J39 - The Costs of Central Planning

Way back in Journal 5, I explained “The Day After Problem”, which highlights the inevitability of change, and suggested that I might return to the topic in a later journal. This is that journal. There in Journal 5, I concluded that “where there is life, where there is action, there is change.” I said that it would be possible to maintain a permanent wealth distribution in a given society, but only insofar as that society was dead. There is a broader point here, not specific to wealth redistribution: Any planned organization imposed upon society is maintainable only to the extent that change, and the life that creates it, is suppressed. “Socialism [central planning] is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.” A planned society is a frozen society, lifeless. 

Why do we mourn death? I’m not asking why we fear death; it’s clear that a large part of this fear is actually just a fear of the unknown. No, why do we universally mourn the death of the people around us and seek to postpone our own deaths? I think it’s because death is a foreclosing of possibilities. A hundred potential futures have suddenly been permanently denied to us. We dread our own deaths because we have so much more to do; we grieve the death of others because of all that they never got to do. Something has been lost. We’ve lost something: any future with that person in it. The world has lost something: any contribution or effect from that person in the future. And, of course, the dead person has lost something: any future at all. Death involves loss. It is this loss that we mourn.

In the same way, when a society becomes frozen due to the implementation of some intellectual’s central plan by the coercive power of the State, and it loses some of its life, we all lose something. We lose the possibility of change. We lose the progress that will go unrealized. A frozen, planned society cannot change, and therefore cannot grow and progress. It loses the benefits of the flexibility and imagination that have so distinguished human beings. Society’s greatest resource, the imagination and purposeful behavior of its members, is lost. It is man’s nature to continually engage in action to change the world into a version that the actor finds more suitable. To the extent that man is denied the right to do this, because some other vision has been deemed to be best, the future potential benefits of society are severely limited.

A central plan is a coercive design, imposed upon society by the State (that institution with a monopoly of force in a given territory), that was created by a group of intellectuals (“court intellectuals”) who believe that they know what is best for everyone. A central plan manifests itself as a set of rules and regulations which constrain the actions of other individuals in society; since the central plan entails a vision for what society should look like in the present and a vision for what society should look like in the future and a prescription for how society should reach that future vision, interference in this plan by other actors must be restricted. By imposing one set of ideas on everyone, and constraining their ability to interfere, a central plan effectively limits the possibility of change and the potential for innovation in society. The central plan’s rules and regulations prevent alternative futures, which have not been endorsed by the court intellectuals, from arising.

It seems to me, and I think that the court intellectuals would actually agree, that the only possible justification for using violence or the threat thereof to subjugate the ideas and visions of some individuals to the ideas and visions of other individuals is if such subjugation, the enactment of the central plan, results in everyone actually being better off, or at least in a net benefit to society, than if everyone retained the freedom to act as they think best. That is, every rule or regulation in the central plan should be able to pass a cost-benefit analysis. Of course, there may be some social planners who don’t care about the costs of their plan. Or, rather, they think that the cost is justified. Many of their countrymen may starve to death, but this outcome is necessary to please the gods or to fulfill some other mission, even if others can’t understand this fact. What I’m trying to say is, value is subjective. If a regulation will objectively cost more than it yields in benefits, as determined by an accountant looking at economic price information, the glorious cause might be subjectively seen as outweighing the economic costs of the regulation, even if that ideal cannot be measured monetarily. However, in order to convince the masses to submit to the authority of the central planner, the court intellectuals must at least pretend that their rules are justified by a net increase in welfare, for that is the standard for every action, and the masses cannot see the vision that the central planner has for society which will theoretically be so good that any sacrifice is justified. And, again, for those who can see this vision and believe that it is good, the rule or regulation would be considered worth the cost. 

However, and this is important, the cost of these rules and regulations is incalculable, because their true cost is a loss of future innovation. The real cost of any action is its opportunity cost. What else could have been, if not this? By choosing one future, and forcibly excluding all others, a central plan costs us these other possible futures. And, because these futures never come into existence, it is impossible to measure how much they might have been worth. The future is always uncertain. But by trying to impose a certain future on the world, a central plan forestalls the possibility of an unseen and unconsidered and perhaps even unimagined future that could possibly be better than the central plan. Now, at this point, I will admit that it is possible that the central plan is a plan for the very best possible future. However, there is no way to confirm this, no cost-benefit analysis that could support it, because the true cost of its enactment can never be actually known. 

And this is the real argument against central plans and government rules and regulations. There are, of course, the plethora of arguments against specific government actions that demonstrate that these actions will not accomplish their goal or will result in unintended and disastrous consequences. And then there are all of the arguments directed against the rule’s objective itself, arguments that support the enactment of a different plan. But the argument against central planning itself, as a practice, rests upon this acknowledgment that there is no objective way to justify a central plan. This fact alone does not prove, by itself, that we shouldn’t craft and enact central plans. But it is powerful and damning to recognize that there is no way to know or even effectively argue that our central plan should be enacted. And this does suggest that central plans should be abandoned in favor or freedom. The argument against central planning is that there could be something better, if only we had the freedom to discover it. 

Hayek put it best when he said that “if we knew how freedom would be used, the case for it would largely disappear.” That is, if we did know the futures that men could and would create, and could foresee all of the future knowledge and innovation that would come about, and conduct comparative cost-benefit analyses of these futures, then we could create a central plan that would lead to the best possible outcome. But, obviously, we can’t do that, precisely because we do not know what the future will hold. We cannot know what the nature or effect of innovation will be until the innovation has already occurred. As Mises said, “progress is precisely that which the rules and regulations did not foresee.” We therefore cannot say that a certain central plan is the best course of action for society to follow.

The alternative to a central plan, as mentioned, is freedom, and the market process that freedom results in. The market allows each individual to craft and act upon their own plan for building a better future, and subjects each action to the profit-loss test, to determine whether the action actually was, on net, good or bad for society. In a complex society based on the division of labor, the surest way to a successful life is to satisfy the desires of your fellow man as you engage in many economic (and personal) transactions. Everyone in the market has the same rights: the right to control their own person and property and to enter contracts with others. Interactions are always voluntary; no one’s will is overridden by the will of another. Therefore, every interaction benefits both parties (ex ante). Every individual retains their own agency and ability to choose the best path they see available to them. The imagination of each man may be allowed to develop to ever greater heights in pursuit of the ever elusive ultimate good, happiness. 

The market does not provide for one overarching plan, but allows every individual to try to enact their own plan for solving the problems facing society. If society agrees with an actor’s plan and actions, then the actor is rewarded with profits, enabling him to serve society to a greater extent in the next round of production. If an actor does not choose the right plan, and does not effectively serve the consumer, then he suffers economic losses which ensure that he is not in a position to squander society’s resources again. See my first SDA for further elaboration of the market process and how it directs society’s scarce resources in ways that are the most beneficial for society. 

The important point about the market, however, is that it does not foreclose the possibility of change. Indeed, change is it’s whole reason for existence. Hayek points out that “economic problems arise always and only in consequence of change. So long as things continue as before, or at least as they were expected to, there arise no new problems requiring a decision, no need to form a new plan.” The market is most suitable for discovering a solution to a problem that is particularly suited to the specific circumstances of the problem. As the circumstances change, so does the problem, and so also the solution must change. In the market, a change in circumstances causes a change in price, which changes the results of the profit-loss test of the individual’s action. This change in economic results causes the individual to either adjust his action to fit the new circumstances or be replaced by someone else better suited to providing a solution to the new problem. The market, therefore, acts as an evolutionary process whereby the plans of individuals adapt in response to changes in the world around them. The market ruthlessly seeks better and better solutions, and allows every individual the freedom to experiment and try their own solution. It cares not who the solution comes from, whether they be an intellectual or not (something intellectuals detest). All that matters is their action, and whether or not it was good or bad for society. 

A central plan is essentially the choices of a single individual (or group acting as a single entity) enacted through the individual actions of all members of society (as directed by the propagated rules and regulations). There is a clear hegemonic relationship in that one plan predominates, and, backed by the threat of force, the plan is not subject to the profit-loss test of the market. There is no effective feedback mechanism that can tell the central planner whether his plan is correct or not. Indeed, in an outright socialist system, there would not even be any prices for the central planner to even try to judge his actions by. The imposition of a single plan forstalls any attempt at trying different ideas. As discussed above, the rules and regulations which make up the central plan freeze the economy and society because change, or deviation from the plan, is forbidden. Even if the central planner allowed the market to arrive at a solution, the codification of that solution into the rules of the central plan would freeze the market process into an arrangement that was only appropriate for those particular circumstances, inappropriate for others. Incorporating the present results of the market process into a central plan still forecloses the possibility of better results arising in the future, or even the ability of the market to respond to changes in circumstances. Progress, and society, would come to a standstill. The plan, defined as it is by the existing state of knowledge and technology, could allow no room for new knowledge or innovation to appear. 

Now, clearly, central plans are subject to attack through employment of the knowledge problem, as done in Journal 38. Society functions by utilizing the particular knowledge that is spread among all the members of society of each individual’s specific circumstances. It is impossible for a single mind or group of court intellectuals to possess all of this knowledge and thus to form a fully-informed central plan. But I’d also like to touch upon my “Theory of the Black and White”. Even if the central planner did possess all of the knowledge in society, it is certain that some of this knowledge would be incorrect, and that the body of the knowledge would be incomplete. We don’t know everything. We cannot possibly know enough to confidently design and pick one central plan to organize society by. There is always something more that needs to be learned or figured out or adjusted. This is because everything exists on a spectrum. And this applies to the central plan itself. Even if the plan was regarded by everyone as the best possible course for society, it would still have the potential for future improvements as man, his environment, and his ideas continued to change, if only such improvements were allowed. This is the great danger in choosing one view and committing ourselves to the belief that it is the best or only view: it denies to us the benefit of encountering other views and testing our view against them and improving our view from our experience with the other views. Choosing one plan is a rejection of the humility that is necessary for true intellectual and social progress. It doesn’t just freeze society; it freezes the planners in their current state of mind. They cannot find a better way, and no one else is allowed to look.

Now, I have addressed the economic and social costs of a central plan. Before I conclude, I would also like to address the spiritual effects. The real cost of a central plan is the loss of a chance to achieve anything better. The plan is all we have, and it is all we will ever have. But if the future is predetermined, and a vision has been chosen for society to move inexorably towards, then there is no possibility of anything ever being different, or better. There is no hope for anything better. Human beings are purposeful creatures. It is their function to act, to constantly be engaged in purposeful behavior in an attempt to create a better world for themselves. But, to act, they must have purpose. If there is no hope for a better world, if there is no belief that a better life can be attained, then there can be no human action. By deciding upon the course of the future and eliminating the possibility of change, a central plan takes away people’s hope for a better future, and this loss of hope leads to a loss of agency. Human beings are defined by their ability to imagine new worlds and act to bring them into existence. If they can’t do this, if they cannot act, then they lose that creative human spark which distinguishes them from the rest of the universe. They become less than human. A centrally planned society has just one actor; one will rules. And since, logistically, society cannot actually be planned, and civilization cannot be built or sustained alone, this arrangement can only lead to catastrophe. If you have a culture in which people do not desire to live better or don’t believe that a better life is possible, then society will grow stagnant, and civilization will collapse, and man will return to the state of nature which he has worked so hard to escape. The only way to avoid this, the only way to keep civilization stable and growing, is to have a culture where people believe in the future and their ability to change it for the better. And in order for people to have this culture, to possess agency, they must be free of any central plan.

Of course, we do not live under a central plan. Such a situation would be, as I just said, impossible. Central plans cannot be sustained because the future does change, and other people do act in new and independent ways. The central planner can never exercise full control over society, because men are emphatically unsuited to behaving like cogs in a machine. But, we do live under many rules and regulations, and each one of these are part of a larger plan, whether this larger plan is recognized or intended to be enacted fully, and each one of these rules or regulations that are enacted and enforced by government, outside the voluntaryness of the market, is a restriction on society’s ability to change and grow and innovate in the future. Each one costs us an incalculable amount of unrealized progress, and chips away at our freedom to act. Every rule and regulation reduces the scope of choice available to us and our sense of agency. Therefore, the criticisms leveled against central planning here in this post, and in other posts, may just as validly be applied to every restriction imposed upon society by a group of intellectuals who believe that they know best, through the coercive power of the State. It should be noted that central planning is a scalable phenomenon; its flaws are the same no matter the context, whenever one individual tries to make decisions for another individual.

My thoughts are, as always, drawn to modern public schooling, which, as I said in Journal 38, is almost a perfect model of a central plan (subject, of course, to the same limitations that apply to the feasibility and efficacy of every central plan). The present schedule and curriculum of every student is determined by a central board somewhere, and the future of all of these students is predetermined for them. It has been decided by one group of intellectuals what each and every student should know, and when, and how they should learn it. There is a definite image of what each student is meant to look like at the end of the years-long schooling process, a process which the students have no choice but to participate in and little control over. The freedom of teachers and students is severely constrained. The system doesn’t work very well, of course; there are many variations in outcomes, and not every student emerges in the image of the central planners. But this is because central plans don’t work very well, not because there was no central plan, and certainly not because there was a lack of effort in enacting the central plan. In Journal 32, entitled “A Human Education”, I said that the purpose of an education was to develop the student’s human mind, “to develop creative, thinking human beings.” And, as I have explained throughout this post and throughout this project, the distinguishing characteristic of man and his thinking is his purposeful action and all that it entails. It seems logical, then, that the development of an individual as a human being is roughly the same as the development of an individual’s agency. As I said above, agency is denied to individuals trapped in a central plan. The proper education of students, therefore, requires freeing them from the central plan that is modern public schooling, and giving them ultimate control over their own lives and learning.

J38 - The Intellectual Division of Labor: Applicability to Education?

The intellectual division of labor refers to the idea that knowledge in society is distributed among many individuals. Just as the physical division of labor involves the specialization of different people in particular tasks in which they have a comparative advantage, the intellectual division of labor involves the use of specialized knowledge that each individual possesses as he goes about his task. I’m not talking about the expertise of certain scientists in certain subjects, but the more commonplace and unique “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.” It is this knowledge, which is different for every man and therefore gives every man some small advantage over his fellows in that he may utilize the unique knowledge that he possesses in some beneficial way, that is referred to by the intellectual division of labor. This concept is derived from The Knowledge Problem, as conceived by Hayek, that it is impossible to organize or design or control society because the human mind is incapable of possessing all of the requisite knowledge for such a course of action. The knowledge that makes society work is spread among all the members of society. 

To quote Hayek extensively: “The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is...a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.” As my work has made clear this year, and as several of my students are coming to realize through their own projects, the state of any individual’s knowledge is always substantially incomplete and riddled with errors. Hence the need for social institutions, such as the market, that can utilize the dispersed and complementary knowledge of all of society’s members for solving all the problems that society faces. 

There is a dangerous tendency in pretty much everyone, but especially among intellectuals and academics, to believe that they know more than they do, or rather that they know what’s best. The archetypical social planner mentality can be discerned in the writings of many, if not most, of the greatest social thinkers throughout history, from Plato to Augustine to Roussou to Kennedy. They all have a vision for what they think the world should look like (as we all do), and believe that it is within their power (and rights) to fundamentally transform and control society to fit their image of what they believe is best. But this mindset is by no means limited to these figures; every time a high school student howls on social media for increased gun control, they are sharing their vision for what society should look like and calling for this vision to be forcibly brought into existence by the coercive powers of the State. Indeed, the very idea of the State may be viewed as a means created by great men to effect the changes they desire on others in society. Now, it should be obvious to anyone with developed critical thinking skills that no politician or bureaucrat, or even a large number of them, could possibly possess all of the knowledge necessary to successfully plan and shape society as they please, nor could they effectively utilize this information if they had it without the guidance of market prices. Every attempt, therefore, is doomed to failure, and these monuments to man’s vanity will no doubt have deleterious effects on the smooth functioning of the spontaneous organization of society. 

[I recently attended a lecture entitled “Economic Calculation and the Vertical Division of Labor: A Causal-Realist Perspective on Development Economics” that discussed the attempts by governments of developing countries to speed-up economic growth through the encouragement of various industries and the enactment of various social welfare programs. In every case, such efforts have resulted in a colossal misallocation of resources and capital consumption, causing the government program to appear quite successful in the short run but ruinous in the long run. Again, this is because of the central planners’ lack of knowledge of present and future conditions in the country, and even of the secondary consequences of their own actions. Each government believed, and were encouraged in this belief by the most prominent Western economists, that they could centrally plan growth and advancement: the results of their experiments confirm the veracity of the knowledge problem as well as any theoretical argument ever could.]

Now, considering a phenomenon called the knowledge problem, my thoughts of course turn to education, and I’ve been trying to see what applicability the knowledge problem and the intellectual division of labor might have to education and the schooling system.

As I have explained countless times, I think that education should be highly individualized to fit the unique needs of each student. Indeed, education should be student-centered, in that the student should be in charge of their own learning. This necessarily includes the right to not learn, if they so choose. Additionally, schooling should be much less structured than it currently is. The artificial apparatus of assignments and grades and scheduled classes is somewhat oppressive and not conducive to authentic learning, which is motivated by a sense of purpose and can occur naturally through conversation and the careful reflection on and analysis of life. The lecture model of schooling seems particularly antiquated in light of the universal availability of information. What kids need are not lecturers, but advisors who will talk with them and give them feedback and ask them questions and teach them how to think and argue in a noncoercive manner. This can happen one-on-one or in small groups; probably not classrooms. It’s important, I think, to conceive of education as an individual experience. And it should be based on respect for the student in the sense that the job of the teacher or advisor is to serve the student and offer him not what the teacher thinks he needs, but what the student wants from the teacher. [The teacher may, of course, use his relationship with the student to influence what the student wants, based on the teacher’s advice.] As I said in an email to Bott when discussing the plan for next year’s EMC2 program: “We shouldn't be asking what the class will look like next year. We shouldn't be planning a class. This shouldn't be a class. This should be a space for kids to learn and relationships to grow and skills to be practiced. Through conversation. For a purpose. Based on the utmost respect for every student. To do that, we need to focus on the students as individuals….Let's not think of EMC as a class to be designed. Let's think of it as a group of students to be aided in their own development. No class, just students.” I said all this because I was worried that focusing on the planning of a class would hurt our ability to work with students as individual cases. “Every student is different, with different learning styles and different learning needs. I think that, with a structured class, it's too easy to see the kids as students-in-a-class, and since the class is at this point, the student should be at that point. The class calendar says this is due, so the student should be doing it. It's too easy to guide and plan and design the class' course, rather than the individual student's.” Anyone who has observed my work with EMC2 this year will see that I have already embraced these principles in my own approach to educating students. 

Now, it seems obvious that the current public schooling system is designed in a way antithetical to the insights provided by Hayek’s presentation of the knowledge problem and the nature of the intellectual division of labor. Recall that the intellectual division of labor does not refer to respective fields of expertise, but to the knowledge of particular circumstances that each individual possesses and uses in a complex economy. Superficially, this does not condemn education as such; indeed, it suggests that there should be people who specialize as teachers and work in the education industry with their particular knowledge. But, the message one gets from an understanding of the knowledge problem, the futility of central planning, is directly attributable to modern public schooling. A clearer example of central planning than modern public schooling is hard to fathom. 

First, there is the compulsory attendance laws that force students to attend school. Besides being just a draconian, barbarous practice, this is a harbinger of the idea behind public schools. Those who created it enlisted the coercive powers of the State to force their vision upon everyone else. Their idea for what kids should be learning and how they should be learning it is so good that is must be made mandatory for everyone. Second, there is the highly structured nature of school, which groups students together by age, not necessarily interest or ability, and assembles regular schedules for these groups of students to follow, and imposes a strict and stark hierarchy of authority upon students with all the rules and regulations one has come to expect from a government agency. Third, there is the curriculum that students are subjected to. It was decided, in some far-off conference room somewhere, what exactly all students should be taught and how it should be taught and when it should be taught. As I’ve said elsewhere, the implications of the modern approach to public schooling is that students are all to be treated exactly the same so that they can all turn out exactly the same. [This is enforced through standardized testing.] And fourth (although probably not last), there is a lack of respect for students or trust in teachers. Students are not given choices about what they want to learn or how they want to learn it or when they want to learn it, despite their own knowledge of their own specific circumstances. Similarly, teachers are not given the freedom or flexibility to adapt their material or method of instruction to fit individual students, as they might wish in light of their knowledge of specific circumstances. Modern public schooling is, in every way, a centrally planned institution.

Like every central plan, public education has been a colossal failure. Kids who are forced into its uncompromising and oppressive hallways and classrooms are unhappy and constrained. Their agency is stolen from them, and they are treated like wheat in a mill, destined only to be ground into whatever form of flour the central authorities have decided is best. But, of course, the schools cannot quite accomplish the central planners’ vision. Many students leave school without the knowledge or skills that the schools were meant to impart. Literacy rates in America, while high, are startling lower than one would expect. I know from experience that most students cannot write well at all. Knowledge of basic civic facts, such as the name of the Vice President or the role of the Supreme Court, is unpossessed by about half the population. Less than 1% of people report that their several years of training in a foreign language has left them any more confident in their communication abilities than they'd be without them. And the soft skills that people need to succeed in this world, such as creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking, are everywhere in short supply. In the meantime, the unintended consequences of school, discussed in other posts on this site, have left our economy and society severely disadvantaged. Not to mention the effects on students themselves. Did you know that the suicide rate among teens jumps tremendously every finals season?

But surely, one might say, there must be a plan. How else could we know what to teach? There must be some things that students must be taught, and surely the experts can tell us what those things are and how and when they should be delivered, right? But, again, this is a fatal conceit. Who are these experts, and who decided that they were experts? And while they might know a lot of educational theory, what knowledge have they of the particular circumstances in which a teacher or student might find themselves? Furthermore, how can anyone possibly decide what knowledge is necessary to be known by everyone? Most of the jobs students will occupy in the future have not been invented yet. The world is one of constant change; the future is always uncertain. How can anyone confidently know what knowledge the future will demand? How can anyone have confidence in another person who asserts that they have such knowledge? [Recall that information is cheap in the Information Age.] And why does there need to be a plan? Why must every student have the same knowledge as every other student? Why does everyone need to be the same? I have a student, Noah, with a presence and a personality and an attitude that I believe lend themselves to showmanship. His writing abilities, on the other hand, are severely underdeveloped. But, I have chosen to give him opportunities to develop his showmanship, rather than writing, because in his particular circumstances, we agreed that this was the course best for him and his future success. So his education was adapted to better suit him individually. Why can’t this happen throughout the education system? Again, who could possibly be qualified to abstractly decide the educational objectives of every child in a nationwide system of millions? The most cursory critical examination of the idea reveals its absurdity. 

If we are to truly transform education such that it can actually serve the individual needs of students, we need to free it from its central plan and utilize the unique knowledge of each child, parent, and teacher of their particular circumstances. Educators should focus on the task before them: this conversation, this project, this relationship. Does the student have a future that will require certain abilities and knowledge of him? Of course. But to try to foresee exactly what these abilities and knowledge are is a vain exercise, and will only result in decreased efficacy in the here-and-now, when the teacher can have the most good. Let the student decide what he wants and needs to know, and serve that need. We should not try to mold children into our idea of what we think they should be. We should meet them where they are and help them get where they want to go and become who they want to be. Education must be individualized and made voluntary. The knowledge problem provides just another reason why this is true.

On Relationships Between Teachers and Students

Recently, the propriety of my relationships with various students has been called into question. This has resulted in some mandated time away from said students, and a revision to the rules for my interactions with students. I understand that I currently operate in a system where I do not have the discretion to draw lines in relationships as I see fit, and that concessions will need to be made going forward. But, my actions have been guided by reasoned thinking, and I would like to share here my thoughts on what the proper relationship between a teacher and a student might look like, at least in my conception of a proper education system.

So, you’re not going to believe this, but I think, fundamentally, that the ideal relationship is a voluntary one. That is, as long as both parties agree that certain interactions are appropriate and desired, then the interactions should be okay. Now, there are issues of age and maturity involved when discussing relationships between older people and kids, but many of these issues may be resolved through parental oversight and consent, or through the adult’s judgment of what is best for the child. Of course, when considering a working relationship, such as the one between a teacher and a student, the objective of the relationship must be remembered. The teacher has a duty and a responsibility to the student, and the student is interacting with the teacher for a specific purpose. There are some activities and behaviors and interactions that not only don’t contribute to the purpose of the relationship, but are actually harmful to it. However, I must stress that every individual student is different, and thus the education goals of the relationship may be accomplished in different ways with each student, thus calling for different types of relationships. So, back to first principles, I think that there should be flexibility for the teacher and student to determine what kind of relationship works best for them in pursuing the objectives of their working relationship. They should draw upon the experiences and wisdom and suggestions of others, while also recognizing the desirability of adapting such feedback to their particular situation. 

I also think that education is much more dependant on relationships than is generally recognized. Genuine education, which is not driven by grades or standardized curriculum or compulsory attendance laws, happens through conversation and collaboration and interaction with others. If a teacher wants to have more influence over his students, he should work on developing stronger relationships with them. To get these relationships, the teacher should recognize their voluntary nature and not push himself on any of the students; he should just be open to the possibility of more than professionalism. Also, to earn the respect and trust of students (or anyone), the teacher must give them respect and trust. That is, elevate their status in the relationship from one who is forced to participate and obey to one who can choose whether or not to interact with the other and who participates in the decision-making of the relationship. My own students do not have grades; therefore, the only leverage I have to get them to do their work is my relationship with them. They write their journals and draw out their formulas and come to round table meetings because I ask them to. There’s no penalty to not doing so, but I treat them with radical amounts of respect (such as not imposing penalties for not doing what I ask), and as a result they respect me enough to actually do what I ask. 

As one half of every relationship that I have with my students, I have lines which I am uncomfortable crossing with them. But, my relationships with students are indeed much less professional than one might consider appropriate. A few aspects of these relationships have been questioned: my interactions with students outside of school, the content of the conversations I have with the students, and my availability for the students. I will explain my thinking on each of these issues to show why I’ve allowed these relationships to develop as they have. 

First, any interaction or activity that would be appropriate in school, I think is appropriate outside of school. For example, a conversation is appropriate in school, as is a lecture, and other instructional interactions. Therefore, they should be allowable outside of school. Similarly, fun activities such as going for walks, playing games, watching video clips of certain things, and sharing meals would all arguably be considered appropriate between teachers and students who are in a school building. Therefore, I think that they should be considered appropriate outside of school. [Activities and interactions that are inappropriate in school, such as sexual relations, the use of illegal substances, the defacement of property, and even bullying, would a fortiori be inappropriate outside of school.] Now, normally school is the one and only setting where these interactions take place, since that is where teachers and students gather each day. So it would look unusual for these interactions to take place outside of school. However, my situation is rather unusual in that I am not in the school every day, and in that I don’t clock out at the end of the school day, as I never really clocked in. I’m low-key just always working. And, let’s be real, so are my students. They do a lot of schoolwork outside of school. Indeed, education does not just occur in school. So I never saw the sense (or feasibility) in limiting my interactions with students to just the school. Apparently, the fact that these interactions occurred outside of school itself makes the interactions different and thus inappropriate, but I would argue that a child’s education is really directed by a child’s parents; if they approve of continued instruction in interactions outside of a normal school day, and both teacher and student agree to it, then the interaction should be allowable. 

Second, I am not a traditional teacher. My job is not to teach certain material in a specific subject matter; my job is to teach students how to think. As I’ve written in a previous post, the best way to learn is through conversation. This is the method that I tend to employ. And because students think and talk about all subject matters, I believed that it didn’t matter what the topic of conversation was for me to do my job and help the student question, argue, and think critically. So I wasn’t going to limit the content of our conversations to issues directly related to their research topics. Of course, there’s a difference, apparently, between discussions that have some academic value, such as Supreme Court decisions and the economics of Bitcoin, and other topics, such as certain weekend activities of certain students. While I get that society sees a difference between these things, I struggle myself to understand why it’s relevant to my goal of encouraging the development of critical faculties. Any and every situation demands thinking skills. Furthermore, because these inappropriate topics are what kids like to talk about, working with these topics allows me to influence the students in a way that they enjoy more and that might be subtly more effective in that it teaches them the ubiquity of the need for these skills. Two other points: part of my tolerance of inappropriate topics of conversation is grounded in my radical respect for the students. I want to treat them like people, with lives and personalities and agency. I don’t want to try to force them into a box where they can’t be themselves around me. If this is what they want to talk about, I’ll listen to them, not shut them up. Additionally, while the fact that I, by virtue of these inappropriate conversations, have knowledge of certain things that I agree are inappropriate for me to know, I think that it is ultimately better for students to have an adult in their lives that they trust and talk about these topics with, so that they’re not just relying on people as inexperienced as themselves, and so that the adult can watch out for any truly dangerous activities, activities which he would have never heard about if students always felt they had to shut up around him. 

Finally, my availability is a matter of my respect for students. I work for them (they should be in charge of their education, not me). And, again, I’m not in the school every day, and my work day doesn’t end at dismissal time. If I’m at my desk at 9 o’clock at night doing work, and a student has a question, why shouldn’t I answer it? If I’m just spending the day reading in the library, and a student wants to meet at the coffee shop across the street, then why shouldn’t I go meet him? I live to serve, and to serve to the best of my abilities. If a student wants to learn something, I feel kind of obligated to go help him with that. Of course, if I’m busy, that’s a different issue. But if I’m available, I should be available to my students. There’s also the issue of texting, my primary method of communication with my students. Again, this is a respect thing. I refuse to try to fit my students into a box and pretend that the rest of them doesn’t exist. Kids text. That’s how they communicate. It’s convenient and casual. If that’s how they want to communicate, then I should accommodate them. It’s not a problem for me. If it helps them learn and increases my influence over their thinking processes, then I’ll take advantage of it. It would, indeed, be strange if I were waiting outside students’ houses or always had my ringer up, waiting to be needed. But to just be more available than other teachers...I see that as a good thing.

Of course, I have always stuck to the voluntaryness principle in my interactions with students. My relationship with students can be as informal and close as they wish, subject to my own lines (partially described above), which are drawn for the purpose of ensuring that the relationship fulfills its educational purpose. But only to the extent that they wish. If a student wishes to keep things professional, or even wishes to push me further away than would be normally expected, I have always been extremely tolerant of such behavior and respect the student’s wishes. 

Anyway, there are clearly some incongruities between what I think is appropriate and what is considered appropriate by others. I do, in fact, understand many of the concerns expressed, but feel that theses concerns miss the unique nature of every relationship. I think that relationships are very important, critical, even, to a successful education, and I have worked hard on cultivating my relationships with my students so that I would be able to do my work as effectively as possible, and because I respect my students more than the average teacher (seeing them more as equals). The result has been deemed unprofessional. But the line between professional and unprofessional, appropriate and inappropriate, is vague and arbitrarily-drawn. The line between voluntary and involuntary is much clearer and meaningful. Seeing students as human beings, rather than as students, and treating them as such, necessarily results in a different type of relationship than the kind usually seen in school. This is a sign of the dehumanizing nature of modern public schooling, and deviations from it should be celebrated, in my opinion. There must be lines, of course, purposeful lines drawn through reasoned argument. But for genuine educational relationships, where the teacher is not just delivering facts but training minds, much stronger relationships are called for, with more respect and less formalism. One of the first steps to fixing our educational system is to reduce the lines between teachers and students. The system currently sets them up as adversaries; imagine the results we would get if they saw each other as friends.

J37 - Note Ramblings

I really don’t have time to write now, because I have so much other stuff to do, but I can’t get anything else done because I feel like I really have to write. I’ve got too much clutter in my mind; I need to draw the thoughts out. So, this journal’s only purpose is to help me clear my head, so it might end up being random and messy and irrelevant. We’ll be back to our regular programming shortly. [Normally this sort of thing would stay in my notes, but it’s a problem I’m currently grappling with and I want it published so that I can consider it against the background of my other thinking this year, which is better synthesized on this site than in my notes.]

One of the really big projects that I’ve been (supposedly) working on this year is writing an academic journal article, called a “Note,” as part of my membership of the Albany Law Journal of Science and Technology. Technically, I should have been working on this article all year, submitting five pages at a time to my supervisor as evidence of progress at predetermined checkpoints. But, that’s not really how I work. I like to use large blocks of time (like 12 hours) to start and finish projects in one or two sittings. I really don’t even know how one would write a paper one page at a time, one page each week, or whatever the schedule I was given works out to. As a compromise, I submitted an outline of my entire paper to my supervisor at the beginning of the year, and was waived from having to show anything at any of the deadlines between then and now. However, one of the two deadlines I was not exempted from, when a draft of my full paper is due, is approaching rapidly. Here’s the thing: I no longer want to write the same paper. My research and thinking since the beginning of the year for this paper and generally look nothing like the stuff I put in the outline. It’s not a huge problem, I think, to deviate from an outline I crafted months and months ago. But it is difficult to stare a deadline in the face and not even have an outline to follow in writing 25 pages for that deadline. I need to rethink what I want this Note to be. There’s a lot of things I’d like to write about, of course. But I also need to find a way to connect it all back to law, and that’s more difficult for me, as I spend all of my free time thinking and reading and writing in subjects like economics and education and philosophy, not law. These subjects are all related, of course, but I need to work hard on making the connections solid and explicit, and to have the law appear to be the focus of the writing, rather than a support of the actual focus.

It’s an amazing moment, when a period of sustained study suddenly culminates in a flash of insight that somehow makes all the academic slogging seem worth it. In my senior year of college, I really threw myself into the study of monetary economics. It was always part of the subject that I struggled with; I was interested in human beings, not numbers and equations, so I naturally struggled to focus in classes that dealt with such aspects of economic science. But, I felt that it was necessary to be conversant in all areas of economics before I graduated with a degree in it. So, most of my personal studying during my senior year was dedicated to the money problem. Through this study, I could tell that something was missing in most of the standard discussions of the subject. This is a common feeling for me. But, until I understand the rest of the discussion, I can’t see what exactly is missing. When I do come to understand the rest, the flash of insight that accompanies it is the realization of what was missing. And that’s an amazing experience. Such a realization provided the inspiration for my senior thesis.  When I originally applied to write a senior thesis, the department chair rejected all of my proposed topics because they seemed too literature-reviewish. I explained that I was analyzing and critiquing others’ theories, rather than analyzing new data with those theories; I wanted my paper to be a theoretical contribution, rather than an empirical one like everyone else’s (most senior theses are just regressions of new data sets and explanation of the findings). The department chair explained that real economic theory was just math, and there wasn’t any math in my proposals. So, rejected. Then I kind of faked people out by submitting a proposal for a paper entitled “The Redistributive Effects of Monetary Inflation,” which could have been an empirical paper if any other student was writing it. Instead, it contained no numbers, and explained that all the math in monetary economics entirely ignored the process of reality and thus, while formally true, had no applicability to the real world.

Similarly, during my summer as a fellow, when I was teaching grad students about the history of economic thought, much of time was spent preparing lecture notes rather than researching new topics in economics. But, I was reading and writing a lot, and, again, I noticed that there was some sort of disconnect in the literature, and I was low-key trying to figure it out all summer. A 3-credit course works out to be about 45 lecture hours (not that you really get to use all of them). For my class, I allocated an hour-and-a-half to economists before Cantillon, three hours to Adam Smith and the other Classical economists, an hour-and-a-half to Marx, and three hours to J.B. Say and the Physiocrats. Nine hours down, right? The next nine hours were all spent on the Marginal Revolution, the birth of modern economics. Nine hours on three economists. And I spent all this time on this period because I felt that the lessons from this revolution had still not been fully absorbed by the economics community. But, during these lectures, I felt that there was actually tension even among the marginalists. Of course, Menger and Walras used different methods, but there was something else, too. Back to that in a moment...my flash of insight from all this work was the realization that the real contribution from Menger was not just that agents operate on the margin, but that the mind is the source of goods-classification and that, as a result, all of economics was actually a product of the mind and occurred therein. This lent itself to my original project this year, which had as its premise the idea that climate change was not merely an economics problem, but a perspective problem. 

My work this year, which spanned many different topics, depending on which hat I was wearing at the time, really came down to a study of what it means to be human and possess a human mind. And, through it all, I was looking for what was missing from other discussions of the topic. And I learned so much, discovered so much, grew so much. My work as a coordinator, designing and implementing a class that rejects the classic public school paradigm and seeks to improve the cognitive abilities and critical faculties of students on a voluntary basis, I came to understand the level of ignorance in all people and the need for humility in the learning process. As a mentor and advisor for students in the class, I more fully developed my Theory of Black and White, which I think will be one of my more significant contributions in my life, the idea that everything exists on a spectrum, despite the human tendency to think in absolutes. My study of being human taught me the significance of society in the rational processes of man. My study of the price system helped me realize that there are not different economic systems, just different levels of intervention in the natural one. I could go on and on about other things, such as the constancy of change, the epistemic barriers to justifiable legislation, the importance of questioning, and the ubiquity of market processes. One of the most important things I realized is that what separates the Austrian School from neoclassical economics is its doctrine of economic action, as opposed to economic equilibrium or nonaction. It’s not that Austrians study man as if he is a man, it’s that Austrians study man as if he is living a life, as if he is a being with purpose. Like I said, just tons of insights from working so hard in so many different subjects, and seeing their interconnectedness. [You can see why I broadened by topic to the study of human beings generally.]

Now, how do I incorporate this new discoveries which so dominate my thinking now that they’ve all illuminated my every thought into a freaking law review article? They are surely applicable to law, but they’re all so new to me that I haven’t even finished fleshing them out into their own articles of exposition. I don’t know if they’re ready to support an original analysis of a legal problem, especially when I have not written the articles I need to cite to if my law paper is to avoid becoming just a massive explication of these new concepts. 

Originally, my Note was going to be about the effect of judicial language on the public perception of climate change, as a way of connecting my Note to my EMC2 project. As you know, my EMC2 project has changed, and thus I think my Note should, too. But, I don’t want to stray too far from my original plan. I think that now the Note will be kind of about the effect of judicial language on public perception of change, or maybe about the conceit of judges in thinking that they can decide complex issues. I mean, specifically in the environmental context, there’s a lot of judicial deference to regulators because, after all, the EPA is full of scientists who are experts on the environment, while the courts are not. But, the judges are actually passing judgment on environmental issues, by deciding who should handle them. On the one hand, the judges are pleading ignorance about a subject, and at the same time indicating that another group of people possess enough knowledge on a subject to make all the decisions necessary. But, as my studies have shown this year, there is no group of people who could possibly know enough about a problem to justify regulating the world in an attempt to fix it. Same thing with economic legislation. [See the language of the Nebbia case, which put an end to the Lochner era of economic freedom in the United States.] It might also be worth considering the natural law method of adjudication versus the modern approach of statutory interpretation. However, my advisor for this paper is an environmental law guy, so my options are somewhat limited.

Of course, having a general idea about a problem with judicial opinions is a lot different than writing a detailed research paper articulating and defending such a broad critique. I’ve got a lot of research into regulations and such before I can begin to piece together a substantive argument. And I need to publish a few articles to cite to so that my arguments don’t seem unsupported (law has this annoying practice where every single assertion needs a citation). And, of course, this critique is not one that’s only applicable to judicial opinions. And this idea is still rather amorphous, subject to change in the writing process. It might just turn into a general criticism of regulations, which I think would be unwise in terms of feasibility (page count and research). It doesn’t help that there are so many other projects to work on and ideas to think about. Alright, I might be whining now, so I’ll sign off.

J34b - Addendum to "Plans For Moving Forward"

For my Theory of Being Human final product, I have decided that I would actually like to create a series of lectures which set forth my ideas and arguments. Instead of forming the beginning of a book wherein I apply the theory to a bunch of other issues, I want the theory to form the first 9 hours of a 45-hour course (3-credit course) that I would call Civilization 101 or something cute like that. I want to somehow make the lectures reflective of my educational philosophy, even though my educational philosophy is somewhat critical of lectures. But, regardless, I want to get back to teaching, and I want to work on lecture notes and deliver speeches and use whiteboards and generally remember who I am through this project. And, I think that my theory will have a greater impact if it is delivered orally as well as through writing, as the modern trend is to watch YouTube videos rather than read books. So...yeah. Lectures. The educational piece will still be written.