Contributions
From AboveTheGarage
Contents |
Significant Contributions
As I mentioned in The V-50 Lectures main page there is a great lack of scholarly discipline in the published works of Galambos.
And yet many audacious claims are made as to how a true free market economy would be self regulating. (The same is true for the proponents of the Austrian School of Economics).
So while Galambos claims many scientific innovations - in particular, an "integration" of the social sciences with physics at a level of achievement consistent with Newton's integration of the laws of motion - I'll skip over all of that as unproven and simply dig deep for the most inspiring ideas.
Respect for Property
The point is hammered home in the first six sessions of the V-50 Lectures that it is impossible to create property by stealing property. Many attempts at scientific justification are made and they all sound wrong to me. Nonetheless, if you listen to the first six sessions, you will have a much greater respect for property.
This respect for property is not unique to Galambos but his pseudo-scientific presentation is very compelling nonetheless, and is apparently particularly inspiring to engineers, who love the idea that freedom is a product that can be built.
The Scientific Method applied to Society
Alvin Lowi believes Galambos' greatest contribution was the notion that the scientific method can and should be brought to bear on all societal issues. Social Science and Political Science are not particularly scientific. Although Galambos failed to bring appropriate scientific rigor to his work his lectures on the need for such rigor are inspiring and set the bar very high for observable, repeatable results for any claims for techniques for improving society.
Toward a Stable Society
To me, the most important contribution by Galambos is the observation that (so far) all societies (by which is meant, I think, nation-states) tend to self destruct, but that there is no law of nature that says that this must be so. (He claims there are laws of nature that make the current forms self-destruct.) In other words, if we had a proper understanding of people and how they can interact peacefully then we can invent a societal structure that is enduring. One aspect of that society would be it's attractiveness such that other people not "in" the society would want to join, and therefore it would get stronger over time.
A Vision of the Future
The last set of lectures in the V-50 series as presented by Jay Snelson are extremely interesting. Members of the audience bring up problems and Snelson does a pretty good job of presenting a consistent vision of capitalism and free enterprise solutions to those problems. The kinds of problems that are brought up are the usual set that everyone wants an answer to: How can we deal with pollution, crime, roads, airplanes, airports, speeding, etc., without a state to enforce standards.
In my opinion, this vision of the future is the most exciting contribution. To my mind, it's science fiction, because it makes a number of assumptions that are currently untested and perhaps untestable. So in that regard it's a bit like reading Jules Verne. But just think how inspiring those stories were! I'd say that if you are a Libertarian or Austrian School follower that it is easily worth the cost of these lectures to listen to Q&A presented on the final disk.
Dubious Claims
Postulates
Galambos claims to have invented two postulates from which all human behavior can be derived. Since nobody agrees on what the postulates mean we can safely discard his claim.
(In particular, Galambos' definition of property has no observable properties, and many find it self-referential.)
Scientific Rigor
Galambos sets the bar extremely high for bringing scientific rigor to societal studies. Unfortunately, what passes for science is generally just anecdotal or clever allusions.
Galambos' greatest error is claiming that the third law of thermodynamics means "you can't get something for nothing." This is such a huge leap that it has put some of my friends off from reading any further in SIAA.
Most importantly, everyone gets something for nothing everyday, and it is consistent with the third law of thermodynamics, which says that the amount of energy in a closed system stays constant.
But the Earth is not a closed system - tremendous energy from the Sun is delivered to us free every single day.
Assumptions about Property
I would say that underlying every single lecture is the notion that property, when left to an individual's control, will always be treated better than communal property. This might be true - I don't know.
But unfortunately, underlying this claim is the assumption that everyone agrees who owns what. This is manifestly not true.
Also underlying this claim is the assumption that it is always possible to identify an owner.
For instance, if a credit rating is going to be the single most important thing in society, then it is critical that there be a 100% perfect mechanism for identifying an individual and that there be a 100% perfect mechanism for attributing an exact list of property owned by that person.
This is not possible. I would suggest reading Bruce Schneier's blog for an unending list of problems with authentication.
Assumptions about the State and Large Corporations and Profit and Plunder
It is generally assumed in Galambos' writing that the political state is corrupt and tends toward greater corruption whereas even the biggest corporation tends toward greater morality because of the need to make profits.
I do not believe the profit motive is the reason for the difference in efficiency between political states and corporations.
The root problem of the state is the same for large corporations: namely bureaucracy. Alvin Lowi brilliantly defines bureaucracy as "administration by non-owners". Most notably the notion of a Natural Estate is defined as administration by non-owners.
Galambos defines profit (as have others) as a morally obtained increase in property. So the current meltdown of AIG would be because of plunder, not profit. That works fine with 20-20 hindsight - we just define any corrupt behavior as plunder and call it good. In fact, though, at the time, the geniuses at the AIG Financial Products group did not spend all day calling themselves pirates and rejoicing in their plunder. No - the root problem was that they administered huge amount of insurance contracts but were not responsible for carrying out payment for those contracts.
Regardless, the executives of AIGFP were motivated by the profit motive even if it later turned out to be plundering. And there is no way restitution can be made - the hundreds of trillions of dollars in credit default swaps can never be made whole.
To me, there is little difference between a large corporation and the political state. It's just a matter of size. Corporations regularly cooperate with the political state to gain advantage over each other. Many willing request and submit to regulation to keep the cost of entry into their line of work high.
There is just no observable evidence that the absence of the profit motive is the sole reason that the political state becomes corrupt.
