David Pinsof on Evolution and Intellectuals
He warns not to over-estimate intellectuals or to under-estimate others; and Michael Magoon on commercial society
we should get into an important concept introduced by Clark Barrett: the difference between tokens and types. The idea is that we have cognitive adaptations to deal with particular types of things, like food, mates, groups, status, and zero-sum conflict. These adaptations help tailor our behavior to the particular tokens of those types we find in our current environment—the particular food items, groups, conflicts, mating opportunities, and status games we’re confronted with. The types of things we evolved to deal with are, for the most part, common to both modern and ancestral environments. We have groups now; we had groups then. We have status now; we had status then. We have politics now; we had politics then.
Where others see “evolutionary mismatch,” Pinsof is arguing for continuity. For example, perhaps it is not an error to perceive the market as zero-sum.
Status is zero-sum: when I rise, someone else falls. Political power is zero-sum: when the Republicans win, the Democrats lose. So once we correctly see wealth as an instrument of power-grabbing and status-seeking, it no longer seems like such a misunderstanding to view wealth in zero-sum terms. This is particularly true in a world where governments have interwoven themselves so much with capitalist wealth production that capitalism and politics can no longer be seen as separate entities. Perhaps our zero-sum mentality is exactly what we should expect to emerge in the sociopolitical system we currently inhabit, where political tribes cannot win at the same time, and where the winner gets to enforce its will on the loser by threat of imprisonment.
Pinsof’s piece addresses the issue of whether intellectuals and their ideas are a force for positive change. Pinsof is arguing in the negative.
It is the appearance of world fixing to a prestige-granting audience—not objective world fixing in external reality—that intellectuals are striving for. And insofar as prestige-granting audiences do not actually know what fixes the world, or hold politically biased beliefs about what fixes the world, then intellectuals’ prestige striving will be uncorrelated with objective improvements in the world. You might even get a few cases where intellectuals get showered with virtue points for creating hell on earth. The disconnect between audience perceptions and objective reality is why I am more pessimistic than Dan about the world-fixing motivations of intellectuals. The lack of depth to these motivations is precisely what should make us skeptical that they will always lead to good outcomes, or that they are the main causes of moral and material progress throughout history.
What moves the world? This is a long-standing argument among economists. Did the Industrial Revolution take off in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries because of material factors, like coal, colonies, and machinery to process cotton? Or did it take off because of intangible factors, like the rise of Parliamentary power and individual rights, the advances of science and technology, and respect for commercial activity (as North, Mokyr, or McCloskey would have it)?
In that debate, Pinsof is not taking a clear side. But he claims that the explicit arguments of intellectuals are not as important as Dan Williams would have us believe.
societies can get richer without anyone knowing or caring about Adam Smith.
Instead, what mattered most were the way that incentives, institutions, and material conditions evolved.
Speaking of the Industrial Revolution, consider Michael Magoon.
Modern historians and social scientists spend enormous effort explaining capitalism, modernity, industrialization, and globalization. Yet one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs that made sense of these transformations has quietly faded from view.
In the eighteenth century, a group of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers identified something genuinely new in human history: a society organized not around land, status, or coercion, but around exchange. They called it a Commercial society, and they believed it marked a fundamental turning point in how human beings lived, worked, and related to one another.
Magoon is not arguing that the Scottish thinkers caused the Industrial Revolution. But he is saying that they understood the commercial society that kicked it off as a significant cultural change.
substacks referenced above: @
@
Perhaps we put intellectuals in the same position as religion. Tolerable so long as they do not gain the coercive power of the State.
Who is, "Dan?"