Diversity: a rightist ideal

The left does not have a monopoly of wisdom - or, if we judge by the row about anti-semitism, any wisdom at all. There is one great truth which, historically, rightists have known better than many leftists. It is that our knowledge and rationality (two different things) are seriously limited.

Hayek, for example, famously based his defence of free markets upon the fact that:

The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.

The economic problem, he said, “is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.” In this, he echoed Edmund Burke:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would be better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.

To Hayek, free markets are a means of aggregating dispersed, fragmentary and even tacit information, and hence a way whereby we can avail ourselves of the general bank of knowledge.

We can of course add Michael Oakeshott to this tradition. As Jesse Norman points out (pdf), he too emphasized the limits of individual reason.

What we have here, then, is a powerful intellectual tradition – one which I think is validated by the research on cognitive biases inspired by Daniel Kahneman.

Which raises a paradox which I suspect is under-rated. It’s hinted at by Will Davies. For conservatives, he says:

Often the deeper anxiety is that the traditional monoculture of the nation, which dates back more than 200 years, is being questioned by feminists and post-colonial critics. Thus another paradox of the free speech panic is that what gets termed censorship is often quite the opposite – namely, the opening up of scholarly debate to a broader range of perspectives.

The paradox is this. If you believe that knowledge and rationality is limited and partial, then it is you who should especially welcome the voices of feminists and ethnic minorities. Their perspectives form part of the “general bank and capital” of wisdom of which Burke spoke. Without them, we are trading only upon the stock of reason of old white men – which is limited. (I should know: I am an old white man).

Similarly – in the spirit of Will’s piece – you should also welcome a diversity of mechanisms for revealing wisdom and knowledge. Yes, markets are one way of revealing these. But so too are scientific methods, peer review and academic debate. You should therefore regret the marketization of universities, as it overturns the wisdom of ages which is for them to be part of the non-market system.

There’s something else that might follow from the Burke-Hayek perspective – a support for worker coops.

Hayek was right to say that markets are a way of mobilizing fragmentary and dispersed information. But as his LSE colleague Ronald Coase pointed out, markets are often suppressed (pdf) in favour of corporate hierarchies. Such hierarchies might well not be an optimal way of aggregating dispersed information: this might be because of path dependency or because firms suffer a form of bureaucratic capture by top managers*. Instead, it’s possible that one way better using fragmentary information is to give workers more say in how the firm is managed. Doing so mobilizes their knowledge of small inefficiencies. It’s a way of aggregating marginal gains through cognitive diversity.

My support for worker democracy owes less to Marx – who wrote little about post-capitalism – than it does to Hayek.

My point here is simple. It’s that diversity should be a rightist ideal. If you take seriously Burke and Hayek’s warnings about the limits of our cognitive powers, you should welcome the diversity of perspectives that comes with hitherto silent groups – women, workers and ethnic minorities – being given a voice.

Which poses the question: why, then, are rightists not championing diversity and coops?

One possibility is that there is a tension here. Ways of harnessing diversity – be it worker democracy or giving more voice to minorities - require us to abandon the wisdom of the past. There’s a trade-off between availing ourselves of the general bank of wisdom of ages and of that of the nation. My personal preference is for the latter. So, in fact, was Hayek’s – hence his essay, Why I am not a Conservative. Many rightists, however, seem prefer the former. Corey Robin says this is simply because their true attachment isn’t to freedom or efficiency but simply to established hierarchy. I wonder: how would one prove him wrong?

* Competition does not eliminate such inefficiencies. We know this from Bloom and Van Reenen’s work showing that there’s a persistent long tail (pdf) of badly managed firms, and from de Loecker and Eeckhout’s work showing that profit margins (pdf) have trended upwards since the 1980s and are widely dispersed.

Comments

[Handy Mike]

I used to enjoy reading this blog even though I quite often disagreed with it.

It used to offer arguments, evidence and insights worth chewing over even if one was doubtful that they added up to the conclusion claimed.

Something's gone very wrong over the last year or so, at least with those posts outside your specialism of financial economics.

Your political theory and culture war stuff often takes the form of a half-dozen or so non-sequiturs strung together apparently in the service of a quota requirement to weigh in on a topical spat in support of a standard left-ish position.

In the post above, none of your conclusions follow from your premises and most of your premises are question-begging where they aren't straightforwardly false.

On the plus side, this is one snarky, shithead of a troll you're close to boring away from your comments section for good.

[Luis Enrique]

some similarities to Zingales' arguing that every economist should be a feminist because markets work best when they are competitive: https://promarket.org/every-good-economist-feminist/

[Jim]

Its more the case that the new thinkers are the ones attempting to deny the free speech of the old ones, not the other way around.....who is being 'no platformed', the former or the latter?

[Scratch]

"Its more the case that the new thinkers are the ones attempting to deny the free speech of the old ones"

I'm not sure that's true.

The echt bourgeoisie appears to have explicitly coalesced with minorities -one might question whether this is a quest for more rounded understanding of market conditions or whatever or a socioeconomic pincer movement aimed at the living standards of the working class whose achievements appear to be resented from both above and below.

[Dennis Smith]

If we are serious about promoting diversity (an admirable goal) one of the most effective methods would be to drop all talk of right versus left – one of the most pernicious bits of authoritarian reductionism ever devised. The supposed left-right continuum lumps together and incoherently mashes up a variety of different, much more useful distinctions including individual versus collective, libertarian versus authoritarian, conservative versus radical, progressive versus reactionary, utopian versus pragmatic and particularist versus universalist. None of these distinctions is identical with or reducible to any of the others and – I suspect – each term is capable of being combined with any other to produce an intelligible (though not necessarily desirable) political programme.

And in passing, - surely rather than ?

[Dennis Smith]

Sorry, the punctuation marks mangled my last sentence above. It was intended to read: In passing, rather than “require us to abandon the wisdom of the past” surely we should say “require us to modify the wisdom of the past”.

[Lord]

Most fail to doubt their beliefs but have nothing but doubt about those of others. Entertaining new beliefs leads to the possibility of error, while not leads to the persistence of it. Diversity of opinion should not be confused with tolerance of bad ideas. Opinions are worth what you pay for them and everyone has one. That does not mean they are equally valid or valuable, and so often those who complain about a lack of free speech are just pushing some bad ideas of some long dead philosopher to reinforce them in their ideas, position, and status, not to question or discuss them, for their interest is in promoting them, not examining them, nor engaging those of others on their merit, but of changing the subject and attention to their own.

[Jim]

" Diversity of opinion should not be confused with tolerance of bad ideas. Opinions are worth what you pay for them and everyone has one. That does not mean they are equally valid or valuable, and so often those who complain about a lack of free speech are just pushing some bad ideas of some long dead philosopher to reinforce them in their ideas, position, and status"

In other words, I'm right, you're not only wrong, you shouldn't be allowed to even say it.

Though ironically your statement could well apply to anyone pushing the ideas of Marx......

[Noah Carl]

Nowadays, viewpoint diversity is a "rightist" ideal:

https://medium.com/@NoahCarl/who-doesnt-want-to-hear-the-other-side-s-view-9a7cdf3ad702

[Nick Drew]

Brian Leiter (no Rightist, he) makes the point that "diversity for diversity's sake" was a construct of 1970s/'80s American HR departments, trying to concoct a (spurious) business rationale for the changes in recruiting policy they were being forced to introduce by positive-discrimination laws. Hey, we do it because it's good for business!

Whether or not it is true, was beside the point

Every management I've ever been a part of was seriously keen to harvest the wisdom of its employees as regards micro-efficiencies, shop-floor savvy etc. My only employer who was not at all thus keen - it was before I was in management (and I quit) - was Exxon: hardly a small example, but equally, not at all representative of my industry (in more ways than one: no coincidence, BTW)

But as a matter of hard-nosed reality, all the talk in the ads about "our apprentices are wonderful, they bring so much new insight into the company" is utter BS. In all the jobs I've ever worked in, the learning curve was measured in years, and the idea a bright, 'diverse' outsider with anything less than some serious relevant experience / expertise could breeze in and show us a thing or two is deeply unrealistic. We pay more than lip-service to seeking out new ideas and ways of doing things, but they are few and far between. When they come (e.g. breakthroughs in solar PV, or horizontal drilling, or stochastic analysis) they sure as hell don't just walk in through the door as part of a diversity programme.

[uair01]

There is some research (am too lazy to google it, sorry) that having even one contrary opinion during decision making, increases the quality of the decision making, even when the contrary opinion is rejected. So diversity of opinions seems good.

This contrasts with two recent examples where diversity of opinion was rejected:

https://quillette.com/2018/08/02/the-death-of-the-author-and-the-end-of-empathy/

https://www.wired.com/story/the-ny-times-fires-tech-writer-quinn-norton-and-its-complicated/

And as the article says: "The Cultural Revolution was hardly more efficient in its shaming rituals."

[Jim]

Incidentally, how much diversity of opinion was James Damore allowed to have?

[Swami]

Let’s drop the right and left, and shift to what Hayek actually was, which is a Classical Liberal. Classical liberalism stresses the value in diversity of decentralized opinions, values, tastes and perspectives.

However, Classical Liberals are very cautious about extending this to intolerance. Thus they would certainly see that value of having people of diverse backgrounds, perspectives and genders. But they do not see value in the divisive hateful mentality of white supremacists, radical feminism or SJWs. These are intolerant, zero sum, win lose perspectives which preach the destruction of tolerance and diversity.

Hayek certainly believed worker coops are a reasonable alternative and worth considering, but the obvious weakness is they are subject to capture and rent seeking by the workers, thus unlikely to serve consumers optimally (as are corporations which get captured by management or unions). They aren’t a very good idea.

As for you comment on competition being unable to eliminate all inefficiency, you are allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Nothing is perfect at eliminating rent seeking. But the article you link to clearly reveals that competition is extremely effective at reducing rent seeking, thus the plug for the more intense US competition over the higher levels of rent seeking in Europe.