The recent hoopla surrounding Brexit has shined a dusty mote through the Overton Window. The media narrative surrounding Brexit consists mostly of an expert consensus that a Brexit would be disastrous for the UK. Let's unpackage this a little bit.
First, the Overton Window of acceptable political discourse in the UK appears to share commonality with the media narrative across the pond: politics is run by experts. Like a Matryoshka doll, we unpackage this idea and find another, smaller idea: politics, and the social sciences in general, are as a boat in a predictable sea of causation and experts are the captain who steers the till.
We could stop at this adorable, smaller Russian doll; but, then, we would deprive ourselves of smaller, more adorable dolls.
A politician or political consultant gains expertise by obtaining the necessary credentials; the necessary credentials are legitimate because the social sciences are, like physics, subject to the regular concatenation of natural phenomena; and, to tie up this memeplex in a nice bow, those credentialed at the most prestigious schools for social sciences are the experts who steer the worlds economic and political policies.
Thus, we arrive at the final doll: an adorable technocrat: a Harvard grad who spent time in the London School of Economics, did a stint at Goldman and is now an unelected official of a central bank or supranational entity like the UN or EU. While the technocrat is the height of expertise, there are many who would aspire to this position, but fall short. The opinion of these people (professors of economics, pundits at popular newspapers, talking heads, bureaucrats, etc...) still carries expert weight and when the opinions of all the experts reach critical mass, we reach the black hole of the social sciences: consensus.
The alternative view to technocracy, and a view that is outside the frame of the Overton Window, is that individual humans are the subject of the social sciences. The ideas that animate human actions are currently unmeasurable and by introspection we find that our own motivations are a complicated mess of competing interests. While humans in general display trends, they remain a rather unpredictable subject in contrast to the movement of particles in a vacuum whose interactions exhibit such regularity that we refer to theories of their behavior in some cases as laws.
Gravity, electromagnetism and mechanics are enough understood to the point that our complex society relies on the laws of their behavior remaining static. If gravity changed tomorrow, or oppositely charged particles no longer attracted, we would find chaos now ruled where order once did.
Conversely, if humans in my general vicinity tomorrow decide that aviator sunglasses are posh again, a new trend in human behavior has developed in favor of an older one. The individual human actions that create the market for sunglasses will respond by decreasing the availability of Wayfarers and increase the availability of aviators. If bomber jackets came to be preferred as well, we would all look like pilots in a very brief period of time.
What does this have to do with Brexit? If I google sunglasses, I am gifted with 174,000,000 results. If I click on one of the first links to Zappos, I am offered the option of browsing sunglasses by the geometric shape of my face. There are a lot of individuals interested in satisfying my need for sunglasses and it would behoove them greatly to know what I wanted before I did. The number of participants in the market makes evident the fact that very few people are successfully predicting and monopolizing the market for sunglasses. This is basically true for most markets, and is true in general about the predictability of human action.
In short: politicians, economists and pundits do not know what the consequences of Brexit would be. If they did, they would be billionaires and likely to be uninterested in trying convince other people of what they already knew: individual human action is impossible to predict and you'd be lucky to spot a trend.
Showing posts with label Overton Window. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Overton Window. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
The Overton Window and Historicism
"[Thymology] is what a man knows about the way in which people value different conditions, about their wishes and desires and their plans to realize these wishes and desires. It is the knowledge of the social environment in which a man lives and acts or, with historians, of a foreign milieu about which he has learned by studying special sources."Mises, Theory and History
A once popular conception of history seems to have crept back into the Overton Window. Although historicism has been defined in numerous ways, it seems to refer to an understanding of history in which individual volition plays only a small part: individual actions are bound by time and place, by culture and history. So of WW2, we might say that Churchill acted in accordance with a nebulous historical and cultural force; we might even allude to a greater destiny being worked through a man whose actions were in a position to have significant influence on the same history that seemed to be moving him. How convenient!
The same views seem to be consistent with a Great Man view of the past in which the turning points of human history rested on the actions of incredible men (and women: I'm looking at you Cleopatra and Helen of Troy). However, this view seems barren in light of individuals whose actions were never recorded and whose histories have never been told. The view also belies a concept of complexity where a world in which the flap of a butterflies wings may not necessarily cause a hurricane, but the coordinated actions of hundreds of thousands of individual human actors are explained away as the necessary lurch of progress.
Several problems exist with a view of history consistent with historicism, not the least of which is that no general laws of human conduct can be inferred from such a view; and, thus, no science towards a better understanding of realizing particular ends can be achieved. Perhaps the most pernicious outcome of the outlook of historicism is the opportunity which is created to justify death and destruction. In light of WW2, of the millions who died in pursuit of their individual ends, we may only say of them: they were valiant cogs in the struggle towards a better, more prosperous and peaceful future. Under this view, we may not say that perhaps those millions died in vain to serve the ends of a few ambitious men's desire for greater power and glory. Almost any outcome of any event can be construed as a satisfaction of historical progress. This is comparable to Marx's view that the proletarian would inevitably struggle towards the realization of a perfect Communism through the material productive forces of history. So, when Stalin starved several million farmers, they were only part of the larger struggle towards a more perfect future - which still fails to materialize more than a century later.
The Overton Window encompasses bundles of ideas which public discourse uses to make sense of the complexity of the present. The Window is influenced heavily by academic, political and commercial forces who rarely have as an ultimate goal the better understanding of truth. Their constituents, rather, benefit in one way or another by continuing the discourse, especially regarding public policy, in line with their individual interests, both economic and otherwise.
"Why one man chooses water and another man wine is a thymological (or, in traditional terminology, psychological) problem. But it is of no concern to praxeology and economics. The subject matter of praxeology and of that part of it which is so far best developed─economics─is action as such and not the motives that impel a man to aim at definite ends."
Mises, Theory and History
Not only does historicism suffer from a lack of theoretical underpinning, it fails to account for the dynamics of human consciousness that we all experience. Historcism substitutes relativity for understanding and, as a direct result, favors a status quo interpretation of past events. As an object of the Overton Window, historicism maintains that the common man has no power over his destiny and, at best, can hope to work towards the ends of their enlightened leaders whom history has seen fit to elevate to positions of power.
A view of history that treats consciousness as discreet rather than universal can not understand economic progress as acting according to natural laws, but instead must attribute progress to leaders and their policies. The Overton Window of the Soviet Union entailed a vision of the future in which capital accumulation resulted from the correct policies rather than adherence to a natural set of laws derived from a theory of human action. The US government today mainly sees problems as nails to hit with the hammer of policy. A shift in the Overton Window might eventually help recapture the gains attained from the application of a science of human action; a failure to shift will result in another historical collapse of an edifice that served a few individuals at the expense of the many.
A once popular conception of history seems to have crept back into the Overton Window. Although historicism has been defined in numerous ways, it seems to refer to an understanding of history in which individual volition plays only a small part: individual actions are bound by time and place, by culture and history. So of WW2, we might say that Churchill acted in accordance with a nebulous historical and cultural force; we might even allude to a greater destiny being worked through a man whose actions were in a position to have significant influence on the same history that seemed to be moving him. How convenient!
The same views seem to be consistent with a Great Man view of the past in which the turning points of human history rested on the actions of incredible men (and women: I'm looking at you Cleopatra and Helen of Troy). However, this view seems barren in light of individuals whose actions were never recorded and whose histories have never been told. The view also belies a concept of complexity where a world in which the flap of a butterflies wings may not necessarily cause a hurricane, but the coordinated actions of hundreds of thousands of individual human actors are explained away as the necessary lurch of progress.
Several problems exist with a view of history consistent with historicism, not the least of which is that no general laws of human conduct can be inferred from such a view; and, thus, no science towards a better understanding of realizing particular ends can be achieved. Perhaps the most pernicious outcome of the outlook of historicism is the opportunity which is created to justify death and destruction. In light of WW2, of the millions who died in pursuit of their individual ends, we may only say of them: they were valiant cogs in the struggle towards a better, more prosperous and peaceful future. Under this view, we may not say that perhaps those millions died in vain to serve the ends of a few ambitious men's desire for greater power and glory. Almost any outcome of any event can be construed as a satisfaction of historical progress. This is comparable to Marx's view that the proletarian would inevitably struggle towards the realization of a perfect Communism through the material productive forces of history. So, when Stalin starved several million farmers, they were only part of the larger struggle towards a more perfect future - which still fails to materialize more than a century later.
The Overton Window encompasses bundles of ideas which public discourse uses to make sense of the complexity of the present. The Window is influenced heavily by academic, political and commercial forces who rarely have as an ultimate goal the better understanding of truth. Their constituents, rather, benefit in one way or another by continuing the discourse, especially regarding public policy, in line with their individual interests, both economic and otherwise.
"Why one man chooses water and another man wine is a thymological (or, in traditional terminology, psychological) problem. But it is of no concern to praxeology and economics. The subject matter of praxeology and of that part of it which is so far best developed─economics─is action as such and not the motives that impel a man to aim at definite ends."
Mises, Theory and History
Not only does historicism suffer from a lack of theoretical underpinning, it fails to account for the dynamics of human consciousness that we all experience. Historcism substitutes relativity for understanding and, as a direct result, favors a status quo interpretation of past events. As an object of the Overton Window, historicism maintains that the common man has no power over his destiny and, at best, can hope to work towards the ends of their enlightened leaders whom history has seen fit to elevate to positions of power.
A view of history that treats consciousness as discreet rather than universal can not understand economic progress as acting according to natural laws, but instead must attribute progress to leaders and their policies. The Overton Window of the Soviet Union entailed a vision of the future in which capital accumulation resulted from the correct policies rather than adherence to a natural set of laws derived from a theory of human action. The US government today mainly sees problems as nails to hit with the hammer of policy. A shift in the Overton Window might eventually help recapture the gains attained from the application of a science of human action; a failure to shift will result in another historical collapse of an edifice that served a few individuals at the expense of the many.
Monday, June 6, 2016
The Overton Window and Epistemlogical Bias
Contemporary Western culture presumes to sit at the pinnacle of progress. It was not always so. The Greeks, those scions of reason and logic (who borrowed much from Egypt), believed that they lived in a period following a Golden Age of men and gods. A belief in progress as a linear march of history, with each successive generation building on the accomplishments of the last, is a relatively recent one.
It is easy to correlate this idea of progress with the material benefit of scientific empiricism since the early 19th century: the explosion of scientific discoveries of the last two centuries has been a blessing in helping elevate the standard living of Earthlings. I believe, though, that this easy correlation belies the growth in something equally (probably more) important and, conversely, nonmeasurable: the growth in the idea of liberty and the enormous impact of increasing the accuracy of prices which rises in proportion to free exchange.
Science benefited from the growing acceptance of liberty as an ultimate end as more and more scientists found opportunity in the greater availability of capital and the social and political freedom to pursue previously unacceptable ideas about how the world might work. Before Locke and Hobbes, Rousseau and Hume, Kant and Adam Smith, the Overton Window of acceptable discourse was framed primarily by religious considerations. The church did not object to an error in Galileo's thinking so much as object to his presumption of offering a more accurate view of the world than could the church. The church was the authority and the authority could not be wrong, which is to say: the church made a power play more than a good argument; a play that we still see being evoked today. Galileo had an empirical view; the church had a theoretical one. In this instance, the empirical view flowed from the Renaissance of Greek logic into the Enlightenment. Empiricism would come to frame the Overton Window for centuries.
Theoretical knowledge and the possibility of gaining understanding without experience (through apriori synthetic deduction) is an old idea. We see in early oral histories a transmission of a kind science in which past experience becomes a story with a moral or a lesson. These lessons helped human civilizations persist through calamity by nipping in the bud the consequences of repeatedly making errors in judgment. The theoretical code of the various churches presented various systems by which people could live in peace and prosperity. As an invention, religion codified the nonmeasurable truths of human interaction (or tried to). If you believe that stories have no real meaning in human history (you're wrong), then math is a good and old example of apriori theoretical knowledge.
That the epistemological bias of the church suppressed the work of Galileo is unequivocal. That the epistemological bias of contemporary politics suppresses the works of Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and Hoppe is contentious.
In discussing the political institutions today, the Overton Window encompasses how to use government, not whether we should use it. Few things remain free from the influence of the state today and it is rare that a situation that arises for which we find the consensus answer: wait before we act, it is likely that there are unseen forces acting as we speak to solve this problem before we make it worse. This is the pejorative, Partisan Gridlock, which impedes the bureaucrat from perfecting his fellow man.
Practical political discourse today evokes restlessness - a sense of needing to do something; in the future, perhaps we will swing back towards humility in the unseen hands of nature. As the discussion stands, communication is made all the more contentious by the unwillingness to acknowledge the current epistemological bias towards empiricism. Thus, the Overton Window will only accept ideas framed by this bias even when the outcome will likely aggravate rather than alleviate the problem.
It is easy to correlate this idea of progress with the material benefit of scientific empiricism since the early 19th century: the explosion of scientific discoveries of the last two centuries has been a blessing in helping elevate the standard living of Earthlings. I believe, though, that this easy correlation belies the growth in something equally (probably more) important and, conversely, nonmeasurable: the growth in the idea of liberty and the enormous impact of increasing the accuracy of prices which rises in proportion to free exchange.
Science benefited from the growing acceptance of liberty as an ultimate end as more and more scientists found opportunity in the greater availability of capital and the social and political freedom to pursue previously unacceptable ideas about how the world might work. Before Locke and Hobbes, Rousseau and Hume, Kant and Adam Smith, the Overton Window of acceptable discourse was framed primarily by religious considerations. The church did not object to an error in Galileo's thinking so much as object to his presumption of offering a more accurate view of the world than could the church. The church was the authority and the authority could not be wrong, which is to say: the church made a power play more than a good argument; a play that we still see being evoked today. Galileo had an empirical view; the church had a theoretical one. In this instance, the empirical view flowed from the Renaissance of Greek logic into the Enlightenment. Empiricism would come to frame the Overton Window for centuries.
Theoretical knowledge and the possibility of gaining understanding without experience (through apriori synthetic deduction) is an old idea. We see in early oral histories a transmission of a kind science in which past experience becomes a story with a moral or a lesson. These lessons helped human civilizations persist through calamity by nipping in the bud the consequences of repeatedly making errors in judgment. The theoretical code of the various churches presented various systems by which people could live in peace and prosperity. As an invention, religion codified the nonmeasurable truths of human interaction (or tried to). If you believe that stories have no real meaning in human history (you're wrong), then math is a good and old example of apriori theoretical knowledge.
That the epistemological bias of the church suppressed the work of Galileo is unequivocal. That the epistemological bias of contemporary politics suppresses the works of Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and Hoppe is contentious.
In discussing the political institutions today, the Overton Window encompasses how to use government, not whether we should use it. Few things remain free from the influence of the state today and it is rare that a situation that arises for which we find the consensus answer: wait before we act, it is likely that there are unseen forces acting as we speak to solve this problem before we make it worse. This is the pejorative, Partisan Gridlock, which impedes the bureaucrat from perfecting his fellow man.
Practical political discourse today evokes restlessness - a sense of needing to do something; in the future, perhaps we will swing back towards humility in the unseen hands of nature. As the discussion stands, communication is made all the more contentious by the unwillingness to acknowledge the current epistemological bias towards empiricism. Thus, the Overton Window will only accept ideas framed by this bias even when the outcome will likely aggravate rather than alleviate the problem.
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