A Realistically Optimistic Scenario for the Future

1. The exponential development of the global Internet culture, intensifying global migration processes, and the rapid development of communication and transaction technologies will jointly result - sooner than most would anticipate - in the dissolution and eventual disappearance of the presently dominant nationalistic, "patriotic", and other worldviews based on morally arbitrary, tribal divisions.

2. The disappearance of the abovementioned worldviews coupled with the emergence of unprecedentedly effective opportunities for developing grey market entrepreneurship (bitcoin, seasteading, 3D printing, etc.) and the practically universal availability of independent, non-ideological education (MOOCs, private online academies, etc.) will lead to the disintegration of the structurally insolvent nation states. All resources under their control will be auctioned off and transferred into the hands of private entrepreneurs or placed in newly created private equity or mutual funds, the shares in which will be distributed among the members of local communities.

3. A world divided into states, nations, and political institutions will be replaced by a world composed of hundreds of thousands or even millions of independent economic zones, neighborhood associations, charter cities, and other forms of contractual, propertarian arrangements integrated through free trade and the global division of labor. With the disappearance of institutionalized, large-scale aggression of states and the balkanizing national conflicts, as well as with the strengthening of a global culture based on respect for individual liberty and property, there will be an explosion of a practically infinite variety of voluntary, bottom-up social institutions, both for-profit and non-profit. The disappearance of the conviction that everyone has a right to live at the expense of others will result in the strengthening of the family bond, the neighborly bond, the professional bond, and the universal, philanthropy-inducing human bond. The human race will not become perfect, but the evolutionary process of technological progress, development of free enterprise, universalization of access to free knowledge, and increasing cultural interconnection will lead it to reject the most irrational and destructive elements of its Paleolithic heritage. Considering a rapid increase in the pace of development of the above processes, all of their consequences described here can, with a bit of luck, fully materialize within the next couple hundred years.

Realnie optymistyczny scenariusz przyszłości

1. Wykładniczy rozwój globalnej kultury internetowej, intensyfikujące się globalne procesy migracyjne oraz skokowy rozwój technologii komunikacyjnych i transakcyjnych doprowadzą wspólnie - szybciej, niż większość przypuszcza - do rozpuszczenia i zaniku dominujących obecnie światopoglądów nacjonalistycznych, "patriotycznych" i innych opartych na moralnie arbitralnych, plemiennych podziałach.

2. Zanik wspomnianych wyżej światopoglądów w połączeniu z bezprecedensowo skutecznymi możliwościami rozwoju wolnej przedsiębiorczości w szarej strefie (bitcoin, seasteading, druk 3D, itp.) oraz praktycznie uniwersalną dostępnością niezależnej, nieideologicznej edukacji (MOOCs, prywatne akademie online, itp.) doprowadzi do rozpadu przytłoczonych strukturalną niewypłacalnością państw narodowych. Wszystkie znajdujące się pod ich kontrolą zasoby zostaną zlicytowane i przekazane w ręce prywatnych przedsiębiorców lub umieszczone w nowopowstałych prywatnych bądź spółdzielczych funduszach akcyjnych, udziały w których zostaną przekazane indywidualnym członkom lokalnych społeczności.

3. Świat podzielony na państwa, narody i instytucje polityczne zastąpi świat złożony z setek tysięcy lub nawet milionów niezależnych stref ekonomicznych, stowarzyszeń sąsiedzkich, miast czarterowych i innych form suwerennych obszarów własnościowych zintegrowanych na bazie wolnego handlu i globalnego podziału pracy. Wraz ze zniknięciem zinstytucjonalizowanej, wielkoskalowej agresji państw i bałkanizujących konfliktów narodowych, a także wraz z umocnieniem się globalnej kultury opartej na poszanowaniu indywidualnej wolności i własności powstanie praktycznie nieskończona w swojej różnorodności gama dobrowolnych, oddolnych instytucji społecznych - zarówno biznesowych, jak i charytatywnych. Wraz ze zniknięciem przeświadczenia, że każdy ma prawo żyć kosztem drugiego umocniona zostanie więź rodzinna, więź sąsiedzka, więź zawodowa i sprzyjająca nastawieniu filantropijnemu więź ogólnoludzka. Ludzkość nie stanie się doskonała, ale ewolucyjny proces postępu technologicznego, rozwoju wolnej przedsiębiorczości, upowszechniania się dostępu do wolnej wiedzy i coraz ściślejszego przenikania się kultur doprowadzi ją do odrzucenia najbardziej irracjonalnych i niszczycielskich elementów swojego paleolitycznego dziedzictwa. Biorąc pod uwagę wzrost tempa rozwoju powyższych procesów, wszystkie opisane tu ich skutki mogą przy odrobinie szczęścia zmaterializować się w pełni już w ciągu najbliższych kilkuset lat.

On the Perennial Topic of Austrian Apriorism

The perennial topic of Austrian apriorism started to trend in certain quarters of the Internet once again (no names will be named), so I'm using this opportunity to restate my position on it, especially given the fact that there still seems to be a great deal of confusion surrounding even its more easily interpretable aspects.

My position, which I take to be the position of Ludwig von Mises, Carl Menger, and most of their classical predecessors who worked on economic methodology (including J. B. Say, Nassau Senior, and John Cairnes), is that pure economic theory is aprioristic, i.e., logically deducible from self-evident premises embedded in and necessary to make sense of the surrounding reality of empirical contingencies.

In other words, pure economic theory is a tool to interpret empirical reality and make it intelligible in terms of the categories of human action, not a replacement for the investigation of its empirically contingent features. It provides a set of non-trivial, necessarily true statements regarding the logical structure of human action – nothing more and nothing less. It cannot and does not attempt to prove its relevance to any particular case rooted in the contingencies of the empirical world. The business of establishing such relevance belongs to other analytical tools, mental faculties, and areas of knowledge. An entrepreneur is in the business of making forward-looking judgments of relevance. A historian is in the business of making backward-looking judgments of relevance. But they both have to accept the logical (a priori) correctness of economic theory (or, for that matter, mathematical theory) if their judgments of relevance are not to be arbitrary leaps in the dark.

An economic theorist can deduce, say, the law of demand, in a purely aprioristic fashion, since it follows from a sound reflection on the logical structure of human action. This, however, does not in any meaningful sense make him an intellectual oponent of, say, a behavioral economist. If the quantity demanded of a given good rises with its price, then the theorist knows that it is not the case that the law of demand has been invalidated, but that the ceteris paribus clause built into it has been violated - in other words, the good in question is not the same good any more (the relevant social facts have changed). Then it is the job of the behavioral economist to find out what caused the change in the relevant social facts, how stable it is likely to be, how reasonable it seems to extrapolate from it, etc. To put it differently, the job of the behavioral economist is to establish what factors are capable of violating the ceteris paribus clauses of economic laws. This, however, he can do only if he accepts that in the absence of any such intervening factors the law holds as a matter of logical necessity. This does not in any sense imply that the supposed economic law is an infinitely malleable, ad hoc mental construct, since the realization that every rule has its preconditions in no way invalidates the concept of rules, their utility in describing the empirical world, or their applicability to it.

In sum, the fact that aprioristic pure theory has to be empirically embedded in order to be empirically relevant does not make it empirical. Otherwise everything of practical value (including logic and mathematics) can be called empirical and the word becomes meaningless, which is not a position that even the most hard-core empiricist could reasonably hold. For an empiricist, the sole purpose of a priori theory is to define and explicate concepts. For an Austrian, the purpose of a priori theory is to interpret the facts and to impose logically necessary constraints on their investigations. None of this can be understood - and these are in fact crucial things to understand - by thinking of economic theory as scientifically useful only to the extent that it is "empirical" or "falsifiable". Mises understood this well. So should those who question his methodology.

My Talks from Summer Austrian Seminar 2013

My talks on the Optimal Currency Area theory and its Austrian critique, and on Regime Uncertainty and Legal Entrepreneurship, both delivered at the Summer Austrian Seminar 2013 in Poland.

Why Almost Everyone Believes in Authority

1. In the paleolithic period, organized brute force was the only game in town in the context of inter-tribal rivalry. Thus, natural selection favored those who were obedient to tribal alpha males. The disobedient were simply killed off.

2. The way to make tribal obedience psychologically bearable and prudentially beneficial was to rationalize it. Thus, the obedient came to view their rulers as necessary for coordinating collective action and/or concerned with the welfare of the tribe. This was the earliest manifestaton of the Stockholm Syndrome. Again, natural selection favored those who succumbed to this syndrome especially easily.

3. The rulers realized that, being a numerical minority, they need legitimacy to maintain their rule. Thus, they set out to cultivate and strengthen the Stockholm Syndrome among their subjects. The pinnacle of their achievement in this regard was the invention of democracy - a universal invitation to join the ranks of rulers, which decisively blurred the distinction between the rulers and the ruled, and ushered in a system where everyone is expected to feel entitled to live at the expense of everyone else.

4. As famously noted by Lord Acton and infamously demonstrated in the Stanford Prison Experiment, power is extremely corrupting. With the advent of democracy, the corrupting effects of power became particularly widespread. This, coupled with the complementary effects of global Stockholm Syndrome, made belief in (political) authority - i.e., the belief that some people have a right to rule other people - practically universal.

All of Sound Social Science Consists of Footnotes to Bastiat

Whitehead once remarked that all of Western Philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato. I would argue that all of sound social science consists of footnotes to Bastiat. In a global society that outgrew its destructive irrationality and reached the level of informed decency, Bastiat would be synonymous not only with common sense, but with the best kind of wisdom - transparent, modest, and timeless - that the human mind can produce.

"Either fraternity is spontaneous, or it does not exist. To decree it is to annihilate it. The law can indeed force men to remain just; in vain would it would try to force them to be self-sacrificing."

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

"The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else."

"No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs (which alas! is all too inadequate)."

"It seems to me that this is theoretically right, for whatever the question under discussion—whether religious, philosophical, political, or economic; whether it concerns prosperity, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, cooperation, property, labor, trade, capital, wages, taxes, population, finance, or government—at whatever point on the scientific horizon I begin my researches, I invariably reach this one conclusion: The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberty."

The Contractarian Quadrilemma

If the social contract can be made in the state of nature, then the state is redundant.

If the social contract cannot be made in the state of nature, then the state is impossible.

If no social contract is in fact made in the state of nature, then the state is unjustified.

If no social contract needs to be made in the state of nature, then the state is a fiction.