Welcome

Welcome to the Pretense of Knowledge! I started this blog primarily for my own benefit – to organize my thoughts and polish my writing – but I hope you will find something interesting to read here as well. The main focus of most posts will be on economics, but I also plan to write on politics, philosophy, and occasionally throw in a couple posts on sports and entertainment.

Since my site shares its title with F.A. Hayek’s Nobel Prize speech, you may have already guessed that I approach most topics from a Hayekian libertarian perspective. If you don’t know what that means, here or here might be a good place to start (and if you’re feeling more adventurous try this). Essentially, it means that I won’t be voting for either Clinton or Trump in November. It means that I think markets work well most of the time and that when they don’t the government still tends to make things worse. And it means that I think the American military is about five times larger than necessary, that we should be knocking down walls rather than building new ones, and that politicians shouldn’t have anything to do with what you do in your bedroom or what you put into your body.

But besides paying my respects to Hayek, the title “the pretense of knowledge” has a deeper meaning for this blog. In his speech, Hayek criticized the arrogance of economists who believed that their knowledge was so great that they could make numerical predictions with accuracy comparable to the physical sciences. Instead, he urged the social scientist to recognize the “insuperable limits to his knowledge.” In my writing I will attempt to adhere to that philosophy. I have no doubt that a large proportion of the ideas I present turn out to be totally wrong and I fully expect in two years (or two months) I will look back on my early posts in disgust. So if you disagree with something I say, tell me why in the comments and try to keep an open mind. Hopefully, we will be able to learn from each other.

Over the next couple days I will have posts coming out about Hayek’s economics, about why 2016 is the best year yet, and about free will vs determinism. I also plan to do a series of posts criticizing modern macroeconomics and will likely have some smaller posts as well.

Thanks for reading!

Chris