Hayek and Knowledge and Climate Change

I’ve been reading some Hayek lately, specifically The Constitution of Liberty, in which Hayek talks about freedom/liberty and what exactly those words mean and why they are so desirable for society.

Hayek believes we should all be “free from coercion.” He is very much concerned with men being able to choose freely between available opportunities and not very concerned at all about what opportunities are available to each one; I feel like a non-libertarian response would involve asserting some equivalence between the two, but I haven’t taken the time to explore that line of thought.

Hayek’s main points, however, rest on the concept of distributed knowledge, or the idea that no individuals have enough knowledge to reliably make coercive decisions that improve the lives of others.

I find these arguments very appealing. It could be argued that, today, computers and the Internet help with the knowledge problem to a useful degree, and I concede there are many instances of coercion that at least appear to have improved lives – such as the airplane smoking ban currently being attributed to the late New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg (due to externalities, that’s something I’m at least ambivalent about).

But I think it’s much easier to find examples of allegedly knowledge-based intervention backfiring and causing unintended consequences, like the ethanol boondoggle, or California’s high speed rail boondoggle, or NYC’s taxicab mess, or the entire War on Drugs, or, oh, almost any time the government has tried to implement price ceilings which led to shortages of the very goods they were trying to make more available.

Incidentally, this is all partially related to why I’m so interested in all the data around climate change. For quite a few years the Smart People have been extremely confident in their predictions about the globe getting warmer and the weather getting worse, but enough time has gone by that I believe we are starting to see results that are beginning to deviate from their earlier oh-so-confident predictions.

Maybe they didn’t have as much knowledge about the way the world works as they thought they did. Maybe the interactions of the Sun and Earth and atmosphere and carbon dioxide and everything else are even less well understood than the reactions of people to artificially suppressed prices.

If true, it would be no surprise to Hayek.

4 thoughts on “Hayek and Knowledge and Climate Change”

  1. I really enjoy this blog and think you have many great (and wise) things to say, but I really don’t understand why you think we are not experiencing man made climate change.

    The examples you give are great examples of government overreach leading to unintended consequences. Quite often, as you mention, they policy ends up worsening the exact problem the government was trying to solve. Of course, it isn’t just government. Any organization has this problem. Even very successful businesses do stupid things in response to serious problems (institute ridiculous levels of bureaucracy to deal with minor employee inefficiencies, layoff the more productive workers in response to a small downturn, etc.). The world is full of great examples of organizations overreaching and making things worse.

    But that is different than the idea that the problem doesn’t exist — or in this case, doubting the science behind the theory of global warming. To be fair, it is a messy subject. This isn’t something as straightforward as physics, which can usually be disproven in a quite straightforward manner. This is much more like medicine. Despite all of the studies, there is no one to one correspondence between smoking and bad health. It is much messier than that. Some people smoke and live long, productive lives. But there is enough science behind it for just about every doctor out there to recommend against smoking. I’m sure you can find a few that say that smoking is benign, and that the anti-smoking thing is some sort of plot, but by and large, the general consensus amongst the medical establishment is that smoking is bad for your health. Maybe we shouldn’t trust the medical establishment (after all, they have had their share of scandals). But I know enough about medical science to feel like the studies are sufficient.

    The same is true for global warming. Actually, there are several parts to the global warming equation, each with their own skeptics.

    1) The earth is experiencing rapid climate change. When these theories came out, this sentence would have suggested “the world will experience rapid climate change”. This is the part that most people agree with. Average temperatures have gone up quite a bit in the last fifty years, which is unusual in the worlds history. It is possible the measurements are mistaken, but I doubt it.

    2) Man is causing this rise in temperature by emitting too many greenhouse gases. This relies on three pieces:

    2 a) There are more and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. I’m pretty confident that the measurements are accurate.

    2 b) These gases do cause an increase in temperature. Laboratory studies and complex modeling suggested this (which is how the theory got started in the first place). Maybe there is something in the atmosphere that the scientists discounted, but so far, there predictions have been pretty accurate.

    2 c) We are the ones responsible for the increase of those gases. It is complicated, but not too hard to determine how much we emit because a lot of it is measured. Oil, natural gas and coal are all well measured commodities. They all burn in a similar way (leaving CO2). Things like methane are more difficult to measure (I’m sure) but again, the record is pretty good. There have been no fundamental disagreement by scientists on these points.

    3) Things will be bad if climate change continues. This is probably the trickiest and most controversial part of the equation. How bad? Depends on your definition of bad. If you don’t care about endangered species, habitat loss or nature in general, then things might not be that bad for you. Of course, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that nature may cause some rather unfortunate problems. The folks in the southern plains probably could care less about the natural environment of their area in the 1920s, but they sure didn’t like the dust bowl.

    I just don’t see any point that is very controversial here. At some point, the arguments against global warming start sounding like the birthing controversy.

    But it is a completely different story when it comes to public policy in reaction to this problem. The ethanol subsidy is a prime example of the government making things worse. Not unfairly “picking a winner” (that turns out to be a loser) but actually making things worse (ethanol subsidies contribute to global warming). I have no doubt that the government is quite capable of making things worse in other ways (in response to global warming) but that doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist. It also doesn’t mean that we should simply try and hope that nothing is done or that one solution isn’t a lot worse than another. For example, the so called “cap and trade” idea (which, to its credit, has worked well for some things) would be a huge bureaucratic mess. Simply taxing carbon (along with some other gases) would be much simpler.

    1. Thanks for your comment, Ross. My continuing skepticism on climate change, as I try to explain in my quarterly snapshot posts, is a result of looking at the data!

      Yes, the Arctic ice cap is melting dramatically, and the sea level is rising slowly, but that’s about it – there are absolutely no increasing trends in Antarctic ice cap melt (it’s actually hugging record levels), tornadoes, hurricanes, or droughts, and while the temperature measurements have increased in the last century, they have not risen for the last fifteen years despite a predicted acceleration! The measurements are in danger of falling out of the 95% confidence interval, and the science has gone from denying a slowdown to coming up with reasons for the slowdown that they previously didn’t expect.

      So I disagree that “predictions have been pretty accurate.” While I have no doubt that science has acquired a lot of knowledge about what has happened in the past and how carbon dioxide works and so forth, I’m not convinced they have enough knowledge to predict the future, and I believe we are beginning to see the falsifying of predictions that things would get worse.

      I’m still trying to keep an open mind about the data, and we’ll see what happens as time keeps going by. I’m also rooting for clean energy like Tesla and solar power even as I criticize the distorting government subsidies that happen to be helping them. I’m just skeptical that the actual data verifies what I see as overconfidence in partial knowledge about a complex world.

  2. I really enjoy this blog and think you have many great (and wise) things to say, but I really don’t understand why you think we are not experiencing man made climate change.

    The examples you give are great examples of government overreach leading to unintended consequences. Quite often, as you mention, they policy ends up worsening the exact problem the government was trying to solve. Of course, it isn’t just government. Any organization has this problem. Even very successful businesses do stupid things in response to serious problems (institute ridiculous levels of bureaucracy to deal with minor employee inefficiencies, layoff the more productive workers in response to a small downturn, etc.). The world is full of great examples of organizations overreaching and making things worse.

    But that is different than the idea that the problem doesn’t exist — or in this case, doubting the science behind the theory of global warming. To be fair, it is a messy subject. This isn’t something as straightforward as physics, which can usually be disproven in a quite straightforward manner. This is much more like medicine. Despite all of the studies, there is no one to one correspondence between smoking and bad health. It is much messier than that. Some people smoke and live long, productive lives. But there is enough science behind it for just about every doctor out there to recommend against smoking. I’m sure you can find a few that say that smoking is benign, and that the anti-smoking thing is some sort of plot, but by and large, the general consensus amongst the medical establishment is that smoking is bad for your health. Maybe we shouldn’t trust the medical establishment (after all, they have had their share of scandals). But I know enough about medical science to feel like the studies are sufficient.

    The same is true for global warming. Actually, there are several parts to the global warming equation, each with their own skeptics.

    1) The earth is experiencing rapid climate change. When these theories came out, this sentence would have suggested “the world will experience rapid climate change”. This is the part that most people agree with. Average temperatures have gone up quite a bit in the last fifty years, which is unusual in the worlds history. It is possible the measurements are mistaken, but I doubt it.

    2) Man is causing this rise in temperature by emitting too many greenhouse gases. This relies on three pieces:

    2 a) There are more and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. I’m pretty confident that the measurements are accurate.

    2 b) These gases do cause an increase in temperature. Laboratory studies and complex modeling suggested this (which is how the theory got started in the first place). Maybe there is something in the atmosphere that the scientists discounted, but so far, there predictions have been pretty accurate.

    2 c) We are the ones responsible for the increase of those gases. It is complicated, but not too hard to determine how much we emit because a lot of it is measured. Oil, natural gas and coal are all well measured commodities. They all burn in a similar way (leaving CO2). Things like methane are more difficult to measure (I’m sure) but again, the record is pretty good. There have been no fundamental disagreement by scientists on these points.

    3) Things will be bad if climate change continues. This is probably the trickiest and most controversial part of the equation. How bad? Depends on your definition of bad. If you don’t care about endangered species, habitat loss or nature in general, then things might not be that bad for you. Of course, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that nature may cause some rather unfortunate problems. The folks in the southern plains probably could care less about the natural environment of their area in the 1920s, but they sure didn’t like the dust bowl.

    I just don’t see any point that is very controversial here. At some point, the arguments against global warming start sounding like the birthing controversy.

    But it is a completely different story when it comes to public policy in reaction to this problem. The ethanol subsidy is a prime example of the government making things worse. Not unfairly “picking a winner” (that turns out to be a loser) but actually making things worse (ethanol subsidies contribute to global warming). I have no doubt that the government is quite capable of making things worse in other ways (in response to global warming) but that doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist. It also doesn’t mean that we should simply try and hope that nothing is done or that one solution isn’t a lot worse than another. For example, the so called “cap and trade” idea (which, to its credit, has worked well for some things) would be a huge bureaucratic mess. Simply taxing carbon (along with some other gases) would be much simpler.

    1. Thanks for your comment, Ross. My continuing skepticism on climate change, as I try to explain in my quarterly snapshot posts, is a result of looking at the data!

      Yes, the Arctic ice cap is melting dramatically, and the sea level is rising slowly, but that’s about it – there are absolutely no increasing trends in Antarctic ice cap melt (it’s actually hugging record levels), tornadoes, hurricanes, or droughts, and while the temperature measurements have increased in the last century, they have not risen for the last fifteen years despite a predicted acceleration! The measurements are in danger of falling out of the 95% confidence interval, and the science has gone from denying a slowdown to coming up with reasons for the slowdown that they previously didn’t expect.

      So I disagree that “predictions have been pretty accurate.” While I have no doubt that science has acquired a lot of knowledge about what has happened in the past and how carbon dioxide works and so forth, I’m not convinced they have enough knowledge to predict the future, and I believe we are beginning to see the falsifying of predictions that things would get worse.

      I’m still trying to keep an open mind about the data, and we’ll see what happens as time keeps going by. I’m also rooting for clean energy like Tesla and solar power even as I criticize the distorting government subsidies that happen to be helping them. I’m just skeptical that the actual data verifies what I see as overconfidence in partial knowledge about a complex world.

Comments are closed.