I haven’t blogged in a while, because I just spent a couple (very busy) weeks in NH with Operation Live Free or Die.  It was amazing to meet so many people so very dedicated to liberty as our founding fathers knew it.

When I returned from NH, I found this great site linked from a slashdot article: The Edge annual question – 2008.  One of the responses to the year’s question (“What have you changed your mind about?  Why?”) is from Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist at Stanford.  His response includes the following words:

“The
other change concerned my life as a primatologist, where
I have been studying male baboons in East Africa. This
also came in the early 90’s. I study what social behavior
has to do with health, and my shtick always was that if
you want to know which baboons are going to be festering
with stress-related disease, look at the low-ranking ones.  Rank
is physiological destiny, and if you have a choice in the
matter, you want to win some critical fights and become a
dominant male, because you’ll be healthier. And my change
of mind involved two pieces.

The
first was realizing, from my own data and that of others,
that being dominant has far less to do with winning fights
than with social intelligence and impulse control. The
other was realizing that while health has something to
do with social rank, it has far more to do with personality
and social affiliation — if you want to
be a healthy baboon, don’t be a socially isolated one.“

This quote reminded me of words about division of labor and human society from Mises’s Human Action, page 146: “Every step by which an individual substitutes concerted action for isolated action results in an immediate and recognizable improvement in his conditions.  The advantages derived from peaceful cooperation and division of labor are universal.  They immediately benefit every generation, and not only later descendants.  For what the individual must sacrifice for the sake of society he is amply compensated by greater advantages.  His sacrifice is only apparent and temporary; he foregoes a smaller gain in order to reap a greater one later.  No reasonable being can fail to see his obvious fact.  When social cooperation is intensified by enlarging the field in which there is division of labor or when legal protection and the safeguarding of peace are strengthened, the incentive is the desire of all those concerned to improve their conditions.”

Division of labor works.  Peace works.  It’s so cool to see, again and again, that the a priori reasoning of Mises predicts what the empiricist will see.