It is often contended that the belief that a person is solely responsible for his own fate is held only by the successful. This in itself is not so unacceptable as its underlying suggestion, which is that people hold this belief because they have been successful. I, for one, am inclined to think that the connection is the other way round and that people often are successful because they hold this belief. Though a man’s conviction that all he achieves is due solely to his exertions, skill, and intelligence may be largely false, it is apt to have the most beneficial effects on his energy and circumspection. And if the smug price of the successful is often intolerable and offensive, the belief that success depends wholly on him is probably the pragmatically most effective incentive to successful action; whereas the more a man indulges in the propensity to blame others or circumstances for his failures, the more disgruntled and ineffective he tends to become. (pp. 82-83)
This is from Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty.
I wish I had remembered this quote years ago when I discussed President Obama’s famous speech in which he said to successful businessmen, “You didn’t build that.”
READER COMMENTS
Jose Pablo
Apr 20 2023 at 10:26am
the belief that success depends wholly on him is probably the pragmatically most effective incentive to successful action; whereas the more a man indulges in the propensity to blame others or circumstances for his failures, the more disgruntled and ineffective he tends to become.
This is a very good quote from Hayek …
… and yet, it placed the idea of “responsibility for your own fate” in the realm of “religion”
God, very likely, doesn’t exist (like the “responsibility for your own fate” thing) and, yet, religion is, very likely, extremely helpful to human beings
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/02/27/places-with-high-religious-participation-have-fewer-deaths-of-despair
“Truth” is overrated.
Roger McKinney
Apr 20 2023 at 10:53am
Christianity gave the world modern science, but more importantly modern economics that generated the first increase in per capita GDP in history and has lifted hundreds of billions from starvation poverty. So if God doesn’t exist, the myth has been very beneficial.
See the book, God is a Capitalist: Markets from Moses to Marx.
Jose Pablo
Apr 20 2023 at 12:57pm
That was precisely my point Roger!
Same happens with the belief that I “build my life due solely to my exertions, skills and intelligence”, it is, indeed, a very beneficial myth.
Monte
Apr 20 2023 at 5:09pm
“The existence of God” is a personal belief, not a myth. A myth can easily be disproven. Alternatively, taking “responsibility for our own fate” is an ideal (ie. a standard of perfection or excellence). And, I would argue, a critically important one for however you want to define success.
Jose Pablo
Apr 20 2023 at 5:51pm
The idea that “all you achieve is due solely to his exertions, skill, and intelligence” (the idea that Hayek is refering to) is also a “personal belief” (or whatever other expression you can use to define believing in God)
… and “taking responsibility for our own fate” is more or less fine compare with a lot of alternatives, but it is very far from an universal “standard of perfection or excellence” … some of the most boring people I have ever met claimed to do just that: “taking responsability for their own fate” … all day long!
I very much doubt Verlaine or Alejandra Pizarnik or Kerouac or Bukowski or Picasso or Freddie Mercury, fall into the category of “responsible, hard working discipline people” … and yet I would enjoy their company way more than the company of most “standard of pefection or excellence” … and their contribution to our world is very relevant (more relevant that most “hard working standards of perfection or excellence’)
Monte
Apr 20 2023 at 8:06pm
Agreed. But that doesn’t mean great things can’t be achieved through it. Self belief is a key element to success. Self doubt, OTOH, greatly diminishes one’s chances for success.
How boring someone might be is hardly a measure of their success.
I’m not so sure you can claim that. For instance, Mercury worked quite hard starting at a very young age, earned a diploma in graphic art and design, and became an accomplished multi-instrumentalist. He didn’t accomplish those things by being irresponsible, lazy, and undisciplined.
Jose Pablo
Apr 20 2023 at 9:56pm
Mercury worked quite hard starting at a very young age, earned a diploma in graphic art and design, and became an accomplished multi-instrumentalist.
Many, many, many people have done that and nobody remember their names … this is not what set Mercury apart. That’s a false narrative that we love.
Monte
Apr 20 2023 at 10:09pm
It doesn’t matter if those who have achieved success through personal responsibility are remembered or not. How is that a false narrative?
Jose Pablo
Apr 20 2023 at 10:34pm
Monte, that was intended to meant they were not successful.
Afterall this hardwork and desing diplomas an piano hours they ended up working as bar tenders or grocery clerks … nothing wrong with this profession but, I guess, not the definition of success if you work hard to be a multi-instrumentalist.
The false narrative we love is that if you work hard you will get there … just because some people worked hard and, indeed, got there
Mark Z
Apr 20 2023 at 3:50pm
This is a pretty doubtful claim, given that, at both the individual and national level, promotion of modern science is pretty well-correlated with secularism. This is probably true of capitalism as well. The founders of classical liberalism in the 18th century – like Smith and Hume – were disproportionately nonreligious and lived in comparatively secular countries, and Christian institutions, especially tha Catholic Church, were infmaously opposed to even technological progress. The Church even tried to prevent the spread of electric lighting and railroads in its territory. It’s often pointed out that the Church funded some scientific research… with money forcibly expropriated via taxation, just like secular states do (only secular states funded much more scientific research).
I’m aware of efforts to characterize some scholastic theologians as the forefathers of modern capitalism, this has always struck me as cherry-picking. The great anti-enlightenment, anti-commercial philosophers like De Maistre and Juan Dinoso Cortez, or the socialistic Catholic Worker movement have at least as good a claim to represent the spirit of Catholic economic thought, for better or worse.
nobody.really
Apr 20 2023 at 11:49pm
To a greater extent than you find in the rest of the world, Western people tend to exhibit individualism, independence, lower levels of conformity to others, and a higher level of trust of strangers (as opposed to restricting interactions to those within one’s own community). Arguably these attributes aid market transactions between strangers. But how did Westerners develop these attributes?
One theory holds that Western individualism finds its root in Christianity—especially as it was practiced in the Middle Ages. Judeo-Christian texts speak of God judging both nations and individuals (“He notes the falling of each sparrow”). Also, I understand that medieval clerics were dismayed that preaching about collective salvation did little to modify people’s behavior, but learned that sermons about individual salvation (and fiery descriptions of hell) proved more motivating.
Perhaps more concretely, starting around 500 CE, St. Augustine of Hippo banned adoption, remarriage, plural marriage, and incest–and gradually expanded the definition of incest to preclude marriages between sixth cousins. This change did much to promote the importance of the nuclear family over extended family networks, as people no longer felt bound to expend their resources to help remote relatives. This dynamic hurt needy families, but helped capital formation among affluent families. Perhaps coincidentally, having more property held by the nuclear family rather than by extended clans meant that there would be more property left unclaimed when all the members of a nuclear family died in a war, plague, or fire—and unclaimed property would escheat to the church or state.
One more theory: Marriage has pro-social consequences. It tends to motivate married people to make smaller investments in attracting new sex partners and larger investments in the existing sex partner, and any resulting children. But in an unregulated environment, high-status people can negotiate exclusive claims to multiple marriage partners. In practice, this results in high-status MEN making exclusive claims on multiple WOMEN, leaving low-status men without partners. As the world urbanized, this resulted in ever larger concentrations of unmarried, low-status men a/k/a gangs. Gangs proved destabilizing. When the Church banned plural marriage, this had the effect of shifting the supply of women down the social hierarchy, resulting in a larger share of domesticated men.
In short, Church regulation of family formation arguably laid the groundwork for capitalism–and belief in God was mostly beside the point.
David Henderson
Apr 20 2023 at 11:10am
I missed the religion aspect of the Hayek quote. Can you explain where you saw it?
Roger McKinney
Apr 20 2023 at 12:01pm
Sorry! I was responding to Jose’s comment that Gid doesn’t likely exist. But since you bring it up, Hayek praised the benefits of religion in his last book, The Fatal Conceit, for motivating people ti follow long term goals, such as Thou shat not steal, when in the short run theft benefited the individual more.
Unfortunately, Hayek ended the book not with an endorsement of Christianity, but suggesting a new religion worshipping the principles of liberty, much as the French socialists did in France in the early 19th century. That in spite of insisting on holding a Mont Pelerin meeting at the University of Salamanca where theologians distilled the principles of capitalism from natural law.
Jose Pablo
Apr 20 2023 at 12:26pm
I saw the similarities in the fact that both, Hayek and religion, share the idea that holding a belief that “may be largely false” (the existence of God in one case and the idea that what you achieve is due solely to your exertions, skills and intelligence in the other); can have the “most beneficial effects” on your life (which seems to be empirically true in both cases)
Jon Murphy
Apr 20 2023 at 11:02am
This Hayke quote reminds me of another quote, this one from Edward Gibbon:
Our fates are not entirely in our own hands, but we can put ourselves in a position to help.
David Henderson
Apr 20 2023 at 11:11am
The Gibbon quote reminds me of one of my old favorites: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
Jose Pablo
Apr 20 2023 at 12:45pm
Yes, yes …
But what you get through hard work, discipline and all that, is a change iin your initial “probabilistic distribution of luck”. You move yourself into a different distribution with, maybe, a better mean and/or better standard deviation.
And yet, all you get after your hard work is still a probabilistic distribution of luck (with, still, very long tails on the bad side of the distribution)
And where you were born, the parents you were born to and the “biology” you were gifted (or not) with, affects this distribution way more than your efforts to improve it
I am not that much into the religion of “effort and discipline”. I mean sure, it is ok, better that than actively working on worsening your initial odds (as many people do)
… but let us not be fundamentalist of this belief. I am ok as far as we know he hold it out of convenience not conviction.
Roger McKinney
Apr 20 2023 at 11:52am
Great quote! There is truth in the idea that successful people accomplished it on their own because many people have the same endowments but only a few achieve unusual success. And a few with the least endowments achieve much greater success than others with much larger endowments.
But socialists like Obama weren’t interested in discovering the secrets of success. They want to discredit any success. No one should succeed above the average. That’s the definition of envy.
Also, socialists claim everything not earned by physical labor is undeserved, so the state has an obligation to take it. Mental work is tainted by an endorsement from parents and so is undeserved. They ignore the fact that being deservingis not the only requirement for property. Luck plays a role as do endowments from parents and gifts. The right to property exceeds merely what one has physically labored over.
Thomas Hutcheson
Apr 20 2023 at 12:10pm
It seem that even more pragmatically useful would be an understanding that a person’s efforts at satisfying his own ends depends on a framework that allows others to do so as well, a framework that they “did not build.”
Jose Pablo
Apr 20 2023 at 12:50pm
The person failure to do so (satisfying his own ends) also depends on the “framework” you are pointing at.
This “framework” leads to a lot of individual failures quite frequently, although also, and this should be more helpful that it seems to be, in a quite predictable manner. That seems to be the case of the Cuban, Venezuelan, Argentinian, Russian, North Korean, Iranian, … “frameworks”
Monte
Apr 20 2023 at 12:39pm
I think Hayek manages here to highlight the distinguishing characteristic between the liberal and conservative mindsets: personal responsibility.
Many liberals tend to believe life’s circumstances are beyond our control due to class, race, and sex. They see the resulting distribution of outcomes as unjust, and therefore seek remedy through government intervention in order to offset those limited opportunities. Conservatives, by contrast, believe individuals should live their lives with a presumption of personal responsibility. To live otherwise is to avoid responsibility for their actions. Government intervention is seen as creating dependency, ultimately becoming a hindrance to those who receive it and to society as a whole.
Unsurprisingly, our current polarization stems from “You didn’t Build That” and “It takes a Village” vs “Rugged Individualism” and Ayn Rand’s concept of “…man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
I fall into the latter camp. And I believe, as Ezra Taft Benson did, that “Some of the greatest battles will be fought within the silent chambers of your own soul.”
Jose Pablo
Apr 20 2023 at 1:02pm
life’s circumstances are beyond our control due to class, race, and sex … (plus country of origin, biology …)
Government intervention (…) (create) dependency, ultimately becoming a hindrance to those who receive it and to society as a whole.
The reality is these two statements are both true.
Philo
Apr 20 2023 at 2:45pm
It is a mistake to think in terms of some standard of *success* applicable to all people. Whatever one’s endowments and circumstances, he should always try to make the best of them; coming close to this should be considered “success,” falling far short, “failure.” One’s own activity will always make a considerable difference, even if many avenues that should be open to him are foreclosed. Saying or thinking, “There is nothing I can do,” is never justified; you can always do you best.
Monte
Apr 20 2023 at 3:00pm
But isn’t it this mindset, rather than the reality of it, that Hayek is primarily speaking to? We’re more easily persuaded by this kind of attitude to give up and rely on government for relief. Whereas adopting an attitude of personal responsibility and a belief that we control our own destiny wcan certainly alter reality more than the former.
Jose Pablo
Apr 20 2023 at 10:23pm
Well, I don’t know … this mindset is helpful … until it is not.
For instance if you live in Chiapas or Sudan and decide to take your destiny on your own hands (maybe after a copy of Hayek or “Invictus” landed in those hands by accident) and walk, in an effort to control your own fate, hundreds of miles to the US border or to Tunisia and decide (because, you know, you are “the master of your fate”) to illegally cross the Arizona desert or the Mediterranean Sea; in this case, this mindset can very easily kills you … as it does with thousands of people every year.
… and if you are, due to your willpower and skills, successful in the crossing, don’t expect the people on the other site celebrating your wonderful achievement of fighting like crazy to improve your odds of having a decent live. Quite the contrary …
Don’t get me wrong, “mindsets” are great and all, but they are a joke compare with the “circumstances beyond our control”.
This “mindset” is like bringing a knife to the “circumstances” gun fight … better than nothing but, if you are not successful in the fight, blaming the “quality” of your knife is a dark joke bordering poor taste.
steve
Apr 20 2023 at 3:38pm
So Obama was correct! Anyway, I am sure I dont pal around with as many rich, important and powerful people as you but the ones I have known seldom actually seem to believe that that they are responsible for the entirety of their success. Most have been decent people willing to acknowledge some component of luck or that others helped them along the way. They still have some ego and think that their hard work/inspiration/leadership was a major if not the major part of their success. I think the popular media had done us a disservice by so often portraying successful CEOs as Chainsaw Al. (See Grant’s work at Wharton.)
Steve
David Henderson
Apr 20 2023 at 4:01pm
You wrote:
I don’t know why you’re sure of that. Unless I’m confusing you with another “steve,” I think you’re a doctor, right? And, if so, I’m guessing you have at least 5 doctor friends. If they’re over 55, then the odds that they are wealthier than the 5 of my friends who are wealthy are relatively high.
nobody.really
Apr 20 2023 at 4:54pm
According to Wikipedia:
“You didn’t build that” is a phrase from a 2012 election campaign speech delivered by United States President Barack Obama on July 13, 2012, in Roanoke, Virginia. In the speech, Obama stated, “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” The sentence “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” was publicized by his political opponents during the 2012 presidential campaign, as an attack by Obama on business and entrepreneurs.[1][2][3] The Obama campaign responded that the criticisms were taking the phrase out of context, and the word “that” in the phrase was referring to the construction of “roads and bridges” in the previous sentence.[4]
Fact-checking organizations reported that Obama’s remarks were incorrectly used out of context in order to criticize the president.[4][5]
Vivian Darkbloom
Apr 21 2023 at 2:13am
“The Obama campaign responded that the criticisms were taking the phrase out of context, and the word “that” in the phrase was referring to the construction of “roads and bridges” in the previous sentence.[4]”
Putting the quote in context doesn’t really help the claim that “that” referred to “the construction of roads and bridges” in the previous sentence. Logically, it would refer to not only “roads and bridges” in the previous sentnce, but also to “the unbelievable American system” in the sentence before that. If “that” was intended to refer to those things, it is gramatically incorrect. Any competent speaker, particularly one with a professional speech writing team, would have used the phrase “you didn’t build those things”.
steve
Apr 21 2023 at 3:13pm
People who speak in public make mistakes, I do. Speechwriters err. There is a whole minor industry that exists to jump on what are probably errors of speech. For example when MTG referred to the gazpacho police coming to arrest someone. I think the proper course is to ask them to clarify what they meant, though it is a lot more entertaining to assume the worst.
Steve
BS
Apr 20 2023 at 3:46pm
Fortune favours the bold, fortune favours the prepared, chance favours the prepared mind … many formulations.
Enoch A Lambert
Apr 20 2023 at 4:07pm
Well, he’s right about it being false. Whether it is the best spring of action requires further empirical research
nobody.really
Apr 20 2023 at 4:27pm
This quote raises the age-old question: To what extent does civilization (or at least the optimization of civilization) require embracing falsehoods?
1: In Capitalism in Ideology (2019), Thomas Piketty argues that throughout history, much income inequality has resulted from familiar tripartite social divisions—societies divided between a warrior class, an educated/religious class, and the rest. These societies have generated a variety of myths justifying these social arrangements.
For example, in Plato’s Republic (circa 375 BCE), Socrates argues that the ideal society requires a tripartite social order—rulers (presumed to include the philosophers), warriors, and everyone else—and citizens should be assigned to their social class based on merit. But since a candid embrace of meritocracy would provoke unsustainable levels of jealousy and social division, leaders should promulgate “a sort of Phoenician tale”: All citizens are siblings, yet the gods have chosen to mingle gold into some people’s souls, destining them for leadership; silver in others, destining them to be warriors; and iron or brass in the rest. People’s god-given talents would be revealed over time, and leaders would merely be respecting the gods’ choices by making the relevant assignments.
In contrast, “critical” social theorists—including scholars of critical legal studies and public choice economists—prefer to strip away the mythology that cloaks government actions. These scholars do much to demonstrate the existence of myths, but do little to demonstrate that a myth-free society would maintain sufficient social cohesion to endure.
2: The US Declaration of Independence (1776) declares that the Creator endows all men with an unalienable right to pursue happiness. But to pursue happiness, people need to predict what will make them happy in the future—in other words, people need some mechanism for affective forecasting. Yet people are really bad at this. Research reveals that people regularly over-estimate how much changes in circumstances will alter their future happiness. This provokes the question whether affective forecasting bias—like other cognitive biases—has some adaptive quality.
Adam Smith thought so. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith considers the case of “The poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition.” The boy pours himself into his work, intending short-run sacrifice for long-term gain. But it’s all for naught; he has been deceived. “It is then, in the last dregs of life, his body wasted with toil and diseases, his mind galled and ruffled . . . that he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility.” Nevertheless, Smith concludes that “it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner [because] it is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”
In other words, the poor man’s son suffers from affective forecasting bias, as do we all. Yet this bias may be adaptive because, otherwise, we might not be sufficiently motivated to delay current consumption and invest in the future — investments that accrue to the benefit of society at large.
(Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert, affective forecasting scholar, reports “I have used [Smith’s] quote often. It turns out that Adam Smith discovered everything, and affective forecasting was the least of it!”)
3: Still, how foundational is lying?
Mark Twain, “On the Decay of the Art of Lying” (1885).
Likewise, Jerry Seinfeld remarked that everyone lies about sex; everyone lies during sex; without lying, there would be no sex. That seems pretty foundational.
Monte
Apr 21 2023 at 12:33pm
This is really quite profound, isn’t it? It may be true that from birth through emancipation, we’re deceived into pursuing wealth and greatness. And, inevitably, nothing attained in life passes through the great wall of death. Regardless, I’m thankful for this deception that predisposes us to pursue “the industry of mankind” for mankind’s sake, if not my own. If we don’t try, we fail.
Ahmed Fares
Apr 20 2023 at 5:10pm
From an interview of Garett Jones, author of Hive Mind, by economist Tyler Cowen:
Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
Thomas Strenge
Apr 20 2023 at 9:48pm
There’s a little bit of chicken and the egg discussion here. I believe the following is taken from Hayek’s Fatal Conceit: Christianity is the most successful religion on Earth because it’s rules make it’s followers successful. Note the great similarity between the great religions. They all share respect for property and family, promote charity and social cohesion, and restrict violence. Whether these rules are a lucky accident or the hand of divine Providence can be debated endlessly, but in the end, a Christian life tends to promote positive outcomes for both members and society.
Jose Pablo
Apr 20 2023 at 10:01pm
Yes … and not eating food borne prone pork and not killing your working animals can be also very helpful
Corollary: if the CDC is not around listen carefully to your priest.
Thomas Strenge
Apr 21 2023 at 1:15pm
I sense a little bit of snark, but religious practice is more than just listening to your priest. For example, many of the traditions of Christianity are independently being verified as simply being best practices for a stable and healthy life. You know, stuff like meeting your neighbors and realizing their common humanity with you. What is prayer, if not meditation and visualization? Those are techniques now advocated for everyone from CEOs to world class athletes. Mental health experts advise the importance of forgiveness. Guess what? That’s part of every mass. The list goes on. If anything, listening to your priest is probably one of the least important benefits of religious practice.
Jose Pablo
Apr 21 2023 at 5:27pm
It wasn’t intended to be a snark. I understand why it could look like that, and I am really sorry if I made you feel that way, Thomas
I agree with you. As a matter of fact I included in the comments this article from The Economist that, basically, says that what you are pointing out seems to be precisely true.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/02/27/places-with-high-religious-participation-have-fewer-deaths-of-despair
Thomas Strenge
Apr 21 2023 at 9:04pm
No worries. I forgive easily. 🙂 Thank you for sharing the very interesting article.
nobody.really
Apr 21 2023 at 2:24am
Henderson and Hayek argue that self-confidence promotes initiative which proposes accomplishment, even if the confidence rests on delusion.
In contrast, others argue that virtue leads to success, and lack of success signals lack of virtue.
1: In 1996 Boy Gregory, the son of musician Prince, died of Pfeiffer syndrome at the age of one week. Likewise, plenty of innocent people die in earthquakes, floods, forest fires, mud slights, plagues, accidents, wars, and genocides. If only they had been more virtuous, they would have avoided their fates. Oh wait—THAT’S NONSENSE.
2: Forbes estimates that there are 2,640 billionaires in the world today—but there were none prior to 1916. This demonstrates that people in the past were just too damn lazy and incompetent to earn $1 billion. Oh, wait—THAT’S NONSENSE.
3: Likewise, the vast majority of billionaires are able-bodied and male. But hey, that’s fair—each one of them worked hard to achieve their status as able-bodied men. Oh, wait—THAT’S NONSENSE.
4: Justin Bieber has amassed great wealth; J.S. Bach never did. This demonstrates that Bieber is just more hard-working and talented than Bach. Oh, wait—THAT’S NONSENSE.
5: Satchel Page, the hero of the Negro Leagues, set the record for oldest Major League Baseball rookie at the age of 40. Before then, I guess he simply lacked the skills and virtues necessary to become a major league player. Oh, wait—THAT’S NONSENSE.
6: From 1994-95 Michael Jordan strove to become a major league baseball player but failed. It’s a shame no one could have taken him aside to explain that he had no hope of succeeding because he simply lacked the drive, discipline, and stick-to-it-ivness to become a professional athlete. Oh, wait—THAT’S NONSENSE.
Moral: The world is unjust. Chance governs our lives—most obviously, chance utterly dictates the circumstances of our births and genetic make-up. The oldest book in the Bible, Job, tells the story of a guy who loses everything except his miserable life through no fault of his own, but simply as a result of supernatural forces. His friends come to tell him that he should repent of his sins because the extent of his suffering proves that he must be at fault.
This ancient text illustrates a longstanding cognitive bias—the Just-World Fallacy. Humans live under constant threat of random events. To cope with the stress, many people adopt a defense mechanism whereby they believe that they stand above such threats because the world is just—and so long as they act righteously, they will be impervious; likewise, anyone who suffers must have deserved their fate.
In experiments, subjects observing a person suffering express compassion for the victim. But as the suffering continues, the observers eventually start blaming the victim for her plight. But if the observers are informed that the victim will be compensated for her suffering, suddenly the observers lose the need to blame the victim. That is, when informed that there would be an external mechanism to restore justice, the observes lose the psychological need to impose their own mechanism.
Social problems often warrant social remedies. Infectious disease has plagued humans since the dawn of time (or perhaps the dawn of animal husbandry). Maybe we should tell a person to take personal responsibility—or maybe advise the group to raise taxes to finance a sewer system, and punish people who dump their sewage directly into the water supply. We can tell people to accept personal responsibility for enduring oppression from foreign forces—or tell them to organize with their neighbors to resist those forces, as the Founding Fathers did. We can tell black people to accept personal responsibility for Jim Crow laws—or tell them to organize a civil rights struggle as MLK did. We can tell people who are threatened by rising ocean waters to take personal responsibility for climate change—or we can tell them to organize efforts to coordinate (and impose as necessary) a world-wide response. Often I suspect that the purpose of telling victims to take personal responsibility is to help the observer restore faith in a just world–not to help a victim with his victimhood.
Jose Pablo
Apr 21 2023 at 10:26am
advise the group to raise taxes
tell them to organize
tell them to organize efforts
“Advise” and “tell” … you are kidding, right?
These “advise” and “tell” reminds me of another Hayek, the one in The Road to Serfdom, chapter 11: The End of Truth
And, btw, “we” (who?) can also tell people who are suffering the additional cost imposed by climate change interventionist to take personal responsibility for the reducing amount of goods and services they can afford —or we can tell them to organize efforts to avoid the government imposing on them the world “they” (who?) see as “adequately diverse”
Poor Coase he should be the least read brilliant mind of our time, so unsecussful despite his discipline and great effort!!
nobody.really
Apr 21 2023 at 1:12pm
Right: Climate change may hurt people; public policy may hurt people. Telling individuals that they are personally responsible for the consequences of either climate change or public policy is just silly. The best strategy for dealing with either problem may well entail organizing a social, rather than an individual, response. I don’t mean to say that every social response has the advantage of being wise; I mean to say that a social response has the advantage of not necessarily being futile.
More to the point, I mean to question whether those who preach personal responsibility rather than collective action are acting to promote the interests of those being harmed–or are acting to assuage their own psychological need to affirm the Just-World Fallacy.
Jose Pablo
Apr 21 2023 at 5:21pm
Telling individuals that they are personally responsible for the consequences of either climate change or public policy is just silly
Agree … although I would replace “silly” by “marginally better” (compare with the alternative of not feeling personally responsible for anything).
The best strategy for dealing with either problem may well entail organizing a social, rather than an individual, response
Agree .. but that was never the debate. The debate is what kind of “social response” we should organize. Two basic alternatives:
a) A “social” response based on voluntary collaboration and exchanges or
b) A “social” response designed and engineered by a “central intelligence” and imposed on everybody (and forcefully financed by everybody)
I really enjoy your comments (most of them) but it seems to me that, sometimes, you don’t consider the first alternative “social”. It is social indeed, as opposed to individual
As a matter of fact, at least under this framing, it should be easy to agree that we should use a) to the maximum possible extend and b) should be consider a solution of last resort to avoid as much as we can.
As of now “we” (humans) overuse option b … big time!
More to the point, I mean to question whether those who preach collective action thru government rather than personal responsibility are acting to promote the interests of those being harmed–or are acting to assuage their own psychological need to affirm the “We Are Doing Something” Fallacy.
[And what a fallacy this is!, citing again Coase:
When I was editor of The Journal of Law and Economics, we published a whole series of studies of regulation and its effects. Almost all the studies–perhaps all the studies–suggested that the results of regulation had been bad, that the prices were higher, that the product was worse adapted to the needs of consumers, than it otherwise would have been.]
nobody.really
Apr 21 2023 at 5:45pm
Fair enough. 🙂
Yes, Prime Minister, Season 2, Episode 5 “Power to the People” (1988)
Monte
Apr 21 2023 at 11:38pm
You’re taking personal responsibility to ridiculous extremes. When people are encouraged to take personal responsibility for themselves, that doesn’t mean by doing so they can overcome obstacles beyond their control, like natural disasters, climate change, prejudice, or lacking a natural gift or ability in sports or music. Taking personal responsibility for yourself means overcoming obstacles within your ability to do so (ie. alcohol or drug addiction, losing weight, or obtaining a PhD). There are also costs and benefits associated with how we react to life’s circumstances.
So yes, encouraging people to take personal responsibility for overcoming obstacles beyond their control is…NONSENSE!
Jose Pablo
Apr 22 2023 at 2:17pm
Taking personal responsibility for yourself means overcoming obstacles within your ability to do so (ie. alcohol or drug addiction, losing weight, or obtaining a PhD).
Really??
Well, this is totally false. How do you deal with addictions, for instance, depends, more than any other thing in the robustness of your frontal cortex (one of the latest part of the human brain to evolve, by the way) and the “set of values” than you have (they made than some “decisions” don’t even reach to frontal cortex: you don’t even “think” what is the right thing to do). There is life outside economics, take a look at the works of neuroscience (or within economics read Lewis about the “culture of poverty”.
This is so obvious that is not even what we are discussing. What we are discussing is whether or not, even knowing that this “personal responsibility” is total nonsense, it is still better for you to believe this lie (or as Hayek himself puts it this “very likely largely false belief”).
And I think the answer is yes: it is (marginally) useful to fool ourselves into believing that we are “the masters of our fate” ..
… but one thing is fooling yourself, something you have every right to do, and a very different one is trying to fool others … this last one is a sin.
Monte
Apr 22 2023 at 4:42pm
Yes, really.
Far from being false, taking personal responsibility for overcoming addiction is totally within our power. It has everything to do with attitude:
“The very word addict confers an identity that admits no other possibilities. It incorporates the assumption that you can’t, or won’t, change. But this fatalistic thinking about addiction doesn’t jibe with the facts. More people overcome addictions than do not. And the vast majority do so without therapy.”
The Surprising Truth About Addiction
Statistically speaking, blaming someone’s inability to overcome drug or alcohol addiction on an under-developed pre-frontal cortex isn’t even listed as an extreme outlier in studies examining the most common reasons people fail to recover.
What is nonsensical is the belief that life’s circumstances, or how we choose to respond to them, is a force majeure. Most experts have found that people who believe in self-determination (what psychoanalysts like to define as “locus of control” or “personal agency”) do much better in life than those with a defeatist attitude. In this sense, we can borrow from Mark Twain’s quote by calling Hayek’s false belief “man’s best and surest friend.”
I disagree. I think it is central to a person’s desire to achieve, coupled with determination and hard work.
“Fooling yourself” or” trying to fool others” are vastly different than positive reinforcement, which is what we’re talking about here. Far from being a sin, positive reinforcement is a virtue. Nelson Mandela, Beethoven, Helen Keller, Rosa Parks, and Stephen Hawking, to name just a few, are individuals who, in spite of facing overwhelming odds, achieved greatness through personal responsibility, hard work, and determination.
Jose Pablo
Apr 22 2023 at 6:02pm
Nelson Mandela, Beethoven, Helen Keller, Rosa Parks, and Stephen Hawking, to name just a few, are individuals who, in spite of facing overwhelming odds, achieved greatness through personal responsibility, hard work, and determination.
Yes, and many more people with more personal responsibility, hard work and determination never got anywhere. It just happen that you did not even know their names. It is call “selection bias” (the probability that the ones that you mention were the most hard working ever is precisely zero)
The fact that Carl Lewis could ran the 100 m in 9.86s thru personal responsibility, hard work and determination, does not mean (by any means) that your incapability to do so is because you don’t work hard enough or that you can work hard enough to achieve that feat
And, by the way, it is also very much about your definition of “greatness”: Nelson Mandela lead for many years the terrorist wind of the ANC, Beethoven was also well known for his grumpiness, bad character, blackmailing of people that criticize him and, apparently at odds with the “personal responsibility” part, a total disaster taking care of himself or his house. Rosa Park got her high school diploma only at 20. She, apparently if we follow your reasoning, was not that “responsible and hard worker” before marrying her husband at 19. And she was only the secretary of the Montgomery NACP Charter. Since Edgar Daniel Nixon (??) was the President of the chapter at the time, and since “President” is more successful than “secretary”; ED Nixon, following again your reasoning, should have been more personal responsible, hard worker and determined than Rosa … you should use him as an example of success due to determination.
And many of the people that has achieved greatness (and so, deserve praise for their self-determination) were, at the same time drug addicts (and so, they lack self-determination).
And the list is huge. Just from the top of my head:
Freddie Mercury, Sigmund Freud, Pollock, Michael Phelps, Bukowski, Camus, Elvis Presley, Michale Jackson, Edison …
So, what is it? are they masters of self-control and that’s the reason why they are genius or are they a total failure at self-control and that’s the reason why they were taking drugs?
Monte
Apr 22 2023 at 7:43pm
Can you cite evidence for this claim, rather than just stating it as a matter of fact?
This is a misapplication of the term. No one has ever claimed (certainly not me) that the average person, through personal responsibility, hard work, and determination, is going to achieve the same level of performance as a naturally gifted athlete like Carl Lewis. What we can achieve by applying those things, however, is our potential or absolute best. And that standard of perfection is what I call success.
That’s not my reasoning at all. Limiting a person’s success to either fame or fortune is a distortion of what we, as individuals, can accomplish through self-determination. That Rosa Parks only earned a high school diploma and became a low-level secretary (why can’t we call these things accomplishments?) pales in comparison to what she accomplished for civil rights.
Huh?
Both. “In life, sometimes we fail and sometimes we succeed, but usually we learn most from the journey.” (Vibrant Khanna)
Monte
Apr 22 2023 at 5:10pm
BTW, I got the impression that you were an atheist (or, at least, agnostic). If so, I find it interesting that you describe “trying to fool others” as a sin. I didn’t think atheists believed in the concept of sin.
Jon Murphy
Apr 22 2023 at 9:26am
The bits you quote are not in contrast, but supporting, David and Hayek. It’s a recognition that luck is a horse to ride just like any other, but there are things one can do to make one’s self a better horseman
James Anthony
Apr 21 2023 at 9:05pm
“The problem with taking advice from someone who’s been successful is, you don’t know how much of it is luck. A lot of what I’ve done is because I am hardworking, smart–and also lucky. There’s no way for me to tell how much of the stuff I’ve done that’s been successful has been because my principles, my philosophies, or my luck.”
— Jim McKelvey, in “Why Square’s Co-Founder Says Be Wary of Advice From Successful People”
nobody.really
Apr 24 2023 at 11:54am
C. Wright Mills
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