In a recent exchange with Don Boudreaux, Bryan Caplan writes,
The heart of the left is being anti-market.
From the standpoint of the oppressor-oppressed axis, it may make sense to be anti-market. If you look at market outcomes, you see some people do much better than others. It is natural to assume that those doing well are oppressors and those doing not as well are oppressed.
As an economist, I look at the market as impersonal. It is a process. As a process, it has many virtues.
Competition helps to regulate exploitation. The profit motive spurs innovation that helps people in general. You know the drill.
Bryan is among those who believe that teaching people economics can help them to understand the process perspective and to see the market in less personal terms. Hence, if you confront people on the left with economics, their leftism will soften. That indeed has happened to many economists. Vernon Smith and Deirdre McClosky are two prominent ex-socialists.
Unfortunately, I think that going forward we are going to see the opposite effect of confronting leftists with economists. That is, I think that the academic economics will be converted to an oppressor-oppressed view of markets. Not that I think that such a view is more justified now than in the past. Rather, I think that the leftism in academia is stronger than in the past. See my recent essay. As I have pointed out in previous posts, we are already seeing much more focus in academic economics on anti-market perspectives that align with the oppressor-oppressed framing.
The two weaknesses are while inequality can be the result of markets, it has an intense need for preservation by any means and competition leads to anticompetitive behavior, and justice is more important than markets.
Bryan is among those who believe that teaching people economics can help them to understand the process perspective and to see the market in less personal terms.
1) This is what I teach my kids which is the market is very impersonal and does not care for individuals. I am telling them focus only on education, career and resume.
2) I always thought that Hayek Road to Serfdom was funny that that many employees feel the Serfdom is the company versus government.
3) It is important to remember markets don’t care about religion or community either. So any conservative that discusses free market and community solutions do not offer true answers either.
4) If I remember right Bryan is having a hard time with free markets to control the behavior of the young, working class and poor without religion control. He hates that young people avoid family formation and can not offer them solutions either.
5) Isn’t one of the problems today in the labor market is skilled labor shortage and doesn’t the somewhat lower birth rates in the 1990s contributing to that? I do find interesting that the US economy one spurt of wage growth happened a bout 25 years after the 1970s baby bust. So people having less children will increase wages in the long run!
And politically it will interesting to watch how the Trump Administration handles his increase in WWC voters. So far he has governed as a standard Republican but:
1) Increasing illegal aliens deportations in TX and CA will have little effect on the WWC Rust Belt wages. Stopping immigration will not have a significant (or even any) effect.
2) Trump has not anything significant on free trade yet and I suspect he will manage to get some insignificant steel tariffs enacted. Anyway factories are so automated any manufacturing job protection will likely have negative net jobs in the short run.
3) The latest Healthcare deal will hurt the strongest Trump states, KY, WV, AK and AL, from 2016 election. (OK AL was not that strong Trump) I am not sure how this plays politically. We will see if the Anti-Bobos stay with Trump.
If no one on the left or right can pursue a more dynamic marketplace reality for all income levels, I fear we may be in for a bumpy ride, ahead.
The oppressor-oppressed axis fertilizes itself. As the economy deteriorates due to the implementation of the progressive model, the corruption and decay that result is simply due to the fact that oppressors are pulling the levers. The o-o axis seems to apply more than ever.
At that point the whole notion of a dynamic system seems incomprehensible.
Everyone recognizes the big disagreement between the left and right on sexual and other “cultural” matters. What’s that got to do with being “anti-market”? Nothing. And it’s a big deal, so it would be relying on a “no true Scotsman” fally to emphasive Caplan’s use of “the heart of”.
I’ve definitely seen this pointed out in the comments at EconLog, but to my knowledge Caplan has never addressed this obvious point.
On th eother hand, it fits right into the oppresor-oppressed or egalitarian social justice frameworks, as well as Hanson’s observation that material equality is well recognized by anthropologists as being an important and widespread forager value.
it’s more defensible to say that the left has always been anti-business in outlook, looking at wealthy businessmen, merchants, dealers, and so forth with suspicioun and disdain, with a presumption that they will do everything they can to exploit and cheat and harm their employees, customers, and vendors – no matter what values it violates or pollution it causes – in order to make another buck of profit. That is, unless Big Brother forces them to stay within bounds.
And it should go without sayins that being anti-business is so different from being anti-market that teaching leftists economics and even respect for the function and operations of markets will have absolutely no impact on the skepticism and suspicion of the potentially wicked businessmen operating in those markets, whose activities must be controlled, channeled, and constrained by regulations and tort law.
Apologies for all the typos. Embarrassing. Since the website change here, my phone browser is both not spell checking and also making the text entry field tiny without scaling, so it’s hard to visually proofread on the fly. I’ll adjust my behavior to compensate.
Handle,
Well, politics can be three key dividing issues: Economic, cultural & foreign policy. Arnold Kling tends to be a hard right economic conservative, a modest cultural conservative and closer to liberal foreign policy. Compare this to Ross Douthat who is hard cultural conservative, a modest economic and FP conservative. Or David Brooks/Bret Stephens who are hard foreign policy conservatives although less economic/cultural. (Or myself a hard liberal FP, modest liberal cultural & economic.)
Of course, what I find most interesting in US politics it is the Blue States have on average stronger social measurements like divorce rates and single motherhood. (Not that red states Utah scores the best in the nation so it is averages.
Aristocrats in ancient both Greece and Rome looked down their noses at merchants, believing that the only proper source of income for a refined, upper class was owning land and farming it (or having it farmed). This was despite the fact that much of Athens’ and Rome’s wealth was based on maritime trade.
This same basic attitude was maintained by European nobles up until the 20th century. These people were no progressives, either. Being anti-business may just be a kind of instinctive attitude, much like the forager preference for equality of resource distribution, like you mentioned.
That’s the excuse, that merchants “will do everything they can to exploit and cheat and harm their employees, customers, and vendors.”
But the ruling classes aren’t against cheating and exploiting per se. The cliche they keep repeating is that merchants behave this way, but that’s a tactic. It’s how the people allied with government, the insiders, have always rationalized their oppression and coercion of the outsiders. It’s how taxi drivers talk about Uber drivers. And yeah, in this example taxi drivers belong to the ruling classes of history.
Taxi drivers, in 2017, are the acceptable kind of merchants because they’re on the side of privilege and licensing and the royal prerogative. They belong to the king’s court. They’re inside the tent. The Austin city council, for example, is an American kind of royal court. The Democrats in Austin are the tent.
And once you’re inside the tent, exploitation and cheating has the sanctity of law. You’re not an unclean merchant. You’ve been cleansed and made pure.
Crony capitalism is acceptable to the ruling class. State capitalism is acceptable. Hugo Chavez was a billionaire businessman, but his business was conducted from inside the halls of government, which made it ok. Cheating and stealing and open plunder itself have always been acceptable within this outlook of the ruling classes, precisely because plunder is not constrained by the market, not channelled into something productive. Not bourgeois or, before that, backwoods. Not decentralized. Not rational or calculating. Not peaceful. Not servile. Not base.
In other words, there are lords and there are villeins. Or vileins, vilains, and villains, in Anglo-Norman and, before that, Old French. Meaning low-born rustics and men of ignoble ideas or instincts. And isn’t that the outlook our betters have always had? Long before the Norman conquest, back to the first agricultural surplus and the first store of grain?
The heart of politics is increasing ones status.
Many members of the left are people that would not have a lot less status in a market economy. Others would do OK, but they do much better under the status quo.
Economics education doesn’t help that at all.
It strikes me that oppressor-oppressed hypotheses — I think the left’s preferred term now is “privilege” — are unfalsifiable. In the market context, the allegedly “privileged” party can be either the buyer or the seller. If he is the buyer, say an employer buying labor, then he can be said to be “exploiting” the services of the seller. If the “privileged” party is the seller, then he can be said to be unfairly profiting from the buyer.
More generally, an allegedly “privileged” party can either interact or not interact with an allegedly “oppressed” party. If there is no interaction, then ignoring the “oppressed” party is evidence of privilege. If there is interaction, then the interaction is cast as exploitation. For example, if chefs don’t feature ethnic cuisines on their menus, then they are deliberately discriminating against or ignorant of those ethinic groups’ culinary contributions. If the chefs do incorporate ethinic cuisines, then they are engaging in cultural appropriation. If a restaurant hires a chef of a particular ethnicity to produce the corresponding ethnic cuisine, then it is pigeonholing that chef and limiting that chef’s options.
Economic thinking includes identifying incentives that may explain observations. Oppressor-oppressed thinking entails identifying underlying privilege that can explain an observation. Because it seems to be the case that privilege can unfalsifiably explain any observation, we may indeed see academic economics (continue to) drift towards oppressor-oppressed framing. Identifying privilege seems to be a choice, not a result.