Handre van Heerden -- We Ate the Evidence

One way to know a person is to sit with everything they have written, in order, until the habits of their mind start to show. This week the person was Handre, a writer from the Cape who calls himself an economic historian, a storyteller, and a free-market pamphleteer. His Substack, Economic Heretics, is a little over twenty public essays deep. Most of them belong to a planned twenty-seven-part history of the Austrian school: Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Mises, Hayek, and the people who carried them forward. Around that spine sit stranger pieces: a long war story about Scipio Africanus, a comparison of early Christianity with early Bitcoin, a correction of how Bitcoiners misuse Gresham's law, a public million-dollar model portfolio, and one essay that has stayed with me more than the rest, an argument that the first money our species ever used was animal fat.

What follows is less a review than a set of notes on what that body of work taught me, and where I part ways with it.

The pamphleteer's method

Handre writes history as scene. An essay on Mises opens in Vienna in 1919, with an empire collapsed and socialists in the streets. An essay on Hayek opens at a Cambridge dinner table, with a Keynesian asking whether buying a new overcoat would increase unemployment, and Hayek answering that it would, though the explanation would take a very long argument. The ideas arrive carried by people in rooms, under pressure, getting things right while the room gets them wrong.

It works. A reader comes away remembering the tin mine in Hayek's 1945 essay, the one that floods somewhere far away and sends a price upward, and every tin user on earth adjusts without knowing why. That example is the whole knowledge problem in a single image, and Handre gives it the space it needs.

The method has a cost, and the cost is visible. A pamphlet needs villains, and these essays always have one: central bankers, the Keynesian establishment, a university system that buried the Austrians out of self-interest. The heroes are vindicated; the villains never apologise. Sometimes the contempt runs past argument into insult, as when Keynes is introduced by an accusation about his private life rather than by his ideas. That move weakens the essay that contains it. The case against Keynesian aggregates is strong enough to stand without it, and a reader who notices the smear starts wondering what else has been bent to fit the story.

The idea worth stealing

The best thing in the collection is the Hayek essay, and the best thing in the Hayek essay is a distinction most writing about markets never draws. Mises argued that a planner without prices cannot calculate. Hayek went further: even a planner handed every price on earth would still be missing what matters, because the knowledge an economy runs on is knowledge of particular time and place. The shopkeeper who knows her street floods with customers on match days. The manager who knows his machine needs attention next month. That knowledge cannot be gathered upward, because gathering it strips away the context that made it useful.

This is the same argument this site has been making about land and neighbors, arrived at from another direction. When I wrote about Professor Claude, the machine that knows nearly everything written down, the point was that it has never walked the ridge behind the house and does not know what the creek did in the last flood. Hayek's tin market and that creek are one idea. Judgment belongs where the particulars are. Whoever moves the decision away from the particulars, whether a ministry, a central bank, or a fluent machine, has not gained knowledge. They have thrown it away and kept the authority.

Reading Handre made that connection sharper than it was before, and that alone repaid the week.

Fat, and the virtue of things that rot

Then there is the lipid essay. Its claim: long before shells, salt, or silver, the money of our species was rendered animal fat. It lit the lamps at Lascaux, sealed wounds, waterproofed hides, kept Arctic hunters alive, and was craved by every human body for two million years. Biology made it wanted by everyone, and scarcity made it dear, which in the Mengerian tradition is the whole recipe for money. Archaeology never found it because archaeology finds only what survives, and fat was eaten. As the essay puts it, we ate the evidence.

As history, this is unprovable and Handre says so; the case is circumstantial. As an idea to think with, it is remarkable, and the most interesting part is not the claim about origins. It is the observation tucked near the end, that a perishable money is self-liquidating. Fat has to be used or lost. It circulates because it cannot wait. It cannot be piled up across generations, which put a natural ceiling on how far wealth could concentrate. The long march from fat to gold to paper to numbers on a screen, in this telling, is a march toward durability, and durability is what made money hoardable, then capturable, then debasable by whoever sat at the center.

Here I find myself further along the road than the author. His answer to debasement, laid out in the model portfolio and the Bitcoin essays, is a harder, more durable money: something no central bank can print, held and never spent. But the fat essay points somewhere else. If perishability was the virtue that kept the oldest money circulating and the oldest wealth spread out, then the cure for captured money may not be a money that lasts forever. It may be a richer life lived among goods that do not: food grown and shared, tools maintained, skills kept in use, favours owed between neighbors that dissolve if nobody tends them. A household with a full larder and a working garden holds a kind of wealth that no one can inflate and no one can seize from a distance, because it has to be used where it is.

Hard money protects savings from the center. Perishable wealth keeps the center from forming in the first place. Both matter, and the second is the older lesson.

The ungrateful city

One essay stands apart from the economics: the story of Scipio Africanus, who beat Hannibal, refused a crown, and died in exile, his last words reproaching the city he saved for its ingratitude. Handre frames it as excellence destroyed by a resentful collective.

I read it differently. Rome did treat Scipio badly. But a republic that grows wary of its most popular general is not only being petty. It is remembering that the next popular general might accept the crown. A generation after Scipio's death, the Gracchi; a century after, Caesar. The city's suspicion was ugly in his case and correct about the pattern. Self-government sometimes means declining to be rescued by the same person twice.

That tension runs under all of Handre's work without quite surfacing. The Austrians he admires distrusted concentrated power in planners. The same distrust has to apply to heroes, to founders, and to any single money or movement that promises to make the rest unnecessary.

What the opus says about the man

Read end to end, the essays describe a particular mind: patient with old books, impatient with institutions, more at home in 1920s Vienna than in any faculty lounge, and willing to put a real portfolio on the table to be judged by results. That last part deserves respect. Most commentators about money never show their positions. He publishes his, dated, against benchmarks, with losses visible.

The pamphleteer's temper is the weak point, and the historian's curiosity is the strength. The lipid essay is the strongest piece in the collection because curiosity wins it outright. It follows an odd idea down to the cave wall and comes back with something none of the textbooks had.

I came for the history of a school of economics. I left with the thought that the oldest money on earth worked partly because it spoiled. That one is worth keeping.