107 — How to Organise Complex Societies? A Conversation with Johan Norberg

This episode fits perfectly into my longer-lasting quest to understand complex societies and how to handle it. I am thrilled about the opportunity to have a conversation with Johan Norberg. The title of our conversation is: How to organise complex societies?

Johan Norberg is a bestselling author of multiple books, historian of ideas and senior fellow at the Cato Institute. I read his last two books, Open, The Story of Human Progress and The Capitalist Manifesto. Both are excellent books, I can highly recommend. We will discuss both books in the wider bracket of the challenge how to handle complex societies.

The main question we discuss is, how can we handle complex societies? Which approaches work, give people opportunity, freedom and wealth, and which do not work. The question can be inverted too: When systems are more complex, is also more control and commands needed, or the opposite?

»The more complex the society, the less it can be organised—the more complex society gets, the more simple rules we need.«

Knowledge and power behave differently, as Tom Sowell puts it:

“It's much easier to concentrate power than knowledge.”

The consequence seems to be:

“If we centralise power we loose knowledge”

We talk about the historic background of the idea of liberty, for instance John Stewart Mills On liberty, Friedrich Hayek Road to Serfdom. Did we lose our desire for liberty? The Austrian philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann observes:

“Dass das Volk nicht herrschen kann, sondern erzogen, belehrt, bevormundet und mehr oder weniger sanft in die richtige Richtung gedrängt werden soll, ist überall spürbar. Die ubiquitäre pädagogische Sprache ist verräterisch.”

“The fact that the people cannot rule, but are to be educated, instructed, patronised and more or less gently pushed in the right direction, can be felt everywhere. The ubiquitous pedagogical language is treacherous.”

How then, should we think about liberty and responsibility? 

“There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”, P. J. O'Rourke.

That might be an uncomfortable truth for some, though. Freedom has consequences and responsibilities! The trend of the last decades points to a different direction. Every minute detail seems to be regulated by someone who allegedly knows better:

“Large projects are essentially illegal in California and in Europe”, Elon Musk

The consequence is, as I have discussed in previous episodes, stagnation since many decades. Follow the links below to other episodes. Now, did we become an old, risk-averse, dying society? This would not be good news because: 

“With innovation comes the risk of failure”

And the uncomfortable truth is: Our desire to reduce risks might actually increase risks. 

“If we are saying that we should not accept anything until it is perfectly safe, that’s the most unsafe and risky bet we could do.”

How can we muddle out of this mess?

“Nothing comes from a committee, nothing from a single genius fully developed. Innovation comes from a process of experiments, trial and error, feedback and adaptation, changes and more people getting involved.” 

There is no such thing as an immaculate conception of a new technology.

But what about volatility? Is volatility a risk? For whom? The individual, society? Is societal risk decreasing when we reduce volatility? 

What does Johan mean by openness, and why is it Important?

“Openness for me means openness to surprises. This is the only way for societies to thrive and function long term. […] Historically, life was nasty, brutish, and short. We need new things. We need new knowledge, new technological capacity and wealth.”

So why did the industr