It’s been a while since I’ve checked up on the Propaganda Clearing House of the Discoverup Institute, a place so ridiculous I can almost always count on blagging material to be there waiting for me. Among the various participants, a frequent target of derision is one David Klinghoffer, who can usually be seen pinching off half-arguments and misdirection with breathtaking rapidity. Now it appears that David is preparing to write a series of essays on how Darwinism leads to Communism (yes, in addition to 19th. century Anglo-Saxon capitalist imperialism, Darwinism leads to the opposite). He gets off to about as strong of a start as you can expect with his introductory post:
Does Darwinism lend support more naturally to a capitalist moral-economic perspective or to some other competing philosophical standpoint, say, a Marxist one?
Economic historian Niall Ferguson takes the former view…
…
Ferguson describes the “creative destruction” that comes about when financial institutions can’t cut it in the marketplace and so fail and disappear, to be replaced with better adapted competitors. Darwinian capitalism?
I’d like to stop here to note that, while I (like Klinghoffer) haven’t read Ferguson’s book, these sorts of analogies tend to annoy me. Darwinian processes involve variation, retention and selection based on differential reproductive success. The overlap with market forces only tends to involve a very superficially analogous mechanism to the third attribute. Market forces are not Darwinian, and most attempts to compare them lead to confusion rather than insight from what I’ve seen.
That being said, David Klinghoffer manages to get a whole lot wrong even given Ferguson’s premise:
“Unless your moral, political, and philosophical ideas are completely untethered by reality, then the way you picture in your mind the rules by which the world does work should have some impact on the way you think it should work. So the various answers that have been offered to the question of how life developed naturally lend themselves to the construction of philosophies that answer other, more practical questions, including how human fulfillment is achieved in the economic realm. Why not that? The notion that theories of evolution properly contribute nothing to theories of how wealth is created and divided just makes no sense.”
That’s it right there, David Klinghoffer simply doesn’t understand the naturalistic fallacy. Let’s try this reasoning in a simple scenario: gravitation informs us that objects will fall toward the surface of the earth; ergo, it is immoral to build airplanes in defiance of this law. See? Any form of moral reasoning that leads you to such absurd conclusions is obviously flawed.
And what is this nonsense about evolution in general telling us “how economic fulfillment is achieved”? Economics is basically the subject of how humans organize societies in a transactional fashion, and as far as how species cooperate and exchange, nature shows us all kinds of wildly varying strategies for such among different species. While a primate species like us tends to be individualistic to a far greater degree than, say, honey bees or ants, both are products of evolution.
“If life’s history required the guidance of a transcendent source of intelligence, that has consequences in the realm of economics. If life developed without guidance, but merely under the power of a Darwinian mechanism, that too has consequences, probably different ones.
The problem comes in determining what those consequences are. I haven’t read Ferguson’s book, but it sounds like he’s offering the traditional Darwinian tautology: The fittest firms survive. And what, in economic history, defines fitness? Well, survival. Because, you see, those that survive are, uh, those that survive.”
And here we see that Klinghoffer takes a famously bad argument and transplants it to another realm, which is hilarious since the abstraction performed here reveals just how stupid said argument is. Firms fail because of cost-ineffectiveness, lack of profitability, or a number of other things. Fitness, of efficiency, in economics can be defined independently of survival. The same goes in biology, thus the appeal to circularity here is faulty.
“Starting tomorrow, I would like to devote a couple posts to the thesis that Communism has deeper Darwinian roots than many of us realize. That, in fact, even though Marx had already begun sketching the outlines of his ideas before Darwin published the Origin of Species — the Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848, the Origin in 1859 — he is fairly called a Darwinist. That, finally, the men who translated Marxism into practical political terms in the form of Soviet terror were evolutionary thinkers, just as they themselves claimed to be.”
(Italics in original.)
What are the odds the David Klinghoffer is going to provide an honest appraisal of Darwinian biology and how it differs from the neo-Lamarckism that was popular among the Communist revolutionaries of the early 20th. century? Judging by the quality thus far, I’ll say “not much.”
January 17, 2009 at 6:51 pm |
Klinghoffer’s an idiot.
OK, that out of the way, I’d like to quibble with you just a little–politely, though, because unlike Klinghoffer you’re not an idiot.
I believe markets do involve the factors variation and retention. In fact of all three of the factors listed, I think variation is the one most markedly demonstrated by markets, as entrepreneurs innovate variations in products and processes constantly. Most are absolute busts (something like 80% of all product launches fail–there’s the selective process, although whether it’s “natural” is probably a pointless question), much like most genetic mutations are harmful. Some are successful variations, but cannot fairly said to be retained because they are too faddish (e.g, pet rocks). Some, however, are both successful and are retained, although of course the spread through the economic/business population is via mimicry rather than genetical reproduction.
But given that, it’s clear that biology has given economists a useful way to look at the market–it’s pretty much a one-way street of influence, as far as I know. The only economic ideas that I’m aware of influence biology at all is benefit/cost analysis.
But certainly Darwinian thought does not lead to communism. Indeed in a communist economic system, there is no competition–everything is a state monopoly. As a consequence there is exceptionally little variation/innovation. Perhaps theories of group selection could apply to communism, but old-style group selection is more thoroughly dead than Marxist thought.
So to return to where I begun, Klinghoffer’s an idiot.
January 17, 2009 at 9:12 pm |
James,
Perhaps markets involve variation, although it sounds to me as though what you’ve described is more a peripheral effect than a primary mechanism. The core of the issue, I think, is that firms are selected for cost-effectiveness of individuals rather reproductive success in populations. That, and whatever variation/retention is going on is Lamarckian in nature rather than Darwinian.
January 21, 2009 at 2:39 pm |
Aha! But that means that the unit of selection is the “product” or the “process”, entities which are far less tied to individual corporations than genes are to organisms.
In principle, nothing prevents the central planning agency of a communist state from trying different “products” and “processes”, gathering data and choosing to go with which works best. They could implement different pesticides on different collective farms, for example. The overall effect would still be a change over time in the relative frequencies of different products/processes — a shift in the meme pool, to speak loosely.
Natural selection is the change over generations of heritable characteristics due to differential survival of randomly varying replicators. In order to apply this principle to a hypothetical system, one must define what the replicators are and how heritable traits are associated with them. One could try to model corporations as the replicators and products as traits, and this would be a model for a particular kind of society. However, one could also build a model wherein the agents are memes competing for supremacy in the Politburo.
January 21, 2009 at 3:41 pm |
Tyler,
Re: Variation as peripheral vs. primary. Neoclassical microeconomics focuses on equilibrium models, so in that approach variation would be peripheral. But Schumpeterian/Austrian approaches focus on constant variation (creative destruction) as the primary characteristic of markets. I’m a Schumpeterian/Austrian in that sense–variation, the search for some change in product or process that will pull customers from someone else to you, or that will reduce your costs is indeed the primary characteristic of free markets.
I’m not clear enough on the meaning of your middle sentence to comment. As to your last comment, indeed Lamarckianism is closer to the mark than a “true” Darwinian (genetic) model (Blake Stacey’s first point is, I believe, quite correct). However I’m not sure Lamarckianism is quite an accurate depiction either. It may be something slightly different altogether. And, again, I’m not trying to say the market is a Darwinian process (except when I’m speaking very casually) or that it’s even a very close analogue, just that the theory of natural selection provided economists with a new way to understand the market–a new way that, while not a perfect descriptor, revealed new aspects of the market that were not clearly recognized or understood before.
Blake Stacey, as an insitutionalist (scholar of institutional structure) I would say that in principle something generally does prevent central planning processes from trying new methods/products. At least that’s the predominant empirical experience, that bureaucracies are most often very resistant to change. Theoretically, I lean towards explaining it by selection bias. Bureaucrats are self-selected, and entrpreneurial/innovative types tend to self-select themselves out of bureaucracies–because bureaucracies are most strongly characterized by rule-boundedness–whereas non-innovative, rule-following, types are most likely to self-select themselves into the bureaucracy.
January 21, 2009 at 5:17 pm |
James,
Innovation can be one successful strategy for mutual competitors in a market system, but it is far from the only strategy such competitors use. Microsoft dominates the OS market despite hardly being known for their innovation, for example. That’s why I refer to it as a peripheral effect of market forces (i.e., the drive for profits) rather than a primary mechanism.
I’m sorry for not being clear as to the meaning of my middle sentence, but here is a less wonky version: firms are selected on an individual basis and what is being selected is the ability to turn a profit, populations of organisms in biology are selected based on their ability to out reproduce their competitors. Hopefully that is clearer.
January 21, 2009 at 6:19 pm |
A cybernetics or “complex systems” person would probably try to describe the shortcomings of bureaucracies by invoking Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety and pointing to the bottlenecks in information flow at the narrowest points of the bureaucratic network. Evolutionary theory would not be directly useful.
On the other hand, nothing in evolutionary theory forbids the rise of replicators with bottlenecks in their internal information flow. Indeed, quite the opposite.
January 21, 2009 at 11:23 pm |
[...] comment on the subsequent posts to the revisionist series on Communism and “Darwinism” promised to us by David Klinghoffer, but after seeing statements like this: “The relationship between [...]