Why Didn't I Learn the FLOW Worldview in my College Courses?

FLOW is based on the classical liberal intellectual paradigm developed by Enlightenment thinkers in the 18th century and their liberal successors in the 19th century, but largely rejected by 20th century academia.  Thanks to efforts of the founders of the modern libertarian movement, including Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and Rand, there is now a vibrant and rapidly expanding body of thought based on classical liberal ideas.  Some of those ideas are available through think tanks, others through independent bloggers, scholars, and journalists, and still others available at universities.

The only university in the world founded on classical liberal ideas is Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala City, Guatemala.  In the United States, the highest concentration of classical liberal thought is in the economics department of George Mason University, in Arlington Virginia, many of whose economists are sympathetic to the Austrian School of Economics, most prominently represented by Ludwig von Mises and Public Choice Theory, the contribution of James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and others.  The law school at George Mason also has a fair number of classically liberal oriented scholars.  Elsewhere in the US, in both the economics department and the law school, the University of Chicago has a good representation of classical liberal scholars.

Indeed, the entire field of economics is by far the academic discipline that is most closely based on classical liberal principles.  Adam Smith was one of the most important of 18th century classical liberals, and throughout the 19th century, economic thought developed along classical liberal lines.  In the 20th century, there were several waves of rebellion against classical liberal economics, including those associated with Marx, Veblen, and Keynes.  For a time, most economists except for those associated with the Austrian School or the Chicago School (whose most prominent spokesperson was Milton Friedman) were not classical liberals.  Then, gradually, after being considered outsiders in the 40s, 50s, and to some extent the 60s, both Hayek of the Austrian school and Friedman of the Chicago school won Nobel prizes.  In particular, the work of the Chicago school became increasingly influential, such that today the Chicago school, broadly construed, is a leading strand in economic thought.  Of course Friedman and others always claimed that they were not doing “Chicago economics,” but only “good economics,” and at this point much of the profession would agree.

That said, even if you studied economics, you were not likely to have been exposed to a worldview like that of FLOW, though your own ideas are likely to be closer to FLOW and more of our perspectives are likely to make sense. If you studied economics, FLOW is likely to be slightly less alien to you.  But mainstream economics is a highly technical field, and it is hardly an idealistic field.

The best predecessor to FLOW in terms of idealism is Ayn Rand, because Rand rightly celebrated the role of the creative entrepreneur in poetic, passionate language.  But because she was writing in an age that was so exceptionally hostile to capitalism, and because of her own temperament, she emphasized a relatively simplistic vision of capitalism based around the concept "The Virtue of Selfishness"  and the symbol of the dollar sign.  Although there are legitimate interpretations of Rand’s “selfishness” as closer to what we mean by “self esteem,” her own use of the term is too one-dimensional for our purposes.  Thus while we acknowledge Rand for her visionary celebration of entrepreneurial creativity, we want to move the concept of the creative entrepreneur well beyond “selfishness” and dollar signs, and up into other levels of Maslow’s hierarchy.

Friedrich Hayek’s essay “The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization” is the single best predecessor to FLOW, it is in a sense our founding document, but it is abstract, difficult, and relatively inaccessible.

But Hayek’s essay brings up the fundamental reason why one doesn’t learn the FLOW worldview in most university courses:  entrepreneurial creativity is invisible to most economists and other social scientists.  Insofar as social scientists study society as it is, they cannot envision what will be that does not yet exist.  The entrepreneur herself is the one who envisions what does not yet exist, and until she has a substantial enterprise that has had a major impact on the economy and society, her work cannot be measured or evaluated by the social scientist.

Thus there is a lethal bias in the worldview of social science itself that prevents it from recognizing the importance of the entrepreneur, the countless obstacles to entrepreneurial creativity, and the wonderful benefits to society that could take place were those obstacles to be removed.  Worse yet, the entire enterprise of social science was very much founded as an endeavor to advise governments on policy; their presumption is always in favor of government action, rather than entrepreneurial creativity, because that is what they can see.

Consider the case of Mohammad Yunus, who was an economics professor in Bangladesh in despair over the fact that he was literally walking over the bodies of starving human beings on the way to his office each day at the university.  He decided to go to the villages and see what people needed to improve their lives, and he discovered that tiny loans could make a big difference in their lives.  From this small, entrepreneurial step, he created Grameen Bank, the institution with which he shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.  There are now more than 110 million people, mostly women, receiving microloans around the world.

Often people who are educated in universities, including most economics majors, do not take the legal obstacles to enterprise as seriously as they ought.  Grameen Bank had to fight Bangladeshi banking laws in order to become legal, and microfinance advocates are still working to get banking laws changed in some nations in order to start microfinance projects.  To take an even more important example, eBay was originally illegal in France because all auctioneers needed to be licensed.  It is now one of the largest economies on earth, with more than $60 billion traded annually, democratizing global commerce to an extent never before possible.  Had eBay been illegal in the U.S. and elsewhere, this extraordinary phenomenon would not exist.  Consider as well the fact that many of the founders of the IT revolution were college drop-outs, including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and how much we would have lost if only Ph.D. engineers had been allowed to create new technology; while countless Ph.D. engineers contributed to the IT revolution, it would not have been as large, as diverse, or as innovative had opportunities for innovation been limited to those who were credentialed. 

It is more often the entrepreneurs themselves, or those who have begun a path towards entrepreneurial activity, who realize that legal obstacles are a severe threat to entrepreneurial creativity.  The academic mindset is not generally equipped to see the countless invisible opportunities for entrepreneurial creation, and thus the costs of shutting down those opportunities through well-intentioned regulation are almost entirely invisible to them.

In order to realize the FLOW vision for a better world, we will need to change countless government policies in the direction of greater economic freedom.  In order to do so, we will need to re-educate the millions of minds that have been formed by standard academic training.  This is one of the most challenging tasks we have before us.

Resources for Those Unfamiliar with Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism