We are becoming more ignorant. Pardon me, you ask. Me, more ignorant? No, not just you - we are all becoming more ignorant. Sure, we know a lot more things now thanks to the internet and the plethora of cable channels and radio outlets that inform us on thousands of varied topics. We can also add our own private learnings to our knowledge base. Still, and at the risk of taking another swipe at our self-perception, we know a lot less about how things work in the world. Here's the good news - this growth in ignorance, oxymoron aside, means that, as a whole (here you can define whole as a city or the planet) we are in a progressing civilization.
Consider the typical hunter-gatherer society of eight thousand years ago. There was little that was not known. The members of the tribe knew who did what, when and how. They had no monetary system to fret over, no tough cell phone vendor choices to make, and little outside dependence on other tribes. The tribe was flat. There was minimal ignorance.
Shifting to today, who can fully explain the billions of actions that need to occur to bring to market all of the the products and services we consume? No one knows this. It involves an ever-increasing degree of human coordination where the actors themselves do not comprehend how their labor specialization contributes to the whole. Through generations upon generations of innovation, testing, executing, failing, re-inventing, re-testing, succeeding again and failing again, we have arrived at where we are.
It is an accumulation of generational knowledge that we act upon without fully comprehending the total picture. And we are not even aware that this is what we are doing. The more complex, more specialized, and larger the "tribe", the less we know. (Want proof? Try to explain the global financial system as it exists today.) This is what freedom and a free marketplace engender. The freedom to try different methods of production and venture into the unknown with the chance for reward and failure alike.
Adam Smith alluded to an invisible hand to describe how an individual's pursuit of self-interest produces a common good. Those that believe in a free market tend to hold a profound respect for this somewhat mysterious manner that we have progressed. We may not understand it, but we know there is a system of human coordination out there. And because we don't fully understand it, we should beware of abrupt changes to the system for fear that the consequences are equally unknown. The invisible hand system self-adjusts. The fact that we don't see the subtle self-adjustments should not overly concern us.
There are those that strongly believe in a government that should decide how things are for a wide-range of economic matters. Communism and other forms of totalitarian states are the more extreme forms of this hyper-control. Well-meaning socialists are also in this camp in a more benign way. Many who have socialist leanings are quite intelligent. It is this very premium that they place on the value of intelligence that makes them feel like they "know how things work and they know how to change them so that they can work better". They consider the human coordination that has evolved from the generational accumulated knowledge as hogwash because it cannot be explained to their satisfaction. It certainly cannot be explained in an appealing sound bite for sure.
To socialists, the invisible hand is a silly superstition that should be thwarted and replaced with "rationalized" human design. They esteem their knowledge to be superior to that of the product of the many preceding generations. The free marketer would rather trust the masses of people that are free to make their own self-interested decisions than to trust a handful to devise a grand plan. The handful simply doesn't know what they think they know.
Socrates said that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.
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