Learn from a Nobelist in economics: all you have to do to not be a racist is prefix all your racist comments with the claim that you have no racial prejudices, like Friedrich Hayek.
Robert Chitester: Going back to the question I asked you about people you dislike or can’t deal with, can you make any additional comments in that regard, in terms of the characteristics of people that trouble you?
Hayek: I don’t have many strong dislikes. I admit that as a teacher—I have no racial prejudices in general—but there were certain types, and conspicuous among them the Near Eastern populations, which I still dislike because they are fundamentally dishonest. And I must say dishonesty is a thing I intensely dislike. It was a type which, in my childhood in Austria, was described as “Levantine”, typical of the people of the eastern Mediterranean. But I encountered it later, and I have a profound dislike for the typical Indian students at the London School of Economics, which I admit are all one type—Bengali moneylender sons. They are to me a detestable type, I admit, but not with any racial feeling. I have found a little of the same amongst the Egyptians—basically a lack of honesty in them.
Bengalis and Egyptians are all liars, but he says that without any racism whatsoever. And of course, he was born in fin de siecle Austria, an environment completely free of the kind of bigotry that might explode into some kind of nationalistic nightmare.
(via Free-Market Orientalism)
Ah, another Racist Butt™, no surprises.
If there’s one thing I hate more than racists, that’s Philippines.
–Tim Minchin
[or something like that]
Paul Krugman isn’t too impressed with Friedrich Hayek either, Friedrich Hayek, Zombie:
But “Indians” and “Egyptians” are not a race. Therefore he cannot be racist.
I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that Vox Day’s economist boy band crush was a racist.
So there is one thing I can get. If he worked at an Economics School it is very likely that foreign students from development countries are only from a wealthy group of society, and thus more likely to be spoiled, which may make them annoying persons regardless of their ethnicity.
But then he makes the incredibly stupid mistake concluding that this behavior is because of their ethnicity, when it is just a result of their social class. So he’s not a racist, he just fails at fundamental logic (because of subconscious racism). That’s wayyyyyy better.
Not.
I wonder if Chitester responded with “ermmm… I meant like economic ideologies not… not racial characteristics…”
This is the guy responsible for that “Austrian economics” the wingnuts are always going on about, right? What a shock.
Pedantically speaking, he’s not talking about race: he’s generalizing about much smaller categories than that. He’s not admitting to treating anyone differently on account of their category membership, which is the thing that makes racism bad. Maybe he did, but it’s not in the quote. All you’ve found is a sinful thought, precipitated by the same hyperactive type-1-error-prone pattern-finding system that all humans have. I wouldn’t declare anyone anathema solely because of a thought they had.
No, he’s not responsible for that rubbish, but did contribute to the gibberish.
It’s via Corey Robin. “Free-Market Orientalism” is the name of the post. He’s done several on Hayek and his gang.
“Levantine”
Now there’s a slur you don’t hear much anymore. It’s a bit long for twitter, I suppose.
It works! From the comments there:
jonathanray@9
You need to better acquaint yourself with the definitions of race and racism. Since he is expressing a belief that certain ethnic groups have certain negative character traits then he is certainly being racist.
You might also consider that there’s a difference between thought, which is internal to the mind, and speech, whereby thoughts are articulated. He is not committing a thought crime, he is clearly stating a racist view that almost certainly affected the students he taught and mentored whilst at LSE.
csrster:
Yes, I was half expecting him to rail about the Musselman and the Hindoo.
@jonathanray #9:
He describes Indians, Egyptians, and other Middle Eastern peoples as “fundamentally dishonest” and “detestable” and says he has “a profound dislike for [them].” Do you really think it’s as likely as not that he treated those students the same as any other? That sure, maybe he was cold and distrustful towards them, and sure, maybe he approached their work with heightened scrutiny, but without an open admission, we have no reason to think that it’s more likely than completely equitable treatment?
To look at it another way, let’s say that in the course of his career Hayek took an interest in some promising students, pushed them to succeed, and helped them find opportunities to further their careers. With the views he stated, how plausible do you think it would be that even one of those students was from India?
Also, I’d just point out that racist statements aren’t outside the category of “things that make racism bad.”
Ayn Rand said some pretty despicable things too:
Kinda disturbing these two are such heroes on the Right.
#notalllevantines #notallbengalimoneylenderssons
What I don’t understand about these shits is why they’d *care* that everyone understood they weren’t racists.
@Barbaz #2
I was thinking along similar lines, but Michael Caine in Goldmember:
“There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch. “
airbagmoments #18
Thanks for the laugh!
jonathanray @9:
Pedantically speaking, you don’t understand what racism is.
But fine, you don’t want to say he’s racist? Then he’s an asshole with prejudicial and bigoted views about several ethnic groups.
Re. No. 17.
This shows not just Ayn Rand’s massive ignorance of the subject, which did not prevent her from pontificating idiotically about and those, but her essentially Stalinist mindset.
Ayn Rand believed devotely in development. and those that were not developing the land etc., properly lost their rights to the land. Thus Ayn Rand thought those who refused to properly develop the land, as defined by her, had lesser rights to its use. Thus the ultimate the right to dispose of land etc., depended on proper use of it, in other words in developing it. Thus development was the proper use of land etc., and those who would develop it could take it away from those were not. This is Stalinism in which the ultimate moral aim is economic development and that morally trumps everything else including it seems the right to use property has you see fit.
Of course Ayn Rand had no idea it seems that the majority of American Indian had well developed systems of user rights to land and resources. Most just didn’t have Western ideasof land ownership.
As for the Arabs Ayn Rand was certainly clueless.
Why is it so important you to find a way to acquit someone who spouts gross racial stereotypes, of racism?
@doubter #5:
What? That’s ridiculously unfair.
The reason Vox didn’t include any Indians in his orc-fighting game was that it would have compromised the historical verisimilitude!
@jonathanray, #9:
Nice straw person you’ve got there. Shame if something happened to it.
…Like your audience noticing you’re completely full of shit about what’s been said.
@moddey, #16
Well of course not! But that was because he objectively evaluated each and every one of those students from India as individuals, and found each and every one to be lacking to exactly the same degree for exactly the same failures that developed due to exactly the same factors. Then he just honestly and without bias reported the universal failings of Indians. He can’t have *prejudged them* of made decisions about them based on group-membership. He did say he wasn’t racist, after all!
I love that some dipshits showed up right away to defend these people of racism. Look, I get it. You don’t know how the word is commonly used and think some proscriptivist bullshit even matters. Ok. Fine. You probably jump in to insist Islamophobia isn’t racism either, “Muslim isn’t a race!! You’re the real racist!!” I hear you rejoining.
Fair enough. If you prefer bigot to racist just say so. If you prefer ethnophobia, ethnocentrism, or in most cases plain old white supremacy to racism, that’s fine too.
Here’s how your comments could read:
“Hayek and Rand aren’t racist! They ARE WHITE SUPREMACISTS.”
Shorter and punchier and it doesn’t derail into bullshit about what you think words should mean.
OK, pedantry warning!
There’s no such thing as a “Nobel Prize for Economics”. The Swedish National Bank shoehorned the “prize in memory of Alfred Nobel” into the real Nobel Prize ceremony in 1969. For some reason (I wonder why!) Alfred Nobel didn’t deem Economics worthy of a prize.
Indeed, but the fact is several European Countries did see their debt increase a lot before the crisis, as the result of the implementation of reaganian economics: During the 2002-2012 decade when France was ruled by the don’t-tax-but-keep-spending-for-clientelist-purpose local conservatives, the debt-to-GDP ration jumped from 58% to 89%, which in turn made implementing keynesian economics much more complicated that it should have been.
***
Hint: next time you hear a right-winger ranting about “Muslims” and “Islam”, he’s not talking about fundies and their self-righteous godly-because-I-say-so ways to justify their own bloodlust: he’s coating the old levantine slur in more socially acceptable semantics.
@laurentweppe, #27:
Go back and read again: We’re talking about the Great Depression. Hayek was dead before Bush I was out of office, much too early to comment on the Great Recession.
You were quoting Krugman talking about the current crisis: “both Ireland and Spain had low debt and budget surpluses on the eve of crisis.“: that’s the 21th century, not the 20th
@laurentweppe:
Okay, I managed to confuse myself. You’re critiquing Krugman and I was still thinking about Hayek.
My bad.
To be fair, it was blf that quoted Krugman, not me. But still, I was confused, you weren’t.
Fortunately, I’m not a racist either, but have you noticed how many of U.S. home foreclosures are carried out by Arabic-speaking moneylender’s sons imported from Bengal? And PZ is right; if you hear an Egyptian speaking a Levantine dialect, you can be sure that if his lips are moving, he’s lying.
Aren’t we glad we have that in the open? Now we can move on without any racial bias to other groups.
I’m not a fan of Hayek’s economics, and I am displeased by his words quoted above, but such thoughts communicated as words aren’t a reason enough to make someone a bogeyman. I won’t argue semantics about the definition of racism. Obviously the real reason for going digging for racist quotes by Hayek is disliking his economic theory, but the former has no bearing whatsoever on the truth or falsity of the latter. The former stems from a tribalistic desire to embarrass the enemy. Generally speaking, beyond this particular thread, I dislike this blog’s and its commenters’ tendency towards sensationalized condemnation of the scapegoat du jour based upon evidence cherrypicked to produce maximum outrage. Blogs’ publication bias distorts perception of various Others (whomever the blogger vehemently disagrees with and would therefore vote off the island) as much as TV news publication bias distorts perception of violence (actual violence is way way down since 1970, but people think the opposite).
jaggington @ 14
“You might also consider that there’s a difference between thought, which is internal to the mind, and speech, whereby thoughts are articulated. He is not committing a thought crime.”
Then neither was Winston in 1984. He had to open his mouth before anyone could detect his thoughts. Condemning speech and condemning thought are functionally equivalent because of the difficulty of observing thought directly.
In my opinion, Hayek is just mistaken, not evil. I think a lot of people have a vain desire to see themselves on the side of good in an epic battle between good and evil, instead of recognizing that the other side is often well-intentioned. Haidt was probably approximately correct about the psychology of morality: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (Newton was wrong about Alchemy. I don’t care if Haidt was wrong about the New Atheists. His psychological experiments are truly groundbreaking.)
firstapproximation @17
FTFY – where do I send the invoice?
jonathanray
What the hell do you imagine that your point is? Seriously?
jonathanray:
Sensationalized condemnation?
Please explain what is “sensationalized” about expressing outrage at the RCC’s continued cover up of child sexual abuse?
What is “sensationalized” about condemning the continual opposition to sensible gun control?
Go on, pick any of PZ’s posts. Explain which comments were “sensationalized condemnation” and why. Or STFU.
And the hell are you talking about cherry picked evidence? That’s something else you need to back up. Or STFU.
jonathanray:
Between this:
and this:
it appears you did not read the OP for comprehension (nor the comments).
Out of all the comments and the OP,
*WHO* has declared Hayek anathema?
*WHO* is treating Hayek as the bogeyman?
BTW, it’s sucks that you want to minimize Hayek’s racist (yes-racist) comments. It kinda makes you an asshole. We’ve enough of those round these parts, so skedaddle.
there are multiple aspects to every issue. You’re going to blame one group for reacting to some elements while ignoring others that aren’t relevant?
really?
but, you, OTOH, evenly react to EVERY SINGLE ELEMENT OF EVERY ISSUE EVER!!
rigghhhhhttttt….
because you are of course personally familiar with everything Hayek has ever said or done.
…or are you “cherry picking” to form that opinion?
fucking ridiculous.
this deserves a book. Are you planning on writing one?
the entertainment value in watching you try to parse that out for a thousand pages would be priceless.
can you tell what I’m thinking right now?
which are you condemning in your mind… the speech I write criticizing you, or the thoughts I haven’t?
Now I realise my mistake, I’ve been putting WOG as my ethnicity/race on the census return when I should have been putting Greasy Levantine.
I guess that was what all those passing motorists (UKIP voters I expect) were shouting at me while I was walking the dog, just trying to be helpful. They were only trying to help me avoid being taken to court for deliberately and knowingly completing the census form incorrectly. If only they had thought to stop and get out to explain the problem (rather than accelerating away) all confusion would have been eliminated.
Note: To whom it may concern FYI; Levantine is not a subset of Muslim.
One thing I find fascinating about this exchange is that it’s not even a leading question. The interviewer just asks if there are any “characteristics of people” that Hayek dislikes and he goes off on this kind of tirade that culminates in his dislike of Bengali moneylenders’ sons. I scanned over the rest of document and didn’t see any previous context that would suggest this was the kind of answer the interviewer was looking for, certainly nothing immediately preceding it.
Hayek could have left it at saying he dislikes dishonest people and described some personality traits. Instead he becomes incoherent–blanket statement, contradiction, qualification, qualified contradiction–but, oh those Bengali moneylenders’ sons (a web search search reveals Churchill had similar prejudices).
It’s clear that Hayek doesn’t want to be thought of as a racist. There are just certain “types” (he uses the word four times) he has an aversion to. And “not with any racial feeling” he has just happened to observe a 100% correlation between a “type” he despises with a particular ethnic group. So it’s not that he could possibly be any sort of bigot. He’s just faced with this incontrovertible evidence, bravely staying objective, and even more bravely pronouncing his conclusion. Shame on anyone who would crassly mistake this for racism.
I’m not sure any of this made him unusual among his generation. There’s probably some inner struggle going on in that paragraph. But I don’t think all his hedging improves matters.
@jonathanray:
Point to one (1) person on this thread that has used stories of the evil Hayek to get their kids to behave.
i didn’t go digging for racist quotes by Hayek. And, I suspect, neither did PZ. I don’t think I read more than a single thing by Hayek in all the economics I took in college (all – I say it like I took a ton. It was more like 12-15 credits). I can’t remember if it was a short paper or an excerpt from a longer work, but it wasn’t much. Though when presented with his name I do remember who he is (was), I have no attachment to him at all.
I’m just reading Pharyngula and praising, criticizing, snarking, or fucking off as the whim takes me.
So who went “digging for racist quotes by Hayek”? Do you have evidence that a single soul has ever done that in the history of the universe? I mean, I’m perfectly willing to believe it. It’s not as extraordinary a claim as drinking from a bloody cup cures a land of King’s-bad-decisions-inflicted-famine. But I’ve got not one shred of evidence it’s actually happened.
Do you?
Not entirely logically dependent! I’m glad you’re here to tell us these things.
Just out of curiosity, which commenter above made the claim that Hayek’s racism did determine the truth or falsity of his economic hypotheses?
Or, y’know, a generous desire to fight racism.
But I’m sure that there’s never been anyone in the history of academic economics or, y’know, nerdy blogging, that has ever both read Hayek to read Hayek AND who cares about ending racism.
What? You, jonathanray, hate sensationalized condemnation based on cherry picked evidence?
Wasn’t it you who said…
and
and
and
Oh, now I get it.
You prefer to utilize sensationalized condemnation based on entirely made-up, non-existent-outside-your-head evidence.
That explains your dislike of the Horde. We prefer actual, available evidence and react to things that actually exist/occur.
Well, I guess you can go have fun lording it over some sci-fi fan blog then. They need more erudite commenters, I hear. I’m sure you’ll be the most knowledgeable commenter on Haidt any Twilight or Hunger Games blog could hope to have.
Ugh. I started responding to jonathanray hours ago, but couldn’t finish til now…and much of my criticism is now redundant.
Sorry folks, I should have just deleted it, but I’d spent so much damn time on it, I just couldn’t… even knowing that by now there were likely other commenters already talking about the same things.
:sigh:
Oh, well.
CD:
Your #43 echoes so much of what I wanted to say, but I think you said it far better than I could have.
No, but since religion is so often used as a proxy for race and ethnicity, the two get conflated anyway.
laurentweppe:
Is that unique to Islam, or are there other religions of a similar nature (my primary experience with religion has been christianity, and AFAICT, it isn’t a proxy for race and ethnicity)?
Certainly not: the US has had the classical Catholics=Irishmen, followed by the Catholics=Hispanics, the western hemisphere invented the bullshit notion of the “Jewish Race” (Cause the Turkic Khazars and the Berber Sefardies were part of the same monolithic endogamic ethnicity, riiiiiiiight), Japanese nationalists tried to prop up shintoism as the Intrinsically Nippon religion while treating the equally animist Ainu religion as backward barbaric superstition (see: Shintoists call their gods “Kami”, Ainus call their gods “Kamuy”: totally different), and of course, conflating religion with ethnicity is what caused the self-destruction of Yugoslavia.
jonathanray@34
True.
Given the difficulty of observing thought directly, on what do you base the opinions that “Hayek is just mistaken, not evil”, and “the other side is often well-intentioned”. The number of people who frankly admit their evil intentions is small, is it not? Almost everyone pronounces their good intentions. So we go on their actions, which includes what they say, and we pay particular attention to the inconsistencies in their utterances. In this case, Hayek immediately follows a claim not to be racist with a (barely coherent) stream of racist crap. It really takes a considerable degree of either stupidity, dishonesty, or self-deluded sense of superiority not to conclude that he was, in fact, racist.
More on Hayek’s good intentions – in this case his well-intentioned support for the tyrant, torturer and mass-murderer Pinochet. But presumably, since we can’t observe thoughts directly, and Pinochet repeatedly stated his good intentions, jonathanray believes that Pinochet too was “just mistaken, not evil”.
sarcasm, I hope, because:
does not relate to how EASY it is to observe speech.
if you want to separate motivation from speech, that’s one thing, but speech is speech. It’s out there, and very easy to observe.
in fact, it’s kind of the purpose OF speech…. to communicate in an observable fashion.
To anyone reading down this far, Let’s not forget where the real racism is today, as Gary Younge wonderfully expresses it.
Well, I’m going to go ahead and say it: I do think Hayek was evil.
He had to know his economic ideas were wrong and causing harm to actual real people (and still are today) but he chose to ignore it.
He supported actual real evil people (Pinochet, for one).
If you voluntarily, even eagerly, side with evil, you ARE evil.
So yeah, he was evil.
Ichthyic@51,
Thanks! My “True” was only supposed to refer to the difficulty of observing speech directly, but I mistakenly quoted more than intended from mirrorfield.