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>I don't understand the trend from these last years of trying to copy successful model by importing just the emergent part and ignoring all which is hidden. It
by ataggart 13y ago
>I don't understand the trend from these last years of trying to copy successful model by importing just the emergent part and ignoring all which is hidden.
It's not a recent trend. Frédéric Bastiat wrote about it in 1850 [1].
Humans have an easy time understanding that something is of human action and of human design (e.g., flipping a light switch turns the lights on), and at recognizing that something is neither of human action nor of human design (e.g., today's weather). We are particularly poor at recognizing things which are of human action but not of human design (e.g., the market).
Recognizing emergent phenomena (i.e., spontaneous order) takes training/practice (and our language, which emerged within the context of humans' poor grasp of emergent phenomena, isn't great at expressing it). Further, politicians are incentivized to treat every problem as if it is in the first category, to treat symptoms as causal knobs to turn (e.g., price controls), thus placing themselves in the role of designer. To admit otherwise is to admit the inefficacy of politics (or more accurately, the state) to "solve" the problem. And with negligible exception, people of every political stripe refuse to accept that truth.
[1] http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html
- BerislavLopac 13y agoThat's also known as cargo cults.