Centrally planned languages

I recently came across a video produced by the Cato Institute that was intended to introduce viewers to libertarianism. The video features David Boaz, the institute?s vice president, explaining the fundamental beliefs of libertarians. One of those central beliefs is the desirability of a free market economy as opposed to one that is centrally planned.

Boaz says that the way goods are distributed in a free market is not determined by a single person or a bureaucracy, as is the case in a centrally planned economy such as communism. However, there is an order in which goods are allocated in a free market, and that is determined by the price of goods. The price of goods contains information about their scarcity and how much they are in demand. Producers use this information to increase or decrease their production of that good. The price of goods is a product of the interaction of sometimes millions of buyers and sellers. An orderly allocation of goods emerges spontaneously from this interaction.

To illustrate the point that spontaneous order is better than hierarchical order, Boaz gives us the example of languages. No single person or even a committee of people sat down to design English, or French or any other language that is widely spoken. All of those languages evolved little by little as their speakers needed to coin new words for new things. Boaz notes that there are a few languages that were designed, the most famous of which is Esperanto. Esperanto is a language invented by a single person, a Russian named L.L. Zamenhof, in 1887 as a means of promoting cooperation through a simple language everyone could easily learn.

Referring to these planned languages, Boaz says, ?What they all have in common is that no one speaks them. All the languages that people actually speak are spontaneously evolved.?

This line perked my ears because I am sympathetic to both libertarianism and planned languages. Boaz seems to assume that the fact that a language has few speakers means it is a failure. That is a cheap shot. By this logic, libertarianism is also a failure because it has few adherents. What is more important to learn from this is that Boaz picked a bad example to demonstrate the superiority of decentralized spontaneity over central planning. Why? Because natural languages like English are not efficient means of communication.

It is difficult to see all the inefficiencies in a language until you match it up against a planned language such as Esperanto which was designed to follow simple grammatical rules. Take English spelling for instance. The language is a mixture of German and French words. Those languages use different spelling conventions. Not only that but for most of their life English words had no standard spelling, and you can see this if you read texts hundreds of years old where the same word is spelled different ways on a single page. Some spellings became popular even though they did not reflect the word?s pronunciation. In an effort to communicate, people latched onto whatever the common spelling or pronunciation of a word was. The end result has been a language with chaotic spelling rules with all manner of unnecessary silent letters. In Esperanto, all words are spelled phonetically and there are no silent letters.

If planned languages are more efficient than natural languages, why does almost no one speak planned languages? Because it is not enough for me to think Esperanto is efficient. The people I want to communicate with also have to think that, and they have to be willing to put in the time to learn Esperanto. That means it will be a waste of my time if I?m the only one to learn Esperanto and the people around me continue speaking English.

In fact, this problem exists when we want to make minor improvements to our own language. Even if you have a great idea to simplify English spelling, it will never go anywhere unless you can convince a large number of your fellow speakers to switch to the new system. But this is difficult since you only have control over you, not them. You have a coordination problem.

Because of this coordination problem we see that efforts to simplify language are quite rare. When languages have been changed for the better it has often come about through central planning. A committee of people or sometimes a single influential person can dramatically alter the way a language is written. Spanish used to have irregular spellings like English until the Royal Spanish Academy simplified the language?s spelling in the 1700s and 1800s. The American lexicographer Noah Webster single-handedly simplified English spelling with the publication of his dictionary in 1828. More recently, the People?s Republic of China introduced a simplified version of written Mandarin in the 1950s which has been taught in schools ever since.

I am not arguing that all linguistic changes are good or that we are justified in forcing them on society. I am arguing that improving efficiency in natural languages is a problem that cannot be left up to spontaneous order to solve. I think Boaz does not see this because he is predisposed to think that since decentralization of power is good, decentralization is good in general. He does not want to admit that centralizing anything could ever be efficient. That is just silly. There is no harm in acknowledging that decentralized decision-making works under certain conditions, and that these conditions are not always met, such as when the parties cannot coordinate to achieve an efficient outcome. To argue otherwise suggests we do not really understand the ideas we are promoting.