Monday, November 12, 2012

"Collective Choice"?

It doesn't sound as though Peter Boettke buys into Friedrich Hayek's warning about collective choice.

Hayek wrote in his brilliant chapter in The Road to Serfdomtitled, "Why the Worst Get on Top":

..if we wish to find a high degree of uniformity and similarity of outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive and "common" instincts and tastes prevail. This does not mean that the majority of people have low moral standards. It is, as it were, the lowest common denominator which unites the largest number of people. If a numerous group is needed, strong enough to impose their views on the values of life of all the rest, it will never be those with highly differentiated and developed tastes--it will be those who form the "mass" in the derogatory sense of the term, the least original and independent, who will be able to put weight of their numbers behind their particular ideals... 
[A] potential dictator...will be able to obtain the support of all the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are prepared to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently. It is those whose vague and imperfectly formed ideas are easily swayed and whose passions and emotions are readily aroused who will thus swell the ranks of the totalitarian party.

Which means Boettke isn't going to buy into my view that we don't need any lawmakers and thus no voting at all.

Nope, Boettke is going to teach his students to be technical mechanics that will result in voters that will somehow divine the best "collective choice over public policy," damn a principled stand on liberty always and everywhere:

Our primary purpose as academic economists is to teach students the basic principles of economics so that they may become informed participants within the democratic process of collective choice over public policy.

6 comments:

  1. How does one have "Collective Choice"? if you are working on the Democratic model, the choice is not "Collective" it's majority based. You can only have a collective if there is consensus.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm pretty sure Boettke is an anarchist.

    http://analyticalanarchism.net/wp-content/uploads/Boettke-Anarchism-as-a-Progressive-Research-Program.pdf
    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871727
    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1892952

    Cut him some slack, he's working very hard to change the economic profession without scaring all of them away.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm pretty sure Boettke is an anarchist.

    http://analyticalanarchism.net/wp-content/uploads/Boettke-Anarchism-as-a-Progressive-Research-Program.pdf
    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871727
    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1892952

    Cut him some slack, he's working very hard to change the economic profession without scaring all of them away.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm pretty sure Boettke is an anarchist.

    http://analyticalanarchism.net/wp-content/uploads/Boettke-Anarchism-as-a-Progressive-Research-Program.pdf
    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871727
    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1892952

    Cut him some slack, he's working very hard to change the economics profession without scaring them all off.

    ReplyDelete
  5. LOL please delete two of those comments, my computer froze up.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Chris P- that's no excuse for him to use collectivist language and terms indiscriminately. The word "collective" is so loaded that (like "liberal") it cannot be used without the imputation of the reader.

    ReplyDelete