Tag Archives: Friedrich Hayek

Philosophy

I-Postcard

1 Comment

Over a decade ago I had shot this glistening sun bathed view of a Lighthouse. It sort of happened during one of those long motorcycle rides, and in an obscure part of the globe. Few years ago someone actually contacted me, and requested permission to create a post card from that exact photo. Of course, I obliged! Recently, just out of curiosity, I Googled for postcards based on that Lighthouse, and ran into this interesting WordPress link – Remembering Letters and Postcards. There are visible paper wrinkles and postal stamp watermarks on that photo, and also a copyright Mahesh printed at the bottom left corner!

Just another one of those motorcycle rides, and just another one of those photos. But it caught the attention of a Lighthouse Thematic Philatelist, and it turned into a postcard. Someone actually bought that postcard, and mailed it to a lady residing in a distant part of the world. Who then scanned and uploaded it to her website. And now I Googled to find my own photo! But, now my memories of clicking that photo are also perceived in a totally different context. Basically, that simple act now feels quite gilded and romantic. To quote a related earlier post – “with every single step we are progressively shaping our own trajectory, and at the same time influencing lives of others.” In this case, that mere instinctive act of capturing a Lighthouse in its tropical sunset splendor, ended up traveling across the world!

The lady who got the postcard, or the person who sent it to her, will never know the backstory of that motorcyclist who captured it. They simply derived some value from the unknown motivations of a photographer. Just like how I derived value from the unknowns who engineered that Royal Enfield motorcycle and that Nokia camera. And also just like how I now derive value from the actions of these unknown actors sending postcards to each other. They all created an elaborate feedback loop to my rather innocuous photo. To generalize all this — our ability to derive and add value to the unknowns, significantly more than to the known, tends to create unique value chains. It’s probably the most romantic side to this market based civilization.

This photograph incident just illustrates a general fact. If for the most part our actions help the unknown, than the known. It automatically implies that we also get most of our help from the anonymous. Grocery we buy, coffee we brew, roads we travel, clothes we wear, this sever hosting wordpress.com, everything! Leonard Reed has this famous essay, I-Pencil, explains how difficult it would be create a simple pencil with only known help. In short, we are always acting as part of different collectives. Just that it’s an anonymous group, and often transient and constantly forming and acting based on needs of the many. Quite like an organism which keeps adapting to emerging survival pressures.

Philosophy

Beyond Creation

Stunning autumn hues aside, motorcycling in Pacific Northwest is a lot about winding roads. It’s about navigating those curves at an optimal trajectory and speed, creating those lively moments when your foot pegs brush the tarmac. It’s about discovering that thin line, the line which separates recklessness from precarious optimism, that belief of everything beyond your control going just right! Discovering that trajectory requires a clear view, and an understanding of the full turn ahead. That along with instincts and skills tends to shape the plan on how to approach the turn, how to maneuver, at what speed etc. 

High level plan aside, how you actually cover every inch on this trajectory also matters, because this determines viable paths to cover the remaining part. In fact, at every point on that curve, along with basic physics, our own limitations and constraints of our machines determine possible paths. Essentially, it’s quite like working towards a long-term vision, while shaping the specifics of the path as we go along. Keeping the long-term line requires constant adaptation to what the road actually presents, not what you anticipated. In fact, this simple principle actually applies to even the most mundane activities in life. 

 

To quote the Canadian death metal band Beyond Creation — “Every decision we take. Every step we make. Every word we use. And every rule we choose.” – In short, even in our everyday life, with every single step we are progressively shaping specifics of our own trajectory, and at the same time influencing the lives of others. So, if you had a fortunate or an unfortunate accident, it might not be that immediately preceding step. It could be any action leading up to the accident, which actually set in motion that accident prone trajectory.  

The actual question is what are those steps which maximized the probability of that incident. It could be that disturbing conversation you had with the neighbor or that reckless driver on the freeway, or both. It could also be that this accident was just inevitable. With exhaustive variables at each step, identifying and modelling that action or sequence of actions is non-trivial. It sort of requires omniscience and infinite computing power. But a functioning society requires individual to take responsibility, with the fair assumption that our free will defines the path. In short, we shape our good and bad “accidents”, by acting or not acting to compensate for external pressures. 

To go back to the analogy of motorcycling PNW winding roads — there are always unforeseen factors affecting the specifics of its execution. Twigs on the road, strategically developed potholes or a friendly neighborhood deer cross the road — all these and more impact a motorcyclist’s vision of navigating curves with finesses. Accepting the realities of physics, skill and existence of unforeseen variables helps. But, consciously developed knowledge, skill, reflexes, and ‘experience-based’ judgement to overcome those unforeseen is the eventual goal in motorcycling and in life. 

Philosophy

Life at the Margins

The early morning buzz of an engine, or that moment when we ride off the garage onto the pavement, or that instant when we tear into a freeway ramp – these are all glimpses of riding at the margins, at the margins of transitions. From stillness to the rumbling promise of 1200cc engine, from being boxed in a garage to bustling downtown alleys, from constrains of 25mph to 70mph open landscapes. All marked transitions. Life actually resides at these margins, because these are the moments when we feel most alive.

Taking a 40 mph curve at 60mph is riding at the margins, but only until we conquer the very same curve at 80mph. If we want that exact same feeling, then we need to simply raise the bar. Doing the exact same thing twice does not help, because we have already moved the boundaries. Margins are now further away. We automatically strive to raise that benchmark because it’s that feeling at the margins which matter, rest is just a means to that end. This is true whether it’s at the margins of riding, or general pleasure seeking, or for that matter any human pursuit! We all seek that feeling — which a first sip of whisky provides at the end of a long day, or that first serving of frozen custard on a summer afternoon, or that satisfaction of solving a new problem at work. Second time around none of these feel the same.

The constant pursuit of being at the margins is visible across all the human spheres. We were probably happy with library until we had ebooks and Wikipedia, now we are only happy with augmented reality! We found happiness with no internet, but now we are unhappy with the internet speeds! We were also contented with Magna Carta or bill of rights, until we had a chance with modern republic with democracy. But, as expected, now we are not merely contented with these unprecedented freedoms. We are not contented with mere liberties which enable us to freely pursue our material goals. But instead we want to be at the margins again, where education, healthcare, transportation etc are universal. Undoubtedly, even if we manage to achieve them, we would simply raise the bar. It’s easy to realize, what makes us tick is this never ending journey to the margins. In short, the next time I clock 120mph, it just might not look as fast.

Philosophy

Hume and that cat

Once this motorcyclist asked me – “What do you call her?” – pointing at the motorcycle. I responded — “nothing!”, and casually explained how it’s just a machine. She was shocked, and retorted in a rather jovial way — “You called her a machine, now she will breakdown!” Sort of reminded me of this David Hume quote – “There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature, to bestow on external objects the same emotions, which it observes in itself; and to find everywhere those ideas, which are most present to it.” Hume goes on to attribute these inclinations to mostly children, poets and ancient philosophers. May be the lady was a poet? My own instincts tend to go the other way, I rather bestow on humans the characteristics of inanimate objects. We are also machines, just really complex ones. Guess I am no child, a poet or that ancient philosopher.

Hume’s insight is probably more prevalent, and often a cause for serious mischief. Recently I went riding to Orcas islands, but had an overnight stay at Anacortes to catch that early morning Ferry. Overnight motorcycle parking in a motel lot is always risky, so to minimize the attention I draped it with a dull two-wheeler cover. Next morning I noticed this feral cat sitting and staring at the motorcycle. In a parking lot filled with cars, this draped bike might have invoked his curiosity? We can actually never know. If I say the cat was curious, all that means is — if I was a cat, then I’d be curious. For all you know, that cat might have been a fan of Triumph motorcycles, and it was simply gazing in admiration. Or maybe it was just day dreaming. Possibilities are endless. Unless we place sensors in his brain, we can never truly understand that intend behind his action.

Not just in animals, we have this propensity to assume intend based on the actions of our fellow humans too. Sometimes it’s related to the curious actions of our spouse, or parents or maybe relatives. Our subject of scrutiny can also be the distant actions of some movie star or politicians, as seen through YouTube or TV. Lengthy contentious discussion on the behavior of such a celebrity is not that uncommon. But, whenever we assume intend based on actions, it only tells us more about our own mind, our own assumptions, which may or may not be relevant to the actual object, animal or the person being scrutinized. Not surprising that Hayek once said “We are studying mental and not physical events, and much that we believe to know about the external world is, in fact, knowledge about ourselves”

Philosophy

Causal Chain

Recently went riding at the margins of Olympic, was actually planning to do a loop through couple of forest roads, but eventually ended up running into a road gated shut. So, had to turn back half way, and ride across the same bridge seen on my way up. And not just the same bridge, I crossed paths with the same hiker who was now walking back from the other end. Clearly, even he was amused at this bizarre coincidence. How often do the path of a motorcyclist, and a hiker in the wilderness converge on a bridge — twice!

In a way, coincidences or accidents are just separate causal chains coinciding at some point. For instance — ferry time, riding pattern, not up-to-date maps on the GPS etc were all immediate preceding links on my causal chain. If we go further back, then there are other causal sequences explaining why ferry times are the way they are, or how I ended up riding in some quirky way etc. But, we can only speculate about the causal events related to the mysterious hiker.

 

In that sense, every moment is the consequence of a set of connected or disconnected and known or unknown preceding causal events. Actually, even in my case, we can only speculate whether it was the incorrect map or did someone just decided to shut that road the previous day? Or maybe my riding pattern was immaterial. That means if all the other factors remained same, all types of riders would have faced the mysterious hiker, twice! If only we could replay life, and control it for various factors.

Some coincidences are rare, but others tend to be recurring and contentious. For instance, rising college tuition, health care costs or govt deficit spending tend to be recurring and divisive. But there are also recurring less contentious coincidences – like plummeting smart phone or fast food prices! Rarely do we see political rallies about unaffordable fries. Recurring events tend to have some dominant agency – it can be some specific group of people, natural forces, or some incentive structure etc. But general discourse is rarely about correcting these complex causal factors, which led to the present contentious pattern. But it’s usually more about introducing new factors into the mix — like price/licensing controls, or a new tax, or may be a new war? So, instead of fixing the root cause we keep introducing workarounds. Sounds like another recurring pattern.

Philosophy

Group Code

Spring poses interesting opportunities, especially if you can manage to ride up to the mountains. It’s not every day you ride through icy roads on a bright day, at near zero temperatures, and with a backdrop of snow-covered mountains! Not to mention occasional water streams gently crossing the freeway, and a highway shoulder precariously stacked with freshly removed snow – guess this is why motorcycling is called sensory overload? As usual, the fuel tank was running low; the two-gallon tank has been a bit difficult to handle, especially when you go exploring. But, like every other time, when it was close to being empty, providence manifested in the form of a Shell gas station.

Group riding on this motorcycle is going to be a tad annoying for others. You don’t want to ride with someone who is constantly on the lookout for a gas station — it introduces unnecessary friction, especially if someone is ahead with a five-gallon tank. In that sense, groups do pose different trade-offs. We all prefer different riding patterns, different frequencies for stops, speeds, routes, etc. A 2-gallon cafe racer will find it hard to get along with a bagger.

Not just in group riding, even general social order demands a certain degree of shared compatible rule following.  Without commonly agreed code, large groups of people will not get along. For example — top-down hierarchical code is mandatory in the military. While role-based layering is common in private organizations. Government bureaucracies depend on documented processes and structure, where adherence to processes often becomes a primary objective. Achieving such goals at scale requires a rule-based coordination. These properties are often decomposed and applied at different layers of the system.

As evident above, the nature of this shared code also depends on the social sphere. The military has a targeted purpose and hence a strictly enforced structure. Here there is little room for malleability. While private organizations tend to have more abstract goals – selling products and services, and are therefore more open-ended, evolving based on contingent profitable circumstances. While a family tends to not have any specific goals, except to treat each other well or general cohesion – hence rules are informal. Societies also have shared laws and norms, but in general they are even more abstract and geared for coexistence. For example, we don’t need to be nice to our neighbors if we don’t infringe on their rights.

The pattern is clear – group goals are mapped to some shared code, and effective compliance determines the outcomes. The goals of a free civil society are not the same as the military; hence they have different codes. While peacetime goals are limited to prosperous coexistence, military code demands predictable and disciplined behavior. While creativity and exercise of individual volition are peacetime virtues, a volatile wartime environment prioritizes disciplined execution under pressure. A soldier is forced to apply predefined rules of conduct to moral choices while a free individual can exercise subjective ethical judgements. Soldier code has its purpose, just that it’s unaligned with peacetime goals.

To go back to the original bagger v/s cafe racer problem – their riding incompatibility is because their motorcycling goals and internal inclinations are different, and that same difference reflects in their machines and riding rules. Eventually, whether it’s riding or life, we’re always part of various groups – and what we seek is elusive harmony of goals, codes, and resulting actions. Peace relies on having that fabric of alignment across time, constantly evolving to satisfy the changing needs.

Philosophy

“I was alive”

Walter White from Breaking Bad famously said – “I was alive”. What essentially drove him to build that Drug Empire was entrepreneurship, that excitement of feeling alive. It was not about providing for family. Being alive is about being in direct contact with reality — absorbing and processing external signals. It demands constant awareness – processing stimuli, gauging situations, and adapting accordingly. In that sense, being alive is also a lot about being human. What separates us from animals, at least most of us, is that ability to not just instinctively react, but instead employ higher levels of cognition. Having that widespread opportunity to employ higher levels of thinking through individual ownership and responsibility deserves some acknowledgement. For most human history, this was a privilege reserved for the few.  

Being alive is quintessential Americana; few civilizations have managed to formally encode this at scale into a political Constitution and broader social fabric. Devising a layered framework to limit the collective while defending individual volition at this scale is unique, because arguments for such a framework run counter to intuition.  

Channeling essential English liberties and the Scottish Enlightenment, American Framers executed something different in terms of impact and scale. They made a well-reasoned argument for Federalism and achieved democratic consensus. A sufficiently intricate argument was framed, communicated to the broader population, and executed as an institutional change. Selling an idea this sophisticated is not easy – usually complex ideas find agreements within a limited minority and then the results motivate slow widespread adoption. But the American framers abstracted the underlying principles of the existing society to a higher level – to that of a union of states and drove mass consensus from there. Being able to execute something like this without corrupting those core ideas through demagoguery or personal agendas is uncommon. In fact, popular support of ideas which refuse to pander to baser instincts is an unusually rare phenomenon. 

There is an interesting scientific aspect to this. Being part of a collective is comforting. Whether it’s politics, sports or music, we tend to seek out that tribal identity. It’s probably our hunter gatherer instincts, constantly pushing us to belong. In that sense, American institutions elevated the overall social order by channeling the tribalism as a check. To paraphrase F.A. Hayek — ‘man got civilized in spite of his best efforts’.  

James Madison quite presciently stated in defense of Federalism — ” the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority”. Instead of enforcing compliance through centralized mechanisms, American framers accepted reality as it exists and attempted to work within those constraints. It simply grounded republicanism in a more realistic understanding of human nature.  

While many societies enforced conformity through top-down control and directed purpose, American framers showed unusual practical prudence. They allowed civil society, order and purposes to emerge through peaceful coexistence.  From that perspective, American Federalism created a framework of incentives favorable to formation of civil society. A society where individual volition can survive, where coexistence was the path of least resistance, and more importantly an individual could feel alive. 

Even though at a more basic level, riding motorcycle is also a lot about being alive, and probably more about staying alive too. For starters, you are always in touch with the realities of the environment. You’re expected to be responsible for your own safety. You’re not protected by the collective, their seat belts, or air bags. You must be aware of the lifted truck with no visibility or minivan with a driver busily sifting through the critical social media reels. You need to simply adapt your path to steer clear of them, or any other potential threats, social media driven or otherwise. But the flip side is, when you are riding, all the other travails blend into the background. So plugged in to that sublime present, there are no cognitive resources to think about an uncertain future, or that disappointing past. In that sense, you feel alive, but in a different mode of engaging with reality. 

Politics

The Road to Serfdom at 75 Years Young

Peter Boettke writes

“Key to his argument is that in a democratic liberal society, there’s no overarching single scale of values. Society cannot achieve a single hierarchy of ends we all agree on. In fact, the great strength of democratic liberal societies is a multiplicity of values that are respected among diverse and often divergent, even distant, individuals”

I used to have this bumper sticker on my Jeep — ‘If we are on a road to serfdom, hope it’s bumpy and bureaucrats are driving lowriders’

 

 

 

Politics

The Hayek Auction

1 Comment

You will find them here, for instance Hayek’s copy of Wealth of Nations went for almost 200k, it was estimated in the 4k to 6k range.

“Desktop ephemera and personal effects” were estimated at 200-300 British pounds, went for 87,500 British pounds.  Crazy!  Many of the items went for 10x or 20x their original estimates.

From Marginal Revolution

Friedrich_Hayek_portrait

The original uploader was DickClarkMises at English Wikipedia. [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Film, Politics

Libertarian Transformers

For some reason people gasp when I mention the dominant Libertarian themes in Transformers 4 : Age of Extinction. Buried beneath inane comedy and not so sleek Budweiser advertisements are some stunning Hayekian/Misesian ideas. Contrasting to the first three Transformers movies, Age of Extrinction refuses to glamorize military. Instead of Marines fighting evil aliens in Middle-East, we have CIA black ops oppressing an innovative Texan inventor. From Cade Yeager (played by Mark Wahlberg) emphasizing to the black cloaked agents to get off his property, to ignorant bureaucrat Harold Attinger (played by Kelsey Grammer) destabilizing planet with his foreign policy, Michael Bay’s U-Turn on politics cannot be more evident.

Govt propping up bad guys in an alien war, or private firms profiting from war, or having an elected US President become subservient to career bureaucrats – this movie cuts close to reality in numerous subtle and different ways. How a private weapons manufacturer, Joshua Joyce (played by Stanley Tucci), changes his mind when confronted with reality. But, a bureaucrat constantly refusing to confront his own folly is worth noting. In this case Hollywood illustrating how private sector can get corrupted by govt incentives — quite uncommon! Not to mention, Kelsey Grammer comforting the US President by claiming the all-powerful alien bounty hunter as his “asset”, a genuine black comedy moment!

Essentially the whole movie is about an individualistic inventor trying to stabilize the world, while govt busy-bodies propping up chaos. Sounds like it appeals to all our civilized human instincts. Café intellectuals might disagree, but Hollywood is among the best Western institutions. They’re  more effective than any military in spreading liberal ideas across the globe. Niall Fergurson’s ‘The West and the Rest’ quite aptly sums up this sentiment through a quote from the French philosopher Régis Debray — “more power in blue jeans and rock and roll than the entire Red Army”.

Bjoern Kommerell [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons