Petr
05-09-2007, 09:04 AM
http://positiveliberty.com/2006/12/on-cheating-darwin.html
Cheating Darwin
Jason Kuznicki on Dec 6th 2006
Commenter XianR writes,
Eugenics will eventually become the norm. Some society (probably Asian) will try it out and gain a leg up on the rest of the world. By limiting reproduction to only the smartest and healthiest individuals, their population will surpass other, eugenically-challenged nations in terms of intelligence, productivity and decreased dependence on pharmaceuticals or other technology for their health. Their success will be an example for some and a nemesis for the rest. You can’t cheat Darwin forever.
I must say I disagree. Reasons, not necessarily convincing, are below the fold.
It was once asserted — confidently, and by experts — that socialism was the wave of the future. Central planning, said the authorities of the early twentieth century, was more efficient than the free market. Once any country in the world tried socialist organizational methods, it would inevitably get a leg up on the capitalist countries, and anyone who didn’t want their civilization to become extinct would have to turn to central planning as well.
The trouble was, central economic planning simply did not work. As the Austrian economists argued, socializing an economy destroys market prices — and market prices are the key signaling mechanism by which economic actors know how much to produce or consume. Robbed of market prices, socialist planners were forced to guess at how much their economies had to produce to maximize satisfaction.
Market prices can only come about through more or less free exchange; their apparently simple numerical values conceal a wealth of unarticulated, subjective, and dispersed value judgments, reflecting our collected assessments of priorities and opportunities in a way that allows consumers and entrepreneurs to make lightning-quick comparisons with their own internalized hierarchy of values.
Socialism can’t even try to keep up. Although computers have made unbelievable strides in the years since Mises first wrote on the problem, and although much of the progress in raw calculation has come since the fall of the largest socialized economies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, still, we are left with an insuperable problem. This is because the question of price is fundamentally not calculational, but epistemological and psychological: How do we know about and organize the hierarchy of economic values within our own minds? How do we communicate these values to others? How do we spot a good opportunity, by our subjective economic valuations, when we see one?
These are not computationally answerable problems, and thus the data required to “solve” them can only be extracted after the problem itself has been solved — that is, after a system of market pricing has been established, and after we have used it to make comparisons to our own values. Only then can we know how our internalized value hierarchy interacts with the aggregate hierarchies of other market actors.
The practical results of socialism have been disastrous, exactly as the Austrians predicted. Much as Mises argued in 1920, central planning of the economy does not work and cannot be made to work. Individual desires are inevitably left unfulfilled; central planners achieve their pet projects at the expense of all else; art, style, and creativity are neglected, as the values imparted by each are among the very hardest for central planners to grasp. All of this is illustrated very well by one of my favorite anecdotes from the bad old days of the Soviet Union:
Where did prices in the Soviet Union come from?
In the late seventies and early eighties, American economists began to travel to the Soviet Union and Gordon Tullock, an American economist… took the opportunity, on a visit to [the central economic planning agency] Gosplan in Moscow, to ask that very question. Rather sheepishly his respondent took out a rather ancient Sears Roebuck catalogue from his desk and handed it over. Tullock didn’t know what to make of this until it was explained that the Gosplan officials used the prices quoted for goods in the catalogue to obtain relativities between this and that item. They would then try to match the goods of the catalogue to what was available in the Soviet Union and then fix prices according to the relativities prescribed by Sears Roebuck. Where there was no match of product they just had to guess. So prices in the USSR were determined by Sears Roebuck.
If you’ve been paying attention, you already see at least two problems with this system. First, we should not presume that Russian consumers will have the same tastes, interests, and values as American consumers. The Russians are culturally different from the Americans, and they will naturally want different things out of life.
Second, prices are moving targets. A true pricing system (as opposed, say, to one cribbed from a Sears catalogue) conveys information to would-be entrepreneurs, who then go on to offer products that, according to their own subjective value judgments, improve in some way on the existing order of goods and prices: They make products with new features; products that are the same as always, but at a lower price; products that come in different styles or modes of availability (just think of the transition from vinyl records to iTunes). This sort of competition, this constant improvement, means that today’s catalogue will be outdated tomorrow, at least in a free market. How do we know where to improve? By looking at market prices.
Now, to get back to the question at hand, which is not the free market, but genetics: It seems plain to me, at least, that if a central planning agency cannot plan an economy, still less can it plan the genetic makeup of the human species. Like an economy, a genome is a spontaneous order, which has the function of aggregating millions of frankly obscure and hard-to-quantify facts of reality. Before both the market and the genome, we must display a profound humility. Let us develop the analogy a bit further.
Genomes and economies are both knowledge aggregators: An economy aggregates knowledge about the relative wants of consumers, while a genome aggregates facts about how to survive under a set of environmental constraints. Moreover, each system does this without our necessarily knowing that it does so, and without any hope of our knowing how.
With every economic transaction, with every act of reproduction, with every birth and death, a dispersed body of knowledge is elaborated, one whose outlines and principles we can trace, as a matter of philosophical abstraction, but whose exact content can never be fully catalogued. Might we eventually compile, in some vast computer, a record of the entire genetic sequence of every human being? Of course. Yet a genome in evolution is also a moving target — and our catalogue could only be a snapshot of that moving target, just like the Sears catalogue in the Soviet Union.
A genomic record of every living human would fail utterly to capture the environmental pressures acting upon the genome; it would be an imperfect impression left by past pressures, with no mechanism for predicting the random mutations of the future, future environmental factors, or their possible interactions. Like the prices in the Sears catalogue, many of the genes in any individual are actually erroneous; the mistaken prices will lose Sears money, and the mistaken genes may actually hurt reproductive fitness rather than enhancing it. But we have no way of knowing this in all cases. Indeed, a central planner could never sort out the whole mess without being able to predict the future reproductive history of every individual in all of its detail. And this is well beyond the realm even of science fiction.
Thus, even setting aside all ethical questions of forced breeding and forced sterilization, we can expect the results of any sustained eugenics program to be a disaster. Like centralized economic planning, a eugenics program would supplant a spontaneous order with a planned one — even while we do not understand and cannot possibly understand the supplanted order. To the extent that a eugenic society approaches total control over its breeding population, so too that society will expose itself to evolutionary dangers that it cannot hope to understand. (For just a tiny glimpse of the problems ahead, consider this site dedicated to eliminating genetic diseases in purebred dogs. Note that while we have no ethical qualms about the forced neutering of animals, presumably the population of any eugenic nation would object to such measures, were they tried on anything other than a very small scale.)
It is true, then, as XtianR claims: You can’t cheat Darwin. But nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. What, then, would a public genetics policy look like if it took into account the insight that a gene pool is a spontaneous order? I suspect it would look a great deal like what we already have: Individuals would be allowed to reproduce as they see fit, and to refrain from reproducing, also as they see fit. Or, as the Cato Institute’s Sigrid Fry-Revere recently put it,
The more extreme and outlandish the idea, the less likely it is to receive support. When mistakes are made on a small scale, they have small scale effects. Governments, which are run by individuals no less fallible than the rest of humanity, are influenced by bad ideas as much as by good ones. But, unlike the individual mad scientist with a small group of supporters, government mistakes loom larger than life — its policies affect the lives of whole populations…
If the eugenics movement had resulted in nothing more than discriminatory marriage practices, the word “eugenics” wouldn’t represent anything more than a silly fad. The reason eugenics has become almost synonymous with mass sterilizations and genocide is because governments got involved.
Indeed, it’s hard to see how eugenics could possibly mean anything other than a) a silly fad or b) mass sterilizations and genocide. The former would be a tiny and insignificant ripple in the overall spontaneous order of the genome; the latter, while it might conceivably have a noticeable effect at the evolutionary level, could not possibly work for the good. The downsides of eugenics are vastly more obvious than the downsides of a planned economy, no?
(I have to acknowledge, however, a significant loose end in the above argument: It appears doubtful to me, given what I have written above, that widespread artificial birth control can ever be justified. Does this not interfere with the spontaneous order of the gene pool? And should it not therefore be prohibited? I would answer this question, but I see I have exhausted my blogging time for today. What do you think?)
Cheating Darwin
Jason Kuznicki on Dec 6th 2006
Commenter XianR writes,
Eugenics will eventually become the norm. Some society (probably Asian) will try it out and gain a leg up on the rest of the world. By limiting reproduction to only the smartest and healthiest individuals, their population will surpass other, eugenically-challenged nations in terms of intelligence, productivity and decreased dependence on pharmaceuticals or other technology for their health. Their success will be an example for some and a nemesis for the rest. You can’t cheat Darwin forever.
I must say I disagree. Reasons, not necessarily convincing, are below the fold.
It was once asserted — confidently, and by experts — that socialism was the wave of the future. Central planning, said the authorities of the early twentieth century, was more efficient than the free market. Once any country in the world tried socialist organizational methods, it would inevitably get a leg up on the capitalist countries, and anyone who didn’t want their civilization to become extinct would have to turn to central planning as well.
The trouble was, central economic planning simply did not work. As the Austrian economists argued, socializing an economy destroys market prices — and market prices are the key signaling mechanism by which economic actors know how much to produce or consume. Robbed of market prices, socialist planners were forced to guess at how much their economies had to produce to maximize satisfaction.
Market prices can only come about through more or less free exchange; their apparently simple numerical values conceal a wealth of unarticulated, subjective, and dispersed value judgments, reflecting our collected assessments of priorities and opportunities in a way that allows consumers and entrepreneurs to make lightning-quick comparisons with their own internalized hierarchy of values.
Socialism can’t even try to keep up. Although computers have made unbelievable strides in the years since Mises first wrote on the problem, and although much of the progress in raw calculation has come since the fall of the largest socialized economies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, still, we are left with an insuperable problem. This is because the question of price is fundamentally not calculational, but epistemological and psychological: How do we know about and organize the hierarchy of economic values within our own minds? How do we communicate these values to others? How do we spot a good opportunity, by our subjective economic valuations, when we see one?
These are not computationally answerable problems, and thus the data required to “solve” them can only be extracted after the problem itself has been solved — that is, after a system of market pricing has been established, and after we have used it to make comparisons to our own values. Only then can we know how our internalized value hierarchy interacts with the aggregate hierarchies of other market actors.
The practical results of socialism have been disastrous, exactly as the Austrians predicted. Much as Mises argued in 1920, central planning of the economy does not work and cannot be made to work. Individual desires are inevitably left unfulfilled; central planners achieve their pet projects at the expense of all else; art, style, and creativity are neglected, as the values imparted by each are among the very hardest for central planners to grasp. All of this is illustrated very well by one of my favorite anecdotes from the bad old days of the Soviet Union:
Where did prices in the Soviet Union come from?
In the late seventies and early eighties, American economists began to travel to the Soviet Union and Gordon Tullock, an American economist… took the opportunity, on a visit to [the central economic planning agency] Gosplan in Moscow, to ask that very question. Rather sheepishly his respondent took out a rather ancient Sears Roebuck catalogue from his desk and handed it over. Tullock didn’t know what to make of this until it was explained that the Gosplan officials used the prices quoted for goods in the catalogue to obtain relativities between this and that item. They would then try to match the goods of the catalogue to what was available in the Soviet Union and then fix prices according to the relativities prescribed by Sears Roebuck. Where there was no match of product they just had to guess. So prices in the USSR were determined by Sears Roebuck.
If you’ve been paying attention, you already see at least two problems with this system. First, we should not presume that Russian consumers will have the same tastes, interests, and values as American consumers. The Russians are culturally different from the Americans, and they will naturally want different things out of life.
Second, prices are moving targets. A true pricing system (as opposed, say, to one cribbed from a Sears catalogue) conveys information to would-be entrepreneurs, who then go on to offer products that, according to their own subjective value judgments, improve in some way on the existing order of goods and prices: They make products with new features; products that are the same as always, but at a lower price; products that come in different styles or modes of availability (just think of the transition from vinyl records to iTunes). This sort of competition, this constant improvement, means that today’s catalogue will be outdated tomorrow, at least in a free market. How do we know where to improve? By looking at market prices.
Now, to get back to the question at hand, which is not the free market, but genetics: It seems plain to me, at least, that if a central planning agency cannot plan an economy, still less can it plan the genetic makeup of the human species. Like an economy, a genome is a spontaneous order, which has the function of aggregating millions of frankly obscure and hard-to-quantify facts of reality. Before both the market and the genome, we must display a profound humility. Let us develop the analogy a bit further.
Genomes and economies are both knowledge aggregators: An economy aggregates knowledge about the relative wants of consumers, while a genome aggregates facts about how to survive under a set of environmental constraints. Moreover, each system does this without our necessarily knowing that it does so, and without any hope of our knowing how.
With every economic transaction, with every act of reproduction, with every birth and death, a dispersed body of knowledge is elaborated, one whose outlines and principles we can trace, as a matter of philosophical abstraction, but whose exact content can never be fully catalogued. Might we eventually compile, in some vast computer, a record of the entire genetic sequence of every human being? Of course. Yet a genome in evolution is also a moving target — and our catalogue could only be a snapshot of that moving target, just like the Sears catalogue in the Soviet Union.
A genomic record of every living human would fail utterly to capture the environmental pressures acting upon the genome; it would be an imperfect impression left by past pressures, with no mechanism for predicting the random mutations of the future, future environmental factors, or their possible interactions. Like the prices in the Sears catalogue, many of the genes in any individual are actually erroneous; the mistaken prices will lose Sears money, and the mistaken genes may actually hurt reproductive fitness rather than enhancing it. But we have no way of knowing this in all cases. Indeed, a central planner could never sort out the whole mess without being able to predict the future reproductive history of every individual in all of its detail. And this is well beyond the realm even of science fiction.
Thus, even setting aside all ethical questions of forced breeding and forced sterilization, we can expect the results of any sustained eugenics program to be a disaster. Like centralized economic planning, a eugenics program would supplant a spontaneous order with a planned one — even while we do not understand and cannot possibly understand the supplanted order. To the extent that a eugenic society approaches total control over its breeding population, so too that society will expose itself to evolutionary dangers that it cannot hope to understand. (For just a tiny glimpse of the problems ahead, consider this site dedicated to eliminating genetic diseases in purebred dogs. Note that while we have no ethical qualms about the forced neutering of animals, presumably the population of any eugenic nation would object to such measures, were they tried on anything other than a very small scale.)
It is true, then, as XtianR claims: You can’t cheat Darwin. But nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. What, then, would a public genetics policy look like if it took into account the insight that a gene pool is a spontaneous order? I suspect it would look a great deal like what we already have: Individuals would be allowed to reproduce as they see fit, and to refrain from reproducing, also as they see fit. Or, as the Cato Institute’s Sigrid Fry-Revere recently put it,
The more extreme and outlandish the idea, the less likely it is to receive support. When mistakes are made on a small scale, they have small scale effects. Governments, which are run by individuals no less fallible than the rest of humanity, are influenced by bad ideas as much as by good ones. But, unlike the individual mad scientist with a small group of supporters, government mistakes loom larger than life — its policies affect the lives of whole populations…
If the eugenics movement had resulted in nothing more than discriminatory marriage practices, the word “eugenics” wouldn’t represent anything more than a silly fad. The reason eugenics has become almost synonymous with mass sterilizations and genocide is because governments got involved.
Indeed, it’s hard to see how eugenics could possibly mean anything other than a) a silly fad or b) mass sterilizations and genocide. The former would be a tiny and insignificant ripple in the overall spontaneous order of the genome; the latter, while it might conceivably have a noticeable effect at the evolutionary level, could not possibly work for the good. The downsides of eugenics are vastly more obvious than the downsides of a planned economy, no?
(I have to acknowledge, however, a significant loose end in the above argument: It appears doubtful to me, given what I have written above, that widespread artificial birth control can ever be justified. Does this not interfere with the spontaneous order of the gene pool? And should it not therefore be prohibited? I would answer this question, but I see I have exhausted my blogging time for today. What do you think?)