Uh-Oh! (Examination Missteps Department)

I do not think that this essay paragraph is an accurate precis of Friedrich Hayek (1945), "The Use of Knowledge in Society," American Economic Review:

On the flip side, we have Hayek, who believed in collectivization. He believed that to help with the economic gap, the government should hand out rations and resources. This process, he claimed, would be expedited by the price mechanism, which would openly share all information so as to increae productivity and reduce waste. In other words, he wanted a communist regime to battle poverty and social and economic disparity...

The rest of the essay is very good, however. I'm giving it an A nevertheless.

And you might, I suppose, argue that the main point of TUoKiS is that libertarian capitalism is a much more effective and just Free Society of Associated Producers than any other possibility...

Comments

[Tucker]

That is a pretty bold re-interpretation of TUoKiS...

[Barkley Rosser]

Brad,

That you gave the essayist in question an A for this probably has old Friedrich spinning in his grave. But then, given how much you like to dump on the old guy, you probably are getting a bit of a kick out of that thought...

[andres]

Well, considering the types of Latin American regimes that Hayek and Friedman lent their moral support to in the 1970's and 1980's, the free market ideology does have the feel of communism turned on its head, so I can sympathize with the student's approach if not with his ignorance.

[Chris]

If the rest of the essay was good, the author shouldn't be escorted off the premises by the security forces with his/her textbooks and lecture notes in a garbage bag, as would otherwise be perfectly justified (and I only just held back from saying '...the perp shouldn't be walked to the police cruiser in handcuffs...). Nonetheless, this not an A situation.
Seriously, if an A doesn't mean, among other things, 'No oh-the-humanity incidents', it's fundamentally misrepresenting itself.

[Chris]

If the rest of the essay was good, the author shouldn't be escorted off the premises by the security forces with his/her textbooks and lecture notes in a garbage bag, as would otherwise be perfectly justified (and I only just held back from saying '...the perp shouldn't be walked to the police cruiser in handcuffs...). Nonetheless, this not an A situation.
Seriously, if an A doesn't mean, among other things, 'No oh-the-humanity incidents', it's fundamentally misrepresenting itself.

[Chris]

If the rest of the essay was good, the author shouldn't be escorted off the premises by the security forces with his/her textbooks and lecture notes in a garbage bag, as would otherwise be perfectly justified (and I only just held back from saying '...the perp shouldn't be walked to the police cruiser in handcuffs...). Nonetheless, this not an A situation.
Seriously, if an A doesn't mean, among other things, 'No oh-the-humanity incidents', it's fundamentally misrepresenting itself.

[Chris]

If the rest of the essay was good, the author shouldn't be escorted off the premises by the security forces with his/her textbooks and lecture notes in a garbage bag, as would otherwise be perfectly justified (and I only just held back from saying '...the perp shouldn't be walked to the police cruiser in handcuffs...). Nonetheless, this not an A situation.
Seriously, if an A doesn't mean, among other things, 'No oh-the-humanity incidents', it's fundamentally misrepresenting itself.

[jessica rooney]

For this to be an A, the rest of the essay must have been like SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO rad, dude.
Seriously, wouldn't the level of excellence required to balance out this howler approach the speed of light, c, and start to trigger relativistic effects that would made the achievement of higher excellence more and more difficult.

[Anonymous Coward]

One Word: Grade Inflation.

I would love to be a student under you...

[Cosma]

Did you assign Lange's "On the Economic Theory of Socialism" as well, by any chance?

[incredulous]

Good god, what my GPA would have been at Berkeley...

[rickhavoc]

You have an artist on your hands there, one that understands the power of parody and holding a mirror up to the source (in the case, a wellspring of canards and strawmen). It took guts to 'go there' on an exam.

[Doctor Jay]

I'm going a different direction, having never actually read Hayek before.

"But those who clamor for "conscious direction"—and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously..."

"The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may be so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilization."

The argument he addresses here is essentially the "argument from design". It is rather shocking, I think, that a social system that developed by accident would outperform anything we can come up with naively.

[Ken Houghton]

I'm still trying to figure out what is wrong with the paragraph. Hayek depends on perfect information--the description of his conceit of the "price mechanism" is spot-on--and that effect, if realised, would certainly be a Universal Co-operative Society, aka Communism.

So those attacking the 'graf have to argue that Hayek, being an economist(?), didn't care about "poverty and social and economic disparity," or at least didn't believe his model would or should apply to or ameliorate those conditions.

[Cosma]

Ken @ 9:07: the bits about "handing out rations and resources" and "collectivization" are, let us say, hard to reconcile with any obvious reading of the text.

[tedb]

Anonymous Coward:
Wouldn't "grade inflation" be two words?

[tedb]

Anonymous Coward:
Wouldn't "grade inflation" be two words?

[Steve Miller]

"I'm still trying to figure out what is wrong with the paragraph. Hayek depends on perfect information--the description of his conceit of the "price mechanism" is spot-on--and that effect, if realised, would certainly be a Universal Co-operative Society, aka Communism."

This "defense" of the student's abysmal reading comprehension is further evidence that some (many?) people need to stay far, far away from economics and focus on more important things, like building ships in bottles or telling kids to stay off their lawns. Saying that Hayek's argument depends on perfect information is like saying Keynes relied on an assumption of full employment in equilibrium.