There can be little doubt that Albert Einstein was one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century, as his enduring appeal to so many indicates. How many other people in such arcane fields as theoretical physics and mathematics can generate such interest? Not many.
Yet sometimes I think Albert Einstein is also the poster boy for the axiom ‘stick to what you know’. Of course in Einstein’s case, what he knew was rather a lot: E=MC2 is a legacy that will speak to the centuries.
But then all you have to do is read much of what he wrote about economics and politics to realise how clueless Einstein when it came to many things, with an attachment to nightmarish notions of supranational government. I share Einstein’s distain for nationalism but the cure for the excesses of governments is not super-nationalism but rather a culture of individualism that demands less government rather than yet another tier of it to regulate our lives and take our money.
Likewise in his apologia for socialism, he got it spectacularly wrong in 1947 when he wrote that…
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones.
…when in fact technology and capitalism means that small business and diffusion of capital have expanded vastly more that ‘one size fits all’ big business since 1947. Technology has created diseconomies of scale in ways that Einstein never imagined in spite of the evidence already being there (pity he did not spend some time with Frederic Hayek). Globalisation (rather than ‘supernationalisation’) of capital markets has likewise put hitherto unheard of quantities of capital into the hands of small businesses beyond counting. He even bought into the daftest and most pernicious economic absurdity of them all, the ‘fixed quantity of wealth’ fallacy.
Albert Einstein. A fascinating genius for sure, but like everyone, he had his limitations.
Actually, many eminent scientists are no more savvy about politics and economics than the typical Hollywoodian moonbat.
Einstein once praised compound interest as “one of the greatest inventions ever,” without realizing that this “invention” has been the ticket to wealth for many an average citizen in a capitalist society. So much for “concentration of wealth in a feew hands!”
It’s public capital that gets concentrated in few hands.
While it might not be 100% true to say that you could substitute the name of Bertrand Russell for Albert Einstein and Perry’s posting would still be true, you can certainly add Russell to a list of heroes who should never have gone anywhere near politics.
But it’s queer – IIRC Russell wrote somewhere of the odd daft opinions of John Locke (such that a man should be forbidden from owning too many plums since they would rot before he could eat them all – not that they could be sold or given away..!) and yet he himself also seemed to have a fair share of daftness (leaving his wife on an arbitrary whim etc..)
Did Carnap join the list at any point I wonder? Or was he an honourable exception (or is it an honourable norm?) with Popper..?
Perry, well said. The same applies to Richard Dawkins, who can be a real buffoon on issues outside his usual domain, such as his recent anti-American ravings.
That said, Einstein’s achievements dwarf any other shortcomings.
Perry, do you have any stats or links to confirm that? I seem to remember reading that (in the US at least) capital had concentrated in fewer hands, quite significantly in the last half-century, relatively speaking.
OK, I probably read it in the Guardian, and I have no stats either, but I just wondered where your view came from, or whether it was just anecdotal.
I would certainly like to believe you correct on this….
A few days ago –last sunday– I finished reading Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions.
His scientific ideas were outstanding, but his political views were certainly biased towards a suicidal transnational utopia.
Taking into accouny his degree of intelligence and refined morality, I can’t imagine why he defended socialism, i.e., the cult of the state, in the form of a (global) goverment.
Perhaps his trust in G-d was so weak that he was prone to fall into that idolatrous –which means irrational– trap.
Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure
about the universe.
—Albert Einstein
Perhaps he was thinking of himself.
I think we find the banality of Einstein’s political and economic views surprising because culturally and unconsciously we think of intelligence, education, worldliness etc as laying on a one-dimensional graph. This leads us to assume that somebody who is our better in one area, like physics, is our better in all areas.
I think we fear individual excellence in intellectual fields in large part because we fear that acknowledging that that we defer to someone in one area means we must defer to them in all areas. (Einstein became a popular public figure in large part because he projected an image as a non-threatening otherworldly type. Physicist that did not convey this image, like Edward Teller have much darker reputations.)
Instead, we need to acknowledge that we are all specialist in increasingly narrow niches. Once we wander off our own intellectual reservations we become idiots, no matter how much horsepower we pack under our skulls.
Shannon Love has, once again, made a very pertinent comment regarding this issue.
It is easy to forget how much of economic and political thinking is emotionally based, not intellectually grounded in empirical observation. Especially when speaking of a mentality formed during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, when all forms of collectivist “visions” for society were considered progressive and even scientific.
I have this same problem with many people I admire for their overall accomplishments, but despair of when it comes to questions of economic relations. Dr. Martin Luther King is one example. His committment to individual rights for all citizens as guaranteed by the Constitution, pursued by a Ghandian path of non-violence, was wholly admirable. Many of his other beliefs of the “social justice” school of religious leftism were unfortunate, to say the least.
I have often wondered if the reason we see so much of human history mired in violence and repression is the simple fact that we have consistently asked the wrong people for guidance on the subject of how we should relate to one another. Certainly it is questionable whether or not the “other-worldliness” of the religious mind is suitable for prescribing codes with which to live our lives here on earth. The mind of an Einstein, travelling far away on another “thought experiment”, may fall into this category also.
But, I am afraid, that is much too complex a topic for this post.
Skeptics of your idea would be happy to site the example of the America giant Walmart thus I too would be very interested in seeing the empirical data. I strongly suspect that you are right about small businesses as they tend to be more adaptive to market pressures because of their ability change rapidly. Could it be that there is a Zipt’s law relationship between the number of companies as compared to their size?
http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/zipfslaw.html
Stephen: I’m sure there is a Zipf law concerning company size. Many financial data show the same pattern: wealth of households or market shares on highly competitive markets, among others.
BTW, I once studied companies’ stock market capitalization vs. stock returns volatility and found that there was a relationship sigma = c – k * log(M) where sigma is volatility, c,k constants and M market capitalization. This empirical relationship can be derived the same way as Boltzman law describing energy of particles in a thermodynamic system.
Wow, somebody published an article in Physica A on Zipf law and power laws in economy:
The social architecture of capitalism
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TVG-4D8MFV6-1&_coverDate=02%2F15%2F2005&_alid=239100107&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_cdi=5534&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=725dde9fbd6f2cf0b8709bcc6eddda0d
This might be final theoretical proof that perfect equality is absolutely impossible.
To be more accurate, firm sizes generally follow power law, which in some cases takes form of Zipf law:
On the size distribution of firms: additional evidence from the G7 countries
Edoardo Gaffeoa, Mauro Gallegati and Antonio Palestrini
Will Rogers said it best. “Everyone is ignorant, just in different subjects.”