| Muck and Mystery Loitering With Intent |
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There's an interesting dialectic between two articles in the same issue of the Wilson Quarterly. One, a Hayek intellectual biography, and the other an article by Stacy D. VanDeveer lamenting the demise of environmental summitry.
The Hayekian thesis:
The problem with socialism, Hayek argued, is that it seeks to replace the dispersed knowledge of those myriad actors with that of a single, omniscient planner. Socialist central planning cannot work because it attempts the impossible: using a static equilibrium model to capture unfathomably complex inputs and outputs characterized by dynamic, constantly shifting equilibria. In market economies, by contrast, the price mechanism provides information about preferences and relative scarcities to thousands of agents, whose continual exchanges produce a socially beneficial if unplanned outcome...Contrasted with its antithesis:One can never fully model and predict complex phenomena such as the spontaneous orders produced by the interactions of simpler agents. These orders include the human brain, whose higher functions cannot possibly be inferred from its physical substratum, as well as ecosystems and, of course, markets, cultures, and other human institutions.
To understand how the earlier optimism yielded to bitter disappointment [about the beginning of a new era in global environmental politics], one must begin with an essential fact: At the international level, central governing authority does not exist. The importance of that fact in the environmental arena cannot be overstated. The key elements of environmental cooperation include treaties and the small organizations that administer them (so-called secretariats), larger intergovernmental organizations such as UN bodies and the World Bank, international conferences or summits involving national officials, and a set of financial mechanisms to help pay for these various components. International environmental governance is, in short, a complex and generally uncoordinated patchwork of relatively weak laws and underfunded and understaffed organizations—a far cry from the image of big, bureaucratic, sovereignty-stealing monoliths conjured up by critics. As a rule, powerful countries rarely propose to strengthen these international institutions.What VanDeveer doesn't grasp is that the world turned away from central governing authority because it doesn't work. It isn't merely that convention fatigue, donor fatigue and green fatigue have drained the energy out of the environmental movement, though that has happened. More importantly, the world has had the opportunity to observe the bumbling ineffectiveness of bureaucratic central planning which has failed everywhere. It is hideously expensive as well as laughably incompetent. It makes things worse rather than better.
The world is increasingly better informed about environmental problems and the exquisite logic of natural systems, and more fully appreciates that as natural systems have no designer they also have no controller. Each agent in the system is more than willing to do its bit, responding with alacrity to information. The world is maturing from the coarse conceptual paradigm of the steam age which viewed the world as a machine - something like a steam locomotive or an infernal factory - to a more accurate conceptualization of a dynamic network. Though the network nature of the world has long been observed the emergent order hasn't always been recognized and has only recently been explained to a useful degree. Steam think didn't describe the world well and led to bungled interventions.
The "complex and generally uncoordinated patchwork of relatively weak laws and underfunded and understaffed organizations" that VanDeveer would like to turn into a "big, bureaucratic, sovereignty-stealing monolith", and so truly deserve the wrath of critics, are consciously being weakened further in order to improve the system. A much better understanding of the value of subsidarity in an information rich network reveals that environmental remediation and preservation are best accomplished by interested actors at a local level. Central control undermines their efforts and displaces their concerns leading to system collapse.
The world has not yet matured and as VanDeveer demonstrates some are completely oblivious to the changes in progress. Prediction is a fool's game but baring major disruption the continued emergence of more accurate mental models of natural systems - including human social systems - seems probable. Rather than clinging to steam age traditions conservatives such as VanDeveer could play a useful role by continuing their education in more modern concepts and helping others progress.