Erik Baker (Harvard University) received a commendation in this year’s History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and his commended essay ‘The Ultimate Think Tank: The Rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian’.
HHS: First of all, congratulations on your commendation in the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize, for your essay ‘The Ultimate Think Tank’. To begin with, could you briefly introduce your dissertation on ‘The Entrepreneurial Work Ethic: Creativity, Leadership, and the Sciences of Labor Discipline in the United States’ and explain how this article fits into that project?
Erik Baker: Thanks and thanks again to the editors of HHS for the commendation – it’s a real honour and thank you for taking the time to share this work.
My broader dissertation project is about the history of what I call ‘entrepreneurial management.’ That strikes some people as a contradiction in terms. Typically we think of management and managers as faceless, gray-suited technocrat types, and we tend to think of entrepreneurs as really dynamic with innovative startups etc. But the cultural figures who typify the entrepreneur category are themselves also bosses. If you think of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, these are people who are icons of entrepreneurship, but they’re also executives who command increasingly large armies of employees. What I show is that since the early 20th century, management theorists have been interested in capturing this mystique that surrounds the entrepreneur, which seems to allow entrepreneurs to command attention, loyalty and legitimacy in a way that other kinds of managers don’t. And they’ve sought to propagate that entrepreneurial spirit among the managerial ranks more broadly.
The result, in the United States economy, is what I call ‘the entrepreneurial work ethic’. This comes from the claim that what makes entrepreneurs effective bosses is the fact that they themselves are committed to a creative project that energizes the firm and willing to work extraordinary hours in pursuit of this vision. They’re able to inculcate commitment to the firm’s mission among their employees through the example of their own work ethic, so people authentically buy into what the firm’s about. They seek to emulate the work ethic of the entrepreneurial leader of the firm.
The material in this article helps to fill in this story. This article is about the Santa Fe Institute, which has been an important proponent, particularly since the 1990s, of entrepreneurial management in the American economy. They had an illustrious list of clients, in what they call their business network, who came to them for advice about how they ought to manage their firms in the construction of what was called at the time ‘the New Economy’. I’m interested in the way that this research institute used a particular metaphor from the natural sciences, the complex adaptive system, to legitimate these changes that were occurring on a much broader scale in the American economy at this time – outsourcing, downsizing, the elimination of middle management ranks etc. All of this was again in service of this vision of a firm that is really managed by inspiring employee initiative, rather than by directing employees in a bureaucratic manner. This was possible because the firms themselves would be saturated with a creative purpose that was supplied by their entrepreneurial leaders.
The other component of this article is this concept of social entrepreneurship, which became a key concept at SFI in the last 20 years. This is the extrapolation of the vision of the entrepreneurial business leader to the social realm. It involves a conception of social problem solving that’s driven by the creative, diligent work of particular entrepreneurial leaders, whether that’s an NGO, working in private businesses, or particular kinds of charismatic political figures. This is related to a broader migration of this concept of entrepreneurship out of the for-profit business world into a much wider range of professional settings, to the point where the Santa Fe Institute researchers themselves are often encouraged to self-identify as scientific entrepreneurs. This, of course, also entails an entrepreneurial work ethic and the expectation of a uniquely driven and committed devotion to a particular creative project.
HHS: I was wondering if you would argue that an ‘entrepreneurial work ethic’ is demanded by academic work and institutions today?
EB: Totally. A large part of the motivation for this project in the first place was identifying this compulsion to extraordinary and increasing work hours that characterize not just my experience in academia, but the experience of people working in all sorts of professional settings. This is, of course, encouraged top down from university leadership. The rhetoric of entrepreneurship, particularly in United States universities, is totally ubiquitous – there are campus centres for encouraging entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship prizes etc. This is the way that academics, alongside all kinds of other professional and managerial workers, are supposed to be conceptualizing themselves. One of the reasons that I was attracted to this project was precisely because there are intellectual figures, scientists and social scientists, who are advocating for entrepreneurship while they’re also conceptualizing themselves as scientific entrepreneurs. You can see the porosity of the boundaries between these domains and the way that this culture of entrepreneurialism has come to saturate both these fields.
HHS: Why did you choose to focus on the Santa Fe Institute?
EB: There was a lot of serendipity involved, ultimately. When I was starting my research and tracking down examples of this way of thinking, I was struck by this quite surprising elective affinity between economic and managerial concepts of entrepreneurship and innovation, on the one hand, and the scientific concept of complex adaptive systems, on the other. That led me to the Santa Fe Institute, which is still the biggest name in this field. But also, I was struck by the extent to which this place seem to be a kind of gravitational attractor for these people and that got me really interested in thinking about SFI, not just as a machine for cranking out ideas, but as a social location or social space where people came, learned something and acquired elements of a new worldview and then left and did other things.
HHS: You claim that the SFI’s main accomplishment was not the invention of ideas or an ideology, but of a particular subject (the SFI libertarian) – what distinguishes/defines this political subject? What is their ‘conceptual worldview’?
EB: This comes from a blog post from a libertarian blogger in the mid-2000s reflecting on the emergence of this new type of person or, as they say on Twitter, a ‘new type of guy’, who this writer calls the SFI libertarian. This is a person who consistently votes for Democrats, who thinks of themselves generally as a liberal person, but who substantively shares elements of the libertarian worldview, namely an emphasis on free markets and an emphasis on this concept of entrepreneurship. This is the most important synthesis that occurs at SFI. Their entrepreneurship becomes the site of their social problem-solving impulses. They’re liberals who recognize real problems in the world, and they want to solve them, but the way that they think that think they ought to be solved is through energetic entrepreneurial people like themselves starting initiatives and, in some cases, for-profit businesses.
HHS: When did these kinds of ‘independent-sector’ institutions emerge and what distinguishes them from the kinds of institutions the preceded them?
EB: In the article I situate the emergence of SFI in the collapse of the Cold War science funding regime, which saw the creation of the national laboratory system and an enormous expansion of government funding for science in universities. By the 1980s, as the Cold War was winding down, simultaneously with the emergence of a new regime of austerity in American domestic politics under Ronald Reagan, this science funding regime came into jeopardy. National Science Foundation budgets were slashed and universities were encouraged to commodify their scientific research in order to bootstrap their own science funding operations. A lot of that led to an increasing movement of scientists out of universities and national laboratories into these new, smaller ventures that were dependent not on the government, but on private philanthropy either from formal charities or from wealthy individuals.
The Santa Fe Institute is emblematic of this trend. It was founded by alums of Los Alamos National Laboratory and subsequent decades it has attracted a great number of expatriates from the world of university science. This exodus from the established world of government labs and universities is reconceptualized as a form of entrepreneurship: the scientists are striking out for themselves and they have their own new creative ventures that they’re really committed to and they’re going to work hard to get them off the ground.
HHS: What is the significance of funders in the story of SFI that you tell? And relatedly, what is ‘philanthrocapitalism’ and when does it emerge?
EB: Philanthropists come on the scene at SFI shortly after it’s founded, because they need money. There’s this optimistic idea that once the founders bring all these brilliant people together, they can leverage their connections and their prestige and everyone will be really excited about what’s going on, and that the money will take care of itself. But, of course, that doesn’t happen. They find themselves in financial dire straits pretty quickly and start to think about how to attract big funders. Eventually they establish a few really important relationships with particular corporate and philanthropic funders, and this leads to a change in the way that they conceptualize what this new institute is all about. It wouldn’t just be a place where you could bring together all the brilliant people and have them talk to each other –– they wanted something more focused and concrete. This led to an increasingly narrow identification with the subject matter of complexity or complex adaptive systems, and an increasingly explicit orientation towards the worlds of management, economics and political libertarianism. It’s a feedback loop. They see for themselves the role of wealthy corporations, foundations and individuals in getting their own research institute off the ground. This then becomes a template for how they imagine problems can be solved in the rest of society.
Not just at SFI but, more generally, the rising social importance of corporate and individual philanthropy and social problem-solving gets labeled as philanthrocapitalism. This portmanteau is supposed to denote a synthesis of older school philanthropy with the imperatives of efficiency and innovation associated with capitalism. This is philanthropy but not in a noblesse oblige way. This is philanthropy that’s supposed to zero in on the really important problems, to figure out the best way to solve them and to industrialize the process of philanthropy. This becomes closely associated with the concept of social entrepreneurship and it’s a feature of the orientation towards politics and social problems that becomes characteristic of the SFI in the 21st century.
HHS: What is the ‘complex adaptive systems concept’ and how did it become a central focus for the SFI? What does it mean to treat ‘complexity’ as a subject matter?
EB: This is a complex story in itself. So, complex systems are everywhere. You can see them everywhere from meteorology to evolutionary biology. They’ve been studied for a long time. What makes the system complex is, basically, that it can’t be modeled linearly. Small effects in one area of the system have surprising and difficult to predict consequences for the behavior of the system as a whole.
The concept of complex adaptive systems comes a bit later. This really begins to take off in the 1980s. The complex adaptive system is a complex system that, in addition to having all the other complex system attributes, adapts to its environment. It displays properties of self-organization and increasing fitness in response to external stimuli. The idea is that complex adaptive systems exhibit properties of order and in some settings even beauty –– but they were not designed that way. This happens spontaneously, as a result of processes of adaptation. There’s no director who sits atop the complex adaptive system and tells it how to improve, rather each agent or molecule in the complex adaptive system is responding to its own environmental challenges. And as a result of the way that the system is organized, this adaptation produces increasing fitness and order for the system as a whole.
This concept of the complex adaptive system has very strong analogies with the concept of spontaneous order, which was developed in the mid 20th century period by intellectuals associated with political libertarianism, including the economist Friedrich Hayek and the philosopher Michael Polanyi. This is a connection that it does not take long for libertarians and scientists to recognize, which helps to explain why libertarian philanthropists get very excited when they hear that some of the scientists at the Santa Fe Institute are interested in complex adaptive systems. They really encourage them to go further down this path, to draw out these analogies between complex adaptive systems in nature and this conception of markets and firms in the capitalist economy as spontaneous orders. So SFI became increasingly preoccupied with attempting to spell out the principles that unify these complex adaptive systems everywhere. And again, this is a move away from the initial vision of the institute, which was to identify people who are at the top of their fields in different disciplines and get them together to see what emerged from their collaboration.
HHS: You argue that the 1990s was ‘characterized by a strong degree of coordinated action by elite actors in business and government to enact the transformations required for the construction of the New Economy’ – would you also argue that this was a significant moment in the development of libertarianism (either generally or at SFI specifically)?
EB: Yes, certainly. This is a major theme of my work and I think a lot of the best recent work on libertarianism and neoliberalism: itrequires a lot of work and coordination to construct a system that’s supposed to regulate itself. This is a period that has been characterized as the zenith of neoliberalism. After Reagan and Thatcher even formerly centre-left parties in the US in the UK turn towards free markets, deregulation and privatization under Clinton and Blair. But the point that I want to make is that this was not just a matter of giving up on public policy or of letting it go laissez faire. This required the construction of intellectual and social networks that allowed this basic political orientation to travel throughout different spheres, different sectors, different domains. Particularly on the level of management: If you want an entrepreneurial economy, then firms and corporations require significant overhauling. You need to get businesses to become more entrepreneurial themselves and that means, in the rhetoric of this time, ‘shedding dead weight’, getting rid of bureaucracy, adopting organizational innovations to encourage employee initiative, streamlining firms to give them a laser focus on a particular sort of creative mission that is set by their entrepreneurial leadership etc. This was not a change that happened organically, it was a change that was encouraged by consultants and by the management press and the business school world.
The Santa Fe Institute was one node in the network that made these changes happen. Its contribution was to say, the economy is a complex adaptive system, the economy is composed of firms that are complex adaptive systems, and at the base layer are people who have to be trained to take this adaptive entrepreneurial approach to the world. SFI gets really interested in evolutionary psychology and claims are made that on an evolutionary level human psychology has evolved to give people certain innate dispositions towards problem solving, cooperation and adaptation.
HHS: What kinds of criticisms did SFI face in the 90s, and why or how did it overcome them?
EB: There are two challenges that emerge. One is a degree of scientific criticism from scientists, funders and science journalists. In particular there’s a scathing piece published in Scientific American in the mid-90s that takes on this new paradigm of complexity science and argues that in their search for abstract principles that unify complex adaptive systems these scientists have become untethered from empirical reality and factuality. The claim is made that no facts about the world are being discovered or accumulated at SFI, rather it’s all modeling and computer modeling in particular. The SFI research has a self-referential character, and it becomes about the coherence of this computer model, rather than any connection to procedures of verification or empirical testing. Secondly, eventually the New Economy model comes under threat, because the dot com stock market bubble bursts, and some of these firms that are supposed to be the new innovative entrepreneurial leaders, most infamously Enron, are exposed as fraudulent. There’s a lot of concern about the morality of this new high-tech venture capitalist funded economy.
At SFI this leads to a period of reorientation towards a greater interest in things like evolutionary psychology, which in their minds is a bit more grounded in the realm of the testable. The question of how humans are programmed evolutionarily or disposed by evolution to behave seems to be an empirical question in a way that questions about the grand unifying principles of complex adaptive systems are not. Then there’s also an increasing orientation towards a more socially liberal articulation of the efficiency of entrepreneurship, which leads towards the social entrepreneur and the social problem-solver. You get a series of studies that come out of SFI that tackle problems like inequality, education and global poverty. Rather than just being really enthusiastic about what’s happening on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, there’s an idea that the principles that are emerging out of this institute can help people who are interested in making the world a better place, rather than than just in making money.
HHS: Samuel Bowles, who became director of SFI, has an interesting ideological trajectory away from Marxism – could you introduce him and describe the changes he introduced at SFI?
EB: Bowles starts his career as an important Marxist economist. Along with his collaborator Herbert Gintis, he is denied tenure for his political views and activism at Harvard in the late 1960s, early 1970s. He decamps to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where he writes with Gintis a book called Schooling and Capitalist America that’s still on sociology syllabi and is an incredibly important work about the relationship between class and equality in education in the United States. Over time they drift away first from Marxism and then eventually from socialism. Especially important for them in making the transition is the rise of the concept of human rights and of human rights advocacy organizations like Amnesty International, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. This is happening concurrently with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bowles and Gintis don’t abandon their commitments towards social justice along with their Marxism and their socialism, but they believe they can continue to pursue these goals by adopting this liberal politics of human rights and by looking to these organizations like Amnesty International and other NGO-type advocacy groups to engage in more entrepreneurial social problem-solving.
Bowles and Gintis come to SFI in this period of internal soul-searching at the end of the 1990s. They really help to reorient the institute towards evolutionary psychology, which they’ve become extremely interested in. Bowles oversees the rebranding of the economics program to be about behavioral science. They publish papers on people’s innate instincts towards cooperation. They imagine that a sense of fairness is evolutionarily engrained in human actors. The view becomes that it’s by encouraging this personal virtue, this cooperative behavior among individuals, that these goals that they’ve held since the 1960s can best be actualized in the 21st century. This fits into a broader story of deradicalization and a shift away from leftism, but it is important to underscore is that Bowles never loses his sense of himself as a person of who’s fighting for reform, for justice, for equality and for fairness. It’s just that his idea of how to achieve these values shifts, and there’s an intersection with this stream of thought, with roots in political libertarianism, that emphasizes entrepreneurial action and spontaneous social problem solving. For those of us who want to critique this worldview, it’s inaccurate to characterize it as a resurgence of selfishness or a retreat from other sorts of values we might think are important. The critique has to be on the question of how social problems emerge and can get solved, and particularly on the possibilities of collective action. We need to ask: what are the practical consequences of an emphasis on social-entrepreneurial problem-solving?
In the 2000s Bowles and Gintis go back to Schooling and Capitalist America. They acknowledge that inequality in educational outcomes is a real problem and that education isn’t working for a lot of people. But the answer to this is no longer this socialist political programme that’s prescribed in the original volume, it’s a much hazier and more pessimistic view about the ability of public policy to solve these problems. But it leaves the door open for
independent sector entrepreneurial solutions, namely charter schools, to address these problems instead. Again, critiquing the charter school movement by just saying that we need to care about educational outcomes or care about educational inequality is a bit of a dead end, because this is not a premise that’s denied by these people. Rather they have a different operational or instrumental perspective on how these values are best promoted.
HHS: You explain that the notion of ‘implicit bias’ arises from this context – what understanding of human nature and society does this rely on/presume?
EB: Mahzarin Banaji, the psychologist who is the co-creator of the field of implicit bias and the co-author of the most popular book on the subject, is an SFI affiliate faculty member. Samuel Bowles is in the acknowledgments of that book. The implicit bias model claims racial inequality is maintained basically by accident. There are no malicious actors. There aren’t consciously racist actors in the story that implicit bias tells. This is consistent with a view of human nature that emphasizes people’s innate desire for fairness and their innate desire to cooperate with one another. But the story is that, as a result of a hangover from a past aberrational era of forthright racism, this layer of implicit bias sort of got written over the fundamental bedrock of pro-fairness, cooperative instincts. As a result, people, in contradiction to the values they perceive themselves to hold, engage in subtle discriminatory behavior in their interactions with other people.
The solution, then, is for people to realize that they hold these implicit attitudes this and so they instinctively act in a way that’s inconsistent with the values they really hold. It holds out the promise of clearing away this residue encrusting our innate cooperative instincts. The spontaneous social dynamics that are maintaining racial inequality can just dissolve if there’s sufficient awareness of the nature of this problem, and so the way that the solution is framed is often in the form of consulting or trainings, which have now proliferated. I don’t necessarily want to say these trainings are are bad or that they shouldn’t be done. But the goal the history that I tell is to direct our attention at the kind of underlying social theory and theory of human nature that’s operating behind this movement, and to think about what’s left out of that picture.
HHS: I have a very broad question to conclude: what have been the broader social and political implications of the emergence of ‘social entrepreneurism’?
EB: It depends where you’re looking, but in the United States I think what’s most important is the way this ideology has helped to channel the broad desire for social change and social progress into support for particular entrepreneurial initiatives, alongside a tolerance for the slow erosion of other modes of social problem solving, namely the welfare state and labour unions. This is often made explicit by the more conservative or libertarian proponents of the social entrepreneurship vision, which is presented as the successor for these institutions that are seen as characteristic of a hopelessly outdated politics of the past.
On a global scale, this concept of social entrepreneurship is profoundly entwined with understandings of economic development, going back to much earlier in the 20th century. This discourse still thrives today in development circles. And we see the consequences of this worldview with the impending divorce of Bill and Melinda Gates, who are considered archetypal social entrepreneurs. The Gates Foundation is often held up as a model of social entrepreneurship or philanthrocapitalism in the realm of global health and economic development. Questions now loom about the future of this organization and the future of this one private fortune that so much of today’s global development infrastructure depends on. We’re really seeing the downsides of giving particular individuals such an outsized, non-democratic role in setting the agenda and directing the flow of resources on a global scale. And Bill Gates, too, is an extremely ardent defender of intellectual property protections and has exerted an enormous countervailing force against efforts to liberalize the intellectual policy regime around Covid vaccines. My question is, who made this guy the boss of global health? Social entrepreneurship is part of the answer.
Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.