Dissent on Hayek

Underbelly's Wichita bureau (newly relocated in Lawrence) points to this instructive critique of Friedrich von Hayek (link), including (surprise!) warm words from Keynes and Orwell.

I came to scoff and stayed to pray on Hayek. I had a college teacher who made us read Road to Serfdom, well before it came into fashion. I was outraged; I knew that as a good liberal, I should it somewhere down around the Protocols of the Elders of Zionj or Mein Kampf. Even as I read it, I developed the uneasy sense that I was wrong. Over the years, I've come to recognize that Hayek has a lot to offer--though certainly not, I should add, the kind of near-worship that he garners from ideological free-marketers (many of whom, I suspect, haven't actually read him).

I remember being particularly impressed by the argument that a central planner cannot possibly know enough to do the planning job right--too much decentralized knowledge in too many out-of-the-way places. I'd say that in the Web 2.0 age, this has come to be pretty much an Article of Faith. Indeed these days, we turn the point around. In the Silicon Valley they quote Hewlitt (or is it Packard?) saying that "if Hewlitt Packard knew what its employees know, we'd be 10 times as rich as we are"--translated, the task of management is to recognize the skill and knowledge of its labor force, and to motivate them to share what they know.

I also appreciate the way Hayek insists; that he's not a conservative. Right enough; anybody that committed to dynamic change cannot possibly share common cause with the troglodytes.

Hayek was, of course, smashingly, crashingly wrong in suggesting that Atlee Socialism must inevitably lead to fascism. But I wouldn't hold this against him. The parade of economists who have made absurdly wrong predictions is long and, ironically, honorable: Malthus, Schumpeter, and yes, Marx. Funny how the ideologues always remember Marx's predictive errors, and ignore or forgive them in everybody else. The truth is we can learn from all of them, and the fact that they were crashingly wrong is quite beside the point.

I've always been intrigued by the friendship between Hayek and Michael Oakeshott--two people who, you might think at first blush, had little to offer each other. Oakeshott is, of course, the arch-foe of systematizers (and, not at all incidentally, one of the best polemicists in modern thought). Of course that makes him a foe of Marxism. But I believe he said (though I can't put my finger on it just now) that Hayek went a bit overboard in his fetishizing of the free market, too.

I suspect where Hayek founders is (surprise!) on a favorite theme here at Underbelly central: the idea that a "market" is no more "natural" than Chinese opera--they are both cultural artifacts constructed out of "natural" materials by paths and devices that we can only dimly comprehend. That's why Hayek failed to understand that Atlee's Britain, very far from being a form of proto-Stalinism, was in many ways one of the most benign governments in human history. But move it lock, stock and barrel to Julius Nyerere's Tanzania and you have a recipe for disaster. Who was it who said that no one has yet invented a system of government under which the Germans will not work, or the Poles will? Not Hayek, but don't hold it against him. He's worthy of serious attention, and a sympathetic critique (like the one in Dissent is the highest form of flattery.