Anti-Statism: The Neo-Con Dream

Along with John Dewey, Friderich A. Hayek has been misquoted and misconstrued to high heaven. Francis Fukuyama gets beyond cant (thanks be to Dr. Samuel Johnson) and nonsense. If this is (fair & balanced) neo-conservatism, so be it.

[x Chronicle of Higher Education]
HAYEK’S CHALLENGE: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek.
By Bruce Caldwell
Univ. of Chicago Press.
489 pp. $55

Reviewed by Francis Fukuyama

The intellectual distance the Western world has traversed over the past two generations in how we think about markets, the state, and economic policy is nowhere better illustrated than in the changing reputation of the Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992). In the decade after publication of Hayek’s tract The Road to Serfdom (1944), in which he argued that expansion of the European welfare state was of a piece with spreading totalitarianism, he was regarded as little more than a right-wing crank, a provocateur who dressed up his own normative preferences for markets and individual freedom in the language of science. Today, by contrast, Hayek wears a richly de­served mantle of intellectual respectability. Win­ner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, he is rightly seen as the intellectual godfather of the pro-market revolution that swept the West with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He has spawned an enormous following that extends well beyond the social sciences.

And yet, even those who claim to admire Hayek rarely understand that many of his most important ideas are critical not just of state intervention and planning as practiced by the Left, but of dominant currents in contemporary neoclassical economics as championed by the Right. Bruce Caldwell’s impressive new biography pulls together these themes and shows how the second critique logically grows out of the first.

All the threads in Hay­ek’s thought came together in the so-called socialist calculation debate of the late 1930s, in which he and other Austrian school economists challenged the view that centralized planning would yield greater economic growth. In such works as “Economics and Knowledge” and “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Hayek’s critique of socialism was, at its core, empirical rather than normative. He argued that human knowledge is inevitably partial: There are limits to rationality, and what any individual knows tends to be local in nature. This is particularly true in a macroeconomy, which depends on the interactions of thousands, even millions, of individual producers and consumers.

The problem with socialism, Hayek argued, is that it seeks to replace the dispersed knowledge of those myriad actors with that of a single, omniscient planner. Socialist central planning cannot work because it attempts the impossible: using a stat­ic equilibrium model to capture unfathomably complex inputs and outputs char­­ac­terized by dynamic, constantly shifting equilibria. In market economies, by contrast, the price mechanism provides information about preferences and relative scarcities to thousands of agents, whose continual exchanges produce a socially beneficial if unplanned outcome.

At the time of the socialist calculation debate, the Soviet economy was growing rapidly and the capitalist West was reeling from the Great Depression, leading many to consider socialism the superior system. Empirical validation of the Hayek thesis would have to await later decades, when centrally planned economies began to display huge dysfunctions arising from precisely the kinds of informational problems he had outlined. Today, virtually no one believes that the coordinating function of the price mechanism in a free market can be replaced by central planners using even the most powerful supercomputers. And we are much more likely to accept Hayek’s broader insight that social order—not simply markets but morality, social norms, the rule of law, and the like—is often the spontaneous and unplanned consequence of the interactions of dispersed individuals with limited knowledge, not the work of a single designer.

But Hayek also offered a far more profound critique of the limits of human reason, which extended to the models that would come to underlie postwar American neoclassical economics and, thus, the economics that we teach university students to this day. Caldwell explains that a constant theme in Hayek’s writing—from his early critique of “scientism” in his “Abuse of Reason” project to his last published work, The Fatal Conceit (1988)—is a critique not just of real-world planners but of positivist social scientists who aim to turn the study of human behavior into something as empirical and predictive as the physical sciences.

Like contemporary neoclassical economists, Hayek was a “methodological individualist” who believed that the behavior of groups needs to be explained in terms of the interactions of the individuals who make up the collectivity. But his view of individual choice was far more nuanced and complex than the typical neoclassical model of economic man. He understood that individuals are neither omniscient nor fully ration­al and are constrained by institutions, norms, and traditions that can be understood only through a study of history.

As Caldwell notes, Hayek initially thought the dividing line between possible and impossible positivism lay in the distinction between natural sciences and social sciences, but by the 1950s he had come to understand that the issue was really one of complexity. A positivist, predictive science is possible only for phenomena, whether human or natural, that are relatively simple—particle physics, for example. One can never fully model and predict complex phenomena such as the spontaneous orders produced by the interactions of simpler agents. These orders include the human brain, whose higher functions cannot possibly be inferred from its physical substratum, as well as ecosystems and, of course, markets, cultures, and other human institutions.

Hayek, in other words, fully anticipated the rise of what we now know as the study of complex adaptive systems, or complexity science. Drawing much of its inspiration from evolutionary biology, this approach is today practiced in such places as the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary think tank that uses agent-based simulations to model the emergence of complex behaviors on the part of larger collectivities. But Hayek would doubtless disapprove of the research agenda in much of the complexity field, which seeks to use these models to produce deterministic, predictive outcomes.

One of the most interesting parts of Caldwell’s book is the epilogue, which quotes Hayek toward the end of his life as saying he regretted his failure to return to his critique of Milton Friedman’s Essays in Positive Economics (1953) as much as his failure to revisit his critique of John Maynard Keynes. Hayek’s critique had not to do, of course, with Friedman’s preference for markets and limited government, but rather with his belief that economics could be turned into a rigorously empirical and predictive science. Caldwell notes that while econometric methodology has become far more sophisticated, and game-theoretic models ever more complex, economics’ promise to cumulate knowledge about universal laws of human behavior has remained largely unfulfilled. Thus, the highly mathematical and ahistorical turn that academic economics has taken in recent years would have been, for Hayek, as much an abuse of reason as the socialist planning of earlier generations.

Hayek’s Challenge is, as its subtitle implies, a purely intellectual biography that seeks to interpret the body of Hayek’s written work. One finds virtually no details of Hayek’s personal life—why he divorced his wife, or how he reacted to being awarded the Nobel Prize alongside the leftist Gunnar Myrdal. Instead, the book begins with a lengthy and informative intellectual history of Austrian economics, touching on such issues as the debate between Carl Menger and Gustav Schmoller of the German historical school. This exposition is critical to understanding the intellectual milieu in which Hayek studied, as well as interesting in itself because it anticipates the controversies that continue to divide contemporary positivist social science from more historical and ethnographic approaches to understanding things human.

Caldwell, an economic historian at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, ends his book by plaintively noting that the un-Hayekian agenda of turning economics into a rigorous science has driven all other approaches, including the study of economic history, out of American economics departments. But the damage done by this positivist approach is, in fact, much greater. Economic methodology has colonized political science too, eliminating individuals with knowledge of real peoples, cultures, and history—for example, experts on the Middle East—from the country’s top schools. We are thus presented with a rather depressing picture of human progress. Although the particular brand of intellectual hubris that elevated central planning over markets is gone, other forms persist, and indeed have grown stronger. Hayek’s challenge remains an open one.


Francis Fukuyama is Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. His books include The End of History and the Last Man (1991), The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (1999), and Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002).

Copyright ©, 2004 Wilson Quarterly

Alan King, RIP

Ah, the Sunday evenings of my childhood and youth: the Ed Sullivan Show and a perennial appearance by Alan King. What a wiseguy. When he met Queen Elizabeth after a Command Performance, she said, How do you do, Mr. King? Alan King replied: How do you do, Mrs. Queen? It this is (fair & balanced) effrontery, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
May 10, 2004
Alan King, Comic With Chutzpah, Dies at 76
By BRUCE WEBER

Alan King, the stand-up comedian who parlayed a borscht-belt sense of humor, a tummler's cheek and a big appetite for the limelight into a thoroughgoing show business career that lasted more than half a century, died Sunday morning at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. He was 76 and lived in Kings Point, N.Y.

The cause was lung cancer, said his wife of 57 years, Jeanette.

Mr. King was an unabashed exemplar of Jewish comedy, a through-and-through New Yorker whose sensibility, delivery and accent never migrated far from their Brooklyn roots. As a boy he worked in the Catskills and sang on the radio, and he was schooled in the rimshot wisecrack by Milton Berle.

Mr. King met Berle at the New York nightclub Leon and Eddie's, becoming the older comedian's protégé — and sometimes sharing dinner with him at Lindy's — while he was still a teenager. But Mr. King was never Berlesque in his own work, never the self-mocking goofball. He grew into his own swaggering persona — part impatient executive, part cranky citizen, part bedeviled husband and father — complete with elegant haberdashery, a long cigar and, frequently, an expression that seemed to indicate he had just eaten something disagreeable and was striving to rid his mouth of an unpleasant taste.

Over time, he evolved from a traditional joke-telling comedian into an astute addresser of audiences. "Why is everybody carrying on about Woolworth's?" he asked a black audience at a rally after the first lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960's. "Have you ever eaten at the counter at Woolworth's? If you wanted to sit in the Colony Club I could understand." Indeed, he became something of a first-person monologuist whose influence can be seen in the work of Robert Klein, David Steinberg and even Bill Cosby.

Mr. King became especially well known through his 56 appearances — only the Italian puppet mouse Topo Gigio and the Canadian comedy team Wayne and Schuster had more — on "The Ed Sullivan Show" during the 1950's and 60's and his frequent guest-host appearances on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson." But that was hardly the extent of his ambition or his fame.

A prolific nightclub performer and renowned toastmaster who became a member of the Friars Club in 1945 — shortly after he opened for Frank Sinatra and shortly before doing the same, at the Palace Theater, for Judy Garland — he was a man who rarely met a podium he didn't like. And he stood on some important ones. In January 1961, he was the M.C. for part of President John F. Kennedy's inaugural party; in 1972, he was host of the Academy Awards.

"Modesty is not one of my virtues," he told The New York Times in an interview in 1993. Stretched by ambition, his career included 29 films as a character actor (he specialized in rabbis, show business agents and gangsters) and myriad guest appearances on television, not to mention, in 1986, a pilot film for a never-broadcast sitcom, "The Alan King Show," in which he was to play a beleaguered college professor. By the time he had his own HBO special in 1987, long before that became a measure of a comedian's arrival, he had already become, as John J. O'Connor noted in his otherwise negative review in The Times, "a show business institution."

He was a producer of both film and theater (his Broadway credits included "The Lion in Winter" in 1968); he was host of "Inside the Comedy Mind," a series of interviews with other comedians that was a staple on Comedy Central in that cable channel's early days; he was an executive producer of the Toyota Comedy Festival in New York from 1992 to 2002. A well-known tennis fanatic, he founded a pro tournament, the Alan King Tennis Classic, in Las Vegas, which he sponsored at Caesars Palace in the 1970's.

He was the author of five books, including "The Alan King Great Jewish Joke Book" and a collection of reminiscences, "Matzo Balls for Breakfast and Other Memories of Growing Up Jewish," to be published next year by Simon & Schuster. He also appeared onstage, most recently in the title role in "Mr. Goldwyn," a 2002 Off Broadway play about the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn, whom Mr. King portrayed as a man of chutzpah and brass very much like himself.

Less well known was his charity work, which included fund-raising for the Nassau Center for Emotionally Disturbed Children on Long Island, his establishment of a chair in dramatic arts at Brandeis and the founding of the Alan King Diagnostic Medical Center in Jerusalem.

Alan King was born Irwin Alan Kniberg on Dec. 26, 1927, in Brooklyn; he grew up in Williamsburg and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His father, Bernard, was a handbag cutter. Both his parents were Russian immigrants, and as he recalled in his autobiography, "Name-Dropping: The Life and Lies of Alan King" (Scribner, 1996), when he took his mother, Minnie, to see "Fiddler on the Roof," he thought the fictional village of Anatevka might bring back memories of her own childhood village. "And when the show was over and we were back on the street," Mr. King wrote, "I said, `Ma, how did you enjoy it? Did it bring back memories?' `It was wonderful,' she said. `Only I don't remember so much singing.' "

Mr. King seemed to know — or at least to have met — everyone in New York, Hollywood, Washington, Las Vegas and a few other places besides, from David Dinkins to Henny Youngman, from the Kennedys to the McEnroes, from Frank Sinatra and Jack Benny to Bugsy Siegel and Jesse Owens. (Even the family house in Great Neck had a pedigree: it was built by Oscar Hammerstein.)

After performing for the British royal family, the story goes, he was introduced to Queen Elizabeth.

"How do you do, Mr. King?" she is reported to have said.

"How do you do, Mrs. Queen?" he is said to have replied.

Even his wife was impressed by this who's who. Although he often made use of marital humor in his act ("If you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books"), she recalled in her own wry chapter of Mr. King's autobiography that putting up with it was worth something.

"I met the queen of England," she wrote, "and Clark Gable."

In addition to his wife, whom he met in Brooklyn when they were teenagers, Mr. King is survived by two sons, Robert, of Manhattan, and Andrew, of Washington Township, N.J.; a daughter, Elainie Gagné of Vermont; and seven grandchildren.

In recent years, responding to suggestions that he slow down, he scoffed. A gardener, he was especially proud of his roses, but stopping to smell them, he said, wasn't as pleasurable as making people laugh.

"You only live once," he said. "Except for Shirley MacLaine."

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company

NIMBY

The beat goes on. Amarillo is in a racial uproar. The Amarillo police arrested an African-American man in a park in a largely black neighborhood last week. The man—with a number of prior convictions—resisted arrest and the police used TASER guns to subdue him. This activity brought a mob into the park and others were arrested. In the melee, the Amarillo police lost a TASER gun, a set of handcuffs, and the keys to a squad car. Since the arrest, accusations of police brutality and police department denials have filled the air and the Amarillo fishwrap headlines. The racial climate in Amarillo was already charged. On Martin L. King, Jr. Day in mid-January, city officials dedicated the Amarillo airport to Astronaut (and local hero) Rick Husband with a cumbersome name-change and a large statue of the late Challenger commander. There was no official recognition of Martin L. King, Jr. Day in Amarillo in 2004. The African-American community was offended and community leaders lately renewed a demand for a street named for Dr. King. The Amarillo white community and civic leadership have resisted such an action for years. A park in the largely black neighborhood of Amarillo was created and named for Dr. King a few years ago. However, the idea of a major traffic artery named for Dr. King is more than the white majority in Amarillo will tolerate. Lo, and behold, Amarillo, Texas is not alone. Zephyrhills, Florida is equally divided. In the aftermath of the rioting after the assassination of Dr. King, the Kerner Commission found that the color line in the United States was hardening and that two nations were emerging: one white and one black. If this is (fair & balanced) prophecy, so be it.

[x Ny Times]
May 10, 2004
Honor for Dr. King Splits Florida City, and Faces Reversal
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

ZEPHYRHILLS, Fla., May 8 — It is a languid, pretty street lined with fat orange trees and live oaks, buzzing lawn mowers, an occasional picket fence. It runs clear through town, ambling over the railroad tracks and ending at a pasture full of cows.

Its new name, Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, has been tearing Zephyrhills apart.

Gregg Matthews for The New York Times
A demonstration last week in Zephyrhills, Fla., supported Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.

Last October, Irene Dobson, a black woman, asked the City Council to rename the street for Dr. King, as hundreds of places have done since his death in 1968. The Council voted 4 to 1 on Oct. 27 to honor her request and ordered new signs for the street that had been Sixth Avenue.

The protests quickly began. A petition to recall the council members arose, along with another to overturn the decision. Sixth Avenue residents said that the Council had railroaded the plan without consulting them and that they did not want the bother of changing their addresses. A business owner told local newspapers that property values would fall, saying streets named after Dr. King were a guarantee of economic blight.

Their battle mirrors dozens that have erupted around the country over plans to rename streets for Dr. King, but with a twist: on Monday, the City Council is to finalize a reversal of its vote and remove Dr. King's name. The decision would put Zephyrhills among only a handful of cities that have put up street signs bearing Dr. King's name, then taken them down because of community uproar. Accusations of racism are swirling, supporters of the name change are picketing City Hall, and a white supremacist Web site is praising the Council's change of heart.

Virtually all of the protesters are white, as are most of the 11,000 people who live in Zephyrhills, which is 35 miles northeast of Tampa and known for the bottled spring water that carries its name, with the slogan "Pure Water from a Pure Place." Most of the roughly 100 people who signed Mrs. Dobson's petition requesting the name change are black. Many, like her, live near Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue on the other side of the train tracks, outside the city limits. But most residents of the renamed street are white.


The City Council voted last year to name Sixth Avenue for Dr. King.

Bitterness is everywhere: in the Crystal bar, where customers rolled their eyes when asked about the name change; in a driveway on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, where four men socializing after work said they had been robbed of their voice; and in front of City Hall, where Mae Pickett, waving a sign supporting the renaming, said the rift reminded her of 1967, when she and other black students joined whites at Zephyrhills High School instead of being bused to nearby Dade City.

"It's 2004 and we're still fighting for respect," said Ms. Pickett, who was among about 20 protesters at Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Eighth Street on Thursday afternoon. "They've put out all these excuses about the process not followed, but it's racism, plain and simple."

Just as emotional are those who fought the name change, or silently questioned it, and say they have been unfairly maligned.

"We're just kind of sick about the thing and wish it would go away," said Cullen E. Smith Jr., whose family has been here for six generations and whose son, Lance, was one of the City Council members who voted for the renaming. Cullen Smith said he would have preferred to name the street after Abraham Lincoln, who he said had done "more for the black people than just about anybody."

"We're being portrayed as a racist little town, but I don't think they've really understood the heart of Zephyrhills," Mr. Smith said.

Derek Alderman, a geography professor at East Carolina University who has studied the politics of naming streets for Dr. King, said at least 650 streets have been given his name in at least 41 states, often not without controversy.

Most of the streets are in the South, in places where the population is at least 30 percent black. Georgia, Dr. King's birthplace, has the most, Dr. Alderman said. Many run mostly through black neighborhoods, he said, often because efforts to name a central thoroughfare for Dr. King fail.

"The second choices are often not the most prominent, the most healthy streets," Dr. Alderman said.

San Diego's decision to rename a major thoroughfare, Market Street, for Dr. King in 1986 was so unpopular that residents got an initiative on the ballot a year later to change the name back, and won. And in 1979, the Alabama Legislature repealed a 1976 resolution naming a section of an Interstate highway after Dr. King.

But far more common, Dr. Alderman said, is for a city to scrap contentious plans to rename a street well before new signs go up. That happened last year in Muncie, Ind., and more recently in Portsmouth, N.H., which decided to name a park for Dr. King instead.

Here, as elsewhere, most opponents of the renaming who are willing to talk publicly say that they are not racist and that their concerns are purely pragmatic. Residents of the street said that they did not want the inconvenience of changing their addresses and that it made no sense, since the city is laid out on a grid of numbered streets and avenues.

The outcry led one council member who had approved the renaming to propose rescinding the decision in November. The move failed then. There has been no recall vote, but in a regular election last month, Lance Smith lost his Council seat to Gina King, who lives on the street and had promised to force a new vote on the issue if elected.

On April 26, before an emotional crowd of 200, the Council voted 3 to 2 to rescind the name change. A final vote is scheduled for Monday night.

"It has nothing to do with racism," said Rich LaCasse, a retired business owner. "We were never given an option. I was ignored as a resident. They made changes on my turf without my knowledge."

To be sure, some residents have publicly questioned whether Dr. King deserved a street named in his honor. Ben Youmans, a Vietnam veteran who lives on the street, said in letters to local newspapers that he resented Dr. King for protesting the war and for creating "divisiveness and discontent."

Still others said that since streets named for Dr. King often run through blighted neighborhoods, the renaming could keep visitors away or hurt property values. Jim Tenney, who owns a saddlery shop downtown, said he had briefly wondered if the renaming would hurt the town economically.

"How could I not?" said Mr. Tenney, who said he liked the idea of honoring Dr. King but that the Council had rushed the process. "If you say that doesn't occur to you, you're not being honest."

Mr. Tenney, a member of the Zephyrhills Unity Initiative, a coalition of black and white residents that formed after the renaming to address racial divisions, said racism unquestionably exists here. He said he was shocked when a number of people attending a recent Founders' Day festival declined to sign the coalition's mission statement: "We want to live in a community that embraces cultural differences and encourages the individuality and abilities of all people to contribute to the fabric of the community."

"Why not sign something so basic?" Mr. Tenney said.

Steve Spina, the city manager, said city officials and protesters were discussing possible compromises: naming a planned water park or a new library for Dr. King, or keeping the new street signs up commemoratively while changing the official name back to Sixth Avenue.

Mrs. Dobson, who is 80, said that she still hoped the Council would change its mind and keep the official name as Dr. King's but that she was already looking ahead to other projects.

In the past, she pushed successfully to get streets paved and streetlights put up in the black neighborhood outside town, which is under the county's jurisdiction. Now, she and other protesters said, they may focus on recruiting new candidates for the Council.

"I'm not about to move away," she said, "and give them Zephyrhills."

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company