Brian Leiter links to the review of Pinker's latest book. A passage in the review caught my eye as confirming John Quiggin's Zombie Economics thesis (briefly discussed here); the undead thinker is Hayek, and the one whose brain has been eaten in Pinker:
Pinker shows his libertarian hand when he casually claims that "economic illiteracy" causes redistributive policies and thus "class conflict." Many have made this claim, of course, but as he notes without seeming to realize he is disproving his own hypothesis, today's redistributive European welfare states are the most peaceful in world history. Pinker, who exhibits no economic expertise, confuses economic literacy with a blind faith that unconstrained markets are a self-sustaining good.
Eric had previously linked to another instance of brain-eating, in which George Mason economist Daniel Klein's cortex proved a tasty snack for Zombie Hayek:
They note that “many have said that people of the left often trail behind in incorporating basic economic insight into their aesthetics, morals, and politics,” and that their findings support “Hayek’s theory…that the social-democratic ethos is an atavistic reassertion of the ethos and mentality of the primordial paleolithic band, a mentality resistant to ideas of spontaneous order and disjointed knowledge”
Since you may think I'm kidding -- "c'mon, John, no one could say that with a straight face" -- here's an example of the sort of thing pre-Zombie Hayek liked to say when still alive. From "Three Sources of Human Value" (Law, Legislation, and Liberty, p. 165):
At present, however, an ever increasing part of the population of the Western World grow up as members of large organizations and thus as strangers to those rules of the market which have made the great open society possible. To them the market economy is largely incomprehensible; they have never practised the rules on which it rests, and its results seem to them irrational and immoral. They often see in it merely an arbitrary structure maintained by some sinister power. In consequence, the long-submerged innate instincts have again surged to the top. Their demand for a just distribution in which organized power is to be used to allocate to each what he deserves, is thus strictly an atavism, based on primordial emotions. And it is these widely prevalent feelings to which prophets, moral philosophers and constructivists appeal by their plan for the deliberate creation of a new type of society.
Eric had previously written a thoughtful post on why he is not a Hayekian. The hilarious armchair anthropology of the above passage is one of the reasons I am not one either.
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