free-market capitalism” merely because they believe in making as much money as possible in their lifetimes. It’s not surprising that many of these folks do tend to be pro-business and supporters of crony capitalism. I want to ask them not to be on my side.

Connotations aside, the free market encompasses far more than the stuff of business or a money-making scheme. Yes, it does include the essentials of private property, free association, and stable governance. But a dynamic market process that generates widespread material prosperity and promotes the pursuit of happiness would not be possible if it were based solely on the relentless pursuit of one’s narrow self-interest. Markets would not have gotten as far as they have today (with per-capita GDP up more than fiftyfold since 1700) if people didn’t also follow norms of honesty and fair play, trust and reciprocity. Such norms are without question partly the result of self-interest; few would trade with us if we weren’t honest and fair. But, as Adam Smith taught us, these norms also arise in large measure from a sense of sympathy, of fellow-feeling and fairness, that comes from our ability to see others as we see ourselves, and vice versa. This is why in most contexts I usually prefer the term “free society” to “free market.”

Bourgeois Virtue

But I think one good reason the association between business on the one hand and economics and classical liberalism on the other has been so persistent is that business and the free society arose together. That is, the liberal idea—that certain fundamental individual rights exist prior to and apart from the State—sparked one of the most momentous social changes in history: the commercial revolution and the emergence of the modern urban middle class. 

The triumph of liberty, of personal freedom, unleashed the creative potential of people, who found expression in art, religion, literature, but most of all—or at least most visibly—in the Marshallian “ordinary business of life.” The changes that have taken place in the past 500 years—scientific revolutions, religious reformations, political upheavals, artistic rebirths—were driven by the same human propensities as the commercial revolution and fueled by the wealth it produced. Indeed, the social and political changes of the past century—for women, workers, and minorities—would not have been possible without the entrepreneurial pressures of competition and innovation that forced radical changes in conventional thinking and socially conservative attitudes.

Tradition’s Worst Enemy

In short, business is the most dynamic social institution known to mankind. The critical and competitive attitudes that enable business to flourish erode custom and break old ties even as they foster new ones. The products of business tend to offend people whose sensibilities were refined by generations of tradition. The free market is tradition’s worst enemy.

Business has become part of the default mode of modern society. We take it for granted. We don’t realize what a radical, subversive force it is, to the point where it sounds strange to say so. But try to imagine a world without businesses and commerce. A world like the Dark Ages of, say ninth century Western Europe: static, grindingly poor, strictly hierarchical, socially intolerant, and, apart from the occasional battle or beheading, boring like you wouldn’t believe.

So, while it’s still a mistake to think economics and classical liberalism are somehow about studying and promoting business, maybe at a deeper level it’s not such a bad one to make after all. Business is subversive.

Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.
***
This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.
On Brakes and Mistakes – Article by Sanford Ikeda

On Brakes and Mistakes – Article by Sanford Ikeda

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Sanford Ikeda
March 30, 2013
******************************

Here’s an observation from a recent column in The Economist magazine on “The Transience of Power”:

“In 1980 a corporation in the top fifth of its industry had only a 10% chance of falling out of that tier in five years. Eighteen years later that chance had risen to 25%.”

Competition makes it hard to stay at the top even as it offers a way off the bottom. Data on income mobility also support the idea. And despite occasional downturns (some quite large, as we well know), per-capita gross domestic product in the United States keeps rising steadily over time. These two phenomena, economic growth and competitive shaking out, are of course connected.

Different Ways of Thinking About Economic Growth

Economists in the mainstream (neoclassical) tradition are trained to think of growth mainly as raising the rate of producing existing products. For example, a higher rate of saving allows firms to employ more and more capital and labor, generating ever-higher rates of output. It reminds me of the Steve Martin movie, The Jerk, in which a man who is born in a run-down shack eventually strikes it rich and builds himself a much bigger house that is just a scaled-up version of the old shack.

But economist Paul Romer, for one, has said,

“If economic growth could be achieved only by doing more and more of the same kind of cooking, we would eventually run out of raw materials and suffer from unacceptable levels of pollution and nuisance. Human history teaches us, however, that economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking.”

So growth through innovation, technical advance, and making new products is more important than just using more inputs to do more of the same thing. The late Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter came even closer to the truth when he famously described competitive innovation as a “gale of creative destruction”—building up and tearing down—with creation staying just ahead of destruction.

But standard economic theory has had trouble incorporating the kind of economic growth driven by game-changing innovators such as Apple, Facebook, and McDonalds. Mathematically modeling ignorance and error, ambition and resourcefulness, and creativity and commitment has so far been too challenging for the mainstream.

What’s the Source of Economic Growth?

Achieving economic growth through innovation means someone is taking chances, sometimes big chances, to break new ground. As Schumpeter put it, what it takes is finding “the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization.” Although talented people are behind this process, we sometimes put too much stress on bold “captains of industry” such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Ray Kroc. The personalities of the players are important—but so are the rules of the game.

Imagine if cars had no brakes. How slowly and cautiously we would have to drive!  Clearly, brakes on cars enable us to drive faster and safer. How? Well, brakes give us the freedom to make a lot of mistakes—entering a turn too fast or taking our eyes off the road for too long—without causing disaster. We can take more chances with brakes than without them. (Of course, good brakes can also seduce us into driving recklessly, but that’s a story for another day.) Similarly, economic development of the Schumpeterian variety presupposes lots of experimentation, and that in turn means making plenty of mistakes.

Markets Mean Mistakes

Now imagine a world in which people looked down on innovators. That’s hard to do in our time, but as Deirdre McClosky argues in her 2010 book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economists Can’t Explain the Modern World,  it wasn’t that long ago when most people disdained innovators who challenged established ways of thinking and doing. The result was cultural and economic stagnation. Making an innovator a figure of dignity worthy of respect, which she says began to take hold about 400 years ago, has sparked unprecedented economic development and prosperity.

But a smart, creative, ambitious, and committed person is likely to make mistakes. And so a culture that lauds spectacular success also needs to at least tolerate spectacular failure. You can’t have trial without error or profit without loss.

Let me be clear. I’m not saying that people in an innovative society should champion failure. I’m saying they must expect potential innovators to make a lot of mistakes and so have not only the right institutions in place (private property, contract, and so on) but also the right psychological mindset—which is something static societies can’t do.

Change, Uncertainty, and Tolerance

If you think you already know everything, anyone who thinks differently must be wrong. So why tolerate them?

One of the great differences between the modern world and the various dark ages mankind has gone through is how rapidly today our lives change. There’s immeasurably more uncertainty in the era of creative destruction than in times dominated by the “tried and true.”  But the more we realize how much uncertainty there is about what we think we know, the more we ought to be willing to admit that we may be wrong and the other guy may, at least sometimes, be right. And so if we see someone succeed or fail, we think, “That could have been me!” In a sense, an advancing society welcomes mistakes as much as it embraces triumphs, just as a fast car needs brakes as much as it needs an engine.

That’s not just fancy talk. The evidence—prosperity—is all around us.

Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author

The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences: Turning the Tide for Life Extension – Video by G. Stolyarov II

The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences: Turning the Tide for Life Extension – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Comments 0 Comment

The tide of funding for life-extension research has turned. With the announcement of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences – sponsored by such renowned entrepreneurs as Yuri Milner, Sergei Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan and Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe – there is now a world-class mechanism for rewarding outstanding scientists whose work contributes to understanding and curing debilitating diseases and extending human life. Mr. Stolyarov explains the incentives that the Breakthrough Prize creates for cutting-edge life-extension research and a more meritocratic society.

Remember to LIKE, FAVORITE, and SHARE this video in order to spread rational discourse on this issue.

Support these video-creation efforts by donating here and here.

References
– “The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences: Turning the Tide for Life Extension” – Essay by G. Stolyarov II –
– Article on Transhumanity.net
– Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Website
– List of first 11 laureates of the Breakthrough Prize
– “Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Yuri Milner Create $33 Million Breakthrough Prize For Medical Research” – Addy Dugdale – Fast Company – February 20, 2013
– “Breakthrough Prize announced by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs” – Rory Carroll – The Guardian
– “Bill Gates Wants to Be Immortal” – Adam Clark Estes – Motherboard

The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences: Turning the Tide for Life Extension – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences: Turning the Tide for Life Extension – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
February 23, 2013
******************************

The tide of funding for life-extension research has turned. With the announcement of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences – sponsored by such renowned entrepreneurs as Yuri Milner, Sergei Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan and Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe – there is now a world-class mechanism for rewarding outstanding scientists whose work contributes to understanding and curing debilitating diseases and extending human life. (You can find out more about this prize from The Guardian and Fast Company.) The first eleven laureates of the prize have already been selected, and every subsequent year eleven more will receive $3 million each.

The incentives behind the Breakthrough Prize are exactly right. In short, they move our society ever closer to a meritocracy. By receiving a sizable fortune, each scientist – still at the top of his or her career – would no longer need to worry about finances. He or she would at last have a justly deserved reward for ingenious work that advances the struggle of human civilization against disease, decay, and death. To produce ground-breaking research in biology, medicine, and biotechnology requires a kind of passion that does not get extinguished just because one’s day-to-day material needs have been satisfied. By getting the material worries out of the way, that passion is allowed full and free rein. Innovation becomes the dominant motive force of further projects, and further research and breakthroughs can proceed without fear of running out of funding.

The people funding the prize are themselves excellent exemplars of meritocracy. They became wealthy by their own efforts – not through inheritance, political pull, or expropriation of others, but through providing services that millions of people voluntarily sought out and recognized as enhancing their lives. It is not surprising that these entrepreneurs of merit would seek to reward the merit in others – particularly merit that, through its further exercise, can eventually save the lives of us all, from the wealthiest to the poorest. The ideal of a societal meritocracy is one in which personal wealth is directly proportional to earned achievement. Meritocracy does not require central planning, because people of merit will naturally seek to exchange values and reward one another on a free market – provided that central planners do not distort the incentives toward doing so. The distribution of wealth will, over time, approach a purely meritocratic one solely as a result of such enlightened and free interactions. Of course, we are far from having a pure meritocracy today, for the incentives are significantly distorted by special political favors, barriers to entry, and the cultural corruption they engender. However, given the slightest opening, the meritocratic ideal will gradually penetrate into an ever-expanding array of endeavors. By the accident of history, computer and internet technologies have been some of the least centrally controlled in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The result was the emergence of a group of merit-based entrepreneurs who could use their wealth to fund productive benefactors of humankind in other fields.

Another ubiquitously known member of the larger group of merit-based achievers is Bill Gates, who has recently expressed his personal desire not to die during a Reddit AMA.  This makes perfect sense: a man who has everything that wealth in today’s world can provide, and who leads a happy and fulfilling life besides, must still confront the fundamental injustice of his personal demise – an injustice that the wealthiest among us have not been able to rectify, yet. While Bill Gates is not sponsoring the Breakthrough Prize (at least not at present), his philanthropic efforts are already going a long way toward alleviating many life-shortening diseases in the less-developed parts of the world. We can all hope that, over time, he and others like him will devote increasing shares of their wealth toward overcoming the more formidable barriers of biological senescence.

For now, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences is an excellent start. It will raise the profile of life-extension research and inspire others to pursue ambitious projects in hopes of earning the prize. Unlike the Nobel Prize, which scientists earn many decades after their most prominent achievements, this prize will come much sooner to those whose transformational work strikes blows against some our least tractable adversaries. With the accelerating pace of technological progress, it only makes sense not to wait over a generation before recognizing their accomplishments. Not only the recipients, but also their benefactors – Milner, Brin, Zuckerberg, Chan, and Wojcicki – are to be saluted for giving a critical and ongoing boost to life-extension efforts on many fronts.

Review of Gary Wolfram’s “A Capitalist Manifesto” – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Review of Gary Wolfram’s “A Capitalist Manifesto” – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
January 5, 2013
******************************

While Dr. Gary Wolfram’s A Capitalist Manifesto is more an introduction to economics and economic history than a manifesto, it communicates economic concepts in a clear and entertaining manner and does so from a market-friendly point of view. Wolfram’s strengths as an educator stand out in this book, which could serve as an excellent text for teaching basic microeconomics and political economy to all audiences. Wolfram is a professor of economics at Hillsdale College, whose course in public-choice economics I attended. The book’s narration greatly resembles my experience of Wolfram’s classroom teaching, which focuses on the essence of an idea and its real-world relevance and applications, often utilizing entertaining concrete examples.

The book begins with several chapters on introductory microeconomics – marginal analysis, supply, demand, market equilibrium, opportunity cost, and the effects of policies that artificially prevent markets from clearing. The middle of the book focuses on economic history and political economy – commenting on the development of Western markets from the autarkic, manorial system of the feudal Middle Ages, through the rise of commerce during the Early Modern period, the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of corporations, and the rise in the 20th century of economic regimentation by national governments. One of the strengths of this book is its treatment of the benefits of free trade, from its role in progress throughout history to the theoretical groundwork of Ricardian comparative advantage. Enlightening discussions of constitutionalism and the classical idea of negative liberty are also provided. Wolfram introduces the insights of Ludwig von Mises regarding the infeasibility of central planning in solving the problem of economic calculation, as well as Friedrich Hayek’s famous “knowledge problem” – the dispersion of information among all the individuals in an economy and the impossibility of a central planner assembling all the information needed to make appropriate decisions. Wolfram further articulates the key insights of Frederic Bastiat: the seen versus the unseen in economic policy, the perils of coercive redistribution of wealth, the immorality of using the law to commit acts which would have been unacceptable if done by private individuals acting alone, and the perverse incentives created by a system where the government is able to dispense special privileges to a select few.

The latter third of the book focuses on such areas as money, inflation, and macroeconomics – including an exposition of the Keynesian model and its assumptions. Wolfram is able to explain Keynesian economics in a more coherent and understandable manner than most Keynesians; he thoroughly understands the theories he critiques, and he presents them with fairness and objectivity. I do, however, wish that the book had delved more thoroughly into a critique of Keynesianism. The discussion therein of the Keynesian model’s questionable assumptions is a good start, and perhaps a gateway to more comprehensive critiques, such as those of Murray Rothbard and Robert Murphy. A layperson reading A Capitalist Manifesto would be able to come out with a fundamental understanding of Keynes’s central idea and its assumptions – but he would not, solely as a result of this book, necessarily be able to refute the arguments of Keynes’s contemporary followers, such as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. Wolfram mentions critiques of Keynesianism by Milton Friedman and the monetarist school, the concept of rational expectations precipitating a move away from Keynesianism in the late 1970s, and the “supply-side” interpretations of the Keynesian model from the 1980s. However, those viewpoints are not discussed in the same level of detail as the basic Keynesian model.

More generally, my only significant critique of A Capitalist Manifesto is that it is too brief in certain respects. It offers promising introductions to a variety of economic ideas, but leaves some significant questions arising from those areas unanswered. Wolfram introduces the history and function of the corporation but does not discuss the principal-agent problem in large, publicly traded firms with highly dispersed ownership. To anticipate and answer (and perhaps partially acknowledge the validity of) criticisms of the contemporary corporate form of organization, commentary on how this problem might be overcome is essential. Wolfram explains the components and computation of Gross Domestic Product and the Consumer Price Index but devotes only a small discussion to critiques of these measures – critiques that are particularly relevant in an electronic age, when an increasing proportion of valuable content – from art to music to writing to games – is delivered online at no monetary cost to the final consumer. How can economic output and inflation be measured and meaningfully interpreted in an economy characterized partially by traditional money-for-goods/services transactions and partially by the “free” content model that is funded through external sources (e.g., donations or the creators’ independent income and wealth)? Moreover, does Wolfram’s statement that the absence of profit (sufficient to cover the opportunity cost) would result in the eventual decline of an enterprise need to be qualified to account for new models of delivering content? For instance, if an individual or firm uses one income stream to support a different activity that is not itself revenue- or profit-generating, there is a possibility for this arrangement to be sustainable in the long term if it is also justified by perceived non-monetary value.

Wolfram’s discussion of inflation is correct and forms a strong link between inflation and the quantity of money (government-issued fiat money these days) – but I would have wished to see a more thorough focus on Ludwig von Mises’s insight that new money does not enter the economy to equally raise everybody’s incomes simultaneously; rather, the distortion due to inflation comes precisely from the fact that some (the politically favored) receive the new money and can benefit from using it while prices have not yet fully adjusted. (This can be logically inferred from Wolfram’s discussion of some of the “tools” of the Federal Reserve, which directly affect the incomes of politically connected banks – but I wish the connection to Mises’s insight had been made more explicit.) Wolfram does mention that inflation can be a convenient tool for national governments to reduce their debt burdens, and he also discusses the inflationary role of fractional-reserve banking and “tools” available to central banks such as the Federal Reserve. However, Wolfram’s proposed solutions to the problems of inflation remain unclear from the text. Does he support Milton Friedman’s proposal for a fixed rate of growth in the fiat-money supply, or does he advocate a return to a classical gold standard – or perhaps to a system of market-originated competing currencies, as proposed by Hayek? It would also have been interesting to read Wolfram’s thoughts on the prospects and viability of peer-to-peer and digital currencies, such as Bitcoin, and whether these could mitigate some of the deleterious effects of central-bank-generated inflation.

Wolfram does discuss in some detail the sometimes non-meritocratic outcomes of markets – stating, for instance, that “boxers may make millions of dollars while poets make very little.” Indeed, it is possible to produce far more extreme comparisons of this sort – e.g., a popular “star” with no talent or sense earning millions of dollars for recording-studio-hackneyed “music” while genuinely talented classical musicians and composers might earn relatively little, or even have their own work remain a personal hobby pursued for enjoyment alone. To some critics of markets, this may well be the reason to oppose them and seek some manner of non-market compensation for people of merit. For a defender of the unhampered market economy, a crucial endeavor should be to demonstrate that truly free markets (unlike the heavily politicized markets of our time) can tend toward meritocracy in the long run, or at least offer people of merit a much greater range of possibilities for success than exists under any other system. Another possible avenue of exploration might be the manner in which a highly regimented political system (especially in the areas of education) might result in a “dumbed-down” culture which neglects and sometimes outright opposes intellectual and esthetic sophistication and the ethic of personal productivity which is indispensable to a culture that prizes merit. Furthermore, defenders of markets should continually seek out ways to make the existing society more meritocratic, even in the face of systemic distortions of outcomes. Technology and competition – both of which Wolfram correctly praises – should be utilized by liberty-friendly entrepreneurs to provide more opportunities for talented individuals to demonstrate their value and be rewarded thereby.

Wolfram’s engaging style and many valid and enlightening insights led me to desire more along the same lines from him. Perhaps A Capitalist Manifesto will inspire other readers to ask similar questions and seek more market-friendly answers. Wolfram provides a glossary of common economic terms and famous historical figures, as well as some helpful references to economic classics within the endnotes of each chapter.  A Capitalist Manifesto will have its most powerful impact if readers see it as the beginning of their intellectual journey and utilize the gateways it offers to other writings in economics and political economy.

Disclosure: I received a free copy of the book for the purposes of creating a review.