BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-07-27 Tu
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First:
Brad DeLong: Suppose I wanted to drop a footnote: ‘If my editors would let me, here I would also trace the current of 20th-century thought and action for which Michael Polanyi, born in 1891 in Budapest, is a convenient marker: how society needs not just the decentralized mercenary institution of the market and definitely does not need comprehensive central planning (which can never be more than a fiction), but needs as well decentralized fiduciary institutions, focused on advancing knowledge about theory and practice, in which status is gained by teaching and learning from others—institutions like modern science, communities of engineering practice, communities of legal interpretation, honorable journalism, evidence-based politics, and others—and in which people follow rules that have been half-constructed and have half-emerged to advance not just the private interest and liberties of the participants but to advance the broader public interest and public liberties as well.’ And at the end of that I would drop a reference to where people should go to read further. What would the single best reference to drop be?
LINK: <https://twitter.com/delong/status/1419678330039635972>
NIcholas Gruen: tricky question because Michael Polanyi was a chemist, then an economist and then a philosopher. His only important publications in economics proper are are his first, which was the first to show how little the Soviet economic expansion was funding improved living standards, and Full Employment and Free Trade, which outlines a neoliberal (i.e. minimally interventionist) Keynesianism with which some of the Mont Pèlerin Society were enamoured of—like Gottfried Haberler who wrote a preface to its second edition. The issues you’re raising are probably best expressed in Polanyi’s 1941 piece “The Growth of Thought in Society”, Economica, 8:32 (Nov. 1941) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550108>.
I think his attempt to distinguish public from private liberty was a fine idea first articulated in this piece—though it never caught on. It’s another way to cut different aspects of liberty as Berlin’s ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ is. The odd thing however—it’s certainly puzzled me, is that MP doesn’t really spend much time on the professions. His categories for the occupations that both nurture and require ‘public liberty’ are those pursuing transcendent values: Science: Truth; The law: Justice; Art: Beauty; Religion: God. I came upon Polanyi after I’d come to the kind of view you sketch out there—that led me to write this essay—citing Alasdair MacIntyre and the importance of the values of professions: <https://griffithreview.com/articles/trust-competition-delusion-gruen/>.
But on this Michael Polanyi is largely silent. And then there’s his marvellous rethinking of the philosophy of science around the centrality of tacit knowledge. Once he took up on that stuff he mostly neglected the concerns that you and are seem to be interested in!…
LINK: <https://twitter.com/NGruen1/status/1419900091016650752>
One Video:
Billy Ocean: When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n3sUWR4FV4>
Very Briefly Noted:
Guido Franzinetti: Ödön Pór: From Socialism to Fascism, from Hungary to Italy <http://italogramma.elte.hu/wp-content/files/Guido_Franzinetti_Odon_Por.pdf>
Kari Polanyi-Levitt (2014): Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Lecture<https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/Veranstaltungen/2014/script_lecture_polanyi-levitt_140508.pdf>
Wikipedia: Ilona Duczyńska <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilona_Duczy%C5%84ska#cite_note-1>
Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy <https://www.concordia.ca/research/polanyi.html>
Karl Polanyi: Digital Archive <https://www.concordia.ca/research/polanyi/archive.html>
Wikipedia: Zimmerwald Conference <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmerwald_Conference>
Linda McQuaig (2001): All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust, & the New Capitalism (New York: Penguin Books) <https://archive.org/details/allyoucaneatgree00mcqu/mode/2up> pp. 124–160.
Wikipedia: Peter Drucker <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker>
Ödön Pór (1923): Fascism (London: Labour Publishing) <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.95399>
Michael Polanyi (1941): The Growth of Thought in Society <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550108>
Daniel Immerwahr (2000): Polanyi in the United States: Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, & the Midcentury Critique of Economic Society <https://www.jstor.org/stable/20621902>
Paragraphs:
Peter F. Drucker: Management: ‘To be sure, Friedman’s argument that business is an economic institution and should stick to its economic task is well taken…. But it is also clear that social responsibility cannot be evaded. It is not only that the public demands it. It is not only that society needs it. The fact remains that in modern society there is no other leadership group but managers. If the managers of our major institutions, and especially of business, do not take responsibility for the common good, no one else can or will…
LINK: <https://archive.org/details/management0000druc/mode/2up>
Judit Zapor: Laura Polanyi 1882–1957: Narratives of a Life: ‘Although we have no way of confirming the actual steps she had taken, it seems that Laura Polanyi had been instrumental in her daughter [Eve]s eventual release [from the Soviet GULAG]; no small feat, given the times and circumstances. As an unintended by-product, Eva Striker's imprisonment served as the inspiration for her childhood friend, Arthur Koestlers novel, Darkness at Noon. The series of subsequent dramatic events included Laura Polanyi’s own arrest by the Gestapo in Vienna in the aftermath of the Anschluss, and ended with her eventual success in helping her three children, her seventy-year-old husband, numerous nephews, nieces and friends to reach America. The one tragic failure concerned her younger sister, Sophie, who, with her husband and two of their three children, perished in concentration camps…
LINK: <http://polanyi.bme.hu/folyoirat/1997-02/1997-14-laura_polanyi.pdf>
Peter Drucker (1978): Adventures of a Bystander: ‘[Karl Polanyi] opened one of the trunks and an enormous mass of books, papers, magazines, letters cascaded out. In the same bellowing voice he shouted at top speed, with the words tumbling out like volcanic rocks: “For the annual review issue we’ll have four lead articles. One on what goes on in China. The civil war there between Chang Tzo-lin and Chiang Kai-shek and all the other warlords,” and he chanted all those nonsense syllables again, “is the most important event of the next five years. And then we’ll have a piece on the fall of agricultural prices on the world markets—it foreshadows a serious economic depression in a few years’ time. The third piece will deal with Stalin in Russia; Leninism is dead and with it the Communist Revolution. There is a new Oriental despotism and the reintroduction of serfdom. And finally we’ll have a piece about an English economist, Keynes is his name; the man, you know, who wrote about the Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919–20. He’s coming out with new and exciting theories that stand traditional economics on its head.” He opened the other trunk and another avalanche of books, pamphlets…
Jere Moorman: REVIEW: David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind. New York: The Free Press, 1998. Pp. x + 646. ISBN 0–684–86720–6, $30.00, hardcover.: ‘Another member of the Polanyi clan as being crucially involved in the development of Koestler’s thought…. Eva Striker… daughter of Michael’s older sister Laura (Mausi), furnished Koestler with the account which inspired him to write Darkness at Noon. Eva followed her fiancée, the physicist Alex Weissberg, to Kharkov, Ukraine, where they were married in 1932. Their home served Koestler as his base of operations when he traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932–33 as a recently minted communist to write a book on the progress being made in the Soviet world…. The trip Koestler took into Soviet central Asia was particularly disturbing to him…. The recent convert was taken aback; his faith in Communism began to ebb. The coup de grace of Koestler’s identification with Communism occurred when he next saw Eva in 1938 after she was freed from the USSR. She told him the story of how, during the Soviet purges, she was charged with spying and sabotage and then had been arrested and imprisoned for sixteen months. With the help of Weissberg (from whom she had been separated in 1934) and the Austrian consul, she was released, but then Weissberg was arrested. In turn, Koestler and Polanyi were among a loose network of those who worked to free Weissberg, a task that eventually was successful…. Koestler[’s] hear[ing]… Eva’s account… helped precipitate his writing of Darkness at Noon…
LINK: <http://polanyisociety.org/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD29-2/TAD29-2-pg50-55-pdf.pdf>
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Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue (Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, The)" by F. A. Hayek, Stephen Kresge, Leif Wenar and wanted to share this quote with you.
"HAYEK: I would still aim at completely eliminating all direct interference with the market—that all governmental services be clearly done outside the market, including all provision of a minimum floor for people who cannot make an adequate income in the market. [It would then not be] some attempt to control the market process but would be just providing outside the market a flat minimum for everybody. This, of course, means in effect eliminating completely the social justice aspect of it, that is, the deliberate redistribution beyond securing a constant minimum for everybody who cannot earn more than that minimum in the market. All the other services of a welfare state are more a matter of degree, how they are organized. I don’t object to government rendering quite a number of services; I do object to government having any monopoly in any case. As long as only the government can provide them, all right, but there should be a possibility for others trying to do so."
If central planning cannot effectively manage the economy, then why is central planning used to manage the myriad needs of public welfare tasks? If not, how should public welfare work be managed?