Gullibility – Econlib

Why should you believe something is true? It is disturbing how intelligent people believe in implausible interpretations of events or grandiose statements about religion or society from the gurus of the time. Elon Musk is known for his impulsive one-liner philosophy and his theological and political musings Wall Street Journal columnist Tim Higgins (“Elon Musk’s walk with Jesus“, August 17, 2024) seem to be in the same vein:

Elon Musk is publicly offering his own interpretation of Jesus’ teachings, with an Old Testament twist. …

We’re increasingly seeing Musk invoke religion as he discusses his worldviews on topics ranging from parenting to freedom of speech. …

“There is a lack of empathy for the victims of the criminals and too much empathy for the criminals,” Musk said. “That’s why you want to have deep empathy for society as a whole, and not superficial empathy for criminals.”

Why would anyone care what Mr. Musk thinks about the unicorn of “society as a whole”?

What should make someone believe something? Scientific evidence should be at the forefront of justifying beliefs. If a coherent theory predicts a result and empirical evidence confirms it, one should believe it – until the contrary empirical evidence falsifies it.

In the field of social sciences – that is, economics or economic methodology – an example is the law of demand. There is no logically coherent theory that implies that people will buy more of something just because its price has increased. On the contrary, economic theory proves the opposite, like a theorem in Euclidean geometry. (When a luxury good is purchased as a status symbol, status is purchased, and the quantity demanded of status symbols will decrease as they become more expensive. This explains why not everyone buys Louis Vuitton baseball caps for €500 each.) Casual observations and econometric evidence show that, ceteris paribus, the quantity demanded decreases as the price increases, and mutatis mutandis. Given his free will, it is not impossible that an eccentric would ever buy another stick of gum just because its price has risen, but that will not shift the market demand curve in any observable way.

A related implication of economic theory is that an explanation must be compatible with the incentives of individuals who maximize their utility—that is, who seek to improve their situation as each evaluates it according to his own preferences. For example, it would have been very surprising if the Sandy Hook massacre had been organized by the deep state, because such an operation would be incompatible with incentives for individual government agents in an open society with some rule of law. (Note that Elon Musk did that not believe that particular conspiracy theory.)

I have mentioned logical coherence, which is a basic condition for believing that something is true. The ancient Greek philosophers made that discovery. If a belief implies both A and not-A, it must be rejected.

In all the universe there is much that we do not understand and cannot hope to understand; Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is just one indication. Perhaps we should keep a small window open for subjective faith, alongside music and poetry. Ten years before the prize was awarded the 2912 Nobel Prize in MedicineFrench physician Alexis Carrel, an atheist, converted to Catholicism after witnessing what he could only explain as a miracle at the Pilgrimage site of Lourdes. (It did not help his career in France and by 1912 he was living in the United States.) We still need to maintain a dose of rational skepticism: in his book The impossibility principle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), statistician David Hand shows how miracles and ‘miraculous’ coincidences can often (he would say always) be explained by probability theory.

In the field of social behavior, as FA Hayek showed, we must also allow room for the meta-rationality of following social rules that have proven their usefulness in adapting to our ignorance.

Only the gullible believe social gurus or philosopher-kings who have not demonstrated any structured knowledge and understanding of how society (including politics and the economy) works, and who pretend to know the ‘common good’ and dictate how others should live. Gullibility seems to have the wind in its sails.

We can relate these reflections to three recent thinkers who have significantly advanced our knowledge of social affairs and debunked the pretenses of future philosopher-kings. Anthony de Jasay argued that a social convention of “live and let live,” when it involves no harm to others, “demands far less of our moral credulity” than other political principles.

In their groundbreaking book The calculation of consentJames Buchanan and Gordon Tullock make an interesting observation:

To be effective in leading to a more harmonious social order, Christian idealism must be tempered by the acceptance of the moral imperative of individualism, the rule of equal liberty. The acceptance of the individual’s right to do as he pleases, so long as his action does not infringe on the freedom of other individuals to do the same, must be a characteristic feature of any ‘good’ society. The precept ‘Love your neighbor, but leave him alone if he wants to be left alone’ can in a sense be called the overriding ethical principle for Western liberal society.

In Why I’m not a conservative either (Edward Elgar, 2006), James Buchanan, who was far from elitist, strongly defended structured knowledge. Review of this book in RegulationI paraphrased what he saw as a requirement for a free society:

Individuals must understand “simple principles of social interaction,” and that entails “a general understanding of basic economics.” Or else, Buchanan claims, they must demonstrate “a widespread willingness” to submit to others who do understand.

As far as I can tell, Mr. Musk is far from possessing any kind of structured social or philosophical knowledge. That he has demonstrated entrepreneurial intuition and talents (see Israel Kirzner, Competition and entrepreneurship [University of Chicago Press, 1973]) gives him no special intellectual authority to speak out on matters of theology and politics. We don’t even need to note that he also (or especially?) seems to be an efficient rent-seeker. The most dangerous gurus are political gurus – ‘political’ in the sense that they want to force others to live a certain way or pay for the privileges of others. There’s certainly no reason to believe something just because Musk says so.