STALE UPDATE 2: More on the irrelevance of ideas when it comes to macroeconomic policy.
This is a post I’d been thinking about for some time, rounded up a few links for back in February, and then dropped it. Here is where the procrastination comes to an end. The point I’d like to make is that intellectuals don’t matter. Murray Rothbard followed Etienne de la Boetie (to whom I prefer Franz Oppenheimer) in believing that governments only existed because people have been bamboozled into supporting them by court intellectuals. His solution was a Leninist cadre that would replace the statist propaganda with the truth. Although Bryan Caplan says Rothbard went too far, in the main he seems to agree with him and thereby find hope for anarcho-capitalism. Caplan is also a fan of the political economy of two of Rothbard’s greatest influences (Mises and Bastiat) and elsewhere quoted Keynes saying “[T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers… are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.”
I argue instead that their ideas are LESS powerful than is commonly understood, but are instead more commonly the result of the material forces to which Marx attributed ideology. I will use both Keynes and Marx as cases in point. As John T. Flynn pointed out in As We Go Marching, “Keynesian” policies of using deficit spending to boost economies were popular well before Keynes wrote his General Theory (and Rawls after-the-fact justification of New Deal egalitarianism is even more obviously an epiphenomena). I expect many people would use Marx as a counter-example of how much suffering can be caused by one person’s ideas, but I’m not convinced. First, there is a folk-Marxism which preceded Marx and made communism relatively congenial to our natures. Furthermore, there were a great many revolutionary ideologies of his time, he just happened to win out and wind up with his name associated with the relatively successful ones. Louis Blanqui and Proudhon preceded him in France, carrying on the legacy of the Jacobins. The anarchists Bakunin (Marx’s rival in the First International) and Kropotkin as well as the nihilists could quite plausibly have succeeded in bringing revolution to Russia had Marx & Engels never existed. After that Marxist revolution spread to other (mostly backward agricultural, rather than industrial as Marx predicted) countries, often in a malleable combination with nationalist anti-imperialism/colonialism. Western europe had undergone its own waves of nationalism after the printing press enabled previously distinct localities to identify with each other and stronger centralized states displaced the Catholic Church, the rest of the world followed suit in the 20th century. Beginning with the Iranian revolution and accelerated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, islamism came to replace the Marxist and secular-nationalist ideologies that previously held sway in muslim regions. These islamists don’t always behave as a “true muslim/scotsman” should, but according to most religious believers are completely ignorant of the dogma (generally the product of elite intellectuals) they claim to profess, and I would say the same was true of Marx.
Now on to psychoanalyzing people who disagree with me to explain away their disagreement. As Bryan Caplan himself has noted, referencing “The God That Failed”, it was very upsetting for people who vested their hopes in communism to give up belief in it. The hope for a libertarian change and the possibility that intellectuals/economists will contribute to it will naturally appeal to people like Rothbard & Caplan. A quote from Steve Jobs: “When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.” I share the same opinion of the media, with Megan McArdle contra Glenn Greenwald. Why do the people want what they want? Largely it’s the result of a long process of evolutionary selection. Ideology and religiosity are highly heritable, but few people will be willing to admit that and thereby make their beliefs less tenable. If political ideology were actually about ideas, we’d see a lot more diversity of opinion and pulling the rope sideways, but instead a one-dimensional model of it does a pretty good descriptive job.
One of the ways that historical selection pressures have distorted our view of reality is to make us believe appealing narratives with important protagonists rather than a long process of material forces (like evolution itself). Fashion may seem an area easily dominated by fads and trends created by high-profile celebrities imitated by the masses, but as agnostic points out, even there they are generally jumping on a bandwagon whose success is later attributed to them. Will Wilkinson, who scoffs at intelligent design in religion or economics, still thinks that a wonkish consensus of intellectuals like him that a policy is inefficient will result in its removal. Again I agree with Megan McArdle that people’s circumstances (including that of the wonks) override intellectual activity in determining preferences and policy.
STALE UPDATE: This from Drezner touches on both my impersonal determinist point here and the recent hubub about “structural” vs “policy” approaches (though it doesn’t mention libertarians).
May 2, 2009 at 11:21 pm
You mean Bakunin, not Bukharin. The latter was the ‘ABC of Communism’ guy, and a ‘right-wing’ Bolshevik arguing on behalf of a relatively market economy at times (civil war period I think).
May 3, 2009 at 12:03 am
The point I’d like to make is that intellectuals don’t matter.
Kevin MacDonald and his glorious followers are deeply saddened.
;)
Seriously, you are quite correct to point out how even the most influential of intellectuals are pawns of powerful macro trends outside their control rather than being the avant-garde trendsetters intellectuals always fancy themselves to be.
Kudos for pointing out the blatantly obvious, again.
May 3, 2009 at 9:48 am
So are you going to start writing about the genetic, as opposed to economic, infrastructure? Who controls the means of reproduction? I think Biomarxism would fill a nice market niche.
May 3, 2009 at 11:15 am
And the doctrine of “what the public wants” emanates from where?
May 3, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Thanks, Dain, I’ve corrected it. I always get those names mixed up.
Top Hat, are you the same fellow from the Codex?
statsquatch, I think the niche already has some people filling it.
Savrola, I’d say the doctrine is the result of the shift from an aristocratic patronage system to mass-public capitalism.
May 3, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Top Hat, are you the same fellow from the Codex?
Nope.
Just an ordinary reader.
May 3, 2009 at 10:14 pm
That is an awesome quote by Steve Jobs.
“Will Wilkinson, who scoffs at intelligent design in religion or economics, still thinks that a wonkish consensus of intellectuals like him that a policy is inefficient will result in its removal.”
Has he said this directly, or is this something you’re inferring from his actions? Because he must be aware of the consensus among economists on free trade, yet the persistence of tariffs and other trade barriers.
Top Hat, you say what TGGP said is “blatantly obvious.” Unless you are trying to convince us of your own intelligence, it seems like you have a very optimistic impression of most people.
May 3, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Megan quotes Will saying this: “But I think this kind of wonk consensus building really matters over the medium-term. Democracy is not a mechanical cui bono machine and elite opinion can, when not coopted by the incentives of the parties, work as a countervailing force.”
When I hear the phrase “countervailing force” I reach for my gun. Though to be honest, I reach for my gun for any damn reason.
May 3, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Hah. That claim is a little too qualitative and qualified to be worth much.
May 3, 2009 at 11:43 pm
I suppose so. I guess I saved the link months ago and then relied on memory when I finally wrote this post. But on the other hand, we seem to persistently have stupid policies for a loooooong time. There’s not many issues where I’m betting on the wonks against inertia. Maybe a Pigou gas tax, but that’s not really scrapping an existing stupid policy so much as creating a new one (taxes on gas currently are for transportation costs and I believe they still would pay for that in addition).
May 4, 2009 at 12:14 am
Yeah, I don’t think expert consensus is too influential either. I was just pointing out that that technically, Willkinson will always be right, since his statement basically boils down to “it is logically possible for an expert consensus to have an effect.” Hard to argue with, though not very interesting.
May 4, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Yes. I’d also like to see more people ask whether there are other factors causing a shift in both expert consensus and policy and thereby giving the impression of causality.
May 9, 2009 at 1:41 pm
[…] Against Rothbard and Keynes, for Marx by TGGP […]
May 15, 2009 at 3:06 pm
[…] whether, outside of a few fringe figures, there is any genuine anti-war Left at all, and TGGP disses Rothbard’s and Keynes’s (and also, though he is not mentioned, Hayek’s) view of […]
July 1, 2009 at 4:03 pm
It’s not so much the material productive forces, as a complex web of incentives and popular beliefs which can feed across each other in very strange ways. I agree, ideas matter less than is predictably supposed by intellectuals. The average democrat, liberal or libertarian is a nitwit, almost in proportion to his fervor. What drives political institutions is a mixture of pecuniary, status and inhereted ideology – and by inhereted ideology I mean Vulgar Ideology.
This is one of the main reasons activism is almost totally pointless, the people who actually control most of society’s structure are biased and not interested in economics, much less higher philosophy.
July 1, 2009 at 6:04 pm
I think the incentives are very closely tied to the material forces. An industrial society will have different incentives than an agricultural one will have different incenties than a hunter-gatherer one. Marx believed that the popular beliefs were themselves a product of the material structure of society.
I don’t know if you came here from there or it’s just a coincidence, but the Austrian Economists have a post up now on the irrelevance of ideas. More support there for my position here.
July 1, 2009 at 7:43 pm
“Marx believed that the popular beliefs were themselves a product of the material structure of society.”
The thing is, the ‘value-structure’ is still subjective; what is a ‘material productive force’ depends on what you want to do. The influences of specific traditions, social norms, and of course the structure of the economy will all affect how people act; and the ‘structure of the economy’ is largely an outcome of people pursuing – perhaps often predictable, or typical – subjective desires based on their expectations of efficacy. If the ‘material productive forces’ were that strongly deterministic, laissez-faire capitalism would have smashed the competition. It hasn’t because there are other things that determine what people see as valuable, many of which don’t translate well into interpersonal exchange goods but strongly influence the structure around which these are produced and distributed.
July 1, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Also, I read that Austrian Economists post earlier, that’s basically what I thought.
August 11, 2020 at 9:34 pm
Over a decade since I wrote this I saw it suggested below one of my more recent posts. It’s doubtful anyone will notice this more recent comment, but I thought it worth noting that I recently revisited the topic of Marxism being an effect rather than cause of revolutionary socialism, comparing it to Christianity and citing a paper by Phil Magness on Marx’s citations after the October revolution. That was a comment on a blog discussing the A Song of Ice and Fire series, and in an odd coincidence I didn’t think to connect until now, around the same time another blog which usually discusses that brought up the topic of rival socialist ideologies which might have been more popular if not for the success of the Bolsheviks in that revolution.
November 11, 2021 at 11:24 pm
[…] by Murray Rothbard (rather than the pacifist Robert Le Fevre, as Brian Doherty claims), but Rothbard was both a professed anarcho-capitalist and a “Leninist” who thought a […]