I think technical-minded people tend to gravitate towards libertarian ideologies because they tend to underestimate the importance of human relationships to large scale systems. You can see it in the stereotype of the lone programmer who dislikes commenting or documentation, collaboration with other programmers, and strongly negative views towards their own project managers or their company’s executives. They also tend to have a negative view of customers/users, and don’t really believe in spending too much time in user interfaces/experiences. They have a natural skepticism of interdependence, because that brings on extra social overhead they don’t particularly believe they need. So they tend to view the legal, political, and social world through that same lens, as well.
I think the modern world of software engineering has moved in a direction away from that, as code complexity has grown to the point where maintainability/documentation and collaborative processes have obvious benefit, visible up front, but you still see streaks of that in some personalities. And, as many age, they have some firsthand experience with projects that were technically brilliant but doomed due to financial/business reasons, or even social/regulatory reasons. The maturation of technical academic disciplines relating to design, user experience, architecture, maintainability, and security puts that “overhead” in a place that’s more immediate, so that they’re more likely to understand that the interdependence is part of the environment they must operate in.
A lot of these technical minded people then see the two-party system as a struggle between MBAs and Ph.Ds, neither of whom they actually like, and prefer that problems be addressed organically at the lowest possible level with the simplest, most elegant rules. I have some disagreements with the typical libertarians on what weight should be assigned to social consensus, political/economic feasibility, and elegant simplicity in policymaking, but I think I get where most of them are coming from.
I think you’re painting with too broad of a brush.
Libertarianism is a very large tent, and it includes a lot of people from both major parties that have decided to stick with one of the two so they don’t “throw their vote away.” I’m guessing you mostly have direct experience with one type of “libertarian,” and assume that because most of the libertarians you know fit a certain mold, that the majority of libertarians in the world fit that mold as well. It’s just like asking a Fox News viewer what liberals think, the sample will be quite biased.
On one extreme, you have libertarian socialists like Noam Chomsky who come from academia, and on the other end you have anarchocapitalists from an economics background like Murray Rothbard, and everything in between, as well as some even more extreme. What unifies them, broadly speaking, is a rejection of coercion.
And libertarianism absolutely relies on human relationships to function. Where it differs is that libertarians often disagree with the notion that a centralized government is the best way for those conversations to happen. Many libertarians prefer natural relationships like community organizations, businesses, and neighborhoods that are selected through competition and common interest vs other similar organizations. For example, instead of having one school system organized from the top down to give students an equal education, you could have multiple competing schools that parents and students can choose from, and the ones that parents and students prefer succeed and the others fail. The alternative is direct involvement of parents with the education system, which just ends up giving more power to the minority who have the time to get involved (i.e. probably not the type you’d want to get involved, at least in my experience). It’s a lot easier to switch schools than to try to effect change in a given school.
So libertarians generally believe that individuals should be allowed to make their own decisions instead of delegating to some central authority. To use your software development analogy, it’s the idea that people should cluster around projects that interest them instead of being grouped arbitrarily based on need. You’ll get a lot more out of someone that’s internally motivated than someone who is externally motivated.
Notice that your comment is framed from the perspective of what Libertarians believe, and analyzing from that context. Mine is different: analyzing a specific type of personality common in tech careers, and analyzing why that type of person tends to be much more receptive to libertarian ideas.
I’m familiar with libertarianism and its various schools/movements within that broader category. And I still think that many in that group tend to underappreciate issues of public choice, group behaviors, and how they differ from individual choice.
Coase’s famous paper, the Theory of the Firm, tries to bridge some of that tension, but it’s also just not hard to see how human association into groups lays on a spectrum of voluntariness, with many more social situations being more coercive than Libertarians tend to appreciate, and then also layering Coase’s observations about the efficiencies of association onto involuntary associations, too.
Then at that point you have a discussion about public choice theory, what the group owes to defectors or minority views or free riders within its group, what a group owes to others outside that group in terms of externalities, how to build a coalition within that framework of group choice, and then your nuanced position might have started as libertarianism but ends up looking a lot like mainstream political, social, and economic views, to the point where the libertarian label isn’t that useful.
Ok, I think I you’re saying that tech attracts self important people that self identify as libertarian.
The opposite is also true, in that it attracts self important people who self identify as socialists. Both think other people should follow their ideals because their ideals are obviously good for society. The difference is that the “libertarian” thinks they’ll get more of what they want with fewer rules, and the socialist thinks that more rules (and the right people) is what’s needed.
But I think you’ll find that if you put either in power, they’ll make similar changes (at least on the libertarian to authoritarian spectrum), but they’ll both justify them as being “good.”
The problem, imo, isn’t with a specific ideology, but the self importance that causes them to openly push their political opinions in a setting where that just doesn’t apply, like a workplace. Unless you’re working in journalism where your political biases could impact your work output, it’s just not relevant.
public choice theory
At a certain point you trade market failures for government failures, or vice versa. The bigger a government gets, the more susceptible it is to special interests. The smaller it gets, the less effective it is at correcting market failures.
Libertarianism, to me, isn’t an end goal (there is no libertarian utopia), but a direction that attempts to solve problems with more liberty rather than less. Sometimes it’ll misstep, and sometimes it’ll look like the two major parties, but the approach is usually the same: how can we solve a given problem with more liberty rather than less.
And that’s the difference. Conservatives want to solve problems by preserving some set of values, and progressives want to solve problems by adding some new government service.
And yeah, there are a lot of questions to resolve, but they’ll be addressed from the perspective of liberty. Public choice is certainly one of those problems, and it’s at least partially resolved by libertarian paternalism, but again, it’s a process instead of a destination.
I think technical-minded people tend to gravitate towards libertarian ideologies because they tend to underestimate the importance of human relationships to large scale systems. You can see it in the stereotype of the lone programmer who dislikes commenting or documentation, collaboration with other programmers, and strongly negative views towards their own project managers or their company’s executives. They also tend to have a negative view of customers/users, and don’t really believe in spending too much time in user interfaces/experiences. They have a natural skepticism of interdependence, because that brings on extra social overhead they don’t particularly believe they need. So they tend to view the legal, political, and social world through that same lens, as well.
I think the modern world of software engineering has moved in a direction away from that, as code complexity has grown to the point where maintainability/documentation and collaborative processes have obvious benefit, visible up front, but you still see streaks of that in some personalities. And, as many age, they have some firsthand experience with projects that were technically brilliant but doomed due to financial/business reasons, or even social/regulatory reasons. The maturation of technical academic disciplines relating to design, user experience, architecture, maintainability, and security puts that “overhead” in a place that’s more immediate, so that they’re more likely to understand that the interdependence is part of the environment they must operate in.
A lot of these technical minded people then see the two-party system as a struggle between MBAs and Ph.Ds, neither of whom they actually like, and prefer that problems be addressed organically at the lowest possible level with the simplest, most elegant rules. I have some disagreements with the typical libertarians on what weight should be assigned to social consensus, political/economic feasibility, and elegant simplicity in policymaking, but I think I get where most of them are coming from.
I think you’re painting with too broad of a brush.
Libertarianism is a very large tent, and it includes a lot of people from both major parties that have decided to stick with one of the two so they don’t “throw their vote away.” I’m guessing you mostly have direct experience with one type of “libertarian,” and assume that because most of the libertarians you know fit a certain mold, that the majority of libertarians in the world fit that mold as well. It’s just like asking a Fox News viewer what liberals think, the sample will be quite biased.
On one extreme, you have libertarian socialists like Noam Chomsky who come from academia, and on the other end you have anarchocapitalists from an economics background like Murray Rothbard, and everything in between, as well as some even more extreme. What unifies them, broadly speaking, is a rejection of coercion.
And libertarianism absolutely relies on human relationships to function. Where it differs is that libertarians often disagree with the notion that a centralized government is the best way for those conversations to happen. Many libertarians prefer natural relationships like community organizations, businesses, and neighborhoods that are selected through competition and common interest vs other similar organizations. For example, instead of having one school system organized from the top down to give students an equal education, you could have multiple competing schools that parents and students can choose from, and the ones that parents and students prefer succeed and the others fail. The alternative is direct involvement of parents with the education system, which just ends up giving more power to the minority who have the time to get involved (i.e. probably not the type you’d want to get involved, at least in my experience). It’s a lot easier to switch schools than to try to effect change in a given school.
So libertarians generally believe that individuals should be allowed to make their own decisions instead of delegating to some central authority. To use your software development analogy, it’s the idea that people should cluster around projects that interest them instead of being grouped arbitrarily based on need. You’ll get a lot more out of someone that’s internally motivated than someone who is externally motivated.
Notice that your comment is framed from the perspective of what Libertarians believe, and analyzing from that context. Mine is different: analyzing a specific type of personality common in tech careers, and analyzing why that type of person tends to be much more receptive to libertarian ideas.
I’m familiar with libertarianism and its various schools/movements within that broader category. And I still think that many in that group tend to underappreciate issues of public choice, group behaviors, and how they differ from individual choice.
Coase’s famous paper, the Theory of the Firm, tries to bridge some of that tension, but it’s also just not hard to see how human association into groups lays on a spectrum of voluntariness, with many more social situations being more coercive than Libertarians tend to appreciate, and then also layering Coase’s observations about the efficiencies of association onto involuntary associations, too.
Then at that point you have a discussion about public choice theory, what the group owes to defectors or minority views or free riders within its group, what a group owes to others outside that group in terms of externalities, how to build a coalition within that framework of group choice, and then your nuanced position might have started as libertarianism but ends up looking a lot like mainstream political, social, and economic views, to the point where the libertarian label isn’t that useful.
Ok, I think I you’re saying that tech attracts self important people that self identify as libertarian.
The opposite is also true, in that it attracts self important people who self identify as socialists. Both think other people should follow their ideals because their ideals are obviously good for society. The difference is that the “libertarian” thinks they’ll get more of what they want with fewer rules, and the socialist thinks that more rules (and the right people) is what’s needed.
But I think you’ll find that if you put either in power, they’ll make similar changes (at least on the libertarian to authoritarian spectrum), but they’ll both justify them as being “good.”
The problem, imo, isn’t with a specific ideology, but the self importance that causes them to openly push their political opinions in a setting where that just doesn’t apply, like a workplace. Unless you’re working in journalism where your political biases could impact your work output, it’s just not relevant.
At a certain point you trade market failures for government failures, or vice versa. The bigger a government gets, the more susceptible it is to special interests. The smaller it gets, the less effective it is at correcting market failures.
Libertarianism, to me, isn’t an end goal (there is no libertarian utopia), but a direction that attempts to solve problems with more liberty rather than less. Sometimes it’ll misstep, and sometimes it’ll look like the two major parties, but the approach is usually the same: how can we solve a given problem with more liberty rather than less.
And that’s the difference. Conservatives want to solve problems by preserving some set of values, and progressives want to solve problems by adding some new government service.
And yeah, there are a lot of questions to resolve, but they’ll be addressed from the perspective of liberty. Public choice is certainly one of those problems, and it’s at least partially resolved by libertarian paternalism, but again, it’s a process instead of a destination.