One of the fascinating discussions at the Mont Pelerin Society conference has been about the role of evolutionary psychology and its role in shaping public thinking about economic issues. Paul Rubin of Emory University spoke on this issue at the conference and, coincidentally, also had a column about the topic last week in the Wall Street Journal. As seen in the excerpt below, he discusses Hayek’s insight about our “biological constitution” and then proceeds to discuss the unfortunate tendency of many people to think that the economy is a fixed pie. This point resonates with me. If asked to identify one common characteristic of the leftists I know, my response would be that they incorrectly think one person must become poor for another person to become rich. Even when I show them data proving that this is false, their brains are hard-wired to think that total wealth is limited and that redistribution is the only way to improve the living standards of the less fortunate.
While Hayek is perhaps best known for his 1944 critique of government economic planning, “The Road to Serfdom,” he also was a pioneer in realizing that the evolutionary history of the human species was a factor for understanding current political and economic beliefs. In “The Fatal Conceit” (1988), Hayek wrote that “man’s instincts . . . were not made for the kinds of surroundings, and for the numbers, in which he now lives. They were adapted to life in the small roving bands or troops in which the human race and its immediate ancestors evolved during the few million years while the biological constitution of homo sapiens was being formed.” His insight anticipated the modern field of study called evolutionary psychology, which explains current belief systems as being based in part on our evolutionary history. …humans tend towards zero-sum thinking. That is, we do not intuitively understand the possibilities of economic growth or the benefits of trade in achieving it. Our ancestors lived in a static world with little intertribal trade and virtually no technological advance. That is the world our minds understand. This doesn’t mean that we can’t grasp the crucial concept that trade benefits both parties to a transaction—but it does mean that we must learn it. Positive-sum thinking doesn’t come naturally. By analogy, we learn to speak with no teaching, but we must be taught to read. Understanding the mutual benefits of exchange is like reading, not speech.
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The assumption of molecules-to-man evolution as some sort of cause for our response to economics is both fruitless and misguided. To go down that road, you’ll have to acknowledge that economics itself is also a product of evolution. From there, you would have to admit that economics could have been more statist-friendly in the distant past, and that it has evolved to its current state. And you would have to admit that economics could further evolve from its current state to a more statist-friendly behavior.
But of course none of us believe that, we believe it is a fixed, undeniable truth. But fixed, undeniable truths do not come from a materialistic, evolutionary goo-to-zoo-to-you theory involving only chemical reactions. It comes from God, who is Himself unchangeable.
The Bible says God created man in His image, but man has chosen to go his own way, and that “way” is not only described accurately in the Bible, it is demonstrated quite nicely in the liberal worldview. If there is no god, and if evolution is true, then we have no foundation on which to claim that we are right about economics or anything for that matter, because evolution by definition cannot evolve truth.
So the answer to liberals’ reaction to economics is found in the Bible – man hates God and everything He created. Mankind has chosen to pretend He doesn’t exist, and has set up his own value systems that violate the truths God created. Which includes economics.
[…] I’m genuinely curious why some people are opposed to this reform. Seems like it’s a win-win-win situation. Could it be that there’s some visceral, evolutionary basis for the opposition? […]
The non-fixed pie is a recent phenomenon in human history. It has only been in the last 200 or so years (the blink of an eye in the time scale of biological evolution) that the pie has seen significant increases. All previous generations of humans were born and died in the same size pie. This is why the finite pie axiom seems so ingrained in our genes. It has only been for the past 3-4 generations that we are experiencing a doubling of the pie every generation (pie doubles roughly every 25 years).
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Hence BTW the absurdity of the Global Warming calamity you mention in your next post. At a mere 3% growth rate (a conservative number indeed, since global growth rates have been in the 4% range in the past decades) the pie will be 19 times bigger (I have to keep reminding people that by simple arithmetic 1.03^100=19). And life expectancy will be double what it is today if the current trend continues (BTW past human history indicates that the growth and life expectancy trends not only continue but are actually accelerating).
So this is basically what the green left is proposing: That today, WE, the poor one pie humans, have to slow down our growth and inconvenience ourselves so that people who in 100 years will have 19 pies and live twice as long as we do, do not have to contend with a planet that is 2C warmer (*). In other words we, the short lived and poor, have to give to the future much longer lived and 19 times richer. Promotion of this most regressive of redistributions coming from the left, I must say, must be one of the most rationally dissonant areas of leftist philosophy.
So the biggest scam is not the scientific one by the socioeconomic one, the complete rejection of any current trends, replaced with the most unrealistic and pessimistic defeatism one could imagine.
Want to worry about something? Worry about nuclear weapons and WMDs, current and future. They remain, by far, the largest possibility that humanity will face an existential challenge in the next 100 years. I’m willing to bet on that over global warming, 30 to 1, hands down.
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(*) And of course, aside from the issue of current scientific integrity, future manifestation of the 2C problem assumes that humanity will not find an economically efficient technological way to deal with the issue.
Collectivism is inherently anti-evolutionary. The collectivists seek to hide from what they see as survival of the fittest, even if this evolution benefits all of humanity.
Dr Mitchell: Your blog commentaries are great!
Have you ever considered writing a book detailing these common economic fallacies that can be used as a teaching primer?
I always suspected that the genome which gives rise to modern liberalism is an evolutionary dead end.
Taking that idea one step further, classical liberalism represents a true evolution of the species, perhaps as significant as climbing down from the trees and moving to the Savanna.