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But if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is. As
there’s a general theory of evolution too, and it applies to much more than biology. It applies to society, money, technology, language, law, culture, music, violence, history, education, politics, God, morality. The general theory says that things do not stay the same; they change gradually but inexorably; they show ‘path dependence’; they show descent with modification; they show trial and error; they show selective persistence. And
Both concerned emergent, evolutionary phenomena: things that are the result of human action, but not the result of human design.
Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.
He starts The Theory of Moral Sentiments with a simple observation: we all enjoy making other people happy.
And we all desire what he calls mutual sympathy of sentiments: ‘Nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast.’
Smith’s most famous innovation in moral philosophy is the ‘impartial spectator’, who we imagine to be watching over us when we are required to be moral. In other words, just as we learn to be moral by judging others’ reactions to our actions, so we can imagine those reactions by positing a neutral observer who embodies our conscience. What
Morality, in Smith’s view, is a spontaneous phenomenon, in the sense that people decide their own moral codes by seeking mutual sympathy of sentiments in society, and moralists then observe and record these conventions and teach them back to people as top–down instructions. Smith is essentially saying that the priest who tells you how to behave is basing his moral code on observations of what moral people actually do.
If God is not needed for morality, and if language is a spontaneous system, then perhaps the king, the pope and the official are not quite as vital to the functioning of an orderly society as they pretend?
Friedrich Hayek advanced the view that the common law contributed to greater economic welfare because it was less interventionist, less under the tutelage of the state, and was better able to respond to change than civil legal systems; indeed, it was for him a legal system that led, like the market, to a spontaneous order.
They vaguely assume in the backs of their minds that the law is always invented, rather than that it evolved.
The beauty of Darwin’s explanation is that natural selection has far more power than any designer could ever call upon. It cannot know the future, but it has unrivalled access to information about the past. In the words of the evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, natural selection surveys ‘the results of alternative designs operating in the real world, over millions of individuals, over thousands of generations, and weights alternatives by the statistical distribution of their consequences’.
The sociologist Jane Jacobs was the first to realise that the density of urban living, ‘far from being an evil, is the source of its vitality’ (in John Kay’s words).
As Nassim Taleb quips, nobody would buy a pied-à-terre in Brasilia the way they would in London.
most businessmen were innovators looking to outwit their rivals, by doing things better or cheaper, and in doing so they inevitably brought improvements to the living standards of consumers. Most of the so-called robber barons got rich by cutting the price of goods, not raising them.
And the beauty of commerce is that when it works it rewards people for solving other people’s problems.
Do you see why I am no fan of experts, policies and strategies? We were the unwitting guinea pigs in an enormous and global evolutionary surge, and it came from that most mysterious of human institutions – the market.
six basic needs of a human being: food, clothing, health, education, shelter and transport.
The economics writer Tim Harford, in his 2011 book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure, pointed out that ‘trial and error is a tremendously powerful process for solving problems in a complex world, while expert leadership is not’. Intelligent design is just as bad at explaining society as it is at explaining evolution.
The economists Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek both saw the economy in explicitly Darwinian ways: as a system where ideas recombine and trends emerge rather than are imposed.
Leave people free to exchange ideas and back hunches, and innovation will follow. So too will scientific insight.
Psychology was then wholly in thrall to the idea that parents shaped the personalities of their children, and that differences between children were caused by parents;
As Harris put it later, whenever a research method was used that controlled for genetic differences between families, then ‘the home environment and the parents’ style of child-rearing are found to be ineffective in shaping children’s personalities’.
that differences in personality are formed roughly half by the direct and indirect effects of genes, and roughly half by something else, which did not include the home environment at all.
Socialisation means learning how to fit in with other people of your own age. Children acquire their habits, their accents, their favoured language, and most of their culture from their peers. They spend a lot of time learning to be similar to these peers. In forming relationships, however, they learn to discriminate between different people, adopting different behaviours with different individuals.
variations in personality are determined by a combination of genes and random influences, but not by parents.
Once everybody gets a similarly good education, the high achievers will increasingly be found among the children of high achievers, rather than the children of those with the best resources.
It is a meritocratic result, and presents us with a world in which people are resistant to being brainwashed because they are in charge of their own destinies.
The bitter irony of the nature–nurture wars of the twentieth century was that a world where nurture was everything would be horribly more cruel than one where nature allowed people to escape their disadvantages through their own talents.
Nature is the friend of social mobility.
In the words of Wikipedia’s entry on Mann: ‘Instilling values such as obedience to authority, promptness in attendance, and organizing the time according to bell ringing helped students prepare for future employment.’
secret, according to Larry Page of Google, may lie in the schools’ habit of bringing out children’s natural tendency for ‘not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world, doing things a little bit differently’.
Education is dominated by creationist thinking. The curriculum is too prescriptive and slow to change, teachers are encouraged to teach to the exam rather than to the pupils’ or their own strengths, the textbooks are infused with instructions about what to think instead of how to think, teaching methods are more about instructing than learning, the possibilities of self-organised learning are neglected,
When Chris Rufer, the founder of Morning Star,
He asked the question: ‘What kind of company do we want this to be?’, and the answer built upon three principles: that people are happiest when they have personal control over their life;
that people are ‘thinking, energetic, creative and caring’; and that the best human organisations are ones like voluntary bodies that are not managed by others, but in which participants coordinate among themselves.
gangsters? As Kevin Williamson argues in his book The End is Near and it’s Going to be Awesome, organised crime and government are more than first cousins; they are sprung from the same root.
The Mafia itself emerged in Sicily in a time of lawlessness when property rights were insecure and plentiful ex-soldiers were prepared to offer their services as paid protectors.
The Russian mafia emerged in the 1990s in a similar way: a lawless time, a lot of ex-soldiers looking for work.
economic historian Robert Higgs’s
Little wonder that the Levellers have received the approbation of modern free marketeers, from Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard to Hannan and Carswell.
the writings of Harriet Martineau, who shot to fame in the 1830s because of her series of short fictional books called Illustrations of Political Economy. These were intended to educate people in the ideas of Adam Smith
Indeed, the paradox of this realisation is that if belief (in the broad sense of the word) is universal, then no amount of argument can extinguish it, and in a sense therefore, gods really do exist – but inside our heads rather than outside.
Money serves three main functions – a store of value, a medium of exchange and a unit of account.
Perhaps the most profoundly important of the internet’s offspring will be digital currencies independent of government: bitcoin, or the crypto-currencies that will come after it.
Like most libertarian collectives, the cypherpunks’ web community soon broke up in acrimonious bickering and flame wars. But not before they had sparked some interesting thoughts in each other’s heads. The key names in this group were Adam Back, Hal Finney, Wei Dai and Nick Szabo.
It was Szabo who went furthest into the history and philosophy of the topic. With a degree in computer science and a doctorate in law, he became fascinated by the history of money, writing a lengthy essay on the subject, in which he explored a throwaway remark by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins that ‘money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism’ – or money makes it possible to pay back favours indirectly and at any time.
This essay, entitled ‘Shelling Out: The Origins of Money’, showed a keen appreciation of the fact that money evolved gradually and inexorably, and not by design.
Satoshi Nakamoto says bitcoin is ‘very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly’. Nassim Taleb says, ‘Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.’ Kevin Dowd says it ‘raises profound issues of an emerging spontaneous social order . . . a crypto-anarchic society in which there is no longer any government role in the monetary system’. Jeff Garzik, a bitcoin developer, calls it ‘the biggest thing since the internet – a catalyst for change in all areas of our lives’.
To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news is manmade, top–down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves.
