Here in southeast Nebraska, we’ve seen a bit of a warm up. Last week at this time, we were in the midst of a blizzard, with 40 mph winds, a foot of snow, and single digit temperatures. Through yesterday, the temps stayed in the single digits (well, it DID get up to 12 degrees yesterday). It is a sign of how Nebraskans, and others in somewhat more northern climes adapt—today, it’s 26 degrees—not even to the freezing point yet—and people are running around without heavy coats, oftentimes making the trip from the car to the building in just their slightly heavy (sweaters) indoor wear.
This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why I just don’t get worked up about “climate change”. Whether it’s hotter or colder, we humans (and most other species on earth) seem to be capable of adapting. And frankly, after this last week, a little bit of “global warming” doesn’t really sound so bad to me… 
Unlike the Scottish enlightenment (David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith), the Continental enlightenment, inspired by René Descartes, turned superstition-busting rationalism itself into a superstition, by ignoring the limits of reason and absolutising certain modes of rational analysis.
Our rational faculties have not brought about our rational faculties. Instead they are a tiny part - of restricted relevance and prowess - of a vastly greater order within which they have emerged and continue to be shaped. Reason is only as good as its ability to adapt humbly and with great circumspection to its subordinate role in the overall scheme of things.
The great thinkers of liberty and classical liberalism understood the presence of a greater order and the need to adapt to it. They were the inventors and definers of the true subject matter of the social sciences, the role of self-generating order in human affairs. But their approach has been superseded by the naive rationalism characteristic of the Cartesian legacy.
Unfortunately, economics, one of the academic fields most suitable for demonstrating and understanding self-creating order - order "by human action, but not by human design," in Adam Ferguson's phrase - has been hijacked a long time ago by glass bead game playing nerds and nation building busybodies utterly blind to the genuine, distinctive and rightful task of economics.
I have entered a number of posts fundamentally critical of the prevailing vein in the social sciences and especially economics:
Command Solutions or Acquire a Degree in Mastering Society, The Dismal Social Sciences, and Economics - Rite of Passage ... , and Unecological Ecologists.
In this post, Robert Higgs offers a breathtakingly brilliant criticism of mainstream economics on the occasion of Paul Samuelson's recent death. In a related post, Higgs writes with incredible depth and incisiveness:
Like most graduate students in economics during the last 40 years, I spent many painful hours plowing through Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis (Harvard University Press, 1947). From that sacred text we novices learned how to prove many specific theorems. Far more important, we learned how neoclassical economics—“modern economic science”—was supposed to be done.
We built mathematically specified “models,” sets of equations describing the relations of selected economic variables. Model in hand, we proved that it had a stable equilibrium, then characterized the relations of the variables in that blessed state. Altering the “data” or the “parameters” of the model, we ascertained how a new equilibrium differed from an initial one. In its advanced form this protocol rendered most older economists instantly obsolete, but for young math wizards like Samuelson it opened up the prospect of “new realms of aesthetic delight.” Eventually most economists entered those realms. Playing increasingly clever mathematical tricks with the models constituted “scientific progress.”
Samuelson fashioned his models, which set the standard, after 19th century physics. Functions were assumed to be smooth and continuous. Economics was reduced to various types of the same calculus problem: finding a constrained extremum. The economist’s job was to state the objective function and the constraints, then grind out the solutions. This required considerable mathematical ability and stomach for tedium but little imagination and no familiarity with economic reality.
By the 1960s, if not earlier, academic economists who quarreled with this way of doing the job were, as Roy Weintraub put it, “regarded by mainstream neoclassical economists as defenders of lost causes or as kooks, misguided critics, and anti-scientific oddballs.” By aping 19th-century physicists, neoclassical economists convinced themselves and others that they were doing science, but the effort was basically misguided, not so much scientific as, in F.A. Hayek’s term, “scientistic.” Human beings, purposeful and creative, are not like atoms; nor is a market analogous to a physical or chemical system. In the view of Hayek and his teacher Ludwig von Mises, neoclassical economics is, in critical respects, pseudo-science.
James Buchanan’s What Should Economists Do? (Liberty Press, 1979) presents a telling critique of mainstream economics. “Its flaw lies in its conversion of individual choice behavior from a social-institutional context to a physical-computational one,” he writes. Further, the obsession with equilibrium gives rise to “the most sophisticated fallacy in economic theory, the notion that because certain relationships hold in equilibrium the forced interferences designed to implement these relationships will, in fact, be desirable.” Mainstream economists cannot move the earth with a mathematical lever, because they have no place to stand—no “given” information about property rights, consumer preferences, resource availabilities, and technical possibilities. What neoclassical economics takes as given is, in reality, revealed only by competitive processes. “Most modern economists,” Buchanan aptly concludes, “are simply doing what other economists are doing while living off a form of dole that will simply not stand critical scrutiny.”
And a “promise” that it might get into double digits today (finally!).
Me, too.
“We trusted the Federal Government to decide what the Federal Government’s powers should be…”
In a remarkable article authors Johnson and Mason correctly detect:
Obama's new "strategy" is no strategy at all. It is a cynical and politically motivated rehash of Iraq policy: Toss in a few more troops, throw together something resembling local security forces, buy off the enemies, and get the hell out before it all blows up.
Much of the excellent article's essence is well outlined in this excerpt available from Reason's post entitled Afghanistan Another Vietnam? You Bet Your Administration It Is, Obama!:
Let's start with the obvious: There isn't the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his Dec. 1 speech will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan. None. The U.S. president and his advisors labored for three months and brought forth old wine in bigger bottles. The speech contained not one single new idea or approach, nor offered any hint of new thinking about a conflict that everyone now agrees the United States is losing. Instead, the administration deliberated for 94 days to deliver essentially "more men, more money, try harder." It sounded ominously similar to Mikhail Gorbachev's "bloody wound" speech that led to a similar-sized, temporary Soviet troop surge in Afghanistan in 1986.....
The president offered three reasons why [Afghanistan now and Vietnam then] are different. And all are dead wrong. First, Obama noted that Afghanistan is being conducted by a "coalition" of 43 countries -- as if war by committee would magically change the outcome (a throwback to former President George W. Bush's "Iraq coalition" mathematics). The truth is, outside of a handful of countries, it's basically a coalition of pacifists. In fact, more foreign troops fought alongside the United States in Vietnam than are now actually fighting with Americans today. Only nine countries in today's 43-country coalition have more than 1,000 personnel there; nine others have 10 (yes, not even a dozen people) -- or fewer. And although Australia and New Zealand have sent a handful of excellent special operations troops to Afghanistan, only Britain, Canada, and France are providing significant forces willing to conduct conventional offensive military operations. That brings the coalition's combat-troop contribution to approximately 17,000. Most of the other 38 "partners" have strict rules prohibiting them from ever doing anything actually dangerous....
The president went on to assert that the Taliban are not popular in Afghanistan, whereas the Viet Cong represented a broadly popular nationalist movement with the support of a majority of the Vietnamese. But this is also wrong. Neither the Viet Cong then, nor the Taliban now, have ever enjoyed the popular support of more than 15 percent of the population....
The reality on the ground is that Afghanistan is Vietnam redux. Afghan President Hamid Karzai's regime is an utterly illegitimate, incompetent kleptocracy. The Afghan National Army (ANA) -- slotted to take over the conflict when the coalition pulls out -- will not even be able to feed itself in five years, much less turn back the mounting Taliban tide....
Most critically of all, Pakistan's reaction to Obama's speech was to order its top military intelligence service, the ISI, to immediately begin rebuilding and strengthening covert ties to the Afghan Taliban in anticipation of their eventual return to power, according to a highly placed Pakistani official. There will be no more genuine cooperation from Pakistan (if there ever was)....
See also my posts Killing Them Softly, The Obama Doctrine ... , War Is Peace (2/2), and 37 Seconds to Insult Your Intelligence.
By contrast:
Mild He lays His glory by
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth
Hark! The herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn King!"
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