Oakeshott was much more enthusiastic about later Hayek — he wrote a lowing review of The Constitution of Liberty.

But there is plenty of evidence that people do not know there own minds. People’s minds are embedded in their social contexts, constructed by their social inter-actions from earliest infancy (and no, I am not supposing a clean slate approach to brain development), and always very much open to social cues. Hence argument, persuasion, advertising, propaganda, the information coded in the built environment and public art and much else (including panics, bubbles and other evident economic happenings). To deny this is to deny our sociality, as well as everything we know about human development.

The individualism at the heart of much economic theorising is mostly a mathematical convenience. It bears little correspondence to human reality.

This no more opens the way to paternalism than the existence of axes opens the way to murder.

However, in economics, “rational” typically means people acting according to their own preferences, whatever those may be. If we deny that people have preferences then we are denying that people know their own minds. Its not a very big leap from that type of thinking to a paternalism in which experts (or the state) know what’s best for people. And, often these experts do not have a humble epistomology. They think that everything can be known.

So, I disagree with Jed’s critique of neo-classical economics (which is basically synonimous with microeconomics). As a theory or world view, it does not propogate an “economics filter” in which things that can’t be priced have no value . That is simply false. It may be true that some individuals or self-described economists might think that way, but that is not the fault of neo-classical economics.

The danger comes not from microeconmics, which is much more humble and tolerant of messiness and the absence of information than many give it is credit for. Rather it from idealogues of various stripes who lack humility and profess some certainty about how the world behaves.

But I would also say that, perhaps as a result, planners in the US often seem overly cautious about urban issues. You hint at this in your post. Sometimes cities need bold initiatives, but my perception is that the the ethos of planning now is an aversion to risk and an orientation toward community development and buy-in, rather than thinking about urban systems and their future. I’m not talking about the megalomaniac risk of ruining the entire east side of Manhattan with the FDR freeway—these kinds of overblown projects were always bad.

But has planning become overly cautious? Is it afraid of even minor acts of boldness because of what happened in the last century? My feeling is that planners need to get over their guilt and articulate a new vision that is perhaps more sensitive to actual human needs than the high modernists were, but that doesn’t fall back on the nostalgic stylizations of the New Urbanists (whose entire movement, in a funny way, is an atonement for modernist urban planning.)

Just to be clear, I’m not attacking professions like economics or urban planning. There are lots of very good practitioners as well as ideologues, fools and the usual mix of other characters. I was painting with a very broad brush some patterns that seem worth investigating more closely.

Jess is right that I was responding to him/her — my apologies for the glitch.

Jess’ follow up comment shows we’re closer than I thought, but I still think not all that close. Getting our agreements and disagreements sorted out would take quite a long conversation, which I, at least, would very much welcome — but this is not the right format. If you want to contact me directly, Jess, my email is given on the sidebar of my blog.

Matthew J. pretty much gives the reading of my comment that I intended. Specifically I was referring to neo-classical economics as a normative framework that has been very explicitly used to justify (and I think direct) the imposition of many massive policies, including austerity programs in developing countries, free capital flows, shock transitions to “market” economies in some Eastern Block countries, etc.

How much neo-classical ideas, techniques, etc. have contributed to our useful understanding is of course much more complex and probably not even decidable. At a minimum, to answer it we’d have to know what would have happened if the neo-classical synthesis had never achieved hegemony in micro-economic theory. But anyway this seems like an entirely separate question that we can sidestep.

Jess and I seem to be talking past each other to some degree. I didn’t assert that any “tenet of neoclassicism led to the current route of I-44″. That seems pretty clearly to be due to modernist planning ideology, and I don’t know that the planners had any love for free markets etc.

Jess also makes a legitimate request that I be more specific, but this is getting pretty long. I’ll try to address that request in another comment soon.

That said, as an urban planner, I need to defend my profession. This post treats the planning profession as if Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses were still duking it out. Planners are largely taught and trained to be overly cautious of exactly these types of fallacies. The profession and the discipline at large bear a lot of guilt for their past mistakes, and that guilt has informed many, many changes. You are more likely to find graduates of urban planning schools working with social equity groups, community development groups, or coordinating between city agencies and neighborhood representatives than you presenting modernist visions of the city’s future.

I read Jed’s points in a different way. I don’t believe he was implying a causal link between neoclassical economics and bad modernist planning. Instead, I think he was expressing skepticism at the kind of utopian project that both modernist planning and neoclassical economics represent (though of course in different spheres of life.) I took him to mean that we should be wary of people and projects that attempt the blank-slate ethic that Tim Lee was referring to above, which are almost always utopian and more often than not megalomaniac in their willful ignorance of concrete evidence. Like Jed, I’m deeply skeptical of Utopian projects and thinking, though not of idealism when it’s grounded in dirty reality. This is why the neoconservative project to remodel the Middle East (the world?) scared me from the outset.

On the issue of modernist planning and architecture, one could argue that many modernists in the US and Europe sort of learned their lesson from the terrible urban renewal projects of the 1960s and 1970s, and now pursue a more humble form of practice, what I often think of as plural modernism—working within the existing context, acknowledging constraints, surroundings, users, etc.

(On this note, there’s a quote from the architect Aldo Rossi that I’ve always liked, responding to Daniel Burnam’s edict “‘Make no little plans”: “To what then could I have aspired in my craft? Certainly to small things, having seen that the possibility of great ones was historically precluded.”)

I sympathize with your rejection of neoclassical and public choice theory, although I do see some value in them. I doubt that rationality is a helpful characterization of human beings, except in the very simplest situations. The many-producers many-consumers perfect-information “perfect” market is a crude idealization (then again, so is Newtonian physics). In its defense, most of the actual progress in economics over the last fifty years has built upon that crude idealization, even if in opposition. For example, the work of the most recent Nobel winner, Ostrom, is in a sense a reaction to the flawed metaphor of “the tragedy of the commons”, itself something of an unempirical misapplication of neoclassical concepts. (To be clear, the Nobel is no great stamp of quality [AHEM! Merton COUGH! Scholes], but Ostrom at least seems to be on the right track.)

I’m not an economist myself, but perhaps I’m more tolerant of neoclassical and PCT because I see economics, like all good social science, as more descriptive than normative. When it stops being about what is and starts to be about what should be, I stop paying attention. (Many economists violate this sensible restriction, but I suppose they don’t particularly care for my attention.) If they tell me that all market participants have, or should have, perfect information, that seems pretty irrelevant to life on Earth. But if they tell me that humans seek their own interest, well, I see confirmation of that on a daily basis.

What I request of you, Jed, is to be more specific. What tenet of neoclassicism led to the current route of I-44? Is it the same one that led to Russian oligarchy? Is there a way to prevent repeats of these unfortunate events without pretending that humans don’t seek their own interest?

Incidentally, the segue into internal social science academy politics is mildly revolting. Those who insist on framing intellectual disagreements as Manichean struggles for scarce academic resources are probably doomed to lose the debate on the merits of their ideas. If PCT is empirically wrong (it probably is, in many ways!), its detractors should point that out. If they can’t make that argument, “theory takeover” meta-theory is a poor substitute.

*rimshot* Thanks, folks, I’ll be here all week…

(But seriously, I’d like to endorse everything Jed said. I just couldn’t resist the bad joke.)