Over on the Google+, Robin Hanson asks a leading question:
Explain why people shouldn’t try to form their own physics opinions, but instead accept the judgements of expert physicists, but they should try to form their own opinions on economic policy, and not just accept expert opinion there.
(I suspect the thing he wants me to explain is not something he thinks is actually true.)
There are two aspects to this question, the hard part and the much-harder part. The hard part is the literal reading, comparing the levels of trust accorded to economists (and presumably also political scientists or sociologists) to the level accorded to physicists (and presumably also chemists or biologists). Why do we — or should we — accept the judgements of natural scientists more readily than those of social scientists?
Although that’s not an easy question, the basic point is not difficult to figure out: in the public imagination, natural scientists have figured out a lot more reliable and non-obvious things about the world, compared to what non-experts would guess, than social scientists have. The insights of quantum mechanics and relativity are not things that most of us can even think sensibly about without quite a bit of background study. Social scientists, meanwhile, talk about things most people are relatively familiar with. The ratio of “things that have been discovered by this discipline” to “things I could have figured out for myself” just seems much larger in natural science than in social science.
Then we stir in the matter of consensus. On the very basics of their fields (the Big Bang model, electromagnetism, natural selection), almost all natural scientists are in agreement. Social scientists seem to have trouble agreeing on the very foundations of their fields. If we cut taxes, will revenue go up or down? Does the death penalty deter crime or not? For many people, a lack of consensus gives them license to trust their own judgment as much as that of the experts. To put it another way: if we talked more about the bedrock principles of the field on which all experts agreed, and less about the contentious applications of detailed models to the real world, the public would likely be more ready to accept experts’ opinions.
None of which is to say that social scientists are less capable or knowledgable about their fields than natural scientists. Their fields are much harder! Where “hard” characterizes the difficulty of coming up with models that accurately capture important features of reality. Physics is the easiest subject of all, which is why we know enormously more about it than any other science. The social sciences deal with fantastically more complicated subjects, about which it’s very naturally more difficult to make definitive statements, especially statements that represent counterintuitive discoveries. The esoteric knowledge that social scientists undoubtedly possess, therefore, doesn’t translate directly into actionable understanding of the world, in the same way that physicists are able to help get a spacecraft to the moon.
There is a final point that is much trickier: political inclinations and other non-epistemic factors color our social-scientific judgments, for experts as well as for novices. On a liberal/conservative axis, most sociologists are to the left of most economists. (Training as an economist allegedly makes people more selfish, but there are complicated questions of causation there.) Or more basically, social scientists will often approach real-world problems from the point of view of their specific discipline, in contrast with a broader view that the non-expert might find more relevant. (Let’s say the death penalty does deter crime; is it still permissible on moral grounds?) Natural scientists are blissfully free from this source of bias, at least most of the time. Evolution would be the obvious counterexample.
The more difficult question is much more interesting: when should, in completely general terms, a non-expert simply place trust in the judgment of an expert? I don’t have a very good answer to that one.
I am a strong believer that good reasons, arguments, and evidence are what matter, not credentials. So the short answer to “when should we trust an expert simply because they are an expert?” is “never.” We should always ask for reasons before we place trust. Hannes Alfvén was a respected Nobel-prizewinning physicist; but his ideas about cosmology were completely loopy, and there was no reason for anyone to trust them. An interested outsider might verify that essentially no working cosmologists bought into his model.
But a “good reason” might reasonably take the form “look, this is very complicated and would take pages of math to make explicit, but you see that I’ve been doing this for a long time and have the respect of my peer group, which has a long track record of being right about these issues, so I’m asking you to go along this time.” In the real world we don’t have anything like the time and resources to become experts in every interesting field, so some degree of trust is simply necessary. When deciding where to place that trust, we rely on a number of factors, mostly involving the track record of the group to which the purported expert belongs, if not the individual experts themselves.
So my advice to economists who want more respect from the outside world would be: make it much more clear to the non-expert public that you have a reliable, agreed-upon set of non-obvious discoveries that your field has made about the world. People have tried to lay out such discoveries, of course — but upon closer inspection they don’t quite measure up to Newton’s Laws in terms of reliability and usefulness.
Social scientists are just as smart and knowledgable as natural scientists, and certainly have a tougher job. But trust among non-experts isn’t demanded, and shouldn’t be based on credentials; it is given on the basis of a long track record of very visible success. Everyone would be in favor of that.
Late to the party… but:
I’ve studied both physics and sociology (politics/economics) at degree level.
Physics is much, much harder to study than sociology, because so much deep thought has gone into it by so many very clever people. It’s been a proper science for 300 years, and has got to the point where even the best and the brightest are struggling to make headway, very little fundamental theoretical progress has been made since the 80s.
Sociology, on the other hand is relatively easy to study, the hardest part is working out what people are trying to say behind the bluster and faux technical language. Most sociology is phenomenology – fundamental theoretical progress is stymied by the vast array of confounding factors in any experiment. Because of this, much of what could be theoretical foundation is closer to opinion.
To answer the original question:
If in 1990, I’d asked 20 physicists about, I dunno, the quantum states of an electron in a hydrogen atom, I’d have got 1 answer (perhaps after a bit of surreptitious page flicking).
If, in 1990, I’d asked 20 economists whether the UK should be part of the Euro, I’d have got 3 answers: yes, no, maybe, in roughly equal proportions.
Asking the same questions today, I’d get the same answer from the physicists, but very different answers from 2/3 of the economists.
Economists are unreliable, and prone to see the evidence that backs up their personal opinion.
I think part of the problem, too, is the politicization of all these spheres of inquiry.
Economics (at least in the U.S.) long ago became dominated by the “Chicago School” of Milton Friedman, et al. They colonized various institutions such as the US Dept of Finance, the World Bank, and exported their brand of economics to various other countries that were experiencing fiscal instability. The result was a wave of austerity programs and massive cuts in government spending in these countries. In my humble opinion, these cuts probably went too far, but that’s subject to debate.
But in any event, Chicago School was driven by the right-wing, libertarian philosophy of “government = bad”, “free enterprise = good”…or even “free enterprise = godliness”. To say nothing of a theory of how society should be run, how government should be run, etc., extending what was an economic theory into the realms of philosophy of government and theories of social engineering, areas with which economics has only tenuous connection. I find this dichotomous view too simplistic, but that’s just my opinion.
But from there, the political spin meisters realized that they could turn everything into politics, and over the last few decades, they’ve succeeded. Now we evaluate everything through the lens of politics.
But scientific fact is politically neutral. The gravitational lensing of light doesn’t care if the person observing it is left wing or right wing. Neither does the temperature or acidity of the oceans, the temperature of the air, nor the extent of sea ice in the Arctic. But the political strategists succeed in making us think first about how all these facts affect us politically, rather than environmentally or how it affects our capacity to house and feed people.
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I would like to see the DATA to back up the statement that social ‘science’ is harder than natural science! Really?! Was the scientific method used to validate that statement. I wonder how often in social ‘science’ the scientific method is used. Why is it called social ‘science’ anyway? It is truly a science?
Laura,
I would not say that economics is as “hard” as classical mechanics. At the same time, geophysics and, specifically, seismology (my profession) do belong to the hard sciences with the overall uncertainty in principal relationships higher that that estimated for the following macroeconomic variables (validated by statistics as adopted in physics):
inflation (deflation) – http://mechonomic.blogspot.com/2011/08/deflation-is-long-term-threat-for-stock.html or http://ideas.repec.org/a/ush/jaessh/v5y2010i2(12)_spring2010p103.html
unemployment – http://mechonomic.blogspot.com/2011/07/when-rate-of-unemployment-will-fall-to.html
real GDP – http://ideas.repec.org/a/ush/jaessh/v5y2010i5(1)_spring2010p92.html
Labor force participation rate – http://ideas.repec.org/a/ush/jaessh/v3y2008i3(5)_fall2008p203-222.html
It is up to you to judge the accuracy and reliablity. It might be too early to call my own blog “Economics as Classical Mechanics” but we all should be interested to make economics a hard science in our understanding of this term.
Completely off-topic, but the Senate appropriations committee has just announced full funding for the Webb telescope!!
Someone should maintain a public, searchable database of predictions made by so-called experts in various fields. The label “expert” could then be reserved for people who routinely make accurate predictions in their area(s) of expertise. This would also give some teeth to the idea that expert opinion has some evidential value — what experts say would (by definition) be statistically associated with what actually happens in the world.
Mainstream economists ignore in their teaching that what they teach has been shown to without empirical or logical foundation decades ago.
For example, behavioral economists have shown agents are not utility maximizers. Many have replicated Hall and Hitch’s work showing the neoclassical theory of the firm to be false.
The utility-maximizing agent exceeds a Turing machine in computational power. If one applies Arrow’s impossibility theorem to an individual agent, a reasonably-behaving agent need not have an utility function. In other words, agents need not behave “rationally”, under the neoclassical economists peculiar definition. Even if agents were rational, the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem shows that this has next to no empirical implications at the level of individual markets. The SMD theorem reinforces the similar conclusions of the Cambridge Capital Controversy. Markets can be expected to exhibit any dynamics you want, including chaos. No presumption exists in the theory that markets rapidly approach equilibrium.
My comments above are about microeconomics. Some say macroeconomics is confused, but micro is fine. They are wrong and, at least, ignorant. But the above shows that macroeconomics cannot be microfounded in the way that both freshwater and many saltwater economists strive for. I am particularly amused by the widespread use of representative agents in neoclassical macroeconomics. This use is without logical support in microeconomics.
Other approaches to macroeconomics are available, but ignored by mainstream macroeconomists. I mention, for example, the circuitist schools, structuralism (as practiced by, e.g., Lance Taylor), and stock-flow consistent models (as practiced by, e.g., Wynn Godley).
It is hard to see how one can teach mainstream economics straight without being a liar. But mainstream economic education, through graduate school, seems to be a socialization into norms of ignorance and dishonesty.
Here is one reason why economics experts are not to be trusted.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/david-graeber-on-the-invention-of-money-%E2%80%93-notes-on-sex-adventure-monomaniacal-sociopathy-and-the-true-function-of-economics.html
The title, “Notes on Sex, Adventure, Monomaniacal Sociopathy and the True Function of Economics” promises a great read, and it is.
Actually, I do not like the term “expert”. When I hear it I usually see a round table with several people (called experts) discussing a problem without any solution in scientific terms. As a rule, they can explain any process or phenomena with the same words and arguments they used to explain the opposite process and phenomena. For me its enough to decide that they are worth nothing together with their words. Economic “experts” use a very limited agrument base to explain everything.
A researcher in the hard sciences is hardly an expert explaining all observations and usually knows what s/he knows and what s/he does not know. The latter is the matter to investigate. When a researcher works as an expert and brings to the unprepared audience (almost any place except specialed seminars, workshops, conferences, etc.) some hypothesis with a large uncertainty it usually has a negative result. The best case, nobody understands and forgets.
The worst case, politicians use one of many possibilities under the larger uncertainty for their dirty profit. As an example, I recall a long discussion in the USSR about the necessity to turn nothern rivers to the Caspian sea, which had been losing water and thus area before the 1970s. The reason is clear – money and resources, i.e. power, and this project was supported by many “experts” who forecasted the sea to disapper according to their linear models. The government was ready to start. However, for an inner lake oscillations is a natural regime (as was argued by many scientists, chiefly, physicists) and the Caspian see has been growing since the 1970s and has inundated many small villages. Hence, do not give any chance to politicians to use your knowledge in their interests. In other words, do not be “experts”. (In reality, it was not the strong scientific opinion but the disintegration of the Soviet Union that stopped the project. Nobody is able to stop the greater political project “global warming”.)
Perhaps we could take a page from Garret Keizer:
“Like a war-wounded veteran unable to give his full trust to anyone who has never experienced the traumas of combat, I can find it hard to respect the opinions of anyone who has never taught school—not only in matters of education, which is reasonable enough, but also in matters of philosophy and politics. John Adams, Samuel Johnson, and Henry David Thoreau, to name but three who make the cut, tried their hand at “school mastering.” All three proved more or less dismal at it; all had greater things to do in their lives than I, whose best accomplishments have arguably taken place in a classroom. Still, I attribute the lack of illusion in their thought, their disinclination to dogma on the one hand and despair on the other, to the fact that they were tested as teachers. They had encountered humanity in all its rawness and variety, and with the dubious aim of “forming” it in some way. In the process, they had beheld their own selves as naked as a human being can get, and may in fact have achieved greatness partly out of fear of being that naked again.”
Physicists and economists have their own philosophies and politics (and their own views on education). We need to seek to achieve a reasonable degree of respect, and perhaps more for those with whom we agree,
In economics, I think one of the primary misconceptions is of assuming capital is a commodity, due to its relationships with such. The reality is that it is a contract. A commodity is subject to the law of supply and demand and since there is no material limit to the supply of capital, it is demand which sets the limits. So it becomes imperative for the financial system to keep increasing demand. Thus ever lower loan standards, pushing ever more debt into both the private and public sectors and when all else fails, legitimizing wagering as a financial necessity, since effectively endless amounts of capital can be juggled. Which is why we have derivatives markets many times the size of the economy on which they are based.
The fact though, is that as a contract, money is a promise and ultimately only as much can be promised as can be delivered.
This first occurred to me some decades ago, trying to figure out how Volcker cured inflation by raising interest rates. Inflation is primarily due to an oversupply of capital, but in drawing down this oversupply, by constraining the growth of the money supply and reducing it by selling Treasury bonds held by the Fed, interest rates rose dramatically. This higher cost seriously inhibited demand for capital, ie. borrowing. So how did they reduce the oversupply, when their methods also reduced demand? It just so happened that by the last time Volcker started to lower interest rates, 1982, the Federal deficit, under Reagan, had reached 200 billion. Which was real money in those days. So, I ask you, what is the effective difference between the Fed selling debt it is holding and the Treasury issuing fresh debt?
For one thing, the Treasury sells far more than the Fed can and the money it collects isn’t just stored, with interest paid to those who own this excess, but is spent back into the economy in ways which enables/encourages further private sector investment, rather than competing with it, thus having a multiplier effect on the demand for capital.
One would think for an economist, this would seem fairly obvious, but when you think about it, it’s not a point which too many wealthy people want emphasized, that they need debtors to maintain the value of their wealth, and would pay economists to espouse, since most economists are employed in the financial and corporate sectors, as well as by schools funded by them.
It’s the simple physics of organization that those who support a system will be promoted by it and those who question it will be sidelined. The feedback loop creates bubbles and the larger they are, the more difficult it becomes to recognize and regulate them. I sometimes wonder if there are any such feedback loops in the hard sciences. Multiverses anyone?
From David Graeber, from the blog Naked Capitalism:
Murphy argues that the fact that there are no documented cases of barter economies doesn’t matter, because all that is really required is for there to have been some period of history, however brief, where barter was widespread for money to have emerged. This is about the weakest argument one can possibly make. Remember, economists originally predicted all (100%) non-monetary economies would operate through barter. The actual figure of observable cases is 0%. Economists claim to be scientists. Normally, when a scientist’s premises produce such spectacularly non-predictive results, the scientist begins working on a new set of premises. Saying “but can you prove it didn’t happen sometime long long ago where there are no records?” is a classic example of special pleading. In fact, I can’t prove it didn’t. I also can’t prove that money wasn’t introduced by little green men from Mars in a similar unknown period of history.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/david-graeber-on-the-invention-of-money-%E2%80%93-notes-on-sex-adventure-monomaniacal-sociopathy-and-the-true-function-of-economics.html
“Why do we — or should we — accept the judgements of natural scientists more readily than those of social scientists?”
Well, I don’t see such a thing generally occurring.
Some people are anti-science and don’t accept either. Enough about that.
Some are pro-science and trust the system. Boring.
So by “we” I conclude he means people who work in universities and colleges.
Well, I have a master’s in statistics and can tell you I saw economics as a corrupt discipline. Every week I saw obviously absurd economic theories promoted in the media. These theories had in common that their application would be to the advantage of the rich.
I recall the Hoover Institute, a building constructed on the Stanford campus and occupied by economists. Obviously a good deal of money had been given to the university, and I expected that the quid pro pro would be research papers favorable to the donor with the Stanford seal of approval.
I quite like classical economics up to about 1950, when economists seemed to have contracted chronic math envy. They set up highly unrealistic assumptions so that mathematical tools could be applied. Perhaps the goal was to impress and baffle the rubes. Somehow these fabulous assumptions came to be mistaken for social reality. Don’t ask me how.
Quite often bogus statistical errors were made to justify harmful economic practices. There was Long Term Capital Management, which crashed with great losses when it was foolishly assumed that losses were uncorrelated. This was the first big bailout. Many more followed, steadily increasing in size until TARP. It appears that nothing was learned. Perhaps no one cared to learn. Why should they learn? They are making a ton of money doing it the wrong way. Wrong for us, right for them.
All this greatly darkens the reputation of economics. Physics has nothing like this, at least until recently with the absurd lies about scientists trying to get rich off of bogus global warming data. But if Jill Voter has never met a scientist in her life, why should she think this is absurd? For all she knows climatologists hold drunken orgies where they fantasize about haw they are going to blow the loot once the scam catches on bigtime.
On the other hand, there are still economists of integrity and reputation who avoid these problems and use mathematics appropriately. However their voices are often unheeded, and economics continues to labor under a cloud.
Recently in biology one sees similar corruption. The crooked scientist comes up with the results a drug company wants. If there is money to be made through lying, someone will take it.
Physical vs. social science has nothing to do with it. If there were big money to be made off of Big Bang theories or the half-life of the proton, then physics would have the same problems. In sum, in life I have learned to completely disregard all statements made by anyone who has a personal financial interest in the topic at hand. Since this covers a solid majority of pubic (mis)information, this does wonders to dispel confusion.
“when should, in completely general terms, a non-expert simply place trust in the judgment of an expert?” I think it is obvious that in this modern world we have no choice other than to put some trust into others. I can’t personally verify all human knowledge. I can’t fly all over the world to check the accuracy of reportage. I can’t expect to be present at the birth of the future President. I’m a scientist myself so while it has its fads, phobias, mistakes, and blind spots I generally trust that system. What better game is there?
I have faith in institutions and individuals with a reputation for truth, because they have a great deal to lose by lying or being mistaken. But if someone thinks The Wall Street Journal or Rush Limbaugh or some anonymous Internet source has a reputation for truth, there isn’t much if anything I can do about it. It’s a free country. All in all, people generally believe whatever they feel like believing.
“So my advice to economists who want more respect from the outside world would be: make it much more clear to the non-expert public that you have a reliable, agreed-upon set of non-obvious discoveries that your field has made about the world. People have tried to lay out such discoveries, of course — but upon closer inspection they don’t quite measure up to Newton’s Laws in terms of reliability and usefulness.”
Let’s compare Newton’s Law with Adam Smith’s free markets. I would say that now that Communism has bitten the dust that world belief in these ideas is about equal, and many would say Smith’s was more useful. As for physics, just how useful is string theory? CERN? Superfluids? Cosmology? Economists have plenty of ideas that are useful, their problem is that some very powerful people consider it more desirable for wrong ideas to be believed. Physics is now getting a taste of this as well. Not so yummy, hmmm?
Spyder,
It would seem part of the problem is that money is assumed to be a substitute or notational commodity, but it is really a substitute for trust. A homogenous and organic community doesn’t need some reductionistic form of economic contract, as the basis of such societies is a wholistic trust and personal knowledge. So it would be counterproductive to have a manufactured substitute.
Money only becomes necessary when different groups interact and communities grow too large to know all or most of the other members. Then some common currency becomes necessary.
Money, as a multiparty contract, actually functions as a form of public commons, much like a road system. We own our houses, cars, businesses, etc, but not the roads connecting them and very few people cry socialism over that. If people understood money as public property and society treated it as such, people would be much more careful what value they convert to money and tend to develop those more organic networks and natural stores of value again.
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http://ineteconomics.org/blog/playground/bretton-woods-past-and-present-1-ethics-economics?utm_content=brodix%40earthlink.net&utm_source=VerticalResponse&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=range%20of%20opinion%20on%20corruption%20in%20academia&utm_campaign=What%20is%20progress%20in%20economics%3Fcontent
“As a citizen I am interested in the stakes of this controversy, perhaps more so than economists. I want voices that I can trust in the dust of factious debate. I want my taxes to pay for their independence and public service. But as an historian my intuition is that these wishes are both naïve and quaint. The professoriate’s extramural commitments are no longer an exception, liable to policing and containment. To open the University was the banner of the labour economist and super-President of the University of California, Clark Kerr, but also of the Free Universities that antagonized his vision. The outcome matched neither design. We have neither the “Multiversity” nor the politically engaged professor, we have an entrepreneur scholar of uncertain loyalties.”
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The problem is one of complexity.
In physics you can plausibly isolate systems. In the more complex sciences (complex may not be the right word, I’m liable to make someone react badly, but I cannot think of a better word at the moment), you hit more and more barriers to doing so. How many isolated economies are there? In the past there were a few but now?
In the more fundamental sciences (ah that’s better) you can therefore test alternate hypotheses with controls. How do you do that in economics?
We say that Hoover’s policies were a failure during the Great Depression, and Roosevelt’s were a success. OK, that’s true on the face of it. But how do we control for the passage of time and numerous other factors? Maybe Roosevelt would have been a failure in Hoover’s day, and vice versa. I’m no historian and undoubtedly many will point out my example’s failings, without noticing the larger point I’m making.
How do the social scientists perform a proper A-B test and prove, beyond any doubt, which scenario is the truth? There are so many uncontrolled variables it is difficult to make any point with mathematical certainty.
I sometimes feel that the difference between a successful social policy and an unsuccessful one is not so much how correct your fundamentals are, but how many people you can rally to your side. In sufficient numbers you can overwhelm a mediocre efficiency in your policy. Just throw more resources at the problem.
The academics have another problem. They desperately want to be relevant to the real world, and money is a powerful lure. Lots of economists have, it seems to me, overstated their actual predictive abilities.
On the other side of the fence the money people don’t care about academics. They look for any advantage, even if it is only 5-10%. Problem is, if they start making money and credit the academic theory for those gains, it becomes easy to over-ascribe the success to academic underpinnings. Even the reverse is true (monetary loss /= totally worthless academic knowledge).
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— James Ph. Kotsybar
When the general public hears about
A breakthrough in scientific research
They want to add their voices to the shout,
So as not to feel they’re left in the lurch.
That they have opinions, there is no doubt.
They’ll foist themselves into the dialogue,
When something sensational’s put in print.
Though their comments reveal they’re in a fog
Without having the slightest clue or hint,
It won’t prevent them posting to the blog.
Most often, all they can add is their moan:
“Why can’t science leave well-enough alone?”
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Professor, I would love to see yourself and Prof. Hanson discuss this topic on bloggingheads.tv.