The Fatal Conceit : The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek)

Rating:
Summary: Better than Road to Serfdom
Review: This was a brilliant book. The language was much shorter and more precise than in Road to Serfdom.

I know that it was one of Hayek's traits to not use mathematics, but it would have been nice if he demonstrated some of his ideas with at least a little math. Or gave us the references if we wanted to look them up right at the bottom of the page.

Particularly neat was his off-setting things that were not critical to the argument in small type.

As it stands, the book is almost 100% empirical evidence of why socialism doesn't work. And kudos to the author for calling Socialism and Communism what they are, which is religion.

Rating:
Summary: Truly a moral tangle
Review: Written in 1988, THE FATAL CONCEIT is a summary of the economic and political arguments made in the life of its author, F. A. Hayek. I am reading an early printing, the University of Chicago Press published this as THE COLLECTED WORKS OF F. A. HAYEK, VOLUME 1. The attempt was not petty because the scope is so vast, dropping back to magical powers which preceded economics in Appendix G for "a remarkable little study by Sir James Frazer (1909) -- PSYCHE'S TASK" (p. 157) on "Superstition and the Preservation of Tradition" to emphasize "the effect of tabooing a thing." (p. 157). This book is torn from its roots mainly by the times in which it was written, in which it is merely an example of rhetoric as an intellectual discipline that has disappeared as politics has slid to a level that assumes a micro-order no bigger than a box or a flat screen in at least one room of each house in those areas which consider themselves part of the civilized world.

This book is a spirited defense of capitalism as an extended economic order. Hayek is utterly convinced that a close look at history shows that a strong government is more likely to stifle than to promote the efforts of those who could produce productive economic activity by following the rules which economics ought to provide for those with great wealth. The main argument, for me, of THE FATAL CONCEIT is about morality, which is primarily avoided by modern people functioning mainly as spectators concerned with the behavior of human beings who have previously inhabited a world in which people had contact with each other. Attempting to apply the lessons of this book is sure to be ironic in a comic society, in which those who are highest in the public eye merit the lowest form of treatment. For example, the comedy channel on television is ready to ridicule any individual who has no way to escape from whatever comic role our entertainment values have assigned to people in positions of interest, while the audience is supposed to be too complacent to think that they can do anything about what they see. The comedians who ape stupidity are filling in for furiously planning activists of the world, who are blatantly called intellectuals in this book, as in:

"Intellectuals may of course claim to have invented new and better `social' morals that will accomplish just this, but these `new' rules represent a recidivism to the morals of the primitive micro-order, and can hardly maintain the life and health of the billions supported by the macro-order." (p. 75).

Hayek was living in Freiburg im Breisgau in April 1988 when he penned the Preface on page 5, stating "There were to be no footnotes" and he was right until page 24, where the editor furnished information to support the text: "Not only is the idea of evolution older in the humanities and social sciences than in the natural sciences, I would even be prepared to argue that Darwin got the basic ideas of evolution from economics." For Hayek, analogous laws, mechanisms, modalities and "cultural development rests on such inheritance -- characteristics in the form of rules guiding the mutual relations among individuals" (p. 25) that make sense, in the context of group selection compared to biological evolution. "Despite such differences, all evolution, cultural as well as biological, is a process of continuous adaptation to unforeseen events, to contingent circumstances which could not have been forecast. This is another reason why evolutionary theory can never put us in the position of rationally predicting and controlling future evolution." (p. 25).

Having established that the small group environments of hundreds of thousands of years ago established instinctual loyalties that are more ontogenetic than phylogenetic in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 starts with a section on "Freedom and the Extended Order" (p. 29) which starts history with "So far as we know, the Mediterranean region was the first to see the acceptance of a person's right to dispose over a recognized private domain, thus allowing individuals to develop a dense network of commercial relationships among different communities." (p. 29). Hayek gave us no reason to suppose that he was thinking of drastic climate change when he wrote in Chapter 3, "Indeed, it will perhaps not be long before even Antarctica will enable miners to earn an ample living. To an observer from space, this covering of the earth's surface, with the increasingly changing appearance that it wrought, might seem like an organic growth. But it was no such thing: it was accomplished by individuals following not instinctual demands but traditional customs and rules." (p. 43).

Billions of people imply a lot more survival problems than anyone can think for, as President Woodrow Wilson discovered, or maybe died trying, sometime after the Great War, and Hayek is only going to provide support for anyone who is primarily interested in economic activity. On a philosophical level, the most interesting thing about THE FATAL CONCEIT might be the charge of immorality on a theoretical level concerning Keynes, an intellectual opponent of Hayek, who is identified as "self-proclaimed `immoralists' such as Keynes" (p. 67) due to "his general belief in a management of the market order, on the ground that `in the long run we are all dead' (i.e., it does not matter what long-range damage we do; it is the present moment alone, the short run -- consisting of public opinion, demands, votes, and all the stuff and bribes of demagoguery -- which counts)." (p. 57). Television makes a superficial effort to keep people informed of major political issues, but, with even less awareness than economists exhibit of anything beyond the present moment, "is also a characteristic manifestation of an unwillingness to recognize that morals are concerned with effects in the long run -- effects beyond our possible perception -- and of a tendency to spurn the learnt discipline of the long view." (p. 57).

Rating:
Summary: Truly a moral tangle
Review: Written in 1988, THE FATAL CONCEIT is a summary of the economic and political arguments made in the life of its author, F. A. Hayek. I am reading an early printing, the University of Chicago Press published this as THE COLLECTED WORKS OF F. A. HAYEK, VOLUME 1. The attempt was not petty because the scope is so vast, dropping back to magical powers which preceded economics in Appendix G for "a remarkable little study by Sir James Frazer (1909) -- PSYCHE'S TASK" (p. 157) on "Superstition and the Preservation of Tradition" to emphasize "the effect of tabooing a thing." (p. 157). This book is torn from its roots mainly by the times in which it was written, in which it is merely an example of rhetoric as an intellectual discipline that has disappeared as politics has slid to a level that assumes a micro-order no bigger than a box or a flat screen in at least one room of each house in those areas which consider themselves part of the civilized world.

This book is a spirited defense of capitalism as an extended economic order. Hayek is utterly convinced that a close look at history shows that a strong government is more likely to stifle than to promote the efforts of those who could produce productive economic activity by following the rules which economics ought to provide for those with great wealth. The main argument, for me, of THE FATAL CONCEIT is about morality, which is primarily avoided by modern people functioning mainly as spectators concerned with the behavior of human beings who have previously inhabited a world in which people had contact with each other. Attempting to apply the lessons of this book is sure to be ironic in a comic society, in which those who are highest in the public eye merit the lowest form of treatment. For example, the comedy channel on television is ready to ridicule any individual who has no way to escape from whatever comic role our entertainment values have assigned to people in positions of interest, while the audience is supposed to be too complacent to think that they can do anything about what they see. The comedians who ape stupidity are filling in for furiously planning activists of the world, who are blatantly called intellectuals in this book, as in:

"Intellectuals may of course claim to have invented new and better `social' morals that will accomplish just this, but these `new' rules represent a recidivism to the morals of the primitive micro-order, and can hardly maintain the life and health of the billions supported by the macro-order." (p. 75).

Hayek was living in Freiburg im Breisgau in April 1988 when he penned the Preface on page 5, stating "There were to be no footnotes" and he was right until page 24, where the editor furnished information to support the text: "Not only is the idea of evolution older in the humanities and social sciences than in the natural sciences, I would even be prepared to argue that Darwin got the basic ideas of evolution from economics." For Hayek, analogous laws, mechanisms, modalities and "cultural development rests on such inheritance -- characteristics in the form of rules guiding the mutual relations among individuals" (p. 25) that make sense, in the context of group selection compared to biological evolution. "Despite such differences, all evolution, cultural as well as biological, is a process of continuous adaptation to unforeseen events, to contingent circumstances which could not have been forecast. This is another reason why evolutionary theory can never put us in the position of rationally predicting and controlling future evolution." (p. 25).

Having established that the small group environments of hundreds of thousands of years ago established instinctual loyalties that are more ontogenetic than phylogenetic in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 starts with a section on "Freedom and the Extended Order" (p. 29) which starts history with "So far as we know, the Mediterranean region was the first to see the acceptance of a person's right to dispose over a recognized private domain, thus allowing individuals to develop a dense network of commercial relationships among different communities." (p. 29). Hayek gave us no reason to suppose that he was thinking of drastic climate change when he wrote in Chapter 3, "Indeed, it will perhaps not be long before even Antarctica will enable miners to earn an ample living. To an observer from space, this covering of the earth's surface, with the increasingly changing appearance that it wrought, might seem like an organic growth. But it was no such thing: it was accomplished by individuals following not instinctual demands but traditional customs and rules." (p. 43).

Billions of people imply a lot more survival problems than anyone can think for, as President Woodrow Wilson discovered, or maybe died trying, sometime after the Great War, and Hayek is only going to provide support for anyone who is primarily interested in economic activity. On a philosophical level, the most interesting thing about THE FATAL CONCEIT might be the charge of immorality on a theoretical level concerning Keynes, an intellectual opponent of Hayek, who is identified as "self-proclaimed `immoralists' such as Keynes" (p. 67) due to "his general belief in a management of the market order, on the ground that `in the long run we are all dead' (i.e., it does not matter what long-range damage we do; it is the present moment alone, the short run -- consisting of public opinion, demands, votes, and all the stuff and bribes of demagoguery -- which counts)." (p. 57). Television makes a superficial effort to keep people informed of major political issues, but, with even less awareness than economists exhibit of anything beyond the present moment, "is also a characteristic manifestation of an unwillingness to recognize that morals are concerned with effects in the long run -- effects beyond our possible perception -- and of a tendency to spurn the learnt discipline of the long view." (p. 57).

Rating:
Summary: The Socialist Conceit.
Review: _The Fatal Conceit_ written by economist F. A. Hayek is a firm rejection of economic planning and socialism in favor of classical liberalism and private ownership of "several property" from an agnostic evolutionary perspective. Hayek argues that morality cannot be founded based upon reason alone but that its foundation must be found within the traditional structures that make up society. He argues this from an evolutionary perspective claiming that morality has evolved and therefore been selected for and therefore that it is naive of us to believe that through reason alone we can determine what is ethical. This is in agreement with a religious perspective that would claim that the morality-bearing tradition has been handed down to man from a source which involved an encounter with the Divine (of course, the religious perspective would deny evolution but would arrive at the same conclusion based upon revelation). Hayek, himself an agnostic, discusses these issues in his book and shows how religion can serve as a guardian of tradition. One specific tradition that exists within Western culture is that of private ownership of "several property". Hayek argues that socialism rests on a conceit and is often rooted in an irrational longing for a primitive time (primitivism). Hayek shows how many philosophers and economists including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas ("the just wage theory"), Karl Marx, Keynes, and Einstein advocated some form of socialism and shows the errors in various aspects of their thinking. Hayek is particularly harsh to Keynes who spoke against the traditional value assigned to saving money, which Hayek feels is absurd. Hayek then shows how socialism is presented as a trade-off; however, involved in this trade-off is the substantial loss of liberty, a value all people should hold dear. Hayek demonstrates how language itself has become infested with words which take on socialistic meanings, and Hayek shows that the very word "liberal" has come to mean the exact opposite of its original intention, i.e. a lover of liberty. Hayek roundly refutes the Malthusian theory of population growth and argues against the over-population scare which is used by the Club of Rome to advance their population control agenda. Hayek shows that in regions which become industrialized and modernized the population growth decreases. This means as more and more regions trade in their premodern existence for an industrialized one the population growth in these regions will go down. The final chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of religion in preserving the traditional system of morality and Hayek's own agnostic philosophy. Hayek argues that it is naive of some to view religion as a conspiracy of the priestly caste to maintain their power, and he shows the value that religious beliefs may have. While I agree with this assessment in Hayek's discussion of religion, I disagree with his agnosticism and failure to recognize a personalized God. Hayek ends with several appendices which discuss various other approaches to economic liberty. In sum this book presents an excellent refutation of the "socialist superstition" which continues to haunt the minds of the intellectual elite to this day.