Here’s a question, paraphrased from Charles Calomiris via Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce: would those who protest globalization and the steady march of economic freedom change their minds if they were convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the globalization, economic growth, and economic freedom they’re willing to fly around the world to denounce was lifting people out of poverty around the world? Would they change their minds if they knew that reversing globalization would harm the world’s poor? I fear the answer.
In his recent Intellectuals and Society, Thomas Sowell points out that what drives people to support their preferred policies is not theory, evidence, or even outcomes, but the desire to be seen as being on the side of the angels. This is disturbingly clear in, for example, the late G.A. Cohen’s recent Why Not Socialism?, a very, very short tract that makes a case for socialism that is utterly free of any reference to the real-world effects of attempts to implement the socialist vision. It’s also free of much consideration of the economic literature on the subject except to say that the calculation problem is really, really, really hard.
And here I think we’re missing out on the debate. It isn’t, as some of us would like to hope, a conflict over theory and evidence. It’s what Sowell termed A Conflict of Visions. The law of comparative advantage and the laws of supply and demand are not, unfortunately, seen as immutable and unalterable truths about the world. I fear that, to borrow from Mises, many in the anti-globalization/anti-capitalism movement view these as specific historical constructs emerging from an order of which they do not approve.
