In large part unions are about how much blood gets left on the floor while evolution is taking place. A look at the history of the labor movement is illuminating on this point.

By formal adversarial systems I’m referring to law and government. I was specifically trying to avoid[!] discussing science itself, as opposed to its use as anology.

But if one is willing to see people as both individuals and aspects of a larger subject, as geeks are aspects of geek culture, with its own codes, norms, and hierarchies, then the role of groups as such, as examples of social units which are themselves aspects of society, is easier to accept.

No one on this site has ever responded to my discussion of a landlady who refused to raise my rent for 12 years, behavior which was common in my old working-class conservative catholic neighborhood. She was acting on what she saw as a principle that one might call “staying down with the joneses,” and I was grateful for it. But again, as above, my point is that individuals don’t make themselves. Language and culture precede us. The web, at least the anglo-american part of it, is self-selected for geekdom, and for an intellectualism predicated and limited by such interests. That’s social construction, and of a variety that privileges expertise over self-knowledge: that is knowledge of a subject as such as opposed to an awareness of that knowledge in context. Cowen’s absurd arguments are only describable as the result of the telescoping of intellectualism that results from increased specialization.

We can see unions as the expression of a collective and see them as in an adversarial relation to individualism. But I’m not going to pay much attention to a libertarian’s description of their role. As with prosecutors and defense attorneys, The senate and the executive, politicians and the press, or art and commerce, individuals and community both have their prerogatives, and both should be respected, and kept strong.

On a final note, the collaborationist logic that has done so much damage when extended into social life comes from the sciences, which privileges the search for truth over the mastery of what are in fact formal adversarial systems.
A trial lawyer needs a sense of irony. A mathematician doesn’t. Seeing intellectualism as an extension of the sciences seems to me a lot more dangerous than seeing it as an extension of legal theater. Seeing it this way may “slow us down” as unions do, but that’s specifically the purpose of the rule of law. To use one of my favorite quotes from one of its founding members: “The ACLU is a conservative institution.”

Thus, for Tyler, the problem isn’t unions per se. It’s government interference with this efficiency enhancing process of organizational selection, which loads the dice in favour of unionized firms.

Where is this planet on which government interference loads the dice in favor of unionized firms?

(Or are you saying that, according to Tyler, under certain conditions of government interference, unionized firms are in fact the fittest organizations, rendering perhaps unrelated government efforts to prevent unionization an economically inefficient act?)

Just by the way, before Cowen penned those lines about New Orleans, it’s possible that he would be profited from googling “Katrina Cottage”. Cheaper than mass-produced trailers, durable, and far cheaper than trailers sitting unused and unmaintained until they’re junked. (Oh, wait, all of that was the result of government interference.)

Or not—it comes down to contingent culture. There is nothing at all automatic about unions being helpful in such a situation.

First of all, isn’t the point of existing worker-owned collectives like law partnerships that they don’t need to raise outside capital, that they are in effect co-ops funded by the participants? So looking to a conflict between capital markets and workers seems off.

But Henry is right to raise Miller’s excellent (and still under-read) book, because the power of that book is to show that the conflict is general between bosses and employees—managers in general have difficulty making credible committments that maximize the productivity of those being managed. Which type of conflict shows up in e.g. law firms as conflict between the partners and the associates, in spite of the fact that the partners are workers who own the firm. Miller’s book (as the titled shows) is not about a conflict between labor and capital, but at a more fundamental level between managers and subordinates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiday_in_Cambodia

Having said that I think Tyler’s argument is not that crazy:

1. If you want to revitalize NO you gotta get people to move back. They’re not gonna move back unless rents are cheap, cheaper then they were before Katrina. To make rents cheap you gotta get rid of some regulations which made sense before K but do not in the changed circumstances.
2. Why do we care about NO anyway? A narrow economic argument might say that the benefits are not worth the costs so forget about revitalizing it. But the reason why we care about NO is because it was a vibrant cultural center, a non-narrow-economic benefit. That’s why we want it back.

It’s not so much what he said rather how he said it.

Anyway I still disagree because I think there’s a confusion between the particular and the universal. One instance of inefficiency, or just the possibility of it does not invalidate the argument. I think folks in the real world are pretty good at solving coordination problems in many many cases. A bit like, supposedly, if you look in the phone book under “honey bee services for apple orchards” you do find some entries, externalities or not.

And I wasn’t calling you a hippy either, just so you know.

Shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio. The slums of Kingston, Jamaica, bred reggae. New Orleans experienced its greatest cultural blossoming in the early 20th century, when it was full of shanties.

Shorter Tyler Cowen (with apologies to Harry Lime)

Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.