No.
There’s never a guarantee, and you have no data to show there is. The pretense that there could be either way is the ideology of modernism, and libertarianism is the last of the modernist ideologies, mostly as parody. The problem of metis is how it can be fostered as a mode of intelligence in bureaucrats and citizens alike.

That debate leads us apparently into discussions of Descartes vs Spinoza and don’t know enough about either to jump in.

Well sure, but that doesn’t address the question of who tends to thrive better where that metis needs to be harnessed. For the most part (see for example agriculture) the market actors seem to do a much better job than government actors.

Take a set of borderline cases—cases where we don’t know if metis or top down work better and we can’t easily figure it out ahead of time. Will governments or market actors figure that out first and harness the proper skills first? Almost certainly the market will find out first. Government will choose one or the other approach and if it is the wrong approach, won’t change for decades if ever. In the market, people will choose both sides of the question, and a few will win out. Now if we let the government dictate the winners and losers (see the Big 3 Auto Companies) that clearly won’t work, but again that is what happens when you let the government dictate the winners and losers.

A last comment on “metis.” However it was intended it’s clear that we can refer to it as the equivalent of autonomous moral and therefore subjective acts of imagination within the playing of a social and/or technical role. But what is the need for such “social intelligence”? I’ve argued all along that it’s less a luxury than a requirement for a mature awareness of the world.

Slocum – I don’t know whether my experience is exceptional, but the price differentials I see are usually much higher than the ones you quote here. On the barbecue issue – I am (perhaps mis)reporting Tyler’s work as he has explained it to me – interestingly, he is closer to a left position on the empirics, if not on the normative consequences, than Brad is, as best as I can tell (Brad seems to disagree on the empirics, but in practice to consider himself a social democrat, and to advocate for various forms of social protection ).

But is it really cheaper than good farmer’s market produce in the U.S. on a PPP basis? Because my impression of food in Italy (and France and the UK as well) is that dining out, at least, is more expensive there than here for the working class/lower middle class types but that they spend the money anyway. And I don’t think that was just weak dollar impression on our part (our algorithm in Europe is just to pretend a euro is a dollar and not worry about it).

But it’s just our competing impressions, obviously, and it would be hard to quantify because you’d have to match food of equivalent quality before you could do the price comparisons. Is there any data at all behind this idea one way or another, or is it only impressions so far?

I loves me a good hoppy microbrew, but they’re very expensive.

But they’re really not, you know—well, at least not around here. For example, here’s the beer list from a local pub. A bottle of Budweiser is $3.25, and a bottle of a microbrew is $3.75.

Why is good barbecue a regional phenomenon more or less confined to certain peripheral parts of the US, and not reproducible elsewhere?

To the extent that’s true, I’d suggest that it’s because to do BBQ right, you need a place that focuses on it pretty heavily—rather than just offering BBQ as one or two of N menu choices. Which means you need a critical mass of people willing to eat BBQ frequently enough to keep a dedicated BBQ pit in business. Even so, although we live pretty far from the heart of BBQ country, we do have a couple of local places that are real BBQ pits. Are they really ‘good’ and ‘authentic’? That’s a subjective matter.

Again, couldn’t this be just taste? In certain areas of the country, people really want good BBQ, and they want it often. These areas can support lots of BBQ places which will compete to be really good.

Everywhere else people may like good BBQ, but they don’t do it enough to support multiple competing BBQ joints which will leverage their metis to good effect.

Government can’t really fix that (in fact it isn’t obvious it needs to be fixed) without leveraging into pretty noticeable inefficiencies elsewhere. (For example if they provide enough of a subsidy to simulate a financial situation as if lots of people had been going to BBQ joints, it would be forced to tax people who don’t want to go, and the distribution would be more difficult to base on quality than the market solution in areas where BBQ is highly valued.)

This doesn’t seem true though. A market based metric can easily be overthrown or replaced by a competitor’s better metric—if something can be better abstracted it probably will be in a market system over time. In a government system, there are sorts of political games that can keep that from happening. (In a market system deeply controlled by governments that can happen too). Both will start with standards that are ok, but the market will tend to get better and better ones faster (so long as it can’t externalize things like health costs, which is where the government may productively come in through tort law for example.)

First, the interesting thing about places like Italy is that the very good food is not only widely available, but relatively cheap – it can be consumed by working class/lower middle class types as well as upper middle classers. I loves me a good hoppy microbrew, but they’re very expensive. Same is true of good cheese and produce at farmer’s markets. Some of this is surely a relative prices issue – they seem expensive relative to budweiser/american cheese, but this is because they don’t take advantage of economies of scale/transport etc and can’t without becoming like budweiser/tasteless tomatoes/american cheese. But some of it isn’t – these goods are positioned and sold as luxuries and carry a very substantial price premium.

The second part of the response – and this is something that Tyler Cowen is working on – is that some kinds of production simply don’t seem to travel well in a free market system. They need certain preconditions – arguably social and cultural preconditions – to work, and these preconditions aren’t reproducible elsewhere. Tyler works on barbecue. Why is good barbecue a regional phenomenon more or less confined to certain peripheral parts of the US, and not reproducible elsewhere? Can’t be the ingredients, which are readily available. There is some secret sauce (pun intended) that can’t easily be reproduced by the market itself in other contexts.

Jacob – I think that Scott himself says something along these lines, albeit he doesn’t develop it as much as he should. He’s less opposed to epistemic knowledge in and of itself than the assumption of its holders that there is no other valid form of knowledge and to its combination with High Modernist overweening ambition. This suggests that some kinds of modernization are much preferable to others (and Scott acknowledges that modernization can indeed be a good thing and that people have entirely legitimate reasons to want to get out of peasant squalor). I suspect that he would similarly be more opposed to some kinds of markets than others – as I hint above, I think that his arguments about standardization are consonant with some of Polanyi’s distinctions between the logics of small, localized markets and the logic of long-distance trade.

how much villagization itself contributed to the success of Tanzania in building a nation-state is pretty hard to determine.
There are a bunch of other factors that may have to do with Nyerere’s choices and policies but not with villagization. And inauspicious beginnings is an exageration.. The widespread use of Swahili for instance, which pre-existed Tanzanian and colonial policies, is an important factor that unifies Tanzania. So is the fact that Tanzania is a patchwork of little and acephalic ethnic groups where it’s impossible for any of them to become a relevant political force.

“Increased market regulation will begin to appear because [the people] want it. It will be the result of a “natural” process.”

If people choose to vote for national health and higher taxes, are they less free? Some people define intellectual life in terms of progress but it’s best defined only in terms of debate. What’s the telos of athletic competition, not of one player’s role, but of the game itself? Not the same thing.
It’s not whether to regulate or not that’s most important but that we debate every choice each time. Stale decision-making processes are the problem not the categories of action taken out of context.

There’s no such thing as the “free” market.

If economics is not about how to make the rich richer, but about providing the best conditions for making the most people healthy and giving them a shot at being happy, then I think the rubber tomato, corn fed beef, and the various ingenious ways in which agribusiness and the state have changed the American diet definitely does have a downside. To not deal with that at all is as unrealistic as to say that it is all downside. Of course – the collapse of the percentage of income spent on food in the U.S. has done a lot of good, too.