Progress Makes Genius Routine
We forget about one of the great advantages of intellectual progress, namely, that people of above-average intelligence can perform better than geniuses did a century earlier.
Think of a graduate of MIT or CalTech today. I do not mean somebody with a Ph.D. I mean somebody with a bachelor's degree. He is better at physics than Sir Isaac Newton ever was. That is because he stands on the shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of Isaac Newton.
Furthermore, Newton was something of a gadfly. He spent a large percentage of his adult life studying alchemy, which was totally wasted time.
It is not just that we stand on the shoulders of giants. We stand on the shoulders of above-average practitioners, too. And we have better tools.
If someone with the intelligence of Newton were to get a degree out of CalTech or MIT, he would be phenomenal. He would make breakthroughs of all kinds. That is true of geniuses in all periods of time. You never know when they are going to show up. You do not know what they are going to accomplish. They will probably be opposed by conventional scholars. These people show up unexpectedly, and then they disappear, with no one comparable to them appearing for a generation or more.
What I am talking about is the above-average practitioner. Because of intellectual progress, and especially because of the division of intellectual labor, it is possible for above-average performers to perform at levels undreamed of by a genius a century or more in the past. What conventional people do as a matter of routine, some genius probably would have been unable to do a century earlier. In certain fields, such as chemistry and genetics, a practitioner prior to 1865 would not have been able to do the work at all.
This is why intellectual progress is such an extraordinary benefit to us. We live off of the moral capital that has been accumulated for over 20 centuries. Then there is the intellectual capital of the last 550 years: post-Gutenberg. Then there is the technological capital of the last 200 years: machines, highways, metallurgy, chemistry, electronics, and so forth. Technological progress is now increasing exponentially.
With a simple computer program that almost anybody can afford, people of above-average intelligence and a graduate school education can perform certain kinds of research and analyses beyond anything possible to a genius 40 years ago. It does not even take much creativity. All it takes is the ability to make certain kinds of intellectual connections, and then the statistical tools to evaluate these connections.
Basically, what we see today is this: the level of performance keeps increasing, but the level of intelligence does not. Genius is always in short supply. But with the spread of communications technology, the ability of geniuses to identify those areas in which they are geniuses, and in which they could make a significant difference, is getting cheaper all the time. That is why we are seeing this exponentially factor in technological progress. This is going to increase as the cost of access to the web decreases in Asia. This economic law is true: when the price drops, more is demanded. Geniuses will not be hidden in obscurity in rural villages in 20 years. They may stay in their villages; they will not be hidden there. The web will give the world access to their genius. Above-average performers will be able to stand on their shoulders faster than ever before in history.
MY ADVANTAGES OVER HAZLITT
Consider my book, Christian Economics in One Lesson. If you compare its early chapters with Hazlitt's early chapters in Economics in One Lesson, mine are better. They are clearer. They get to the point analytically a lot faster. Why should this be? Because Hazlitt in 1946 had not read Human Action, which did not get published until 1949. Hazlitt in 1946 had not read the works of Murray Rothbard, who was 21 years old at the time.
Hazlitt had read and absorbed one essay, above all other essays: Bastiat's 1850 essay on the things seen in the things not seen. In that essay, written in the year of his death, he offered the metaphor of the broken window. That metaphor empowered Hazlitt analytically in a way never seen before in popular economic literature. Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson is superior to anything Bastiat ever wrote. Bastiat made the initial breakthrough, but it took over 95 years for somebody else to put the pieces together. Hazlitt was a gifted expositor, and he was able to put the pieces together. Nobody else had done this before. This is what makes his book so remarkable. The initial breakthrough was even more remarkable, but for almost a century, nobody picked it up and ran with it. Hazlitt did.
There is the genius of initial creativity, but there is another kind of genius: the genius of application. Hazlitt possessed this second form of genius. By the time he wrote his book, he had been applying economic principles to real-world events for a quarter century. He was a master expositor of economics. He was able to communicate with the intelligent layman. There was nobody else like him in 1946. He was the right man at the right time with the right idea. He also was given six weeks to write his book.
I am a much faster writer than Hazlitt was. I can write a chapter in about three hours. If my schedule works out as planned, I will produce a comparable book, although somewhat longer, in about 75 hours. That is about a week and a half. It took Hazlitt six weeks. The advantages I have are these: I have his book in front of me; I have read Human Action twice; and I have read all of Murray Rothbard's books on economic theory and monetary theory. If I were not better than Hazlitt at this point, I would be a slacker.
I also have a cookie-cutter to use: the five-point model that Ray Sutton offered in his book, That You May Prosper (1987). That makes my work much easier. It also makes the readers' work much easier.
Rothbard would have told you that Mises was a better economist than he was. But Mises was not a better writer than Rothbard was. Rothbard was far more widely read than Mises was. Mises did not pay much attention to the world of footnotes; Rothbard was prodigious in his accumulation of footnotes. He had a much broader knowledge of history than Mises had. This is especially evident in his two-volume history of economic thought. There is nothing else out there to rival it, including Joseph Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis. Rothbard wrote that book before Wikipedia.
GENIUS SUPERSEDED
Intellectual progress makes intelligent people geniuses in retrospect. They can do greater things than the geniuses of a century before. In a field like genetics, it lets the average geneticist do things that a genius half a century before could not have dreamed of.
Genius is always going to be in short supply, unless there is some major technological breakthrough that affects the production of geniuses. But as the number of people grows, the number of geniuses also grows. As the technology of applied genius grows, the performance of conventional specialists will begin to resemble the genius of a generation earlier.
There is a downside to this. One of them is the familiar one, namely, that wisdom does not accumulate in an exponential fashion. It barely accumulates in a linear fashion. There is no college curriculum that increases the supply of wisdom. Even if there were, there would not be much demand for it. Nobody offers a Ph.D. in wisdom.
There is another downside: the realization that you are going to be superseded, no matter how sharp you are. Some conventional practitioner with better tools in 20 years is going to make your production look pathetic. Mises' peer and correspondent, Max Weber, put it well in his 1917 lecture, "Science as a Vocation."
In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years. That is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work, to which it is devoted in a quite specific sense, as compared with other spheres of culture for which in general the same holds. Every scientific 'fulfilment' raises new 'questions'; it asks to be 'surpassed' and outdated. Whoever wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this fact. Scientific works certainly can last as 'gratifications' because of their artistic quality, or they may remain important as a means of training. Yet they will be surpassed scientifically--let that be repeated--for it is our common fate and, more, our common goal. We cannot work without hoping that others will advance further than we have. In principle, this progress goes on ad infinitum. And with this we come to inquire into the meaning of science. For, after all, it is not self-evident that something subordinate to such a law is sensible and meaningful in itself. Why does one engage in doing something that in reality never comes, and never can come, to an end?I read that sometime around 1968. I never forgot it. I recommend that you not forget it.
INHERITANCE
If there is no inheritance, than what we do seems irrational. We sacrifice to the future, but the future will supersede us. It will make our work look mediocre in retrospect. We probably will not even be remembered. Every generation has faced this, but not every generation has faced the rate of technological and intellectual progress that we are experiencing today. We will be superseded so much sooner than ever before.
If there is no personal legacy beyond the grave, then the pursuit of progress does seem misguided. Our children may inherit, but then they will be superseded. Instead of our world being on top of an elephant, and elephant on top of the turtle, with turtles all the way down, we live on a linear treadmill into oblivion.
If we do not believe in the idea of progress, which means the idea of meaningful inheritance in history, then we really will be like hamsters in the cage. The wheel will consume us.
Is there a final inheritance? Or is our future ultimately going to be consumed in the frozen heat death of the universe? The latter outcome was H. G. Wells' vision in The Time Machine (1885). It finally consumed him in his final book, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945).