Augustus
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You are missing the context of the discussion, which is the views of Adam Smith as opposed to Ayn Rand as regards the free market.
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Meet the CEO Who Followed Ayn Rand
- Thread starter Sunstone
- Start date
You are missing the context of the discussion, which is the views of Adam Smith as opposed to Ayn Rand as regards the free market.
Virtue isn't necessary for economic systems to work.He was a moral philosopher
Anyway, it is not 'God telling us what to do', it was 'it works because of Divine Providence'. Something that works due to DP, doesn't necessarily work if people lack virtue, which goes back to Smith's moral philosophy.
Something nearly everyone can agree upon, eh.
Think of markets as an analog to ideal gas behavior.
We may change parameters, but aggregate molecular behavior will still tend to Boyle's Law.
The ability to affect the emergent properties doesn't mean these properties vanish.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
It has been well established by history that laissez faire economics simply has too many problems, which is why no country on Earth uses it today. What we and most "capitalist" countries have is called "mixed economies", mixing elements of both capitalism and socialism.
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber
I'm not saying they vanish, I'm saying they aren't invisible, and it's not a "hand" but rather many. Kind of like how thousands of years ago the "invisible hand of god" directed things, but we learned what was really there and going on (at least some of it, anyways). A couple hundred years ago the "invisible hand of the market" directed things, but we've learned much about what is actually there and going on.
Yeah.....the invisible hand metaphor still applies.
Confucian Mormon Buddhist
Member
Been a while sense I read Ayn Rand (back when I was a teenager) but I generally liked her ideas. What do you view as being the problem with her concept of human nature?
Confucian Mormon Buddhist
Member
Particular evidence? My observation has been that economies grow faster under laissez faire but are more unstable. So you have big upswings but also big dips. Wise regulation reduces growth but also reduces instability. Unwise regulation just causes destruction...
Terrywoodenpic
Oldest Heretic
I have never even heard of Rand, or the invisible hand come to that.
Nor do I give much heed to providence, which i see more as chance than an act of God.
I think that God very rarely defines what happens in this world.
If we have a function at all it is to be the active part of Gods work, and that he works through us when we let him. Unfortunately our self serving often works against him.
Nor do I give much heed to providence, which i see more as chance than an act of God.
I think that God very rarely defines what happens in this world.
If we have a function at all it is to be the active part of Gods work, and that he works through us when we let him. Unfortunately our self serving often works against him.
One of the most glaring problems with Rand's view of human nature is that it is almost devoid of any grasp on any level of how evolution shaped us. You can't understand human nature without understanding human evolution, and she didn't understand human evolution. For example: She no where that I know of addresses the significance of the fact that our survival as a species crucially depended on our exceptional (for mammals) cooperation with each other. Her notion of why we cooperate seems to me to owe more to Hobbes than the evolutionary sciences.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
Exactly, and I didn't say anything different.
Again, agreed.
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber
Her idea of "rational selfishness" (or the number of other ways I've heard it phrased) just doesn't work out for us. Love, for example, often contradicts this, but yet we have evolved to be social animals who pair and mate with others, and though I've not much experience with it, rationalizing it is terribly difficult to do even though it is something good for us in the long run. As social animals we compromise, yield, negotiate, and just have to accept that at times our egos will not be satisfied, and if everyone put "me first" we could not have a functioning society.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
If we go back prior to the 1930's historian tell us that we suffered from a depression or recession (mostly the latter) on an average of less than 10 years (I can't recall the exact figure). Because we now have many more devices that we can use, thus that number is now quite a bit higher.
When we deal with what happened in 2007+, without help from the fed and the "bailout", many economists feel that would could have suffered a worse fate than we did during the Great Depression because we had a higher percentage of our GDP tied up in credit than then. Bernanke and Paulson, both Republicans, told a closed-session of congressional leaders in September, 2008, that our economy was on the verge of collapse. Left to it's own, we could today looking up to see the bottom of our economy because of a downhill spiral, whereas people panic, that is hard to stop because it would tend to keep going down on its own volition.