Libertarianism in Engineers
I’ve noticed a disproportionately high number of self-described libertarians among my software engineer coworkers. As in, more than half of the people whose political/economic leanings I know are libertarians. This is pretty clearly out of line with the general populace — why is that?
(Man, this whole post is totally pointless. But I’m gonna keep writing it.)
My theory is that it’s because the pure free market economy is elegant. It’s the most elegant solution to the problem of how to distribute scarce resources. And software engineers are trained to strive for elegance in solutions — hence the attraction to pure free markets.
However, much like software, the free market, as it turns out, has to occasionally deviate from the theoretical ideal in order to work properly. Sometimes you just have to hack in a special case, like penalties for pollution or subsidies for public works projects.
(Whenever I come up with an analogy between software engineering and anything else, I always feel (a) like a tool and (b) like I’m on very thin ice. It’s much more likely that I am making no more sense than an underwater eggnog factory right now, but I will forge ahead.)
This is not to say that you shouldn’t bother striving for elegance, though, either in economics or in engineering. You should try to write elegant code, resorting to hacks only when necessary (and exercising due diligence when determining whether it’s necessary). Similarly, although I wouldn’t call myself a libertarian, I believe that a free market-type structure should be the first attempt to solve any distribution-of-resources problem. But if a free market isn’t going to work, you should not force it, recognizing that free markets cannot solve every problem perfectly.
