Concrete Liberalism: What Hayekian “Policy” Looks Like

This was written as an entry into the GMU Economics Department’s Hayek Essay Contest for 2018.

In Economical Writing, Deirdre McCloskey advises economists to explain their concepts in the concrete before the abstract.  It is much easier to describe the process of buying less expensive fruit than to walk through the mathematical steps in deriving a demand curve.  Classical liberalism suffers from a lack of concreteness. Our terms are open-ended, vague, and far from particular. Freedom of speech, property rights, and free markets can mean too many things to count.  On the other hand, progressive and conservative terminology is far more tangible. Social welfare programs, military initiatives, regulations on the market, and drug prohibition are clear, identifiable actions from which the government or any populace can evaluate, debate, and conclude upon the best course of action.  Why should we feel compelled to give credence to one’s abstract right to property when alternative concrete solutions appear to afford more justice?

The case is made often that we already tried a classical liberal utopia, but when the robber barons, pollution, and racial injustice proved it faulty, we wised up and implemented the proper reforms.  Today, we seem to be doing well despite the interventions; both market and military. The modern world stands on the shoulders of unprecedented material enrichment over the past 200 years, but few ask the question of how we reached our current state and whether or not things could turn back.  Nazi Germany and the USSR are examples of when the world flirted with such disaster, but those are often dismissed as anomalies, weird events that couldn’t possibly happen to us. It is uncomfortable to consider that the citizens of those countries could not imagine the horrors that awaited them five years in advance, nor did they recognize what kept those horrors at bay for so long.  

The liberal case, especially that of Hayek, is a hard pill to swallow.  Rather than outlining our problems and prescribing solutions, he analyzes the way that problems get solved and lets people know that they can’t go about solving them that way.  To the typical legislative-minded activist he is incredibly frustrating. Every policy that would be proposed to Hayek is shooed away rather than having an argument for why another policy is superior.  Politicians, voters, and political thinkers can’t process Hayek because he only gives half a standard argument. He tells someone why they can’t centrally plan, but doesn’t offer a clear preferred policy.  His philosophy is seen as hopelessly pessimistic. “We have to try something!” the crowd will lament. “Even if there are problems with central planning, I don’t want to give up all hope!” Peter Boettke describes the economist that views themself as a savior and has Hayek’s epistemic modesty to be a frustrated engineer.1  Most observers think that frustrated engineers are what Hayek wants us to be: engineers of the economy whose hands are tied because we aren’t allowed to make assumptions, or we don’t have enough information.  His real point is that the emergent orders that we should not chain up are reliant on not being meddled with to survive. We shouldn’t see ourselves as saviors, but to turn to other forces of change. They are the real locus of progress, and we should treat them as such.

Many people miss the nuances of Hayek’s argument because of their limited view of what passes for methods of societal change.  Basic civics classes teach that the democratic process is used to issue legislation to solve problems. We just need to be careful that we write good legislation.  Hayek recognizes that the vast majority of meaningful events in history were not big power moves by governments, but the spontaneous and emergent orders that result from human action.  These are things like the family, the culture, the church, and the market. Spontaneous order doesn’t fit into the civics class set of possible solutions. If anything it’s seen as the source of problems.  Inefficiencies and inequalities come from the uncontrolled, selfish, and non-democratic processes of the market. The benefit of the market is taken for granted as the product of something else like technology or industrial efficiency.  Rights are only offered to the market to further private interests, and legislation remains to balance public against public (they are rarely considered mutually beneficial). I believe Hayek’s case would appeal much more to the general population if they were given concrete examples of legislative central planning failing, spontaneous order succeeding as an alternative, and what the classical liberal forward vision looks like.  

Political commentators are never hesitant to criticize government programs when they clearly do fail.  The recovery effort after Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the TSA just to name a few.  After the standard news reporter does describe what went wrong in a situation, their lament is not that the government overstepped their bounds but that their own favored policy was not implemented instead.  The question is rarely about whether the government should be in the business of prescribing solutions to problems.

Hayek does not deny the necessity and relevance of plans and endeavors towards human betterment.  “All economic activity is in this sense planning; and in any society in which many people collaborate, this planning, whoever does it, will in some measure have to be based on knowledge which, in the first instance, is not given to the planner but to somebody else, which somehow will have to be conveyed to the planner”.  What he does deny is the requirement that these plans be centrally managed as if there was a small group of people who held all the relevant information, economic, technological, and moral.  

Hayek’s case so far is a negative case against government planning, but this doesn’t offer alternatives.  Typical commentators would still be looking for a policy to fix the problem. As I stated earlier, the market is both seen as a source of problems and the benefits of the market process are taken for granted.  Frederic Bastiat famously inquired how the entire city of Paris was fed?  Through a seemingly impossible task, the market process was able to coordinate goods and services to the right people at the right time.  The policy analyst might admit that the market process was able to feed Paris, but they still see a market economy that produces inequalities and inefficiencies and claim that there must be better states of affair.

In this sense, they treat the market like a policy itself.  The supposed outcomes of the policy are only the things that we’ve seen the market produce in the past.  Does adding a marginal unit of “market” increase or decrease social welfare? Even free market advocates sometimes only are such because they believe that the market is the best policy.  The truth of what makes the market successful is not its policy design or the incentives it creates, but the process that unfolds in the absence of intervention. Hayek’s positive argument for the market was that the price system does a lot of the work that a central planner cannot.  It relayed information about scarcity and desire in a way impossible for any central authority to understand.

To describe this process, I want to turn to the work of Israel Kirzner.  Kirzner’s book Competition and Entrepreneurship sees the economy, not as a set of equilibrium states shifted by exogenous change, but as a process spearheaded by the entrepreneur.  A Kirznerian approach (or an Austrian one for that matter), treats the economy as if it is not at a final resting point that can only be shifted by shocks such as public policy.  Instead of in equilibrium, the economy is in various states of disequilibrium. There are yet unexploited opportunities that entrepreneurs can realize and exploit. Does this mean that the ideas of entrepreneurs are always good?  Certainly not. But allowing the attempt is a necessary prerequisite to not just making a profit, but gaining knowledge about the world at all.

Philosopher and psychologist William James made the claim that “a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.”  Applied to the theory of entrepreneurship, intervention in the economy might be this sort of irrational rule.  It prevents entrepreneurs from discovering the truths that are underlying the proper kinds of action we want to find in the world.  The pursuit of truth is then not at all separate from the pursuit of morality; our ises and our oughts. Not all entrepreneurial discoveries are the right ones to make, but we trust in other institutions and the self-interest of the entrepreneur to guide us closer to the truth through action.  Perhaps the role of the government comes in here, but that is not the point I want to make.

Establishing the prerequisites for discovery is the classical liberal policy I’ve been alluding to.  Our forward-looking policy is the endeavors of the entrepreneur, whatever those may be. The market is the non-policy of getting out of the way of the real solution, the ideas of entrepreneurs.  This generation has begun to see entrepreneurs as the way forward through individuals like Elon Musk. He is attempting a trip to Mars because he has realized it as a profitable venture, not because it is politically expedient.  The market let him know what the most efficient routes of obtaining his goal were. He remained aware and seized the best opportunity when it came.

The vagueness of the liberal policy is hard to communicate but necessary to its accuracy.  The not-knowing aspect is intended to reflect the inherent lack of ability in humans to truly understand the conditions that create the world around them.  It’s not intended to breed pessimism. Its purpose is to establish the real kind of responsibility to the truth that those who want to change the world have to undergo.  If humanism is the idea that humans can change the world for the better, then Hayek advocates having humility before we can even try humanism. It would be like trying to absolve humans of sin by pretending we never left the garden of Eden.  The entrepreneur is a kind of figure who takes into account the responsibility of following truths because they are motivated by the need for concrete success not hopeful idealism. Those who want to change the world for the better have to realize all of the personal moral responsibility and humility that comes with doing it right.

 

Works Cited:

  1. Boettke, Peter J. Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. The Independent Institute, 2012., 331
  2. Hayek, F.A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” In Individualism and Economic Order, 77-91. Auburn, Ala: Ludwig von Mises Institute. 2009
  3. Bastiat, Frédéric. “There Are No Absolute Principles” in Economic Sophisms- First Series in The Bastiat Collection (Auburn, Ala: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007,) 271-274
  4. Kirzner, Israel M., Peter J. Boettke, and Frédéric Sautet. Competition and Entrepreneurship. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2013.
  5. James, William. “The Will to Believe.” New World, June 1896.

Image from http://www.altarandthrone.com/category/market/economics/spontaneous-order/

Game Over? – The Economics of Video Game Death

My father, being a casual video game player, will occasionally spectate my endeavors into virtual realms.  Being interested in game design he will on occasion comment on my game, usually ridiculing it and very rarely praising it.  One particular gripe that he has had with many games is in the respawn function in which your character can die and then continue the game.  Compared to the arcade games that he would have played back in the 80s, the consequences of failure or death in a video game is no longer a simple and blunt GAME OVER.  Players are just slapped on the wrist with a loading screen and then plopped back perhaps a few steps.  Essentially, games with narratives are just models of plots in which the players provide some of the exogenous variables as I discussed in my article on Economics and Plot Vol 3.  Various models of death have significant impacts of both artistic importance and in the construction of a solid game without plot holes.  

 

To start we could categorize game death models into two categories.  The first being permadeath, and the second being some sort of respawn.  Permadeath would entail that once the game has decided that you have died, then the game ends and you must start over from the beginning.  This would be similar to the arcade games of my father’s era.  A respawn would not make the player begin the game again, but would bring the player back at some checkpoint or when they last saved.  Most games today function this way.  Perhaps because most games are in the home rather than a quarter a play.  Respawns can be brought down to two additional categories as well.  One being the in-game universe respawn and the other being the out of universe respawn.  In-universe respawns give an explanation in the story of why the player can continue playing after death.  Out of universe respawns merely let the player continue from a checkpoint or their last save.  There are of course some games that fall in between these respawns and permadeath, so they are not all-encompassing.  Some examples would be Super Mario Bros. and Contra where they have a respawn model until the player runs out of lives.  The permadeath model is fairly self-explanatory and now mostly out of date so I will focus on the respawn model.  

One of the most important features of any game is the separation of knowledge between the player and the character they are meant to represent.  Both Skyrim and Diablo have respawn models.  In Skyrim, the player respawns at the last save.  In Diablo, the player respawns at the last town (checkpoint).  If a player is in a Skyrim dungeon and dies, they will now replay the area on the path to their quest between the save and the location of death.  Since the path will be the exact same that was just experienced, the player then has knowledge that the character does not lead them to make decisions that would disrupt the coherence of the plot, damaging both the player’s experience and the artistic integrity of the game.  In Diablo (or my preferred clone, Path of Exile) each dungeon or area is randomly generated every time that the player goes through.  If the player dies and re-enters the zone, the player and character have the same amount of information with roughly the same difficulty.  If the player is meant to represent the choices of the character then their knowledge must match to allow the game to maintain a coherent series of events.  

 

Subsequently, it becomes quite difficult for the game designer to construct a story that surrounds their death model.  The Skyrim or “Last Save” model can be copied into most stories quite easily, but the Diablo model might be quite difficult.  A game I have found to have a quite good integration of the death model and the lore is the MOBA SMITE.  In Smite, you play as one of the gods of ancient mythology battling it out over various eternal battlegrounds.  When you die, there is a penalty period depending on the strength of your character, and then you respawn at your team’s base.  This makes total sense in the context of deities fighting with one another as they are presumed to be immortal.  The epic saga Bioshock respawns the character in a nearby Vita-Chamber which were apparently reincarnation tools used by the crazed residents of Rapture. However, you still lose the bullets that you used before you died, so there really is no complete do-overs.  The popular FPS Counterstrike also takes a hard line as opposed to its
counterpart Call of Duty in that a death is a death.  There are no respawns until the next round.  This has led to Counterstrike having a much more respected competitive community than COD, but that might have to do with the target demographic for both games.

 

In conclusion, video games, like any other narrative art form, is to some degree subject to economic law.  The player-character dichotomy can likely be further studied and the split is almost reminiscent of the classic problem of mind-body interaction that plagued the modern philosophers.  However, in this case, it becomes a problem that the mind knows more than the body ever experienced, and can reincarnate itself after the body has already died.  Spooky.  The death problem and other player-character problems hopefully will inspire game designers in the future to get ever more creative with their stories and break new ground in the art form of the future.

Photo Credit: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/votpmwC25Ek/hqdefault.jpg

Jean Baptiste Colbert: The Rise and Fall of Mercantilism

This is a short video that I did for my AP Euro class last year. Again thanks to Mr. McCauley.  It’s on the topic of mercantilism and particularly the policies and ideology of Jean-Baptiste Colbert.  This is the first upload to theeconplayground youtube channel so be sure to subscribe to that as well.

RE: Does Technology Lead to an Existential Crisis?

I recently ran across a post on /r/philosophy by /u/_pseudointellectual that I couldn’t help but respond to.

The thread has since been removed, but you can read the original posters thoughts here.

There has been a lot of buzz in the tech community for some time now about the impending robotic revolution. This, for the most part, hasn’t bothered me, progress is progress. But I recently stumbled across this video on r/all and near the end, Elon Musk raises an extremely interesting question about meaning in life.

Now, this isn’t a post in which I want to start a discussion on our meaning (or lack of) in life. I’m interested in exploring the soon to be realities of those who don’t bother to even question existence but merely ‘get on with it‘ as if it’s a chore. Because this is a place we’ve gotten to in our modern capitalist society. Living, for a lot of people, has become almost a burdensome routine which main focus is situated on employment. So, what happens when those people lose their jobs?

Assuming Musk is right, that a Universal income is implemented and we end up having an almost socialist-like society; the majority of humanity being supported by a Government of some kind. Will this push people into an existential crisis? And possibly even be the cause of many suicides? A situation like this brings us all back to that wonderful -and albeit overused- Camus quote “there is but only one serious philosophical question and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy”.

Of course, as someone with a keen interest in philosophy, this prospect does in some ways delight me, I’m also struck with a chord of sadness for those that simply do not want to confront this reality yet.

What happens when people don’t know what to do with themselves?


EDIT: Also, what would this do to educational institutions? Will people bother getting an education anymore? How about business ventures, if the majority of the world has the same individual amount of wealth and that will suffice, does that entail mass apathy?

My response:

I can speak from an economic lens as that’s what I study, but it does have philosophical importance.

In the past, the economic importance of human labor was mostly the physical aspect and we were all employed with physical labor. i.e. farming, hunting, building

As those got pushed away due to technology, we shifted to a service economy. Most people today are employed providing some sort of often mental service to others. Financial advice, medical advice, being a philosopher, being an economist, writing, and organizing various aspects of society.

Some of these will be replaced by technology again if technology can produce as good or greater output at the same or lower cost. If we employ technology to it’s utmost peak we will be left doing things that robots can never do. Theoretically these things will be those concerned with what is unique to human experience manifesting themselves in art and creativity. This leads to a creativity economy instead of the manual labor economy or the service economy. Kevin Kelly said on an episode of the freakonomics podcast that the last job that robots will take from us is comedy.

As to your question on educational institutions, there are two perspectives on their utility relative to production. One that they grant us skills that we can use, and second that the fact that we have a degree or any form of educational accreditation is information for others to use in deciding if they want to hire us or relate their own choices to us in some way. However, education may also be consumed in the sense that if education is a value on its own, it will be pursued regardless of productive utility. Both this consumption use and possibly the second productive use of education will still exist post-AI totality.

How’d I do? Other thoughts? Thoughts on basic income?

 

Photo Credit to http://www.chilloutpoint.com/featured/human-and-robots-visions-of-the-future.html

METALLICultural Costs

When I firstMetallica Concert listened to Metallica it changed my life.  Before a certain point I would have told someone that asked about my musical tastes that I outright didn’t like music.  After Metallica, and the subsequent dive headfirst into headbangerdom I would proudly call myself a metal-head.  Recently, Metallica released a new album, Hardwired…To Self Destruct, so I thought it appropriate to write about an idea that I got from experiencing Metallica myself and delving deeper into the history of thrash metal culture.  What makes Metallica, thrash, and metal unique to other more popular genres of music is that the music is directly tied to a greater culture, and that culture incurs certain costs.  Metallica just so happened to be born in the right place at the right time.  

Firstly, we need to actually define what a culture is.  The way I want to organize this is by designating culture to a special kind of utility.  Cultural utility is unique from other kinds of utility in that cultural utility is the satisfaction gained from a good or activity because it is shared with others.  You cannot have culture with only one person.  On my own, I can listen to Metallica in my room or in the car, but at that moment I am not gaining cultural utility.  The cultural utility of Metallica comes when I go to a concert, or when I talk to a fellow fan and we share the bond that the music creates.  A more grounded example would be with the way that we use the road.  If there were no other cars on the road, driving on the left or right side, would be largely indifferent to most people.  However, since the road is usually filled with many cars, the cultural utility of us all driving on the right is great as it prevents accidents.  None of us really have ever made the explicit choice to drive on the right side, but the government recognizes that a law like enforcing driving on the right provides cultural utility.  

So with every culture, there are two necessary costs.  One is the cost of producing that specific good or service which is shared.  The other, since we’re dealing with multiple people in culture, is communication or transaction costs.  So if either one of these two costs is high, a culture may have a difficult time taking root, and when they are low new cultures have the opportunity to spring up.  The most basic example of communication and transaction costs being low is when people live very close to each other.  It’s not too hard to yell at someone across the street, or to make a short distance phone call.  This is often why we like to think of cultures in terms of ethnicity or country.

Now that we have this theory, we can apply it to Metallica and the Bay Area Thrash culture.  Thrash metal bands are known for mostly coming out of the San Francisco Bay area, but Metallica actually originated in Los Angeles.  Los Angeles was saturated by glam metal bands, which were the opposite of everything that Metallica stood for.  However, record labels would only pick up glam bands, as they were the ones who made the money.  Thrash bands didn’t have a way to produce their music on a massive scale.  However, during this time the costs of recording studio equipment were falling, and a new record label Megaforce Records popped up to sign Metallica.  The still prevalent Metal Blade Records opened to sign other bands like Slayer.  The recording costs in this case are the same as the costs of producing the shared good, the music.

But only producing music would not have created the cultural explosion that it did.  It needed an easy way to communicate.  For thrash, it was cassette tapes and metal magazines.  Cassette tapes allowed thrash fans to easily reproduce the music and spread it to friends anywhere in the world.  Magazines allowed them to talk to each other, and consolidate information on bands such as tour-dates or album releases.  These both contributed to the ease with which the thrash culture was able to grow, and how Metallica was able to be as dynamic and wild as they were when they finally reached San Francisco.

So thrash was built on the backs of not only talented musicians, but savvy entrepreneurs who built the thrash metal culture and studios, tapes, and magazines.  There may be out there cultures who are not dependent on communication costs or the costs of producing the cultural good.  If you can think of any more interesting examples that either confirm of break this theory, leave a comment. Regardless, Metallica is still super metal. \m/

Photo from http://marklange.typepad.com/blitzkrieg/2013/08/metallica-returns-after-20-years.html

Information from Metal Evolution Episode 6: Thrash

Exclusive Interview with a Candy Market Broker

I haven’t yet mentioned my career before starting this website, but I used to work for my family’s candybroking business in the BMCE (Bryn Mawr Candy Exchange).  Today I conducted an interview with a close associate of mine from my candybroking days, my sister, Miriam Shera.

Q: So Miriam, How have you been?

A: I’m doing fine.  Our parents have been doing fine. They’re still alive. They want you to call more.  

Q: Can you discuss the unusual spikes in price that occurred in the mid-Fall quarter of the candy market.

A: It’s referred to as the All Hallow’s eve effect.  Our market analysts have been unable to explain why it occurs only that it is a constant trend in late October, in which suburban candy demand skyrockets as a result of costumed marauders threatening locals with a war chant of “Trick or Treat”.  The demand here is really one for security.

Q: Can you describe these costumed marauders?

A: They seem to wear a wide variety of costumes making it unable to track their origin.  Costumes tend to focus around figures in popular culture or more traditionally horror themed.  Some of them seem to be nonthreatening, but since there is no way to know where they come from, no one is willing to take the risk.  They seem to be attracted to pumpkins like moths to a light, and some have had success at deterring gangs by merely turning their house lights off.

Q: How does this affect your candy trading?

A: Honestly, it gives us a big boost.  This period is consistently a bull market as most candy firms tend to raise their prices to adjust for the newfound utility of candy, crime deterrence.  Many insurance companies also subsidize candy buying in order to prevent having to pay for property damages.

Q: This season have there been any particular trends that you noticed.

A: There are a few industry standards such as the consistent success that candies like Kit-Kats and Snickers have, but this year we were willing to take a risk and invest in Almond Joy.

Q: Has anything come of that?

A: I can’t reveal too much information, but it appears to have been somewhat of a bubble as a majority of the stock that we accumulated inexplicably disappeared after the bag was left open near Dad’s desk.  

Q: Other than that how profitable have you been this year?

A: We’re weighing in at about 1500g of sugar, up from our down round last quarter.

Q: Where is the market going as you see it?

A: Two words.  Fun Size.  

Q: Is there any advice that you have for prospective candybrokers?

A: You really need to know the products you’re working with.  You can’t make in this business without getting your hands sticky.  And you have to be prepared just because you’re on a sugar high doesn’t mean the sugar crash isn’t coming soon.  

Credit to David Shera for the idea.

Can Philosophy be Specialized?

I’m better than you at X, and you’re better than me at Y.  This seems fairly intuitive, but is a really important concept in economics called the Law of Comparative Advantage.  Basically, if I engage in X I’m giving up less productive time in engaging in Y, and if you engage in Y you’re giving up less productive time in engaging in X.  It’s a bit more complicated than the way that I describe it here, but that’s another lesson for another time.  The important thing is that this results in the phenomenon that we call specialization or the division of labor.  These are things in the economy that most people take for granted such as the fact that there are certain people who specialize in medical work and we call them doctors, and there are those of us who specialize baking cakes and we call them bakers.  The division of labor makes people more productive, and therefore people have an incentive to behave in this way making specialization a cornerstone of our economy.

 

There are certain things that might pose a problem to the productive efficiency of specialization.  Perhaps, some things, if specialized, lose a part of their value.  When you specialize you are placing the production process upon someone else.  So are there goods that derive a part of their value from the production process?  When we engage in creating an idea, the production process is the various logical gates or hoops that must be jumped through to come up with a valid idea.  In the case of philosophy, a philosophical idea is produced when one creates a set of proofs that have true premises and a valid argument which would lead to a true conclusion.  To understand what makes this good valuable, we need to consider why anyone would engage in producing a philosophical idea.  If it is only so that they have the final product, the conclusion of the argument, to guide their actions buy, then anyone could go to the philosophy store and pick up a package of conclusions to valid arguments. However, this isn’t entirely true.  A large portion of the reason that we engage in philosophy is not only to know what conclusions to act by, but also to understand the process by which they are arrived at in order to make ourselves feel more secure on the conclusions that we live by.

 

“Believing things on authority only means believing them because you’ve been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I haven’t seen it myself. I couldn’t prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place.”      

-C.S. Lewis

 

Taking things on authority is not a bad idea as Lewis states, but just because it is okay to believe people in whom you trust does not mean that this is true of all ideas at every level.  If Immanuel Kant was to approach me today and tell me that I should not murder, am I now to trust him and not murder?  My trust in him is based mostly on the fact that he is well established and reputable philosopher, and many people revere his work so I can trust that his argument behind “Thou shalt not murder” is sound.  If I live my entire life based on true conclusions of philosophical arguments, one could say that I am acting morally, but did I gain the full utility of philosophy?  

 

A large reason that we can’t take philosophical conclusions based purely on authority is that in the real world, even if a philosopher is reputable they may be wrong, and we want to do our own proofreading of their argument.  There are many opposing conclusions out there, and we need to do our own processing of the arguments behind each to figure out which one we believe to be most true.  If we were to take a conclusion based purely on authority than we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to a situation where another conclusion is proposed to the problem we are trying to solve by an equally reputable source as our previously held conclusion, but since we cannot tell the difference between the validity of either argument we are left in a philosophical limbo where we now have less knowledge than we had before.

 

Does this mean that philosophy cannot be specialized?  Let’s imagine a world in which no philosophy is specialized.  Everyone does their own philosophical proofs starting from cogito ergo sum.  This would take incredibly large amounts of time, and if every person was to do all of the other activities of their life in addition to creating their own philosophy then no one would get very far in life, philosophy or otherwise.

 

In real life, we have come to a consensus.  The kind of specialized philosophy that I have been describing could be called perfectly specialized philosophy, in which there are designated people called philosophers who produce a philosophical conclusion which are accepted on authority and directly applied to the life of the consumer for an ambiguous amount of utility.  In reality philosophy is specialized, but not to this perfect degree.  The philosopher creates arguments and conclusions and puts them into the world for people to either accept or to criticize and modify to something that they believe is more accurate to live by.  Perfectly specialized philosophy may occasionally create individuals who do the morally correct thing, but it does not give the consumers the personal comfort of additional confidence in the good they are using nor does it allow them to distinguish from other philosophical ideas.  

 

To put this into more economic terms, we could consider the perfectly specialized philosopher to produce consumer goods.  The philosophical conclusions are the part of philosophy that we directly apply to our actions so that we derive more utility from our life.  People cannot really choose an action based on its actual utility, but act on how much utility they expect to gain from it.  A philosophical conclusion in and of itself does not communicate to its adherent how much utility they might gain from it.  Therefore, what the real life imperfectly specialized philosopher does is create the various productive such as factors and relevant premises that they analyze and organize for their followers to produce conclusions from themselves. At the very least they show the entire process, and allow the public to understand and consume them at some degree.  
So in fact many things that seemed perfectly specialized may in fact not be.  Even the baker who makes the cake to the very end does not lift the fork to the diners mouth.  The basic Law of Comparative Advantage still holds true in light of the productive complications that philosophy holds.  There are those of us who are better at engaging in the activities that are useful for philosophy, and therefore those become philosophers as they are more productive than if those same people became construction workers.