In The American,  Lee Harris writes Science and the Republican Brain,  4/30/12.

Excerpts:

This is certainly tempting, but there is a serious problem with classifying all crackpots as anti-science. More than once in the history of science, the crackpot of one generation has been hailed as a visionary by the next. Indeed, during the seminal period marked by a major paradigm shift, it is often impossible to distinguish the pseudo-scientific crackpot from the genuine scientific revolutionary.

Conservatives wouldn’t be conservatives if they liked change; liberals wouldn’t be liberal unless they did. This neatly explains why conservatives hate to change their minds, while liberals simply love to. Indeed, some liberals have changed their minds on so many issues so often that they finally got sick and tired of it all and have turned into conservatives from simple exhaustion.

It would be unfair to say that only liberals (or Democrats) are taken in by the extravagant claims of Mr. Scientific Truth, but the moment you hear someone attacked for being anti-science, you can be certain that the person making this charge is a true believer in the teachings of that rank charlatan, Mr. Scientific Truth. Belief in the infallibility of the latest scientific consensus may be useful in the process of learning about science when we are children, but the history of science teaches us that the scientific consensus of today is no more immune to future scientific revolutions than the scientific consensus of the past. To label as anti-science anyone who is skeptical of the current scientific consensus may be a clever political stunt, but it betrays a hopelessly naïve idea of the nature of science. The real enemy of science is not the skeptic, but the true believer.

HKO comments:

When fundamentalists refute evolution with creationism they merit the scorn of being anti-science.  Religion has value in proposing how to live and behave, but science is much better at determining how things work, and the nature of matter and energy.

Being anti-science,  however, should not apply to skepticism towards scientific consensus, as long as the skepticism has a rational and scientific basis.  Republicans and others are too often deemed intellectually lacking for credible refutation of climate change.  But the language of those who defend the consensus is so polluted politically that they sound more like religious zealots, true believers, than open minded scientists.

It is a mistake to equate creationists and climate skeptics.  Politics mixes as poorly with science as it does with religion.

Jeff Jacoby writes The College Money Pit for the Boston Globe, 4/29/12.

Excerpt:

Year in, year out, Washington bestows tuition aid on students and their families. Year in, year out, the cost of tuition surges, galloping well ahead of inflation. And year in, year out, politicians vie to outdo each other in promising still more public subsidies that will keep higher education within reach of all. Does it never occur to them that there might be a cause-and-effect relationship between the skyrocketing aid and the skyrocketing price of a college education? That all those grants and loans and tax credits aren’t containing the fire, but fanning it?

“It’s not enough just to increase student aid. We’ve also got to stop subsidizing skyrocketing tuition,” Obama said to applause in Iowa City. He might as well have declared that it’s not enough to keep flooring the accelerator; we’ve also got to stop the car from going faster. Reality doesn’t work that way. Rising government aid underwrites rising demand for higher education, and when demand is forced up, prices follow suit. (See under: Crisis, subprime mortgage.)

HKO comments:

Jacoby sees the pattern that most seem to ignore.

Government subsidies for health care have driven up the prices of health care for everyone (and driven down service and choice).

Government subsidies for housing created the housing boom and its subsequent bust. What made government interference so much more dastardly in housing was the addition factor of leverage, a very deadly double edged sword.  Do we expect government subsidies for college to have any different effect?

Why do we ignore the basic economics of the issue?  Again.

The idea that everyone needs a college degree is as misguided as the belief that everyone needs to own a home.  By pushing students into college who may not be suited for a higher education we sacrifice the quality of our schools and we do not serve the best interest of the students who may benefit from other educational opportunities.  The gap between the matriculation rate and the graduation rate widens.

Just as everybody does not need to OWN a home there are a lot of solid career paths that do not truly need a four year undergraduate degree.  By inserting themselves into the educational structure the government has helped create unwieldy institutions that may adapt poorly to the technical educational improvements that should help to lower educational costs.

The growth in education infrastructures may be headed for another shakeup.  Online colleges and other learning avenues offer education without the bloated cost.  Check out Khan Academy as an example of where we may be headed.

Charles Wheelan write a worthy piece in the Wall Street Journal, 10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You.

My three favorite:

Don’t make the world worse. I know that I’m supposed to tell you to aspire to great things. But I’m going to lower the bar here: Just don’t use your prodigious talents to mess things up. Too many smart people are doing that already. And if you really want to cause social mayhem, it helps to have an Ivy League degree. You are smart and motivated and creative. Everyone will tell you that you can change the world. They are right, but remember that “changing the world” also can include things like skirting financial regulations and selling unhealthy foods to increasingly obese children. I am not asking you to cure cancer. I am just asking you not to spread it.

Your parents don’t want what is best for you. They want what is good for you, which isn’t always the same thing. There is a natural instinct to protect our children from risk and discomfort, and therefore to urge safe choices. Theodore Roosevelt—soldier, explorer, president—once remarked, “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” Great quote, but I am willing to bet that Teddy’s mother wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer.

Don’t try to be great. Being great involves luck and other circumstances beyond your control. The less you think about being great, the more likely it is to happen. And if it doesn’t, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being solid.

My daughter  graduates Indiana University next week.

Congratulations Natalie!

John Tomasi

John Tomasi wrote Free Market Fairness in an attempt to find common ground between the classic liberals that created the basis of capitalism and the ‘high’ liberals (liberals as we commonly think of them today) that place a higher emphasis on social justice in the form of equality.  While this work is philosophically thick, it substantially clarifies the core differences in our political parties.

The classical liberals such as Adam Smith, Locke and Hayek considered economic liberty on par with the other liberties such as freedom of speech, religion, and assembly.  Equality was considered in terms of opportunity, not outcomes.  The classical liberals believed the drive for economic growth would benefit all classes of society even if it came at the expense of disparity of wealth.

But the distribution of this increased wealth became a sticking point in some thinking and the equality of opportunity led to the realization of some of the thinkers that without basic material wealth and basic assurances such as housing and health that such opportunity was limited.  Some of the classical liberals acknowledged that there was a place for the government to exercise its power to attain some sense of social justice.

The ‘high’ liberals saw economic liberty as a lesser freedom alongside freedom of speech, religion and the individual freedoms. They saw economic liberty in the sense of personal freedom to work where you wish and buy what you wish, but they differed on the freedom ordained to owners of the means of production.  They felt the benefits of the means of production should be more widely shared. This inevitably led to more government control of production.

As a reaction to the reduction in the importance of economic liberty claimed by the ‘high’ liberals, the Libertarians countered that the economic freedoms were the most essential and even more important than the other personal freedoms.  To the Libertarians the economic freedoms were absolute.

Tomasi seeks to blend the ‘thick’ economic liberties of the classical liberals with the aim for social justice of the ‘high’ liberals.  While his arguments may seem absorbed in theoretical niceties, the difficulty will always be bringing reality into the discussion.

While the high liberals claim to seek justice as equality, they often engage policies that fail to achieve their aim. Meanwhile the policies of the classical liberals/ libertarians do not directly aim for social justice,  but their policies have been more successful in bringing wealth and progress to far more people.

Much of our corporate ownership is in the hands of workers in the forms of pensions and 401k. The American experiment began with patricians such as George Washington and  Alexander Hamilton seeking to protect the rights of the majority through virtuous leadership but quickly morphed into a economic democracy as individuals claimed opportunities no longer  reserved for a privileged few no matter how virtuous they were.

This paralleled  the early history of capitalism as merit and financial return trumped class and heredity as a means of distributing capital.  The result was a dynamic growth never before seen.

The intention of social justice through redistribution which infected the American electorate in the Keynesian post Depression era failed to deliver on its promise because it never effectively addressed the human response and political pressure.  If wealth is transferred instead of earned it stills the animal spirit that drives growth and production.

There will likely never be enough wealth to redistribute to give a large group of  citizens prosperity (though a few well connected seem to have benefited handsomely from it): those who receive become mired in a culture of poverty. Bureaucrats and political opportunists begin to see the receivers as a source of political power, and this class of subsidized citizens is fertilized and grown for their political fuel.

This outcome was hidden by a period of economic growth in the United States that was protected from the competition of a world decimated by back to back world wars.  The setback of the global financial collapse has exposed the means of redistribution as being unable to honor the intent.

Giving economic growth priority over fairness and meritless redistribution ends up helping more people than the obsession with fairness.

Tomasi makes a grand statement  about the common ground that can be justified between classical and ‘high’ liberals, a blend of thick economic freedom and social justice. But he falls short in addressing the ‘how’ of how to accomplish the redistribution  without destroying to production potential in all of us.  How much can we take from producers before we kill their willingness to produce? How many citizens can we pay not to produce and how long can we pay them before they lose the willingness to earn?

The economic freedoms of the classical liberals have done more to reduce poverty by accident than the ‘high’ liberals have achieved with the best of intentions.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow author Daniel Kahneman wrote of a study conducted by psychologist Philip Tetlock at the University if Pennsylvania (my alma mater).  Tetlock asked 284 people who made their living commenting or advising on political and economic trends and compared the outcome of their predictions to random outcomes.

The results were devastating. The experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned equal probabilities to each of the three potential outcomes.  In other words, people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys….  Even in the regions they knew best, experts were not significantly better than non specialists.

Those who know more forecast very slightly better than those who know less.  But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable.  The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of their skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident.  ”We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” Tetlock writes.  ”In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals- distinguished political scientists, and study specialists, economists and so on- are any better than journalists or attentive readers of The New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.”  The more famous the forecaster, Tetlock discovered, the more flamboyant the forecasts.  ”Experts in demand,” he writes, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

Tetlock also found that experts resisted admitting that they had been wrong, and when they were compelled to admit error, they had a large collection of excuses.

HKO comments:

One of the great disservices we have accepted is the illusion that scientific principles apply to realms that are not science.  Endless statistics are researched and catalogued to be used to apply to economics, psychology and political science, but the realm of human behavior defies scientific categorization. Such data may be dependable most of the time during a range of normal outcomes, but they fail miserably at the extremes when we depend on them the most.

A sound theory in physics is not right only most of the time.  When a scientist tests his theory against reality he adjusts the theory to reality.  But political ideologues do not develop theories to describe reality as it exists but as they want it to exist.  When reality does not respond the way their theory predicts (a theory’s value is its ability to predict), then they attempt to adjust the reality to fit their theory.

Adjusting reality requires a lot of force. This is how utopian masters of the universe develop into tyrants.