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Thursday, May 20, 2021

Politically polarized brains share an intolerance of uncertainty

 This article showed up in my Facebook feed a couple of times. The unfortunate thing is that people do not generally understand the cause of this intolerance.

"[A]n inability to tolerate uncertainty" produces the tendency to use force to produce outcomes—what we might generically call "statism," which is clearly present in the ideologies of the right and the left. I've encountered this many times, and even in Jeremy Shearmur's book Hayek and After, where he frequently suggests that Hayek's ideas may not have led to outcomes he preferred. To put one's confidence in markets as the mechanism of discovering the structure of society is the epitome of uncertainty toleration.

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