jade versus gold
Roderick Long posted a comment to "ancient Chinese secret" that will probably escape the notice of anyone not digging through the handful of comments left on this blog, so here it is:
Long on Taoism: "No writing, education, material improvements, curiosity, travel, or trade -- this is not exactly the Hayekian 'Great Society.' Anarchic it may be, but it is less the dynamic market-based anarchism of Rothbard than the primitivist, acorn-munching anarcho-stagnation of Rousseau?s Second Discourse. If this is the price of freedom, statism begins to look good."
bk on spontaneous order:There's the wu-wei of ecology, evolution, biology and the wu-wei of the market. Both are self-regulating systems and both can suffer from intervention, which will produce ugly unintended consequences.
Once upon a time, I thought it would be good to confront environmentalists with their own thoroughly anti-ecological worldview of markets -- their failure to grasp the parallel between the two.
But the more economics I learn, the less strong I think that parallel is. The market is in fact superior to (or at least more complex than) ecology because of the spontaneous human invention of money and money-prices, which allow for a form of calculation completely absent in ecology and evolution. I don't know of any bio-equivalent to capital formation or entrepreneurship. I don't know of any eco-equivalent of technology or civilization.In the end, I think the anarcho-primitivists are the only honest shade of green there is.
They know that they are rejecting civilization, rejecting society, rejecting human happiness and health and welfare. They hate that which makes us different from other animals. They consider our species a disease.If it's true that the Taoists themselves failed to perceive and celebrate the wu-wei of commerce and civilization then I'm with Long: the alternative starts to look better and better.
Update from "Mr B":
Hello again Mr. Marcus!
I read "Jade vs. Gold" this morning. You may be interested in a particular book, if you haven't already read it. The edition I have is called "Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem" by Michael Rothschild. This edition is out of print, but Amazon seems to have a few available for less than $10. There also seems to be a new edition, called "Bionomics: Economy as Business Ecosystem".The page at this link describes the second version. Barnes and Noble has the second edition for around $30. The cover art has changed, but the table of contents is the same as the edition I have. Perhaps the contents of the chapters have been updated, though. I would be glad to lend you my copy as well. This book points out many parallels between biological systems and economies, including a bumblebee hive income statement. The are too many good quotes from this book to list here. I will give these two, not because I think they are the best but because they are the first two that caught my eye and I have to get to work sometime today. If you would like more information about the book I can send you more stuff over the Thanksgiving break.
From the "Profits and Technology" chapter: "The human capacity to imagine, to consciously pull together unrelated pieces of knowledge and produce new answers, is what makes economic evolution happen so much faster than biological evolution. Nonetheless, the fundamental proces - turning profits earned today into information for tomorrow - is the same for both organisms and organizations."
From the "Savings and Taxes" chapter: "The second crucial error was made by John Maynard Keynes. Perhaps the most influential economist of the twentieth century, Keynes argued that recessions and depressions, particularly the Great Depression of the 1930's, were caused by too much saving and not enough consumption. Keynes imagined the economy to be an engine that could not run efficiently and keep everyone employed unless the government kept a heavy foot on the accelerator."
As for an eco-equivalent to technology, this article points out a recent discovery of gorillas using tools, and mentions other tool-using strategies by the other great apes (beyond the stick-down-an-ant-nest trick).
A shorter and otherwise slightly different version of my Confucianism article was published in the JLS two years ago; link here.