R. R. Reno’s book The Return of the Strong Gods is very broad in scope. He covers many disparate phenomenon, including some commentary on economics. Unfortunately, Reno’s arguments in this regard are disappointing.

While describing possible causes of economic inequality, Reno says, “This is the sort of assertion I prefer to leave to the economic theorists to debate.” This was a wise instinct on Reno’s part, and one he would have benefited from if it had been more consistently applied. Some of his claims are just strange – he says that economists argue that the “‘animal spirits’ of the economy need to be freed from oppressive regulations.” This is bizarre because, far from being a call for deregulation, “animal spirits” are invoked as a major reason why the economy needs regulation – starting with John Maynard Keynes, who said, in The General Theory,

Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits – of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

Similarly, any economist reading Reno’s book is going to wince when Reno confidently makes proclamations about, for example, how Apple can and should produce its products in America, asserting, “The problem is not the ‘vast scale’ [of international supply chains]. Apple and other large companies could easily afford capital investments in large plants in the United States.” (When I read that line, I winced so strongly with secondhand embarrassment that my wife asked me if everything was okay when she saw the look on my face.)

Reno also criticizes open-society thinking by saying, among other things, it ought to be in favor of “advantageous trade, not open trade.” But, of course, economists who argue in favor of open trade do so precisely because they believe that open trade is advantageous trade. Reno doesn’t try to describe the economic arguments in favor of open trade, let along engage with or rebut them. He simply declares open trade and advantageous trade are opposed to each other, but this is pure question-begging. He’s assuming the very point under dispute.

One of the biggest misses in his book is his description of F. A. Hayek. He argues that the paradigm that took hold in the postwar period (what today would probably be called a “vibe shift”) held that strong social norms are unjustly constraining and should be weakened and opened up. But strangely – staggeringly, even – he ascribes this view to Hayek as well, despite the fact that Hayek was one of the 20th century’s most eloquent defenders about the importance of maintaining and upholding strong social norms! The examples of Reno making this odd claim are numerous – for example, he argues that for Hayek “there is always greater freedom for the individual when the social consensus about right and wrong is weakened.” And for Hayek, says Reno, “Since the basic principle of individualism is individual liberty, we must resist anything that compels our choices, even holding at arm’s length the compelling character of solid and significant moral truths.”

As a summary of Hayek’s views, this is about as accurate as claiming FDR spent his free time during his presidency engaging in marathon running as a hobby. A much better summary of Hayek’s thoughts on this matter can be found in Erwin Dekker’s book The Viennese Students of Civilization:

If we think back to our first section in which we argued that Menger and Schaffer changed the start and end point of economics, we recognize that in Hayek the individual is not the starting point anymore. What is perhaps even more surprising, he or she is also not the end point. Hayek argues that the submission to constraints is the only way that the individual can contribute to something that is ‘greater than himself’ (Hayek, 1948: 8); that, which is bigger than himself is the civilization of which is a part. Hayes argues that civilization makes individual autonomy possible, and that individual actions contribute to civilization. In no straightforward way can this be called methodological individualism anymore…

Freedom for the Viennese students of civilization, and especially for Hayek, is not the absence of constraints. Freedom for them is enabled by traditions, morality, and institutions to which the individual must submit so that he can be free.

Reno comes across as someone who reads his own theory into Hayek. And at some points, Reno seems aware that his description of Hayek’s ideas doesn’t fit Hayek’s writing – he occasionally tosses in disclaimers noting that Hayek “does not say it explicitly” or that Hayek’s outlining of these ideas “is not as precise as Popper.” Other times he speculates about what Hayek really meant, saying “By ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ the economist Hayek undoubtedly means increasing or reducing my utility rather than congruent with morality or not.” Reno needlessly narrows, and is seemingly unaware of, the full breadth of Hayek’s thought. There is a reason Hayek said “Nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist – and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger.”

What seems to be the lynchpin in Reno’s understanding of Hayek comes from this passage from The Road to Serfdom (emphasis added by me):

What the German and Italian who have learned the lesson wants above all is protection against the monster state – not grandiose schemes for organization on a colossal scale, but opportunity peacefully and in freedom to build up once more their own little worlds.

I say this seems to be the key to Reno’s understanding of Hayek because after quoting this passage, Reno references the phrase “little worlds” at least eighteen additional times, invariably in a critical way. Reno represents this passage from Hayek as having the following meaning:

In our public affairs, we must renounce our desire for great things and transcendent vistas, seeking instead only “little worlds”: decent health, a modicum of wealth, and ordinary pleasures. The free society requires going small.

This, too, seems like Reno simply reading his own theory into Hayek. First of all, Hayek never advocated that people renounce their desire for great things or transcendence – Hayek very much argued in favor of people seeking to contribute to that which was “greater than himself.” Hayek’s claim that people wanted the “freedom to build up once more their own little worlds” in no way entails or implies Reno’s claim that we should limit ourselves to “seeking instead only ‘little worlds’”, nor does it entail that one must renounce seeking the transcendent. Wanting to be able to live your day-to-day life free of direction from “the monster state” and its “grandiose schemes for organization on a colossal scale” is light-years away from saying that “little worlds” are the only things one should care about, nor does it imply one must renounce any desire for transcendence.

Reno frequently makes similar, and similarly off-base, criticisms of Milton Friedman, but I don’t want to belabor the point. Reno making these kinds of mistakes immediately sets off my “Gell-Mann Amnesia” alert – a phenomenon identified by the author Michael Crichton. As Crichton said,

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

In the same way, when I see Reno making such elementary mistakes in, say, his representation of Hayek’s thought, it immediately lowers my credence in his analysis on other specific points. I’m not well-versed in the thought of Albert Camus. Reno describes, and critiques, Camus’s thoughts. But should I take Reno’s representation of Camus at face value? Do I have some strong reason to assume he’s getting Camus right, when he gets Hayek so badly wrong? I’m highly skeptical. Maybe he’s spot-on in his description and criticisms of Camus, but based on what he’s said about topics I know well, I’m at the very least going to suspend judgment on that.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Bilbo Baggins, his life long extended by his exposure to the One Ring, tells Gandalf that he feels “thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” Like most authors of grand theories of society, Reno has stretched himself too far. He’s trying to bring in his evaluation of widely disparate ideas and fields of study into one grand approach, and in doing so, he has overextended himself.

I enjoyed reading this book. And I do think there is some truth in it, and some value in his ideas. And I generally strive to be the kind of person who rules thinkers in, not out. So while Reno’s arguments fall well short of being a knock-down case, I’m still glad to have engaged them, and I’ll continue to ponder them over time, including considering whether there are ways to strengthen his case. And if a book can make me do that, then I’d say reading it was well worth my time.