When Were We Freer?

This list of libertarian heresies by Tyler Cowen is really interesting. He gave this as keynote speaker at the IHS, and listed what he called "5 libertarian heresies." The first one is struck me as probably right:

First, he made a cogent case for the idea that we (in the developed world, at least) are freer now than we were in the past, and that it’s unwise for libertarians to look back on any particular era as some sort of libertarian elysium. If government was small way back when, in large part it was because everything was small. There is a tendency among some libertarians to argue for the future by going back to a past that did not exist; Cowen exposed this tendency very effectively.

So if libertarians are always looking to the past as an ideal, but we're freer now than ever, then why do they do that? I think there's a strong backwards and forward-looking tendency with a lot of social ideologies, both religious and secular. Not sure why, but I know someone who I bet has a few ideas.

HIs second idea is also interesting, and reminded me something that J said yesterday when he described what "development" meant:

I've got some quibbles with Easterly, but talking to individuals who are unfamiliar with development work about its aims I've found that one of the most basic and useful definitions of development is "moving people from a life of many hardships and few choices to one of satisfied needs and many choices." Moving from point A to point B is often a long and winding road, one down which I think you occasionally do need an "expert" to guide you along the particularly dark spots, but its hard to argue that the power to "figure out their own answers," the power of choice, isn't vastly more important than innumerable $4-million reports.

In Cowen's words, he argues for something he calls "positive liberty," which he described like this: "People should be able to do certain things, and the most successful society is one where the most people can do the most things. Then - and this is where there was an audible gasp around the room - he argued that roughly 70% of the liberties worth having fall into this ‘ability’ version of positive liberty.

Cowen also thinks the interest we have in inequality, as itself an intrinsic bad, is a "categorical mistake." If it's not a categorical mistake (it may not be), I suspect it's not nearly as problematic as we believe. Robert Frank thinks that inequality creates its own kind of winner-take-all inefficiencies, so I leave that possibility (which I'm sure Cowen has thought a lot about), but even with it, I think absolute poverty is much, much worse - by orders of magnitudes worse - than relative poverty.

Finally, the writer who summarizes Cowen's talk says Cowen ended with the following thought experiment, which I know is taken very seriously by Christian churches concerned about the effect of the market process on communities:

He then asked, somewhat rhetorically, if liberty was confined (and defined) by culture: ‘We should not presume that our values are as universal as we often think they are’. What happens, he asked rhetorically, if - in order to enjoy the benefits of liberty and prosperity - societies have to undergo a major cultural transformation, including the loss of many appealing values? Cowen focussed on Russian loyalty and friendship, but there are potentially many others. Think, for example, of the extended family so privileged throughout the Islamic world, or the communitarian values common in many indigenous societies.