Symmachus wrote: ↑Tue Aug 23, 2022 3:47 pm
Yet one wonders what the other essays that scored lower were like if this was the winner, because if young Peterson's sub-erudite pessimism is justified, then it suggests a paradox resulting from one of the core ideas in classical economics: the free market functions on the assumption that individuals are best able to determine their own interest, so why have individuals seen it in their best interest to vote in statist politicians to regulate and over-regulate the market? Does Daniel Peterson understand their best interest better than they do? Answers to a question like that are way beyond my ability, but I would have expected an essay winning a prize associated with such eminent political economists would attain at least that level of self-awareness. The main strengths of the essay are the correct use of the word "sybaritic," the presence of the Latin phrase "ipso facto"—italicized no less—references to all the right people, and lots of commas to give you a rest through all those needlessly long sentences. These remains the hallmarks of that Petersonian style so beloved by us all....
LOL. The one element of Petersonian style that I didn't see in the essay was random words
being italicized.
I also noted how religious the essay was--it's written from the perspective of a true believer in the one true theory of economics bearing his testimony to other true believers. The revelations given to Adam Smith (peace be upon him) have been proven true, in both the classroom and the laboratory. The only outstanding questions are why doesn't everybody see the light, and what happens next?
The religiosity of the essay extends to its use religious language. The very first sentence refers to the theory of the invisible hand as Adam Smith's most famous "doctrine." The second sentence refers to meddling with the free market as reaching out to "steady the economic ark" by people who can't see the "preternatural" power that Adam Smith "believed he saw." It makes me wonder why he couched the language this way--is it because Adam Smith didn't produce 11 witnesses that also saw what he saw?
Going back to the Interpreter story, Peterson said the following about his trip to Scotland:
One evening, my next-door neighbor in the university dorm where we were staying — an economics professor from Colorado, I think, whose name I’ve forgotten — suddenly dragged me off to a late-night gathering of something called “The Invisible Hand Society,” the main point of which seemed to be alcohol and bonhomie. There were about ten of us there, including Milton Friedman and a few others. The fellow who invited me had warned me at the last minute to put on the Adam Smith necktie that each attendee at the Mont Pelerin meeting had been given and that, it tuned out, each member of the Invisible Hand Society was supposed to wear. This was lucky for me, because one poor soul showed up without it and was immediately fined ten pounds by the chair. (And he had to pay.) At one point, each of us in the room had to tell what we had done during the past year for the cause of the free market. I felt hopelessly inferior, because I was just an undergraduate student (in classics, no less), and all I had done was to write my essay. But that was deemed sufficient, and I passed. Another member of the group reported that he had debated John Kenneth Galbraith at Princeton. He was fined twenty pounds for mentioning Galbraith’s name.
One day, we made a pilgrimage to Canongate Kirkyard, on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, where we were to place a wreath on Adam Smith’s tomb. But it turned out that nobody had actually brought the wreath. Everybody had thought that someone else had it. So, later that afternoon or early evening, we gathered on the battlements of the ruined St. Andrews Castle to watch Friedrich von Hayek cast the wreath into the surf below, expressing the hope, just before he did so, that Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand” would take the wreath where it needed to go.
One of the big advantages Peterson had in the essay competition is the fact that his essay confessed that he was a true believer in their cult.