Max Borders

Tea Party: Starfish or Spider?

I offer my answer in this piece. Here's a sliver:

The functional reasons are compelling: You don’t want your organization to dissolve because your leadership gets sandbagged, or because your information system is way too top down. But function and form is just one reason the Tea Party should never formalize... 

A formal (hierarchical) organization - like a political party - is not only too centralized, but it becomes less effective as a check on government power. Currently, the Tea Party is coalescing around anti-incumbent, anti-elite and anti-state-power themes. It moves from without and, due to it’s form, is not as corruptible. Don’t believe me?  Try lobbying the Tea Party. 

There are trade offs, of course. What you lose when you’re decentralized is decision-making power, carried out at some instance, based on some plan. You can’t just turn, go straight, or back up on a dime. Tim Kaine or Michael Steele can’t either, but they can turn the ship with commands and controls to a far greater degree. Their organizations are more like spiders.

But the pluralism and broad theme-orientation of the Tea Party makes it effective in ways that really count: like keeping politicians accountable, raising a stink, and getting people to the polls--which is currently the only game in town when it comes to checking Leviathan.

Read the whole thing if you like.

Max Borders: "Radicals for Rules" Talk - Clip and Full Length

The folks at the John Locke Foundation were kind enough to let me talk about one of my pet ideas: panarchy. Find a clip and full talk here.

Healthy Skepticism on Climate Change

Examiner post on climate skepticism. Check it.

Borders on the beauty of the Swiss System

Happy Fourth, Switzerland!

Borders on Hayekmania

Here I'm commenting on the recent Hayekmania created by the Beck bump.

Poking at Taboos: Neanderthal Genes and Custom Kids

In this Examiner piece, I poke at some taboos about heredity, ethnicity and the possibility of custom kids.

Max Borders: The Myth of the Model (The Freeman)

I'm thrilled to have my third cover article for The Freeman. In this piece I discuss the severe problems with economic modeling, which guides more economic policy - fiscal and monetary - than you might imagine. Why can't economists find consensus in their forecasts? My hypothesis is they rely on models that seek to describe complex systems -- systems that cannot be limned with even the most sophisticated maths. 

Here's a sliver:

Likewise, we have to explain that a scientist’s model, while useful in limited circumstances, is little better than a crystal ball for predicting big phenomena like markets and climate. It is an offshoot of what F. A. Hayek called the “pretence of knowledge.” In other words, modeling is a form of scientism, which is “decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”   A model is thus a cognitive shortcut for both the wonk and the journalist, the latter of whom wants to peg his story to something authoritative the wonk has to provide. At the receiving end of this wonk-writer alliance are the rest of us—with little besides common sense as a shield. And I don’t mean this as populism. It is rather a defense against scientism launched from the turf of Austrian economics.

I may piss a lot of economists off with this piece. But there are very strong a priori reasons to reject this type of economics. The Austrian insight is potent and powerful. Professional academics in the thrall of the machine metaphor would do well to pay attention to the Mengerian school who grasp bionomics.

More on the Machine Metaphor at Locke

Here I'm sitting with the Locke Foundation's Mitch Kokai discussing the problems of false economic metaphors. (And here's an old piece explaining the concept in depth if you like the video.)

  
 

(Something like) an Anthropic Principle for Economics

I have another guest post over at Let a Thousand Nations Bloom. In this one, I make a tenuous association between economics and cosmology -- but hopefully one that will set folks to thinking. A sliver:

Let’s just put it out there: There is an optimum range for economic dynamism, diversity and complexity determined by rules. If our economic rule-sets are too complicated and cumbersome, we won’t get flourishing. There will be distortions and perversions at best. If our economic rulesets are underdeveloped or ambiguous, economic actors will not be able to regularize their behavior so as to lower transaction costs and focus on innovation. As with the laws of nature, there is a sweet spot in the set of all possible rulesets, which gives rise to maximum complexity and diversity. If we can agree that a complex, diverse economy is likely to result in concomitant opportunity and prosperity, then maybe we should turn our attention to those rules in the sweet spot that yield complexity and diversity.

One commenter thinks I may be pushing the analogy. You be the judge.

Olson, Organizations and the Red Queen Effect

I have another guest post over at A Thousand Nations. Here's a sliver:

If people like Shirky are right, it’s getting cheaper both to monitor and to organize against special interest groups—at least select ones. I’m not saying we’re anywhere near being able to fight them at parity. Perhaps we’ll never be. Nor are we likely to see the immediate effects of our new distributed, organization tools. But we may soon be equipped at least to slow the process of “demosclerosis.” We may already be. And as long as our collective productivity gains outpace the growth of the deadweight state, we’ll be okay—at least in some less-than-savory utilitarian sense. We’re also going to be better equipped to drive creative destruction and out-compete the government in some of its historic monopoly areas, such as education. (We might even unleash the forces of social entrepreneurship if you believe folks like Michael Strong.)

My optimism ends there, however. Read the whole post.