Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
Nigel Lawson has a very long and very wonderful piece out in Standpoint this week on the five great myths and the menace of modern political economics.
I've never met Lawson in person, but I did speak to him on the phone about Margaret Thatcher. The disembodied voice of the former Chancellor--one of the chief architects of the Thatcher Revolution, as he quickly reminded me--is thin and impatient, like a Potions Master at Hogwarts. In her memoirs, Margaret Thatcher remarks that she made Lawson her Chancellor because she “had come to share Nigel’s high opinion of himself.”
Nigel Lawson never writes anything brief. He just doesn't. His memoir of the Thatcher years may be used not merely as a doorstop but as a desk or a single-family dwelling. But everything he writes is worth reading, and reading in full. I too share Thatcher's high opinion of Nigel Lawson. So I commend the article to you in its entirety.
If you're in a rush, though, here's the summary:
- Myth number one is that economics is a science.
- Myth number two is that policy-makers should be guided by the precautionary principle.
- Myth number three is the notion that policies to promote the replacement of carbon-based energy by substantially more expensive renewable energy will bring great economic benefit.
- Myth number four is that Keynesian (or neo-Keynesian) stabilisation policy makes sense.
- Myth number five is that the very substantial current account imbalances that exist in the world are both unnatural and a threat to global economic health.
And the menace: a recrudescence of protectionist sentiment that threatens to repeat the disaster of the 1930s.
Go on, you want to read it all now, don't you?
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Jul '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
I love here muffins ......
Come on everyone was thinking it, well most of the guys were.
Nov '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
I will sure read the whole thing. The opening paragraph is one of the best I’ve ever read. I’ve wondered for a long time why conservatives who embrace Adam Smith’s invisible hand and F.A. Hayek’s concept of spontaneous order can then rail against Charles Darwin and natural selection without seeing any disconnection in their arguments.
Sep '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
I understand your point, but I wonder how many people are aware that Hayek wrote a devastating treatise against scientism?
Edited on Mar 10, 2011 at 7:10amSep '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
In a post replete with witticisms, that was particularly sharp. My hats off to you, Lady Anatolia.
Edited on Mar 10, 2011 at 7:15amMay '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
As an economist, there are closed-set games with precise solutions, easily mastered. In reality, economics is a Petri dish. Just watch it go.
May '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
Myth #1 is pure provocation to arouse curiosity. Examining his argument within the link demonstrates he argues that the method of natural science is distinct from the method of economics, not that economics is a non-science. Mathematics operates far more effectively in the natural sciences than in the social sciences because there are quantitative constants in the natural sciences. Quantitative inferences can be made from quantitative constants. The social sciences lack quantitative constants, hence fewer meaningful quantitative inferences can be made within the social sciences.
Fine. But this neither discredits the use of mathematics, particularly statistics and probability theory, in the social sciences, nor does it demonstrate that economics is not a science. Economics is considered a social science. Will Lawson argue that the term social science is no good?
Edited on Mar 10, 2011 at 8:17amOct '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
You are correct that arguing against Darwin's view will come to naught. And to argue for the Intelligent Design view will not prevail. What the two views do, however, is present very strong opposing views. The God who is the designer reveals himself in His design, but in the end, the choice, let's call it Pascal's Wager, is ours to make, and more importantly, to live out. To merely choose and not change reveals an intellectual choice, not a spiritual one. "Except you come as a little child" doesn't mean be a little child, it means trust as a little child.
Regarding economics, it is far more a philosophy, like God gives us about our being, than a science. We observe and we choose, and delay is uncertainty. That simple.
Nov '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
Pseudodionysius
Edited on Mar 10 at 07:10 am
Scientism is the improper use of science where science doesn’t apply. Since Lawson doesn’t believe economics is a science and probably believes biological natural selection is a science, how would you explain his opening paragraph in which he describes "the intellectual connection between [Adam] Smith and Charles Darwin?"
You wouldn’t call it scientism, would you?
Nov '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
The reality is that they are non sequitur. Darwinism says that selection is random (non-intelligent). Smith, Hayek, Freidman et al rightly say that there is intelligence. It is merely broadly disbursed.
Sep '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
how would you explain his opening paragraph in which he describes "the intellectual connection between [Adam] Smith and Charles Darwin?"
He hedges by saying he's never really explored it, and that he's not an intellectual historian nor an expert in the thought of either thinker. The more fruitful line of discussion would be contrasting Hayek's thought with Darwin's and looking for similarities and differences.
To add to the point just a bit, he also mentions that Adam Smith's work reflected an economic historical thinking and a penetrating view of human nature which he contrasts with the over mathematicization of his profession in the present day.
Edited on Mar 10, 2011 at 9:05amMay '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
Michael Labeit: Will Lawson argue that the term social science is no good? · Mar 10 at 8:09am
Edited on Mar 10 at 08:17 am
Walter Russell Mead (whose blog is shamefully not included under People We Like, cause it's required reading) teaches a course called Political Studies. Not Political Science.
As an economist and turf speculator of consistent profitability, math gets you part of the way to interpreting Chaos. And what math shows is that Chaos cannot be controlled well, and produces great things.
Oct '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
Pseudodionysius
I understand your point, but I wonder how many people are aware that Hayek wrote a devastating treatise against scientism? · Mar 10 at 7:08am
Edited on Mar 10 at 07:10 am
Thank you, it's on order
Oct '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
Kennedy Smith
As an economist and turf speculator of consistent profitability, math gets you part of the way to interpreting Chaos. And what math shows is that Chaos cannot be controlled well, and produces great things. · Mar 10 at 9:21am
Personally, I much prefer chaos to entropy.
Jan '11
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
Concerning: “the vexed question of free will — one of the few remaining philosophical problems not to have been either resolved by scientific understanding or dissolved by the exposure of linguistic muddle.”
A note about that …
Uncertainty proves the reality of free will. Take “Let’s Make a Deal,” and pick door number 1, 2, or 3. You have no information to decide which door to pick. It’s completely arbitrary. A truly “determined” person wouldn’t be able to pick anything. The essence of determinism is that there’s something that drives you to pick one thing rather than another, for whatever reason. But when the situation is utterly arbitrary, a truly determined person would be stuck.
Freedom is the remedy to uncertainty. Freedom is what overcomes uncertainty. Without freedom, when the information isn't decisive, no action is possible. The only way to act in the face of uncertainty is to exercise freedom.
Sep '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
Ricochetrivia QOTD:
"Friedrich Hayek was the cousin of Ludwig Wittgenstein."
Dec '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
Indeed. One has to wade into the third paragraph to reach his forthright confession of an Oxfordian pedigree. However, it can be surmised as much from the very first paragraph after his successive mention of Darwin and Cambridge, the former as a smear on the latter.
Oct '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
Great thread, Claire and respondents; I've just met some interesting authors and ideas chasing the links here.
Thank you one and all!
Nov '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
Robert Promm
Darwinism says that selection is random (non-intelligent).
Mar 10 at 8:43am
“Darwinsim” may say that but Darwin does not. Darwin says mutations are random but natural selection is anything but.
Feb '11
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
About that menace of protectionism...
Forgive me, but instead of believing in wonders of free trade and globalism I'm always hearing about I'll believe my lying eyes.
I live in Michigan. I drive past several abandoned factories every time I go to work, and I know of many more. Yes, I know about the UAW, etc. I also know that many of the closed factories were non-union and paid roughly what Wal-Mart pays. Now they're gone and so is the tax base they provided.
And somehow I'm supposed to believe that this is good thing. I do not. Right now the US is facing an enormous fiscal crisis, obviously. The day is coming when the government just won't have the money to simply sign people up for food stamps and free everything when their job emigrates.
Lectures about how rough it is in China or how wonderful it is that poverty in India is much reduced just won't cut it.
A government that places the nebulous interests of globalism ahead of the plain interests of its people won't last long. Nor should it.
Nov '10
Re: Nigel Lawson Strikes: Five Myths and a Menace
Xennady, free trade is not the cause of the things you cite. In fact, even freer trade would help to alleviate them. The Smoot-Hawley tariff that Hoover signed in 1930 was part of the cause of the Great Depression. Other causes were tight money by the Fed and tax increases. Then the New Deal prolonged it.