Cafe Hayek

Some Thoughts on Science

I very much like this recent essay by Bob Higgs.  And here's one of my favorite parts:

Finally, we need to develop a much keener sense of what a scientist is qualified to talk about and what he is not qualified to talk about. Climatologists, for example, are qualified to talk about the science of climatology (though subject to all the intrusions upon pure science I have already mentioned). They are not qualified to say, however, that “we must act now” by imposing government “solutions” of some imagined sort. They are not professionally knowledgeable about what degree of risk is better or worse for people to take; only the individuals who bear the risk can make that decision, because it’s a matter of personal preference, not a matter of science. Climatologists know nothing about cost/benefit cosiderations; indeed, most mainstream economists themselves are fundamentally misguided about such matters (adopting, for example, procedures and assumptions about the aggregation of individual valuations that lack a sound scientific basis). Climate scientists are the best qualified people to talk about climate science, but they have no qualifications to talk about public policy, law, or individual values, rates of time preference, and degrees of risk aversion. In talking about desirable government action, they give the impression that they are either fools or charlatans, but they keep talking―worst of all, talking to doomsday-seeking journalists―nevertheless.

In this connection, we might well bear in mind that the United Nations (and its committees and the bureaus it oversees) is no more a scientifc organization than the U.S. Congress (and its committees and the bureaus it oversees). When decisions and pronouncements come forth from these political organizations, it makes sense to treat them as essentially political in origin and purpose.

Breast milk hoax?

Was the breast milk barter ad a hoax? Maybe. It looks like Craig's List has flagged it which can mean a lot of things—it was offensive or entertaining or something. Here's the science. Drinking breast milk doesn't seem to be the key but breast milk does seem to be rather extraordinary.

Still Cool With Being Sanguine

Quoting my Favorite American of All Time, H.L. Mencken, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby reminds us that there is wisdom in remaining sanguine in the face of the current hysteria over global warming.

The Mencken quotation -- characteristically brimming with insight, wisdom, and wit -- is this:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

For this reason, among others, I cannot join my colleague Tyler Cowen in joining Greg Mankiw's Pigou Club.  Even if global warming is a reality, another reality -- one with a much more consistent track record throughout history and across different countries -- is the perversity of political incentives.  Given these perverse political incentives (not to mention the inevitiable scrawniness of government's access to information and knowledge), I don't trust government to impose and administer a Pigouvian tax with sufficient disinterestness and skill to make such a tax a plausible policy option.

As I've written before, I'm quite prepared to concede that global warming is real --  although I'll not be surprised if, should I live as long as Ronald Coase (who turns 96 this month ) fears of global cooling will again supplant fears of global warming as the excuse for government to seize more of our money and our liberties in "exchange" for its promises to save us and lead us to salvation in which all marginal social costs are nicely equal to all marginal social benefits.

Who's the Impractical Theorist?

As both an economics and a law student, I was very lucky in the professors I had.  Fritz Machlup's International Trade course at NYU will always rank among the intellectual highlights of my life.

Another truly great teacher is Leland Yeager, from whom, at Auburn University, I learned much about money, banking, macroeconomics, and political philosophy.  Leland is a scholar's scholar: careful, thorough, brilliant, learned, wise, and possessing not a whiff of self-importance.  (See also this wonderful article, by Bill Breit, Ken Elzinga, and Tom Willett, on Leland.)

I recently discovered a monograph Leland wrote back in 1954, entitled Free Trade: America's Opportunity.  (Although long out of print, the wonders of the market enabled me to buy a copy for $9.99.)  This monograph bursts with wisdom and insight -- for example, consider Leland's response to those persons who assert that free trade is good "in theory" but not so good "in practice."

The Protectionist actually takes pride in his narrow viewpoint.  He sticks to plain facts -- clear examples of benefit from Protection or of damage from foreign competition.  He does not concern himself with remote, intangible, theoretical consequences.  Thank God, he is no impractical theorist who never met a payroll!  If he happens to be a watch lobbyist, he must struggle for patience with the poor understanding of Congressmen who never had practical experience in retailing watches.  If he is a fishing-tackle man, he pities the ignorance of trade-agreements negotiators who never had practical experience in manufacturing fishing tackle.  He scorns the theorist's "over-all" view of the economic system and sticks to the down-to-earth case-by-case approach.  In so doing, he refuses to consider the decisive heart of the tariff controversy.

[Leland then offers this quotation from Norman Campbell, What is Science? (1952)]:

The plain man -- I do not think that this is an overstatement -- calls a "theory" anything he does not understand, especially if the conclusions it is used to support are distasteful to him.... It is only because he does not understand "theory" that the plain man is apt to compare it unfavorably with "practice," by which he means what he can understand.

The practical man is apt to sneer at the theorist; but an examination of any of his most firmly-rooted prejudices would show at once that he himself is as much a theorist as the purest and most academic student; theory is a necessary instrument of thought in disentangling the amazingly complex relations of the external world.  But while his theories are false because he never tests them properly, the theories of science are continually under constant test and only survive if they are true.  It is the practical man and not the student of pure science who is guilty of relying on extravagant speculation, unchecked by comparison with solid fact.

For all his vaunted realism, the Protectionist theorizes without knowing it.  Furthermore, his haphazard theories are far less able to stand inspection than those of the trained theorists whom he scorns [pp. 33-34; original emphasis].

The next time you hear someone praise the "practical" insights about trade issuing from people such as Ross Perot, Lou Dobbs, or the well-meaning but economically uninformed business executive who pleads with Congress for protection from competition, remember the above slice of wisdom from Leland Yeager.

Wise Words on Global Warming

The Foundation for Economic Education's Sheldon Richman has some wise words about the global-warming debate.  Here's the crux:

More than a few reputable scientists see potential problems in the climate change that is occurring. Thus the issue needs to be evaluated on its merits. I know of no a priori reason to rule out the possibility that human activity is producing enough greenhouse gases to warm the atmosphere to an extent that will have bad consequences. That doesn't mean it's happening, just that it's not impossible.

For every factoid about ice sheets or sea levels or sun spots I can pull from the skeptics' literature, someone else can produce a counter-factoid. How is a nonscientist to decide which is accurate?

This is not to say the skeptics don't raise apparently compelling points. They do, and the believers should address them. But that still leaves the problem of how a layman is to sort the wheat from the chaff.

For advocates of individual liberty it is tempting to believe the skeptics are right because the other side is associated with statist solutions to climate change. Most solutions call for government control over the burning of fossil fuels. No advocate of free markets can be comfortable with a position that entails substantial taxes and subsidies to achieve a political objective -- reduction of carbon emissions -- especially when the solutions promise no more than negligible reductions in temperature. (Temperature, not emissions per se, is supposed to be the believers' cause for concern.)

But picking sides in a scientific debate on the basis of proposed remedies is the wrong way to go about things. A believer in global warming could get the science right but the remedy wrong. That government shouldn't ban smoking doesn't mean smoking isn't bad for you. There is nothing incoherent about favoring free markets and thinking that global warming is a problem.

Sheldon's absolutely correct.

Relatedly, my GMU colleague, law professor Bruce Johnsen, sent this response to the George Mason University Faculty Senate.  Bruce's note is self-explanatory -- and also wise:

Dear Faculty Senate,

I emphatically decline to sign the Climate Change petition and would like to be on record for so declining.  I object to the Faculty Senate presuming to speak for individual faculty members on matters such as this that are both debatable by any reasonable person standard and highly political.  They are best left to individuals' actions as citizens independent of their connection to GMU.  This kind of group-think is most offensive and in my view the Faculty Senate has no authority to engage in it.

Although climate scientists are competent to tell us whether the earth is, for the time being, warming, or whether it is warming outside some historically normal parameters, they are not competent to forecast the economic consequences of such warming or to suggest what should be done in response.  When they try to do so they are not acting as scientists but as political advocates.  Even if it is true that global warming will generate "large-scale disruptions," the consensus among economists -- whose expertise is at evaluating trade-offs --  is that taking the steps necessary to avoid such disruptions will lead to substantially larger disruptions.

Cordially,
D. Bruce Johnsen
GMU School of Law

How Newsworthy are NASA Space Flights?

Karol and I and our nine-year-old, Thomas, are in Houston visiting the Johnson Space Center.  Thomas is fascinated with astronomy and space travel.

I'm impressed with the exhibits and activities available to tourists here.

But why is NASA so self-congratulatory these days?  Why is the current shuttle mission (STS-121) so newsworthy?  Why is any shuttle mission newsworthy?  Space travel -- old news; big deal; been there and done that; yawn.

Oooops!  Sorry.  Of course even the most routine space shuttle flight (or an "STS" as each one is called here in Houston) is a marvel of human achievement.  Nevertheless, I continue to insist that space-shuttle flights are no longer as newsworthy as NASA makes them out to be.

Here's a short essay that I wrote a few years ago on this matter.  (Note that this essay was written before the February 2003 Columbia shuttle tragedy.)  Here's my main point:

It's true, of course, that each shuttle flight is a marvelous achievement of human ingenuity -- scientific and organizational -- but our world is a barrage of similar achievements, almost all of which we regard as mundane and not the least bit newsworthy.  There's nothing so special about shuttle flights to distinguish them from any of the cornucopia of other wonders that we encounter daily.

Is the flight of a shuttle a greater wonder than the flight of a Boeing 747?  Each time a 747-400 takes off, 437 tons of steel, plastic, cloth, fuel, cargo, and people rise gracefully into the sky.  Meals are served and movies are watched.  Passengers eat, sleep, work, sip cocktails, relax, and chit-chat as if  whizzing through the air seven miles above the earth's surface at nearly 600 miles per hour is among the most natural of human situations.

How It's Made

One of my son's favorite television show (I proudly reveal!) is a show on the Science Channel called "How It's Made."  (I apologize: I can find no really good link to the show; the link here is just the Science Channel's scheduled airing of the show.)

Each half-hour segment features three or four explanations of how ordinary things are manufactured. Among the familiar items whose manufacture Thomas and I have learned about by watching this program are digital CDs, mozzarella cheese, sliced bread, pantyhose, and toothpicks.

Several things strike me about this program. Here’s one.

The level of automation is truly astonishing. Viewers of "How It’s Made" almost never see a human being. It’s almost all machines – computerized robots – doing the work. Even the most mundane of everyday items such as sliced bread and toothpicks are produced today with truly impressive advanced technology.

Watching "How It’s Made" last night brought to mind Adam Smith’s important insight that one advantage of the division of labor is that as tasks become more specialized they are more likely to become mechanized, thereby releasing scarce, precious human labor to do other valuable jobs.

We live truly in a world of wonders. The lowly toothpick – a splinter of birch wood – is the product of millions upon millions of dollars of investment and unmeasurable human creativity – and, of course, our happy propensity to truck, barter, and exchange,

Social Creationism, Social Deism, & Social Atheism

Browsing through the August 15^th issue of Time, I came across an insightful quotation from the brilliant Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker is quoted in Time’s cover story on the role of religion in schools. Pinker says, defending the theory of natural selection against the idea of "intelligent design," that

Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings.

Indeed so.

I don’t here write to enter my two-cents in the debate between Darwinians and creationists (although, for the record, I am solidly in the Darwinian camp). I write to record that Pinker’s insight applies to society no less than to biological beings.

Naive minds believe that social order must be created, planned, the result of intention. These minds worry that without such conscious guidance, the result will be either chaos or an order that is inferior to one that is planned and consciously crafted. In contrast, sophisticated minds understand that social order is largely "the result of human action but not of human design" – and that highly complex, productive orders that offer maximum prospect for widespread human flourishing are those that are least infected with efforts to centrally craft social order.

Of course, the above is a summary of the chief insight of Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek.

Most people who understand and accept this Smith-Hayek insight become what we might call "social deists."

A social deist assumes that sovereign power is necessary to design and maintain the foundation, but not the superstructure, of society. That is, a social deist regards conscious design and maintenance of the ‘constitutional’ level as necessary. Upon this foundation, social order grows unplanned.

Social deists are contrasted, on one hand, with "social creationists." Social creationists are members of that species of juvenile thinkers who regard conscious, central direction by a wise and caring higher human authority as necessary for all social order – not only for the foundation, but for all, or much, of what the foundation supports.

Economic central planners are prime examples of social creationists. In their view, government must not only create and enforce law (society’s foundation), it also must plan the course of the economy (society’s superstructure) – for example, which good and services to produce, and how to produce these.

Social deists are contrasted, on the other hand, with "social atheists."  What is a social atheist?

A social atheist regards even the institutional foundation of a free and complex society as uncreated – as being just as much an unplanned, spontaneous development as is the superstructure of society that builds itself upon this foundation.

Social atheism is difficult to grasp – as difficult to grasp as atheism itself. How does it all start? How can it all hang together without some prime mover, some intent-laden authority or mind imparting logic to its processes?

Unlike questions involving the material universe – where the existence or non-existence of god is a fact that disputants can only hope to discover but not control – people can at least attempt to make society one in which social creationism, social deism, or social atheism is descriptive.

But human society seems to progress the further along the spectrum it moves from social creationism toward social deism toward social atheism. How far in this direction can we move profitably?

Stem Cell Politics

Anne Applebaum has a nice piece in today's Washington Post where she explains the current regulatory environment for stem cell research. She writes about how the Democrats spoke last week as if stem cell research were illegal. While she is sympathetic to increased stem cell research, she points out that the current situation is not quite as bleak as it was painted.

Stem cell research is not, in fact, either illegal or unfunded: The federal budget in 2003 included $24.8 million for human embryonic stem cell research -- up from zero in 2000. Private funding of stem cell research, which is unlimited, runs into the tens and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars. The current, admittedly hairsplitting policy came about because Congress in 1995 passed a ban on federal (but not private) funding for any form of research that involved the destruction of human embryos, because it is a form of research many American voters dislike and don't want to pay for. After some important (privately funded) breakthroughs, the Clinton administration began looking for legal ways to bypass the ban, but never got around to paying for any actual research.

I haven't paid close attention to the stem cell debate. I assume that stem cell research, like cloning, is inevitable. It is very hard for the state to stop human curiosity. It can slow it down. It can decide not to fund it. It can make it illegal. But it is only a matter of time before we start playing with our genes. Many good and bad things will no doubt come of these efforts. But if most of the good accrues to individuals (a cure for Alzheimers, a child cloned after a tragic accident) and the bad accrues to our culture in intangible ways (hubris, a cavalier attitude toward the mystery of life, etc) then it's going to happen. I happen to think the good will outweigh the bad, but for those who disagree, the costs of stopping it will eventually be insurmountable. Stopping cloning for example, or genetic fiddling to improve human health, or genetically modeified foods that feed starving people will make the war on drugs look like an enormous success. Stopping research that will allow people to live longer, healthier lives will take too many policemen probing garages and basements along with every university lab and corporate research center.

The Soup of Life

In the August issue of the always-fascinating Wired magazine, James Shreeve takes a look at human genome hunter Craig Venter's current project, an attempt to map and understand all life, every microbe, every gene. OK, it's not quite clear what Venter is up to other than it involves scopping up a lot of water in Polynesia and elsewhere and filtering it for microbes.

Carl Linnaeus thought there were no more than 12,000 species of plants and animals. We're at 1.7 million and counting. Of that 1.7 million, only 6,000 are microbes. There may be as many as 10 million. Or 100 million. We're not sure. But it's probably bigger than 6,000 and Venter will have something to do with it.

Venter is despised for trying to profit from mapping the human genome. On this project he's promising to make all his data public. But now he hits bureaucratic barriers from foreign governments who want a piece of the action and make it hard for him to scoop up water from their territorial waters.

The whole project, which may turn out to be a complete bust, is made possible by the millions (hundreds of millions, I think) that Venter made as an entrepreneur. He may be crazy but he's spending his own money. Many good things come from the concentration of wealth in a free country where competition protects us from much of the bad things. And then again, Venter may be a genius who will change our lives for the better at his own risk.

Here's a quote from Juan Enriquez, a friend of Venter's. "The world is going genomic. If you do not perceive the possibilities of this shift, if you say no instead of yes, you will be left in the past. There will be whole societies who end up serving mai tais on the beach because they don't understand this."

I know what he's trying to say, and its a nice quote. But I suspect most of the changes will come whether one nation or another embraces genomics or not, just as the world has benefited from Edison even if in the early days, some cities found electricity very frightening. If some societies don' t understand the importance of genomics, they eventually will.

My view is that the genetic revolution is coming whether we like it or not, whether we have ethical or religious or environmental qualms about it or not, whether we ban it or try and slow it down. The human desire to know is very hard to stop. The Craig Venters of the world will be out there discovering new stuff. It's only a matter of time.

Very Crude Oil

In today's NY Times, Paul Krugman warns us that we are running out of oil, and that scarcer oil (and consequent higher prices) are inevitable over the long run. I'm skeptical for a variety of reasons. Here's a link to one of these reasons -- a link to a story, not incidentally, that nicely reveals the importance and validity of Julian Simon's insight that the human mind is the ultimate resource:

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Business/ap20040413_66.html

I thank my student Amanda Mariano for this link.

Science & Olympics II

For historical evidence that "leadership" in science is neither necessary nor sufficient for a country to prosper materially, see the fact-packed book by Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena (2002).

Mokyr argues persuasively that the industrial revolution (and the prosperity that it brought to ordinary people) happened first in England because the English were especially open to new ideas -- even ideas that weren't English in origin. The English were also relatively open to the economic changes that useful new ideas typically spawn. In the 18th century France boasted an impressive number of scientific geniuses, perhaps more than England, and yet England grew economically far faster than did France during the latter half of the 18th century and first part of the 19th. France was not as open to the commercial use of new ideas as were the English.

The English were also creative in devising institutions (for example, professional socieites) to spread these ideas widely and to apply them to commerce and industry.

New ideas are economically worthless if they aren't allowed to spawn change, to upset any applecarts. And on the other side of the picture, a people who are free to trade with foreigners benefit from whatever worthwhile "foreign" ideas are incorporated into the goods and services they import.

Science is not the Olympics

The New York Times reports (rr) that America is losing its edge in science:

Foreign advances in basic science now often rival or even exceed America's, apparently with little public awareness of the trend or its implications for jobs, industry, national security or the vigor of the nation's intellectual and cultural life.

"The rest of the world is catching up," said John E. Jankowski, a senior analyst at the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that tracks science trends. "Science excellence is no longer the domain of just the U.S."

Is this good news or bad news? As long as total knowledge is growing, this is good news. The race for scientific discovery isn't a zero sum game where finishing second makes you a loser. Most scientific knowledge is essentially a public good. The Times does see some positive benefit:

Even analysts worried by the trend concede that an expansion of the world's brain trust, with new approaches, could invigorate the fight against disease, develop new sources of energy and wrestle with knotty environmental problems.

Some concession, no?

But profits from the breakthroughs are likely to stay overseas, and this country will face competition for things like hiring scientific talent and getting space to showcase its work in top journals.

I'm not sure that point about profits is even true. But even if it is, general uncaptured benefits from scientific advancement must dwarf the profit impact manifold. And competition is going to open more avenues in the inevitable trial-and-error process of scientific progress.

The real question is not whether America is "ahead" or "behind" but whether students interested in science have good opportunities to explore science. Surely we could reform education in ways that improve science education.