The Open Society and Its Complexities

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The author, Gerald Gaus, died shortly after completing this book. It was nominated for last year's Hayek Book Prize by the Manhattan Institute.

I picked it via Interlibrary Loan, which was unfortunate. If I'd browsed through it off a library shelf, I probably would have quietly put it back. It's very complex and dense, and I had to go into "look at every page" mode for long stretches. There's even math (page 219):

xi = xi-1 + 1 ± (p × yi-1) ± (q × Zi-1)

I don't know how well that will translate on Goodreads. But in any case, that tells you the intended audience for the book: those who can look at that and say "Ah, of course." (I can almost tell what's going on: it's intended to model the evolution of a social policy that has a number of "targets", which are influenced by each other and a couple other independent parameters.)

So what did I understand?

Gaus's goal here is to update the concept of the "Open Society" as described by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper. (Hayek usually called it the "Great Society".) In the decades since that framework was promulgated, there have been immense strides in anthropology, evolution (biological and cultural), economics, and game theory. How does (especially) Hayek hold up?

It's a mixed bag. Hayek was pessimistic; he speculated that the ethos of small-tribe hunter-gatherer societies was more or less hard-wired into our brains, and those egalitarian biases could well flummox any effort to establish a classical-liberal order for the long term. Gaus objects that before those small tribes developed, we were more like our closest primate kinfolk: chimps and bonobos. And those species aren't egalitarian at all. So there's every reason to suppose that we aren't hardwired egalitarians.

Gaus goes on to examine how social morality and cooperation can evolve, given the (actually) unchanging bits of human nature, diversity of attitudes, values, and talents, and changing environments and resources. Lots of game theory here. Basically, Gaus winds up agreeing with Hayek's belief that "grand plans" for human society were misguided; instead, society can and should evolve on its own, self-organizing. Probably painfully, but necessarily so. "Governors" at every level of society can help by measured, small-scale fixes. But much remains outside their power. Gaus is pretty optimistic about the long-term prospects for the Open Society.


Last Modified 2024-01-17 9:30 AM EDT

URLs du Jour

2022-07-06

  • One last Independence Day post. And it's this tweet from the Free Staters:

    Unfortunately, you have to click through to see the template, but trust me, it's worth it.

    I know the Free Staters are a little wacky, and everyone respectable hates them, but still, that's pretty good.


  • The Dude abides. Jeff Maurer takes an unconventional tack in his analysis of a recent SCOTUS decision: A Stoner Question Has Changed the Course of Climate Policy.

    The Supreme Court justices all agree on one thing: Congress sucks. “Congress has become a pathetic little circle jerk in which sad losers publicly crap their pants,” Justice Roberts (for all intents and purposes) wrote in his majority opinion on West Virginia v. EPA. “These feckless donkey turds wouldn’t know good legislation if it kicked them in the taint,” Justice Kagan (basically) wrote in a stinging dissent. In what’s probably the most contentious era of the Court in our lifetime, all nine justices concur that Congress is a rubber room for useless little dorks.

    However, the justices disagree on who, specifically, is metaphorically stealing Congress’ lunch money and throwing their backpack into the girl’s bathroom. The conservatives think it’s the bureaucracy: “EPA claimed to discover unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its regulatory authority in the vague language of a long-extant, but rarely used, statute,” the Court (actually) wrote. The liberal justices think the Supreme Court is usurping Congress’ power; Justice Kagan (for reals) opined that the Court had “[stripped] the Environmental Protection Agency of the power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.’” This chasm in opinion led to starkly different views in the 6-3 ruling that greatly reduced EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases.

    I don't totally agree with Maurer's preferred policy option, but his analysis is (even more) R-rated hilarity and I recommend it.


  • Think of the children! Specifically, think of the crappy books they'll be reading. Kat Rosenfield (a book author herself) looks at the latest trend in publishing: Sensitivity Readers Are the New Literary Gatekeepers.

    Alberto Gullaba Jr. was the type of author that publishers dream of having in their catalogs. A first-generation college grad, a child of working-class immigrants, and the recent recipient of a Master of Fine Arts degree from the prestigious University of California, Irvine, program, Gullaba was a debut novelist with a gift for visceral and vivid prose. His first book, University Thugs, had all the makings of a smash hit. A work of character-driven literary fiction steeped in immersive vernacular, it tells the story of a young black man named Titus who is trying to make his way at an elite university in the wake of a criminal conviction—all while the school is being rocked by racial scandals, not unlike the racial reckoning that consumed so many American institutions in the summer of 2020.

    Gullaba's agent knew he had something special, and he was excited for a big submission push. But on the eve of sending the manuscript out to publishers, the agent suggested Gullaba update his bio to emphasize his racial identity. Publishers, he reasoned, would be excited to support a young black writer fresh on the literary scene.

    There was a problem: Gullaba is Filipino.

    "We had never met in person," he tells me, laughing. "I guess you can't really judge who's black or not based on a name like Alberto, and Gullaba is just ethnically ambiguous enough that it could be from Africa? I don't know."

    What was clear, immediately, was that something had changed. The agent wasn't excited anymore. Actually, he seemed downright nervous, and he started asking for significant changes to the manuscript.

    "The guy's frightened," Gullaba says. "God bless him, that's the reality of that world."

    At first, Gullaba was asked to add an Asian character—east Asian, specifically, perhaps a Pacific Islander. Then it was suggested that Titus' wingman, the biggest secondary character, should also be assigned an Asian identity. And there was one more bizarre twist: Another agency employee, who we'll call Sally, was brought in at the eleventh hour to read the book and provide additional feedback.

    "My agent was like, 'I don't want to do this, it makes me very uncomfortable,'" Gullaba says. "But then he says it."

    Sally, the agent explained, was black.

    And Sally was a so-called "sensitivity reader". Ms. Rosenfield's article goes on to describe the outcome.

    Now, youth fiction has near-always been a minefield for authors. (Please see Robert Heinlein's battles with his publisher of juveniles back in the 1950s.) Still it seems that the field is aiming to produce books that are as processed and predictable as a bag of Cheetos.


  • With a headline like this… I barely need to excerpt the article. Jacob Sullum complains: The FDA Perversely Seeks to Make Both Cigarettes and Harm-Reducing Alternatives Less Appealing: The Agency's Policies Would Boost the Black Market and Smoking-Related Deaths.

    The Food and Drug Administration wants to prevent smoking-related deaths by making cigarettes less appealing. Toward that end, the FDA plans to ban menthol cigarettes and limit nicotine content to "reduce the addictiveness of cigarettes."

    Meanwhile, the FDA seems determined to make vaping products, the most promising harm-reducing alternative to cigarettes, less appealing to smokers. The perverse combination of these two regulatory strategies would undermine public health in the name of promoting it.

    "Undermine public health" is a nice way of saying "kill more people". Thanks, FDA!


Last Modified 2022-07-06 3:51 PM EDT