The V-50 Lectures
From AboveTheGarage
Contents |
Introduction
- ... it has many omission and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate... -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
Andrew J. Galambos and Jay Snelson developed The V-50 Lectures which were now available for sale here (dead link). (Now I can't find them.)
These pages are my notes on those lectures. To be fair (to me), the published work by Andrew Galambos is very hard to analyze, for like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it is sorely lacking in accuracy, and for something that claims to be a scientific work, it is lacking citations for the various claims that are made throughout. So getting these notes into something that makes any kind of sense at all is a large task and one that I attack only occasionally.
Availability
Andrew J. Galambos developed what he called a new Science of Volition which was the "third science" after physics and biology. He attempted to use the scientific method to develop a societal structure which he believed would endure forever. He delivered a series of lectures in California at his own college called the Free Enterprise Institute aka FEI. He charged tuition and required his students to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Some of the lectures - in particular The V-50 Lectures - were released as a book sold by FEI. The book, Sic Itur Ad Astra (frequently referred to as SIAA) used to be available for sale at Amazon.com but not anymore. You can search http://www.ebay.com or http://www.amazon.com for used copies). The title is Latin for "This is the Way to the Stars".
More recently (late 2008), Jay Snelson and Charles Holloway released Jay Snelson's version of The V-50 Lectures as MP3 CDs which were available for purchase (another dead link).
Some other material was made available, in particular, a series of pamphlets called Thrust for Freedom which Galambos would give away as a promotional item. Those pamphlets were collected into a book that used to be available at The Universal Scientific Publication Company (another dead link).
- April 26, 2009 - Check it out! The first new V-50 lecture in over 30 years! (and another dead link)
- April 18, 2009 - Check it out! The V-50 Lectures site has a blog with video clips from early FEI associates (and another dead link)
- July 10, 2011 - How about here? CD Baby
- July 15, 2011 - A new site has sprung up! The Capitalism Revolution is a site created by Frederic Marks that is converting Galambos' lectures into book form. Chapter 1 says:
- AJG’s trustees have apparently decided it was a mistake to publish the V-50 lectures they published in 1999; and they have withdrawn from sale their remaining inventory of the books containing the printed V-50 lectures. The trustees have not published the transcribed intellectual property lectures, which AJG entitled V-201. Furthermore, it appears that the trustees will not publish the intellectual property lectures any time soon, if at all. This failure and refusal to publish is discussed at the beginning of the V-201 portion of this presentation.
An endorsement
Volitional Science in a Nutshell
What is V-50 (yet another dead link) is an article at the TUSPCO site that describes V-50. You might get the feeling reading it that the ideas in the course are an extreme version of The Austrian School of Economics.
An extremely short (and perhaps unfair) characterization of Austrian Economics is:
- The political state is bad;
- All free enterprise is good and self regulating.
Lew Rockwell is a leading proponent of the Austrian School and a co-founder of The Mises Institute which promotes the Austrian Economic view through lectures and classes.
To that, Galambos would add (I'm paraphrasing):
- It is only by contractual, free enterprise, self regulated disclosure of ideas that a stable society can come into existence.
To Galambos, ideas are the most important products of a person's existence, because without them there can be no progress beyond simple brutish survival. In later courses he developed how the market would separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the quality of individual ideas.
Therefore, he argues, more power and influence should be accorded to innovators, and in particular, in terms of power, all innovative disclosures should be contractual in nature, with severe penalties for breaking those contracts. This is to be done in a completely non-coercive way. This last point is pure Austrian Economics.
Stephan Kinsella is a vocal opponent of Galambos and the notion that ideas can be owned.
What do I think?
I think that libertarians and/or anarcho-capitalists will enjoy this extreme look at market self-regulation with its particular emphasis on the value of ideas and on the notion of creating a marketplace for ideas.
If you have a scientific bent you will find the book SIAA and these lectures severely lacking in scientific rigor, in spite of the material's claims for such. All of the use of science is strictly by analogy and references to proofs are inaccurate or missing.
After you read SIAA you will have a much higher respect for entrepreneurship.
A number of friends have read SIAA and it has inspired them to new levels of entrepreneurship. I agree that fundamentally we would be much better off as a society if everyone was a contractor and standard employment contracts and corporations as we know them today disappeared. But alas, entrepreneurship is hard; so while I have spent many years as a contractor, I've spent many more as an employee working at companies that have tons of resources available for funding large, fun projects. I'm a better intrapreneur than entrepreneur.
