The pretensions of intellectuals (or why I'm happy to know that my shit stinks)

This is what I cannot abide in the scholarly world.

On the cusp of economic history

It's an interesting article discussing some novel ideas for dealing with equity issues and globablization. The proposal by Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative politician, commissioning Amartya Sen, the most important liberal economist in the world that I have studied, and Joseph Stiglitz, another recognized liberal economist, to develop a better indicator of economic progress than gross domestic product, is particularly intriguing.

Stiglitz's analysis of economic and policy matters concerns me since he and I work from different assumptions. Stiglitz assumes in much of his analysis that politicians and policymakers can better correct for market failures than participants in markets themselves.

I don't doubt that government can do good at times, and believe in active government efforts that are consistent with free trade principles and the principles of a free economy, generally. Federal Reserve efforts to improve economic growth with interest rate cuts to stimulate investment or tax cuts as economic stimulus for investment and spending are measures that make an immeasurable amount of sense to me to preserve the integrity of free markets and to provide some relief from political pressures for government to "do something" while offering some moderate and temporary stimulus which does moderate good within the market.

I believe government efforts to, for instance, regulate environmental issues would be better cast as collaborative efforts between government, business, non-profit, and other actors to solve environmental problems with freedom for participants to find approaches that best address various issues and accounting for different interests and concerns that parties might have, with coercion as an option only when death or serious health issues are certain and imminent and parties are not in good faith (and with an understanding that such measures will, generally, be far from as successful as genuinely collaborative efforts, no matter how much coercion or incentives are used).

Meaning, I think people work together better when they are free to do so without presuming, generally, that one party knows best, especially since, generally, no one party, no matter how smart they are, does know best, and, as such, parties shouldn't coerce, as much as possible, because it interrupts and corrupts this process and it can never, in any of its best case scenarios, be as successful as genuine, honest, voluntary collaboration. Efforts by Bruce Babbit and Bill Clinton to bring together logging interests and environmentalists to discuss ways to address issues of nature preserve and logging in the 1990's were a model that closer approximates what I think constructive activity would look like on this front than the current liberal obsession with regulation.

I guess my concern with Stiglitz's work and with the tone of this article is that it seems to presume that people in government have sufficiently better understanding of markets and other issues impacted and that impact markets than those who participate in markets themselves that, of course, we should presume in favor of government intervention because markets are just never perfect and economists like Joseph Stiglitz, on the other hand, are just overflowing with unchallengeable economic wisdom to make those markets operate more efficiently.

As someone who has spent much time in scholarly and policy circles at this point in my life, I just think that's a load of shit, no offense to scholars like Joseph Stiglitz who spend their lives studying such matters.

While I have been a liberal more of Stiglitz's breed, in the past - although I must restate; I am an independent, today and have no such liberal attachments, these days - I have never shared that level of faith in scholars and academics, nevertheless in politicians and policymakers who often employ their skills.

I remember reading Plato's Republic my freshman year of college and thinking, "What an arrogant and dangerous worldview." I shared Plato's concern that government was often not intelligent enough. I still share it. I shared his view that thoughtful, wiser people needed to be making decisions, if we were going to have a representative democracy, than more rash and less thoughtful people.

But I never shared Plato's faith that intellectuals, philosopher kings, could be trusted to govern for the rest of us without a liberal democratic discussion and marketplace of ideas that was always a better barometer of better ideas and policies and the freedom of individual conscience taken more seriously than any of it.

It is why I like Twain and Mencken so much and why I aspire to write in their vein, as well. Because they just didn't swallow the bullshit that academics fed themselves that they knew more than they did. And it is obvious, really, to anyone who is not being defensive of academics or anyone, for that matter. That's why I like Twain and Mencken and humorists and comedians, of all stripes, to parody the flaws that all of us and each of us have, no matter how smart we think we are.

That's why I am much more seriously skeptical of Stiglitz's worldview and the standpoint of this International Herald Tribune article than I am of the market and its failures. Because anyone whose perspective starts from, "I am smarter and therefore know what is best for others" reeks of arrogance and smugness to me. And my nose for bullshit is stronger for those who reek of that kind of smugness much more than my nose for perhaps any other kind of people. It is the fact that they are so intelligent that makes them so dangerous, in this regard, and which gives such a bad name to intellectuals and institutions of education, for those for whom such people and institutions have a bad name, than any other kind of people.

I'm plenty arrogant, at times, I'm sure. I try to be as humble as I know how. But I carry with me more humility than that line of reasoning offers, and, in the case of folks like Joseph Stiglitz, seems to offer at every corner where someone might defend the right of people to make their own decisions, even when Joseph Stiglitz doesn't think it's good for them and even when he might be right.

I have many friends who smoke, for instance. But if Stiglitz takes after their right to smoke, on the grounds of "inequitable market information," one of the funniest and most foolish arguments that could made against smoking and one of the best reasons to presume that people should be able to do even bad things to themselves without others meddling, even if those arguing for "corrections for market inefficiences" don't approve, you can be sure that I will be protesting such a move with the whole of my passionately free-thinking being, even as my smoking friends, as with many bad things in the world, would have to concede that smoking isn't good for you.

This is what concerns me most about the current political period. This assumption that so many people carry with them that they are smarter than everyone else therefore they know better. And if you don't like it, you can sit in jail for awhile while they help you sort it out for yourself better.

It smacks of Ahmadinejad, in more stylish clothing. But I'm not convinced, in the least, that such emperors wear enough clothing to cover for their hubris.

This inspires me to write.