Last week, CNN featured a story called “Men are dropping out of the workforce. Here’s why” The article went on to tell us virtually nothing at all about why so many men are leaving the workforce. Although as many as seven million men have stayed out of the workforce for varying reasons, the CNN piece was really about how more women are joining the workforce, and how wonderful it is that more women are working in “male dominated” fields. The fact that more women are joining the workforce, however, tells us nothing about why men are leaving. Indeed, the CNN piece offered only one reason to answer why men are leaving the workforce: they’re becoming stay-at-home dads.

That category, however, is fairly small and numbers only in the hundreds of thousands. That leaves us wondering why millions of men have left the workforce for reasons other than raising children. If we look deeper into the available information on the question, the reality appears to be a lot less rosy than CNN’s suggested reason of “their wives are so doggone successful, these men decided to stay home and raise the kids.” 

Source: Census Bureau, Table SHP-1: Parents and Children in Stay-at-Home Parent Family Groups.

Instead, the reasons driving the lion’s share of missing men to leave the workforce appear to be illness, drug addiction, a perceived lack of well-paying jobs, government welfare, and the decline of marriage. None of these are reasons to celebrate, and few of these reasons lend themselves to any quick fixes through changes in law or policy. 

At Least Six Million Missing Men 

As I noted earlier this month, there are at least six million men of “prime age” (age 25-54) who are out of the workforce for various reasons. Historically, this number has been getting larger at a rate faster than growth of total men in that age group. That is, fewer than 3 percent of prime-age men were “not in the workforce” in the late 1970s, but 5.6 percent of men in this group were out of the labor force in 2022. That translates into approximately 7.1 million men according to the Census Bureau’s count of men “not in labor force.” 

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

We could contrast this with the proportion of women who are not in the labor force. Fewer prime-age women today are out of the labor force than was the case in the late 1970s. Women tend to remain out of the labor force in much larger numbers of men, so we find that in 2022, the total number of women out of the labor force is approximately 15 million. That number is smaller than what was common in the late 1970’s, however. As more women have joined the labor force over the past 40 years, more men have left. 

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Again, it is important to emphasize we are talking about prime age men here, and we’re excluding older and younger populations in which retirement and schooling remove large numbers of workers from the workforce.

Even including only prime age men, however, Alan B. Kreuger notes that the workforce trend in the US is headed downward faster than other wealthy countries:

Although the labor force participation rate of prime age men has trended down in the United States and other economically advanced countries for many decades, by international standards the labor force participation rate of prime age men in the United States is notably low.

Why Men Leave the Labor Force

Determining reasons for leaving the labor force is not easy, as the data depends heavily on surveys and on extrapolation.  According to the census bureau, however, number less than 250,000 men in recent years are outside the labor force in order to care for children full time. This is only a tiny fraction of the total number of parents who leave the labor force to be stay-at-home parents. That leaves more than six million men who have left the labor force for some other reason. 

Wages and Social Status

One thing is fairly clear: labor force participation is worse for men with less schooling. As Kreuger notes, labor force participation for prime age men has fallen for men at all education levels, “but by substantially more for those with a high school degree or less.” Indeed, labor force participation has barely fallen for men with advanced degrees, but has gone into steep decline among high school dropouts and those with no college. 

Source: Ariel J. Binder and John Bound, “The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 170.

Closely connected to this is the relative wage growth among these groups. While inflation-adjusted wages have increased significantly for men with college-level schooling or more, the same is certainly not true for men with “some college” or less. In these latter groups, earnings have stagnated since 1965, having risen throughout the mid 1970s, falling below the 1965 wage by 1995, and then slowly returning to 1960s levels. While this does not represent a sizable fall in wages in real terms since 1965, it is a large drop relative to the wages of men with more schooling. 

Source: Ariel J. Binder and John Bound, “The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 165.

(Women, incidentally, have not seen nearly as large declines in wages based on levels of schooling.)

This growing earnings gap between men at various education levels has been blamed for driving the exit of so many men from the workforce. For example, in a report from the Boston Federal Reserve earlier this month, research Pinghui Wu concludes that relative decline in wages drives more men to leave the workforce than has the overall decline in real wages. Moreover, Wu ties the decline in relative wages to declines in “a worker’s social status.” This effect is seen most strongly in non-Hispanic white men and younger men. Wu writes: “non-college-educated men are more likely to leave the labor force when the top earners in a state make disproportionately more than the other workers.”

Falling social status has been tied to low job-satisfaction, disability, and higher mortality. All of this tends to lead to lower workforce participation. Moreover, men at lower education and lower wage levels tend to be more prone to workplace injury, given the nature of the work. Indeed, as Ariel Binder and John Bound have shown, men who have exited the labor force say they are frequently in pain, and take pain medication regularly. Men in this group who are over 45 years of age also tend to be more frequently eligible for government disability benefits. Binder and Bound suggest that the expansion of disability benefits in recent decades “could explain up to 25 percent of the rise in nonparticipation among 45–54 year-old high school graduates (without college).”

The Decline of Marriage

Wu, Binder, and Bound all also point to another important factor in falling male workforce participation: changes in marriage patterns. 

Wu notes that men with lower social status fare more poorly in the marriage market, and that “marriage market sorting [a] potential channels through which relative earnings affect men’s labor force exit decisions.” This would also help explain why declining social status also appears to especially affect younger men who are more likely to be active in pursuing a spouse. 

Binder and Bound meanwhile note declining marriage rates are closely tied to workforce participation overall. This works in both directions: Declining incomes lead to declines in marriage. But unmarried men also have less incentive to actively seek employment. Marriage also may hamper a man’s ability to draw income from existing relatives. Binder and Bound write:

As others have documented, family structure in the United States has changed dramatically since the 1960s, featuring a tremendous decline in the share of less educated men forming and maintaining stable marriages. We additionally show an increase in the share of less-educated men living with their parents or other relatives. Providing for a new family plausibly provides a man with incentives to engage in labor market activity: conversely, a reduction in the prospects of forming and maintaining a stable family removes an important labor supply incentive. At the same time, the possibility of drawing income support from existing relatives creates a feasible labor-force exit.

It’s not just men with lower levels of schooling who marry less often, however. Marriage has indeed declined more for lower-income men than higher-income men. Declining marriage rates at the middle-class level and below, however, likely drive falling labor participation independent of wages. That is, “changing family structure shifts male labor supply incentives independently of labor market conditions” as unmarried men are simply less motivated to work.”

What Is to Blame?

The importance of relative wages points to the importance of economic factors in the decline of working men.  

Enormous growth in government intervention in the twentieth century has led to a reversal of nineteenth century trends and led instead to capital consumption. It is notable that since the 1970s, savings and investment have declined, and Mihai Macovai notes ” the real stock of capital per worker has grown in a clear and sustained manner only until the end-1970s and fell afterwards until the trough of the Great Recession.” This has led to declining worker productivity and lower wages for many workers.

In more recent years, covid lockdowns impacted lower-income workers the most, and lockdowns are likely to raise overall mortality among these workers, as well, even years after the lockdowns ended. Unemployment and intermittent employment is tied to higher mortality rates and disability in both the medium and long terms.

Finally, a powerful factor is the central bank’s monetary policy which has been linked to a rising gap between higher-income workers and lower-income ones. Easy-money policy has been especially damaging to wealth-building for lower-income groups, as Karen Petrou notes in her book Engine of Inequality:

Ultra-low [interest] rates fundamentally eviscerated the ability of all but the wealthy to gain an economic toehold; instead they lead investors to drive up equity and other asset prices to achieve their return … but average Americans hold little, if any, stock or investment instruments. Instead, they save what they can in bank accounts. The rates on these have been so low for so long that these thrifty, prudent households have in fact set themselves back with each dollar they save. Pension funds are just as hard-hit meaning not only that average Americans can’t save for the future, but also that the instruments on which they count for additional security are unlikely to meet their needs.

But not all can be blamed on economic policy. The importance of marriage as a factor in workforce participation illustrates that some aspects of declining workforce participation lie beyond mere economics. Marriage rates for the middle class have continued to fall even in periods when median wages have increased—such as the 1990s. These trends are tied to changes in ideology, religious observance, and a host of social factors. Other factors such as rising drug addiction and obesity affect workforce participation as they are tied to disability and poor health, often at elevated rates among lower-income workers.

In other words, government policy certainly plays a sizable role in declining male workforce participation, but changing American culture cannot be ignored.

Attempts by the Chinese government to arrest the spread of Christianity have faltered since Christians are remaining steadfast in their faith. Over one hundred million Chinese are estimated to be Christians, and projections suggest that by 2030, China could have as many as 247 million Christians. However, instead of affirming the rise of Christianity, the Chinese government has ramped up efforts to clamp down on Christian missions.

In China, the Church is treated like another arm of the state that must be monitored to ensure conformity with the doctrines of the Communist Party. The “Administrative measures for religious groups” which was instituted in 2020 compels religious institutions to report activities to the Communist Party and propagate its political message. Officials rightfully perceive Christianity as a source of antiauthoritarianism and if left unchecked the growth of Christianity will pose a serious threat to the legitimacy of the Chinese state.

With its emphasis on individual salvation and equality, Christianity offers a liberal alternative to the rigid strictures of the Communist government. Christian churches have been instrumental in establishing civil society organizations that defend the rights of citizens from government abuse. Politically, Christianity in China has spurred change by acting as an agent of reform even during the turmoil of the Qing dynasty, as G. Tiedemann explains: “To a significant extent it was Protestant missionary involvement that provided the inspiration for the partial transformation of the Manchu Qing Empire into the Chinese state.”

Intellectuals inspired by Christianity introduced notions such as individualism, democracy, and international law to a curious Chinese population. Since Christianity has been a potent source of vitality in China for over a century, tolerating this instrument of subversion is politically untenable for many in the Communist Party. However, clamping down on Christianity could prove to be detrimental in the long term, because as we shall see Christianity has played a pivotal role in China’s socioeconomic development.

China is still benefitting from the seeds that were planted by missionaries in the nineteenth century. Historically, strong governments have presided over China, yet missionaries despite criticisms succeeded in establishing independent institutions that were free from the clutches of state intervention. Catholic and Protestant missionaries were devoted to evangelism, but their mission in China was broader than converting locals to Christianity.

Missionaries also spearheaded a modernization project in China through the avenue of education. Children were exposed to a modern curriculum in missionary schools and educated about the importance of governance and human rights. Moreover, the egalitarian approach of missionaries resulted in mass exposure to schooling thus uplifting women and the poor. Interestingly, the influence of missionaries motivated the Chinese government to fund higher education in the late 1890s, long after Protestants had built the Anglo-Chinese College.

Confirming Christianity’s positive effects on China’s development from 1920–2000, researchers from Peking University identify a positive association between the intensity of Christian activities and socioeconomic outcomes such as human capital formation and openness to foreign direct investment (FDI). As education reformers, Christian missionaries lobbied the Chinese government to offer relevant science courses and retire the archaic Confucian system to modernize education. Because of these efforts, China recorded exponential growth in education and by 1918, over thirteen thousand Christian schools were in operation thereby accounting for one-sixth of total schools in China.

Particularly, nursing education received a major boost due to the pioneering activities of Christian missionaries. By the late 1930s, the nursing profession had a membership of six thousand and trained prospective candidates in schools across the country. Missionary activity in China was holistic and afforded ordinary citizens access to superior nutrition and healthcare. Missionaries had successfully created over three hundred hospitals offering more than twenty thousand beds by 1937, and many of these facilities were in rural areas, where they catered to the poor for free.

By improving the quality of education accessible to locals and investing in social infrastructure, missionaries nurtured an urban middle class in nineteenth-century China. A study by Ying Bai and James Kai-sing Kung of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology shows a link between missionary activity and urbanization. Using 1840–1920, as the baseline, they argue that by building learning institutions and hospitals, missionaries expanded the stock of useful knowledge necessary for sustaining economic growth. Crucially, they also report that for this period, Protestantism influenced the emergence of sophisticated industrial firms in China.

Furthermore, according to a 2015 study in the China Economic Review, among the various religions, Christianity had the most considerable effect on growth during 2001–11. Fascinatingly, no consistent conclusions could be drawn for other religions. The researchers contend that Christianity enables economic growth by promoting ethical business customs and prioritizing accountability to fellow humans and God.

On the other hand, the authors theorize that the link between Christianity and FDI is positive because historically Christian missionaries helped to narrow the gap between Chinese locals and the outside world, therefore resulting in greater openness to foreign ideas and businesses. Essentially, the relationship missionaries cultivated between locals and foreigners has a persistent effect on China’s ability to attract foreign investments.

Additionally, studies argue that Protestant entrepreneurs are heralding a new moral revolution in China by leveraging Christian principles to operate ethically sound businesses. Indeed, the higher ethical standards imposed on Chinese businesses due to Christianity will help China to attract FDI.

Invariably, Christianity is competing with the Chinese state and delivering for citizens, so obviously, its growing popularity worries government officials. However, based on the data presented, it is evident that Christianity is a liberating force in China, and it would be apt for the Chinese state to step aside and allow Christianity to help citizens thrive.

Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is colloquially defined as insanity, per a quote attributed to Albert Einstein. Call me insane, but I wince whenever I hear this. As a rule of thumb, it’s fine but it can be slippery. I’m reminded of another quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who is alleged to have said, “A man cannot step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

Heraclitus, in other words, would say it is not possible to do the same thing over and over. We may think we’re doing the same thing, but on closer inspection we’re not. We never are. 

In matters of government there is a fundamental tension between Einstein and Heraclitus. Defenders of government tend to favor Heraclitus — it’s not the coercive approach that’s wrong, it’s the particulars of the approach. Better people and more money will move us forward. Especially more money.

If we look at particulars, we might get confused. A case can be made that the War on Poverty is the mother of all government programs in the extent of its failure, yet it’s been around since 1964. How failed is it? Economist Walter Williams writes (2014):

Since President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, the nation has spent about $18 trillion at the federal, state and local levels of government on programs justified by the “need” to deal with some aspect of poverty. In a column of mine in 1995, I pointed out that at that time, the nation had spent $5.4 trillion on the War on Poverty, and with that princely sum, “you could purchase every U.S. factory, all manufacturing equipment, and every office building. With what’s left over, one could buy every airline, trucking company and our commercial maritime fleet.

If you’re still in the shopping mood, you could also buy every television, radio and power company, plus every retail and wholesale store in the entire nation”. Today’s total of $18 trillion spent on poverty means you could purchase everything produced in our country each year and then some.

It would seem the Einstein theory of insanity has taken center stage, but defenders of government programs take a dissenting view. For one, the idea of poverty is a river that flows with the times. As Williams notes, today’s poor have many of the things not usually associated with poverty, such as air conditioning and computers. But the poor are simply responding to a market that makes these things affordable for more and more people — but they’re still poor. 

One of the engines of poverty is divorce, and the divorce rate, though trending downward since 1981, is much higher today than it was in the 1960s when Johnson launched his program. More evidence of a changing river. Einstein’s insanity doesn’t apply.

Coercion fails, over and over

Defenders of free markets note that any government attempt to interfere with the choices of individuals is a recipe for failure. From the point of view of an economist, the various kinds, shapes and sizes of government programs or agencies, or the level of rot in the culture, are all irrelevant. You do not solve problems with coercion. Government through its forced involvement in our lives is in fact committing the same error over and over and expecting positive results. In Einstein’s sense it is insane.

Worse, the voters are insane for putting up with it.

Year after year they go to the polls, and year-after-year government gets worse. Why do they do the same thing over and over? If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal, said Emma Goldman. But that’s unnecessary. Rather than make it illegal and cause a stir they simply screen out candidates that threaten the system.

In many ways we’re still free but this is not a matter of voters drawing a line and telling government don’t cross it. Voters don’t talk about freedom anymore. What freedom we have comes from a sober realization on the part of the parasitic class that they need to avoid killing their goose.

Thomas Paine observed this principle over two centuries ago:

The portion of liberty enjoyed in England, is just enough to enslave a country more productively than by despotism; and that as the real object of all despotism is revenue, a government so formed obtains more than it could do either by direct despotism, or in a full state of freedom, and is therefore, on the ground of interest, opposed to both. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, p. 29

When given an unprecedented opportunity to vote for someone who actually opposes coercive means, they go along with the bought media and kick him like a dog. It seems that voters are insane.

More precisely, they’re graduates of government schools.

It is said that central planning has failed over and over, and this is the reason for its abandonment. Central planners therefore are not insane. But central planning has not been abandoned. It is enthusiastically endorsed by economists the world over in one area especially, central banking. 

This one exception apparently refutes Einstein. Establishing a committee of bright people to force their monetary decisions on millions of market participants is better than allowing those participants to make monetary decisions on their own, notwithstanding the horrendous results. 

It is better, but only for a privileged few.

In politics, the Einstein – Heraclitus distinction is useless because what’s good for the ruling elite is usually bad for the public. Communism imposed misery on millions but not on those holding the reins of power. As counterfeiting by another name, central banking is a means of piling up money and power in a few hands while draining wealth from the rest. But the cheat is invisible to the populace, so it stays, and with the blessings of economists it stays as a prestigious institution.

Federal Reserve inflation is only insane from the losers’ perspective, provided they understood the cheat. But they don’t.

Worse, they don’t try. 

Opponents of secession in the United States often choose from several reasons as to why they think no member state of the United States should be allowed to separate from the rest of the confederation. Some anti-secessionists say it’s bad for national security reasons. Others oppose secession for nationalistic reasons, declaring that “we”—whoever that is—shouldn’t “give up on America.” 

For the Elites, Self-Determination Leads to “Bad” Laws

One of the most popular reasons to oppose secession is that opponents believe people will pass “bad” laws in places allowed to live under their own governments. That is, we’re told that without federal “oversight” over state and local communities, independent states would deny basic “rights” such as getting an abortion, voting without ID, or guaranteeing that every cake-shop owner is forced to bake cakes for same-sex couples. These independent governments, we are told, would also fail to enforce “progressive” regulations such as bans on fossil fuels and paying workers below a federally-imposed minimum. Therefore, the story goes, these places must be forced—by military means if necessary— to comply with US’s government’s mandates and regulations. 

Yet, far more tolerance is extended to the rest of the world—a place composed of 190-plus independent states—where governments adopt their own laws. Only in a select few cases—think Russia, Iran, and Syria—do we hear that the US government must intervene to ensure—by force, of course—that people in these parts of the world adopt the “right” laws. Everywhere else—as in Peru, India, Canada, or Poland—we are told it’s perfectly tolerable that laws be set locally in accordance with local values. Those places are democracies, after all, and we’re told democratic institutions establish “legitimate” government. 

Why is it that some governments are “allowed” self-determination by the US government, but any area presently within the national borders of the US—including member states with democratically elected governments—is to be denied self-determination until the end of time? The answer appears to be a mishmash of nationalism, half-baked “social contract” theory, and the old-fashioned desire to dominate others “for their own good.” 

Anti-Secession Is about Extending Washington’s Control

Opposition to secession in the name of preventing “bad” policy has many adherents across the political spectrum who place great faith in the ability of the US Supreme Court and other federal technocrats to “protect rights.” This is supposedly accomplished by deciding whether or not states and local governments conform to federal notions of “good” law.  The desire to deny self-determination to state and local governments, however,  appears to be especially intense on the Left. For example, in a recent article in The Nation opposing “blue-state secession,” Paul Blest contends that secession by blue states would be “cruel” because it would allow red-state governments to be unhampered by the US federal government. This, presumably, would enable conservatives to violate the human rights of “marginalized people” wholesale. More specifically, Blest believes secession should not be contemplated because it would limit the reach of federal mandates that “accommodate” transgender students and guarantee access to abortion (among other presumed benefits of federal control). 

Indeed, the idea that American separatists might be able to run governments anywhere without a federal babysitter strikes much of the Left as abhorrent, to say the least. We can see this in a recent article from New Republic in which author Brynn Tannehill warns conservative state officials are “lining up” to pass new laws against birth control, “ban books,” “rig democracy” and generally oppress groups conservatives allegedly hate. Tannehill contends that this is all part of a conservative plot to create “two Americas,” or, as a CNN piece put it in July, build “a nation within a nation.” Whether this leads to “soft secession” or “hard secession,” Tannehill concludes the answer is for the left to re-assert federal control over these separatists and ensure that enlightened federal policies are imposed on red states. Otherwise, these states will continue their descent into a non-progressive “hellscape.”

Most of the World Gets to Make Its Own Laws

The hysteria over abortion or voter ID never seems to extend to the world beyond the US border, however. This is true even though the “progressive” states of Europe often have gestational limits on abortion are more strict that was the case under Roe v. Wade, and abortion is largely illegal in Poland. Latin America employs a wide variety of restrictions on abortions that would be labeled intolerable by progressives in the US were such laws to be employed in the US. In Iraq, where thousands of Americans died to install a progressive democracy—or so we were told—abortion is illegal. In all this—so long as these countries are considered “allies” by the US regime—we never hear how the US must launch a humanitarian military operation there to preserve what the US Supreme Court has decided is a “right.” Similarly, most democratic regimes require identification to vote in elections, although Americans leftists tell us this amounts to “rigging democracy.” Meanwhile, same-sex marriage is banned in parts of Latin America and eastern Europe, and only civil unions are considered legal among same-sex couples in half a dozen European countries. Of course, it is banned in most of Africa and the Muslim world. Again, where are the calls to send in federal agents to ensure the protection of human rights in all these places? Certainly, advocates for abortion and same-sex marriage will demand that laws be “improved” in these foreign jurisdictions. But it is also generally accepted that these changes should be brought about through local institutions, and that local self-determination is to be—more or less—respected. 

Three Reasons Why Most of the World Is Granted Self-Determination, but Not Americans 

Yet far smaller deviations from the progressive consensus are treated as grave violations of human rights should they take place in Texas or Idaho or Arizona. Just imagine if the government of Arizona were to declare “we’re now subject to federal law in the same way as Mexico, and we will determine our laws in accordance with our own democratic institutions.” That is, Arizona would be saying it gets to set its own policies without permission from Washington in the same way that most of the world does now under the status quo. Arizona has a democratically elected legislature, after all, and every other institutional feature that would qualify it as a “democracy” even according to global elites. Would Arizona then be afforded the same degree of self-determination as any other democracy somewhere else on the planet? Of course not. Rather, we would be sure to hear howls of protest from Washington elites and demands that the US government send in the Marines to ensure that these traitors and “authoritarians” in Arizona take orders from Washington. We would hear about how any attempt at defending local sovereignty would be a human rights disaster and must surely be motivated by nefarious goals—most likely racism. 

In order to deny Arizonans the same self-determination afforded to Mexicans right across the border, opponents of secession have to make the case that there’s something “special” about the people inside the US border drawn by politicians many decades ago. 

There are several strategies employed here. One is to claim that there is no “need” for local self-determination in the United States because all residents of the US member states are “represented” in Congress. That is, in the case of Arizona, seven million people are “represented” by 9 people who sit in the House of Representatives and make up two percent of the voting population of the House. In the Senate, seven million Arizonans are “represented” by two US Senators. The US Congress consists of 11 Arizonans and 524 non-Arizonans. For many opponents of secession, this is what passes for democracy and political representation and it supposedly justifies the denial of local self-determination. Rather than have any real say in federal laws that affect Arizona, though, Arizonans must instead submit to federal laws decided by 500 or so people from other states. Of course, Arizonans could always appeal these laws in federal court, where decisions would ultimately be made by 9 federal judges, none of whom are from Arizona. 

Moreover, there is the nationalist claim that relies on emotions and maudlin appeals to national unity and feelings of solidarity. These are the people who insist “we are all Americans” and for that reason, no portion of “free” America is ever allowed to leave. These people also tell us—less convincingly every year—that Californians have fundamentally the same values as people in Texas or Idaho or Kansas. And, for that reason, there is a “natural bond” among Americans. If this alleged bond was as strong or as natural as advocates claim, though, we wouldn’t find that more than one-third of Americans polled support secession. Notably, it’s not up to regular people to decide for themselves if they “feel” American or feel a bond with other “Americans” two thousand miles away. Elites in Washington will let you know with whom you share a special spiritual and national bond within the warm embrace of the “homeland.”

Another claim used to deny self-determination is the idea of the “social contract.” By this way of thinking, all residents of US member states have voluntarily agreed to submit to all US laws in some fashion. How exactly this voluntary consent to US law comes about is never quite clear. Obviously, no living American was involved in the creation or signing of the US constitution. Some advocates of social contract theory claim that residents somehow grant “tacit consent” to US law simply by not emigrating to another country. This absurd claim was already dealt with long ago by both Adam Smith and David Hume who mocked John Locke for suggesting the idea. The idea nonetheless persists.

Moreover, many parts of what we now call “the United States” were not even annexed to the United States through any consensual process. No vote was taken of the residents of the Louisiana purchase before it was added to the United States. In fact, the French-speaking Louisianans complained bitterly of the mistreatment they received at the hands of their new Anglo overlords. The Floridas and the Pacific northwest were added as a result of great-power negotiations, not by local consent. Virtually all of the American southwest (plus California) were added to the US through a war of conquest, after which the Mexicans were forced into signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. As a result of these wars, diplomatic machinations, and accidents of history, we’re now told that being part of the United States is all a matter of amicable consensual agreements. Therefore, any part of the United States now seeking to break off will be forever prevented from exercising any self-determination.

Ultimately, however, most opponents of secession end up being crude consequentialists. They’re afraid that if US member states or local governments were given self-determination these people would make laws the elites don’t like. Thus, whatever reasons serve that end will be deemed acceptable. 

[T]he confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. 

— Hayek, F. A., The Pretence of Knowledge, Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1974.

It is a common practice among scientists who win the Nobel prize for some intellectual achievement to deliver their Nobel Prize lectures on another intellectual achievement that is in more need of attention. Such was the case with Albert Einstein, who won the Nobel prize in physics in 1921 “for his services to Theoretical Physics and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect,” which celebrated his achievements in statistical and quantum mechanics, but who delivered a speech on the special theory of relativity, a controversial idea to many scientists at the time. Likewise, Friedrich August von Hayek has won the prize “for [his] pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for [his] penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social, and institutional phenomena,” and has delivered his Nobel lecture on the abuse of reason in the social sciences.

Hayek is one of the last century’s great polymaths, with major contributions to economics, political philosophy, ethics, legal studies, and epistemology. His intellectual heritage survives in the Austrian school of economics and is alive and well today with journals and schools producing current research and training younger researchers in economics and the social sciences. His work on macroeconomics and monetary theory with Ludwig von Mises in their newly founded (1927) Austrian Institute of Economic Research has resulted in Hayek’s Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1929), and Prices and Production (1931).

These two volumes, along with Mises’ Theory of Money and Credit (1912), form the basis of the modern Austrian Business Cycle Theory. The theory cemented Hayek as a major economist of the twentieth century. However, he gained international fame from his eerie volume, Road to Serfdom (1944), which warned of the totalitarian regimes that would come after the wake of the second world war. His analysis of the nature of social knowledge and its limit is perhaps what we most remember him for.

What is Knowledge?

In 1945, Hayek published one of the most cited papers in the field of economics on the nature of knowledge that may be used by individuals in making their decisions. His article, The Use of Knowledge in Society, has stressed that our actions as agents choosing between alternatives are not informed by facts and beliefs that can be produced when prompted, but by imitating behavior that successfully produces the desired results and by interacting with a world that is constantly changing.

A machine can hardly manage in dealing with a world in flux, but it comes perfectly naturally to us humans. As Descartes reminds us, “we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words corresponding to a change in its organs. But it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as even the dullest of men can do.” (Cottingham, John, In Search of a Soul, Princeton University Press, 2020, p. 55.) And even with the advent of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and modern computers, human oversight is always needed since, ultimately, we generally do not accept that anyone (or anything) be held accountable for the risks and choices we relegate to others.

Hayek observes that humans do not become proper citizens by being taught how to act, but by carefully following practiced traditions and responding to external stimuli. (Hayek, F.A., The Fatal Conceit, University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 19 – 28.) Thomas Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions (1980), chiefly inspired by Hayek’s article, has incorporated this idea into the realms of sociology, psychology, and public policy, showing the idea’s breadth of scope and the extent of its function and utility.

We may abstractly discuss the nature of knowledge, but our practices reflect another type of knowledge that can hardly be articulated. Prices function as facilitators of our limited knowledge regarding the skills and resources needed for any end we seek. And so, by responding to price signals as a mediator of our dispersed knowledge, we are able to navigate the choices we have and discriminate between them.

The Limitations of Science

In his article, The Pretence of Knowledge (1974), the author carefully stresses how misguided it was of economists to mindlessly emulate the methods of the physical sciences. This approach wherein researchers in the social sciences use forecasting and attempt to explain prices has been dubbed scientistic (a pejorative term), due to its use of sophisticated schemes that produce errors caused by the misuse of data and accepting the results of mathematical analyses at face value regardless of their assumptions. Hayek’s explanation of this error, which is reminiscent of the Streetlight Effect (often called the McNamara Effect), cast doubt on the increasingly theoretical direction modern economics has taken to its detriment. This clarification of the abuse of statistics and mathematics has notified many social researchers of the limitations and failures of pseudoscientific practices when the methods adopted from the physical sciences are twisted and stretched beyond their area of applicability.

But Hayek had another, important reason, for exploring these issues. Science has often been used to implement government interventions that diminish people’s freedoms and imposes arbitrary control over their decisions. Ludwig von Mises, Hayek’s postdoctoral mentor, has discussed in previous articles (1. Mises, L. H. E., Profit and Loss, lecture presented to the Mont Pèlerin Society held in Beauvallon, France, September 9 to 16, 1951. || 2. Mises, L. H. E., Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften 47, 1920.) the operating mechanisms of the market and the impossibility of the central management of society into prosperity.

The torch of liberty has been carried by Mises’ students afterward; the three most notable students were Israel Kirzner, Murray Rothbard, and the object of this article, Friedrich von Hayek. Unless this issue has been addressed, science will always be abused by positions of authority. Hayek ends his Pretence of Knowledge with a warning:

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society—a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

Wisdom and prudence may well advise us to pay attention to these cautionary words.