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Science, PseudoScience and Society

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It's not easy to write about pseudo science. The problem has to do with the fluid nature of the concept. It has no single, precise meaning and there is little agreement about its constituent elements. It involved subjugation of scientific aims to political and deliberate attempt in deception and subsequent cover up. But recently almost all science became political and all politics involved deception: to say that a politic is not lying is the same as to say that an alcoholic is not drinking. Still there are different degrees of lies with Lysenkoism probably representing one of the most extreme cases when obvious lie is supported by repressive apparatus of state. We saw it as a tragedy in Stalin's Russia genetics, we now see it as a farce in USA economics.  

One of the most dangerous feature of  deception schemes use by pseudoscience is Faustian bargain when one trades the independence for political influence, the power grab. And despite popular image of scientists they proved to be as corruptible if not more corruptible as anybody else. Historically the scientific community is generally held together and all its affairs are peacefully managed through its joint acceptance of the same fundamental scientific beliefs. Science is best practiced in a voluntary, peaceful and free atmosphere.  What really matters as far as politics and science is concerned is what type of environment the individual scientists have to work in and what degree of freedom they can enjoy. But that changed irrevocably since early XX contrary. In this sense one can say that Lysenkoism represented natural consequence of  shrinking of freedom of the scientific community.

As by Frederick Seitz noted in his The Present Danger To Science and Society

Everyone knows that the scientific community faces financial problems at the present time. If that were its only problem, some form of restructuring and allocation of funds, perhaps along lines well tested in Europe and modified in characteristic American ways, might provide solutions that would lead to stability and balance well into the next century. Unfortunately, the situation is more complex, made so by the fact that the scientific establishment has become the object of controversy from both outside and inside its special domain. The most important aspects of the controversy are of a new kind and direct attention away from matters that are sufficiently urgent to be the focus of a great deal of the community's attention.

The assaults on science from the outside arise from such movements as the ugly form of "political correctness" that has taken root in important portions of our academic community. There are to be found, in addition, certain tendencies toward a home-grown variant of the anti-intellectual Lysenkoism that afflicted science in the Stalinist Soviet Union. So-called fraud cases are being dealt with in new, bureaucratic ways that cut across the traditional methods of arriving at truth in science. From inside the scientific community, meanwhile, there are challenges that go far beyond those that arise from the intense competition for the limited funds that are available to nourish the country's scientific endeavor.

The critical issue of arriving at a balanced approach to funding for science is being subordinated to issues made to seem urgent by unhealthy alliances of scientists and bureaucrats. Science and the integrity of its practitioners are under attack and, increasingly, legislators and bureaucrats shape the decisions that determine which paths scientific research should take. There is, in addition, a sinister tendency, especially in environmental affairs, toward considering the undertaking of expensive projects that are proposed by some scientists to remedy worst-case formulations of problems before the radical and expensive remedies are proven to be needed. They are viewed seriously though they are based on the advice of opportunistic alarmists in science who leap ahead of what is learned from solid research to encourage support for the expensive remedies they perceive to be necessary. The potential for very great damage to science and society is real.

Of course, the rise of 'Lysenkoism' in the Soviet Union in the late 40th of the twentieth century is one of the most tragic pages of the history of science.  Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist, came to prominence as the proponent of a theory of heredity that stood in direct opposition to Mendelianism. The details of this theory need not concern us, except to note that it was 'Larmarckist' in its contention that it is possible for organisms to inherit acquired characteristics.  This was wrong and the principles of Mendelianism - the theory of heredity - were well understood by then. But Lysenko theory fitted nicely with the Soviet ideology. Particularly, the idea that acquired characteristics could be inherited held out the promise of the perfectibility of mankind.

So the state intervened in the scientific struggle and the consequences, certainly for many of the scientists involved and arguably also for the USSR agriculture, were disastrous. The power of state was used to suppress dissidents. Many scientists were exiled; some killed. Unfortunately we cannot dismiss the obviously pernicious use of ideology by Lysenko and his supporters simply as an aberration of the era that is often brushed aside as 'the cult of personality' (with or without naming the personality in question). This proved to be much more dangerous and at the same time remarkably resilient phenomenon that survived the dissolution of the USSR.

Do not fool yourself that Lysenkoism is irrevocably connected with communist ideology. The link was poorly accidental. In reality Lysenkoism emerged as a new religious of control freaks with high position in government. Moreover a lot of administrators in academic institutions belong to the category of micromanagers and as such they are naturally predisposed to Lysenkoism.  

In general "Lysenkovisation of  science" occurs when the state tries to control both the methodologies and goals of scientific activity and that happens all over the world, although to different degree.

In the USSR huge bureaucratic institutions such as VASKhNIL and VIEM had been set up with the specific goal to control resources and, especially, scientific press.  Part of the reason that Lysenkoism gained official support in the Soviet Union was because the Mendelian approach to genetics contradicted official ideology, in particular to Engels's dialectical materialism. In early 50th just before his death Stalin began to sense that Lysenkoism can hinder practical science by interfering with the academic atmosphere of toleration of dissent most conducive to scientific accomplishment. He even went as far as to declare that

“no science can develop and proper without the clash of opinions, without freedom of criticism.”

But it was too late...

Other governments are also far from being immune from this kind of tendency to select between scientific theories on the basis of ideology rather than the balance of evidence.

More benign variant of Lysenkoism that does not rely on the power of the state is usually called Cargo Cult Science.  Another related term is "Mayberry Machiavellis". A long time ago -- well, actually it was just a year, but it seems like a lot longer than that -- a former Bush advisor John DiIulio got into quite a bit of trouble for revealing to Esquire that the White House did not possess, in any conventional definition of the term, a policy-making process:

...on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking—discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue...

This gave rise to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis—staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible.

Dan Gardner - Senior Writer for The Ottawa Citizen writes: "Cabinet meetings were scripted, Mr. O'Neill discovered, by White House staffers who sent advance notes to cabinet secretaries telling them when they were 'supposed to speak, about what, and for how long.'" Is this the shadow of Politburo or what?

Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov

Old News ;-)

[Jan 6, 2009] "Laffer-able"

Since the recession is caused by rich people deciding not to work, the solution, of course, is to cut capital gains taxes to they'll stop lounging around and do something productive:

Laffer-able, Marion Maneker, BP Cafe: ...Art Laffer ... was on Fast Money... The segment was on the proposed Obama tax cuts. Laffer didn’t think much of them. Instead, he wondered aloud, what if the government proposed a 6-month income tax moratorium: how great a stimulus would that be? After all, Laffer reasoned, freeing citizens from the undue burden of taxes would get them all out working harder and spending money.

Really? Did anyone on the panel believe that Americans of all income levels are sitting on the couch–or lounging out by the pool–instead of working because they’re unhappy with their income tax? They’re knocking off early because the marginal rates are too high and they’d prefer the leisure time to the minimal extra money? Fascinating. Unemployment moving toward double digits and the greatest white-collar restructuring in 15 years all because of onerous income taxes?

Sure, he’s a guest on the show–they’re being polite, right?–but not one of the traders said a word about this preposterous idea. They just nodded their heads in agreement and kept the bobbing up as Laffer launched into his idea that capital gains should not be taxed at all.

The slam against the Obama cuts was that the money would go into the mattress, not stimulate the economy. ... But why would the wealthy be any different? Cut their income tax or capital gains and they’ll put the money in the mattress right now too.

Not that cutting the capital gains tax would do anything to move money off the sidelines. Where would it go? What productive use would it be put to?

I’d share the segment with you but there’s no clip of his appearance on the CNBC site and the short post on the segment on Fast Money’s page is covered by an intrusive pop up. Maybe they’ve finally gotten a sense of shame for promoting this voodoo.

This tries to use a stabilization argument to implement a growth policy, which is a bad idea. We can debate whether cutting capital gains taxes is a good way to promote economic growth in the long-run, but it's clear that cutting the capital gains tax is a lousy short-run stimulus program. Even if it does promote new investment, and again that is a point that can be debated even in good times, in bad times it's hard to imagine a cut in capital gains motivating new investment when the economic outlook is so poor and so uncertain. In addition, you run into the same "are the projects shovel ready" problem you run into with public spending. For the most part, they aren't shovel ready and planning and constructing new investments, e.g. building a new production line, is not something that happens overnight. But no matter, the real goal here isn't stabilization anyway, and the long-run growth arguments are mostly a vehicle for obtaining the real goal: tax cuts for the wealthy. I hope Democrats don't give into this nonsense as they continue to compromise to get something passed.

Update: In comments to another post, where I agree that some type of tax cut may be needed as part of the stimulus package, and also say that "I am not thinking of the trickle down variety,"pgl says:

Tax cuts for the well to do - who are not borrowing constrained - will likely have NO aggregate demand stimulus effect as I have often argued (aka either Life Cycle or Ricardian Equivalence) models so if this is what the Republican Party have in mind - it is based on hogwash economics.  Tax cuts for the working poor, however, may be a good idea as these households will consume much of the tax cut.  I think this is what Obama has in mind.  If your argument is that we should go with the kind of tax cuts Obama campaigned on - I agree.  But tax cuts for Bill Gates is just stupid from a Keynesian point of view.

Update: And speaking of tax cuts of questionable value as a stimulus measure, Dean Baker:

More Money for Robert Rubin, Beat the Press: It looks like President-elect Obama is picking up President Clinton's promise to end welfare as we know it. Back in those pre-welfare reform days, welfare checks went to poor families. Welfare as we know it now seems to involve giving taxpayer dollars to Citigroup and other banks.

The media seem to have largely overlooked the Citigroup tax credit in their discussion of the latest items in President Obama's stimulus proposal. According to the Washington Post, the proposal will allow companies to write off current losses against taxes paid over the last 4-5 years, not just 2 years, as in current law.

There are relatively few companies that could benefit from this tax break since most companies will not have losses so large that they would need more than two years of tax payments to balance them against. But, really big losers, like Robert Rubin's Citigroup, and other badly failing financial institutions, are losing much more money in 2008 and 2009 than they earned in 2006 and 2007.

Did the political connections of Robert Rubin and others in the financial industry have anything to do with the decision of Obama's economic team to be so generous to them? I don't have an answer to that question, but the media should be asking it.

At best, I suppose you could argue this is a backdoor method of recapitalizing struggling financial institutions, but even then there are better ways to provide for recapitalization.

[Dec 31, 2008] Economist's View Correspondence, Abstraction, and Realism

Philosopher of social science Daniel Little on "realists" versus "instrumentalists":

Correspondence, abstraction, and realism: Science is generally concerned with two central semantic features of theories: truth of theoretical hypotheses and reliability of observational predictions. ... Truth involves a correspondence between hypothesis and the world; while predictions involve statements about the observable future behavior of a real system. Science is also concerned with epistemic values: warrant and justification. The warrant of a hypothesis is a measure of the degree to which available evidence permits us to conclude that the hypothesis is approximately true. A hypothesis may be true but unwarranted (that is, we may not have adequate evidence available to permit confidence in the truth of the hypothesis). Likewise, however, a hypothesis may be false but warranted (that is, available evidence may make the hypothesis highly credible, while it is in fact false). And every science possesses a set of standards of hypothesis evaluation on the basis of which practitioners assess the credibility of their theories--for example, testability, success in prediction, inter-theoretical support, simplicity, and the like. ...

Whatever position we arrive at concerning the possible truth or falsity of a given economic hypothesis, it is plain that this cannot be understood as literal descriptive truth. Economic hypotheses are not offered as full and detailed representations of the underlying economic reality. For a hypothesis unavoidably involves abstraction, in at least two ways.

First, the hypothesis deliberately ignores some empirical characteristics and causal processes of the underlying economic reality. Just as a Newtonian hypothesis of the ballistics of projectiles ignores air resistance in order to focus on gravitational forces and the initial momentum of the projectile, so an economic hypothesis ignores differences in consumption behavior among members of functional defined income groups. Likewise, a hypothesis may abstract from regional or sectional differences in prices or wage rates within a national economy. Daniel Hausman provides an excellent discussion of the scope and limits of economic theories in The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics.

Another epistemically significant feature of social hypotheses is the difficulty of isolating causal factors in real social or economic systems. Hypotheses are generally subject to ceteris paribus conditions. Predictions and counterfactual assertions are advanced conditioned by the assumption that no other exogenous causal factors intervene... But if there are intervening causal factors, then the overall behavior of the system may be indeterminate. In some cases it is possible to specify particularly salient interfering causal factors (e.g. political instability). But it is often necessary to incorporate open-ended ceteris paribus conditions as well.

Finally, social theories and hypotheses unavoidably make simplifying or idealizing assumptions about the populations, properties, and processes that they describe. Consumers are represented as possessing consistent and complete preference rankings; firms are represented as making optimizing choices of products and technologies; product markets are assumed to function perfectly; and so on.

Given, then, that hypotheses abstract from reality, in what sense does it make sense to ask whether a hypothesis is true? We must distinguish between truth and completeness, to start with. To say that a description of a system is true is not to say that it is a complete description. (A complete description provides a specification of the value of all state variables for the system--that is, all variables that have a causal role in the functioning of the system.) The fact that hypotheses are abstractive demonstrates only that they are incomplete, not that they are false. A description of a hockey puck's trajectory on the ice that assumes a frictionless surface is a true account of some of the causal factors at work: the Newtonian mechanics of the system. The assumption that the surface of the ice is frictionless is false; but in this particular system the overall behavior of the system (with friction) is sufficiently close to the abstract hypothesis (because frictional forces are small relative to other forces affecting the puck). In this case, then, we can say two things: first, the Newtonian hypothesis is exactly true as a description of the forces it directly represents, and second, it is approximately true as a description of the system as a whole (because the forces it ignores are small).

This account takes a strongly realist position on social theory, in that it characterizes truth in terms of correspondence to unobservable entities, processes, or properties. The presumption here is that social systems generally--and economic systems in particular--have objective unobservable characteristics which it is the task of social science theory to identify. The realist position is commonly challenged by some economists, however. Milton Friedman's famous argument for an instrumentalist interpretation of economic theory (Essays in Positive Economics) is highly unconvincing in this context. The instrumentalist position maintains that it is a mistake to understand theories as referring to real unobservable entities. Instead, theories are simply ways of systematizing observable characteristics of the phenomena under study; the only purpose of scientific theory is to serve as an instrument for prediction. Along these lines, Friedman argues that the realism of economic premises is irrelevant to the warrant of an economic theory; all that matters is the overall predictive success of the theory. The instrumentalist approach to the interpretation of economic theory, then, is highly unpersuasive as an interpretation of the epistemic standing of economic hypotheses. Instead, the realist position appears to be inescapable: we are forced to treat general equilibrium theory as a substantive empirical hypothesis about the real workings of competitive market systems, and our confidence in general equilibrium hypotheses is limited by our confidence in the approximate truth of the general equilibrium theory.

[Dec 3, 2008] » Blog Archive » Economic nationalism and the USD

Is this economic nationalism or just a common sense plus realization the US account deficit might be  unsustainable ?

 FT Alphaville

Bank of America’s Robert Sinche explains the significance (emphasis is ours):

… the international community is shifting its focus from reserve accumulation to domestic economic stability.

Russia is liquidating accumulated reserve holdings (almost $150bn since August) to support its domestic economic/financial system while South Korean reserves have fallen by $50bn in a similar effort. China has pledged a massive fiscal stimulus (accounting details aside) in an effort to rejuvenate its domestic economy, reducing its level of aggregate savings that can flow into foreign markets. Even Brazil announced this week that it will potentially use part of its small sovereign wealth fund (SWF) to support its domestic economy.

Given this growing tide of “economic nationalism,” funding the U.S. internal and external deficits may become a source of legitimate concern for the USD entering the new year. And while it is early for these forces to unfold, there already has been a noticeable slowing in the rate of growth in custody holdings of Treasury and Agency securities at the Fed for foreign central banks and official institutions.

Couple those current account problems (the US deficit looks set for another record year, something like 7 per cent of GDP according to BoA) with collapsing yields and you have further downward pressure on the USD. As BoA notes:

This period of extreme risk aversion may enable the world’s reserve currency to maintain its value on global markets, but the combination of low real yields, low domestic savings and high borrowing needs is not one that appears sustainable indefinitely.

For what it’s worth, BoA thinks dollar weakness won’t really start showing up until the first-half of next year.

…in 1H 2009 as the repatriation process slows, foreign savings are utilized for domestic policy initiatives and flows into low-yielding US assets remain sluggish. That is an environment in which even the world’s reserve currency could begin to suffer, leaving the USD and its asset markets at risk of underperformance.

[Dec 3, 2008] "The State of Financial Engineering"

An email suggested this as a follow-up to Quants Did It?:

The State of Financial Engineering, by Sylvain Raynes: ...All over the world, it has become fashionable for Universities and Colleges to offer Masters degree programs in quantitative finance or financial engineering (FE), a code word meaning the solution of the Black-Scholes option pricing differential equation in as many ways as possible. To do so, students are taught to use basic techniques in numerical analysis whenever the equation is either non-linear or does not lend itself to the standard analytical solution. As a precursor to this main task, the program usually includes a course in stochastic calculus during which Ito's celebrated lemma is discussed, proved and used.

In general, the cost and length of such programs are remarkably similar... Even Ivy League schools like Princeton University, who swore up and down they would never play this game, are now happily teaching finance and deriving significant incremental income from a fully depreciated curriculum.

The techniques taught in quantitative finance are completely standard in other fields. In most cases, the only exciting thing about the curriculum is that one day these methods might be applied on Wall Street to the calculation of cash flows. If they were instead applied to the making of widgets or the collection of tomatoes, it is a fair bet that nobody would be interested in them, and certainly no university would be able to charge $35K to learn them. ...

It is a plain fact that the field of quantitative finance has not made a single fundamental step forward over the past twenty years, not to mention that Black himself, by his own admission, had nothing to do with the equation that now bears his illustrious name. The BS equation was first formulated and solved by Casey Sprenkle some ten years before Black's famous 1973 paper in the Journal of Political Economy. Regrettably, it is still politically incorrect to give due credit to someone who made a real contribution to finance. Unlike those of some of his associates, Black's reputation hardly hangs on one paper.

Statistics and numerical analysis have nothing to do with finance per se but are merely tools of financial analysis, just like accounting statements and legal opinions. Finance is quantitative by definition; there is thus no need to add an adolescent adjective to the word. This is like saying aerial flight or wet swimming. Although people employed as aerospace engineers use computers on a daily basis, none would describe him- or herself as a computer programmer.

But if this were about mere semantics, it would not be worth mentioning. Unfortunately, FE programs are also drifting farther and farther away from their purported subject matter. In effect, quantitative finance has entered the scholastic stage whereby numerical techniques are taught completely out of context as if a deal were somehow a differential equation that could be solved for the right solution. In fact, there is no solution to a deal as there is to a differential equation. ...

Students thinking themselves financial experts simply because they can solve the BS equation in a few minutes (there is apparently no other one around) are being misled by their own mentors and teachers into the naïve belief that this amounts to finance. ...

» Continue reading ""The State of Financial Engineering""

[Oct 28 2008 ]  How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington  by George Monbiot

Please note extremely high level of comments to the article. The look like an academic discussion, not a regular press forum. Some of them were reproduced below. One of the key quotes of Geroge Monbiot article is "A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that one in four of the state's state school biology teachers believed humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time." Here is an astute reaction by one of the readers: "Some of it made for unnerving reading, especially the 25% of biology teachers who think humans were contemporary with dinosaurs. The piece was however lacking in corrobative references... would it be possible for the author to provide us with sources for this information?"

The Guardian

The degradation of intelligence and learning in American politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies

How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama was a Muslim and a terrorist?

Like most people on my side of the Atlantic, I have for many years been mystified by American politics. The US has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

There have been exceptions over the past century - Franklin Roosevelt, JF Kennedy and Bill Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived - but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan's response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter - stumbling a little, using long words - carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said: "There you go again." His own health programme would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.

It wasn't always like this. The founding fathers of the republic - Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and others - were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin?

On one level, this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves round the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15-year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD. But this merely extends the mystery: how did so many US citizens become so stupid, and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.

One theme is both familiar and clear: religion - in particular fundamentalist religion - makes you stupid. The US is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.

Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication of The Origin of Species, for instance, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin's theory was mixed up in the US with the brutal philosophy - now known as social Darwinism - of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer's doctrine, promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation. Gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary.

Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of social Darwinism.

But there were other, more powerful, reasons for the intellectual isolation of the fundamentalists. The US is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. "In the south", Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."

The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest denomination in the US, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the south stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that one in four of the state's state school biology teachers believed humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time.

This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishisation of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln's career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary: all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment, it is a recipe for confusion.

Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day men such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rage against the "liberal elites" destroying America.

The spectre of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the election of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite - like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush - has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an over-educated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the rightwing elite has been successfully branded as elitism.

Obama has a lot to offer the US, but none of this will stop if he wins. Until the great failures of the US education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers, there will be political opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their ignorance.

Comments

Utterson  Oct 28 08, 3:43am (about 22 hours ago)

The most interesting and best-written analysis of this pattern comes from Thomas Frank, in a number of books but best in *What's the Matter with Kansas?* (in the UK styled 'What's the Matter with America?*. Do yourself a favour and read him.

Here's a 2004 interview on related issues:

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200408/?read=interview_frank

Susannah27  Oct 28 08, 12:28am

It seems to me that you're letting some cynical bad guys off the hook. This didn't just happen...it was planned. The Republican elite doesn't believe this stuff for a minute. It suits their agenda to assure its widespread acceptance but their children go to "the best schools" It's far worse than you think.

martinusher  Oct 28 08, 12:37am

Its not as clear cut as it looks. Think of government as two tier -- you've got the populist front end, the "tell the oiks anything that'll get 'em riled up and keep 'em on your side" and the back end which is where the real action is.

So, for example, the W. administration has been characterized by much chattering about faith and morals up front but actually represents a cabal of global oil interests. McPalin continues in this tradition -- what they say and what they will actually do are very different. The gap's made up by people skilled in mass psychology -- spin doctors is how they used to call themselves.

The current election climate is a bit weird because Obama's running on a platform that's not too different from McCain circa 2000. McCain's had to drink the Party KoolAid so he's now trying to push positions that he knows just don't make sense. He's been issued with a running made that's completely off the wall -- this whole trooper thing only scratches the surface.

For more explanations of the American Way, read the book "It can't happen here". (Its a novel published in the mid 1930s, something of a classic.).

SSDD

Oct 28 08, 12:44am

And, most important, to my mind--an American Media horde (especially inside-the-Washington Beltway) that lives and breathes and enables and sustains cheap, meaningless personality-celebrity politics. With this, of course, we have a Repuglicritocracy in America that both preys on, and feeds off,
the Federal government (the people)!!!

Leesburg, VA

toenail

Oct 28 08, 12:45am

This view of the US and A could be part of a new comedy "Monbiot - Cultural Learnings of America to make great success for cliched liberal views of the US and A"

Gimme a break.

Sure the USA is filled with a particular kind of moron but at least, as anyone might of noticed, they get the chance to vote for their head of state.

Over here, in the UK, we're still dominated by an entrenched network of public school boys, feudal landowners all topped off by that establishment-clinching clique known as the Royal Family. The USA does have similar levels of entrenched elites as the UK but what chances a young Black man from a poor single parent family succeeding in the UK as Obama has in the USA? Not as much. It's hard to even see a poor white boy or girl achieving the same seeing as the halls of the great and good are universally stuffed with Oxbridge (intake still 60% privately schooled) grads. Dint of birth is still the defining marker in social order in the UK.

It should also be added that the UK has exported gazillions of brainnumbing reality TV shows to the USA while we've had the Sopranos, the Wire etc in return. Our culture is dumbed down to extraordinary levels. The USA has brought us jazz, rock and roll, jeans, art, writers (Steinbeck to Wolfe), filmmakers (Welles to the Coens) whose entire body of work outweighs the UK for longevity and the ability to infuse the popular with the profound.

Monbiot's USA bashing is rooted in a weird parochial British liberal view of things that is more akin to Jeeves and Wooster than sentient thought. He's out of touch because for him, from his nice secure posh upbringing, living in his rural idyll, the best of what the USA represents has always been a cultural threat.

Roosterbooster198

Oct 28 08, 1:54am

toenail

The USA does have similar levels of entrenched elites as the UK but what chances a young Black man from a poor single parent family succeeding in the UK as Obama has in the USA?

John Major was poor and didn't even go to university. Margaret Thatcher was a woman. Disraeli was Jewish. There are many openly gay/atheist MPs. It's not even an issue.

Firstly, George Monbiot should be congratulated for a thought-provoking article. Some of it made for unnerving reading, especially the 25% of biology teachers who think humans were contemporary with dinosaurs. The piece was however lacking in corrobative references... would it be possible for the author to provide us with sources for this information?

Secondly, I had always thought Mr Monbiot tending towards dryness in his writing, but he proved me wrong with his belly-laugh-inducing line: "Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president?" Well-played, sir.

And to think I used to imagine a Harvard education would signify talent rather than money...

Unencom Oct 28 08, 1:01am

Oct 28 08, 1:04am

Yeah. Isn't Democracy awful? Why they let hicks vote too!

We have had thisarticle from Western intellectuals going back to Plato if not longer. Isn't Democracy just terrible - they can elect people just like themselves! They no longer tug their forelocks! Why can't they just accept that it is better for them to be ruled by the Wise, the Good and the Just - people just like us!

The truth is as dumb as dumb people are, the really dumb things are done by intellectuals. It was intellectuals that endorsed Stalin - and Hitler too for that matter. It was Sartre that defended Stalin's Terror techniques. All when any eight year old could see the USSR for what it was.

I'll take Sarah Palin over Sartre any day of the week. Whatever the usual crowd of Palindrones think.

Good article.

I usually am immediately suspicious (or downright angry) whenever sweeping generalisations are made about america. They invariably smack of a certain intellectual smugness on our part; the classic "americans don't get irony" is a good example of this lazy racism. Trying to defend the inevitable criticism by saying "most powerful nation on earth blah blah " beforehand just makes me think of Kilroy Silk saying "some of my best friends are black".

Having said that I appreciate what Mr. Monbiot is doing here and you can't really write an article about the american election without generalising somewhat. I like the social darwinsism point. He gets to the root of the problem with the fundamentalist religion in schools as well. Nothing compares to the sense of profound frustration I get when I think of the millions of children being indoctrinated to believe in some bizzare fairytale. I'm with Dawkins when he calls it "mental child abuse" - I believe religion really does make you stupid, it certainly limits your thinking. And it happens over here as well (faith schools are terrifying). Sarah Palin is what happens when you dont have a robust, secular, education system.

The irony is that all of the americans I've known well (and I've travelled quite a bit there) are invariably friendly, gracious, hardworking, knowledgable and clever (but maybe thats just bcos I tended to meet younger, travelling types). Im a bit of a sucker for the place and I like to think (maybe too optimistically) that they will do the right thing eventually.

I cant think of a better example of "doing the right thing" than electing Barack Obama as their president. Ive never been massively into politics but this one has got me hooked. I want that man to win so much it hurts. It is such a screamingly obvious choice.

When he gets in next week I am going to go out and party till I drop. COME ON OBAMA!

This is indeed a good, thought-provoking article, and I would like to put some of its oversimplifications down to "limited space available."

But, I think there are a few other aspects besides US politics that mystify Mr. Monbiot. US Religious denominations and affiliations and "how such things work" being one of them.

As loathe as I am to defend tne Southern Baptist Convention (especially since the fundamentalist purge of the 70's through 90's), characterizing them in this generic fashion tars a lot of pretty intelligent folks with the same broad brush.

For one thing, unlike truly vertical groups like Anglicans, Catholics or even Methodists, the "Convention" is a more or less voluntary association of separate independently governed legal entities (churches/congregations), and many southern Baptist churches are members of both the SBC and also other more liberal (and academic) Baptist associations.

Academically sound and fine southern/Texas universities such as Wake Forest and Baylor have historical Baptist ownership, although, admittedly they both have had changes of either ownership (Wake) or governance (Baylor) within the past 20 years to stave off the predations of the fundamentalist Baptist jihadists who used modern political techniques (i.e. well known to Republicans) to take over the Convention. (The Ivy League Brown was also Baptist, by the way, founded by either Roger Williams or an accolyte--can't remember which at the moment.)

Many of the Ivy's were originally religously affiliated or owned universities, and still have strong religion departments and/or seminaries, a fact that is also more and more forgotten or ignored.

As one who has lived through some of these fundamental take-over sea changes in southern religious thinking, governance and education, and, as doltish as some Southern Baptist preachers and laypersons can be at times, I would suggest that the biggest blip in the ignorance meter has not come from the SBC, but from the rise in "private" personally-owned churches and "ministries" (most visible in the TV variety), which actually are more in the "Christian academy" and home school business than the SBC itself, I think.

The average privately owned church and/or TV minister is simply the modern day version of the snake oil salesman, and, since THEY LITERALLY OWN IT can (and do) tend to foment the behavior most likely to rouse the rabble's emotions--so they will send money, of course. And since THEY LITERALLY OWN IT can require, through power of the purse (i.e., employment) fealty even to the most extreme or bizarre behaviors.

Listen: it is no random fact that the likely illegalities--and at least the improper and non-historical level of political misbehavior of the US Justice Department under the incompetent Alberto (who Harvard has to defend, if they can)--came via marginally educated and likely dumb-as-Palin ideologues recruited from the lowest-rate private law schools formed, owned and/or propagandized by the likes of the Robertsons and Falwells.

And, in the end, I remain a bit more optimistic than Mr. Monbiot's apparent final assessment that things are unlikely to change within the political establishment, and that ignorance will remain king.

My observation and experience is that politicians always respond and "change" according to what gets them elected--or not-elected.

If enough good, reasonably educated folks vote others than the usual Republican dupes and blockheads into office this time, I suspect that we will shortly see less and less of the looney tunes likes of the Robertson's, Hagee's and Parsley's on the political stump, or as spiritual guides.

It is those non-SBC folks who are the real fount of ignorance, hate, fear and resentment.

And those are four things that totally antithetical to education.

What on earth is Monbiot talking about? The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest religious group in America? What? It's probably one of the smallest in the US. It has 16 million members (out of 300 million US citizens), 99.9% of which exist in the South. Compare that with the 70 million Catholics in the United States.

I'm pretty left wing myself, but Monbiot is desperately twisting the facts here to fit his (and some of his readers') assumptions about America. All the wacky crazy things people talk about in the US exist, yes, but they exist on the fringe. Somehow the Republicans were able to manipulate this fringe into victory through the apathy of the general public; now we're finally seeing a backlash as our average American citizens recoil in horror at what they've done.

When people say, "all these biology teachers don't believe in evolution!!!" they're talking about teachers who teach children in towns with populations of 100 or 200 people; these bizarre, poor backwaters. Of course writers like Monbiot ignore the well educated people in the regions that have higher populations than the whole of England... no, that wouldn't fit with their image of America.

Europeans simply do not understand the United States. They don't understand how vast this country is, and the fact that most of the citizens here live in the well-educated, generally liberal urban areas. [I am nor sure the US suburbs are liberal --NNB]  People look at the wackos in the isolated, rural villages and trump it up as THIS IS AMERICA! I TOLD YOU THEY'RE IDIOTS! Good job there, chief. The truth is, the problems we're facing now are caused by apathy and preoccupation of the educated majority, to the advantage of the nutjob minority who work way harder to push their agenda. They also simply have more free time. John McCain has blamed for the crisis. Coming from Mr. McCain, a longtime champion of financial industry deregulation, it was a puzzling attribution, squarely at odds with the cherished belief of free-market enthusiasts everywhere that unbridled pursuit of self-interest promotes the common good. As Adam Smith wrote in “The Wealth of Nations,” “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Greed underlies every market outcome, good or bad. When important conditions are met, greed not only poses no threat to Smith’s “invisible hand” of ccts all kinds of competitive endeavors. This may be seen clearly in the world of sports.

Consider a sprinter’s decision about whether to take anabolic steroids. The sprinter’s reward depends not on how fast he runs in absolute terms, but on how his times compare with those of others. Imagine a new drug that enhances performance by three-tenths of a second in the 100-meter dash. Almost impossible to detect, it also entails a small risk of serious health problems. The sums at stake ensure that many competitors will take the drug, making it all but impossible for a drug-free competitor to win. The net effect is increased health risks for all athletes, with no real gain for society.

This particular type of market failure occurs when two conditions are met. First, people confront a gamble that offers a highly probable small gain with only a very small chance of a significant loss. Second, the rewards received by market participants depend strongly on relative performance.

These conditions have caused the invisible hand to break down in multiple domains. In unregulated housing markets, for example, there are invariably too many dwellings built on flood plains and in earthquake zones. Similarly, in unregulated labor markets, workers typically face greater health and safety risks.

It is no different in unregulated financial markets, where easy credit terms almost always produce an asset bubble. The problem occurs because, just as in sports, an investment fund’s success depends less on its absolute rate of return than on how that rate compares with those of rivals.

If one fund posts higher earnings than others, money immediately flows into it. And because managers’ pay depends primarily on how much money a fund oversees, managers want to post relatively high returns at every moment.

One way to bolster a fund’s return is to invest in slightly riskier assets. (Such investments generally pay higher returns because risk-averse investors would otherwise be unwilling to hold them.) Before the current crisis, once some fund managers started offering higher-paying mortgage-backed securities, others felt growing pressure to follow suit, lest their customers desert them.

Warren E. Buffett warned about a similar phenomenon during the tech bubble. Mr. Buffett said he wouldn’t invest in tech stocks because he didn’t understand the business model. Investors knew him to be savvy, but the relatively poor performance of his Berkshire Hathaway fund during the tech stock run-up persuaded many to move their money elsewhere. Mr. Buffett had the personal and financial resources to weather that storm. But most money managers did not, and the tech bubble kept growing.

A similar dynamic precipitated the current problems. The new mortgage-backed securities were catnip for investors, much as steroids are for athletes. Many money managers knew that these securities were risky. As long as housing prices kept rising, however, they also knew that portfolios with high concentrations of the riskier assets would post higher returns, enabling them to attract additional investors. More important, they assumed that if things went wrong, there would be safety in numbers.

PHIL GRAMM, the former senator from Texas, and other proponents of financial industry deregulation insisted that market forces would provide ample protection against excessive risk. Lenders obviously don’t want to make loans that won’t be repaid, and borrowers have clear incentives to shop for favorable terms. And because everyone agrees that financial markets are highly competitive, Mr. Gramm’s invocation of the familiar invisible-hand theory persuaded many other lawmakers.

The invisible hand breaks down, however, when rewards depend heavily on relative performance. A high proportion of investors are simply unable to stand idly by while others who appear no more talented than them earn conspicuously higher returns. This fact of human nature makes the invisible hand an unreliable shield against excessive financial risk.

Where do we go from here?

Many people advocate greater transparency in the market for poorly understood derivative securities. More stringent disclo asset bubbles cause real trouble when investors can borrow freely to expand their holdings. To prevent such bubbles, we must limit the amounts that people can invest with borrowed money.

[Oct 3, 2008] Sam Harris on Sarah Palin and Elitism Newsweek Politics Campaign 2008 Newsweek.com

Sara Palin as a vice-president would tremendous victory for religious obscurantism in this this country. IMHO this would a slap in the face of any academic...

Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin's speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer who—being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy—could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.

Then came Palin's first television interview with Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady's misfortune—and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.

The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface (she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story—but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.

The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.

We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.

Palin's most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been widely discussed. The truth is, I didn't much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase "Bush doctrine." And I am quite sure that her supporters didn't care, either. Most people view such an ambush as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things Palin isout financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth.

I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with mil-lions of Americans—but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country—even the welfare of our species—as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.

In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the "end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing—as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that "God's going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you"?

You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"?

It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska. But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin's impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if, instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who "intends" to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation to speak of "the dysfunction in the black community"?

Teen pregnancy is a misfortune, plain and simple. At best, it represents bad luck (both for the mother and for the child); at worst, as in the Palins' case, it is a symptom of religious dogmatism. Governor Palin opposes sex education in schools on religious grounds. She has also fought vigorously for a "parental consent law" in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning—or, indeed, of the 21st century.

We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a "higher Father" before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist. Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to "talk the talk" between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to "walk the walk" until the Day of Judgment.

What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:

"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"

"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."

"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."

"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."

The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.

Harris is a founder of The Reason Project and author of The New York Times best sellers “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.” His Web site is samharris.org.

[Sep 28, 2008] Palin Claimed Dinosaurs And People Coexisted

Come on people. This is not XVII this XXI century. America deserves better then that.

ANCHORAGE -- Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago -- about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct -- the teacher said.

After conducting a college band and watching Palin deliver a commencement address to a small group of home-schooled students in June 1997, Wasilla resident Philip Munger said, he asked the young mayor about her religious beliefs.

Palin told him that "dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time," Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said "she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks," recalled Munger, who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and has regularly criticized Palin in recent years on his liberal political blog, called Progressive Alaska.

The idea of a "young Earth" -- that God created the Earth about 6,000 years ago, and dinosaurs and humans coexisted early on -- is a popular strain of creationism.

Though in her race for governor she called for faith-based "intelligent design" to be taught along with evolution in Alaska's schools, Gov. Palin has not sought to require it, state educators say

[Sep 17, 2008] Letters Financial mayhem - Letters, Opinion - The Independent

I wonder why nobody sees a strong link between creationism and communist doctrine with its obsessive idea of central planning ;-)

Science lessons from creationism

I agree with Robert Smith (letter, 13 September) that creationism should be taught more widely; pupils could learn a lot by analysing the implications. I've been thinking about the events of that busy first week in the "Young Earth" model.

Consider the challenge of creating the first chicken (on the fifth day); an egg would be no good on its own. Would you start at the beak and sweep backwards? You would have to be quick, or fluids would leak out. No, it would have to be completely formed in an instant, with all the organs and blood supply and nerves (including behaviour and memory). The space it suddenly occupies would have to be cleared of air at exactly the same moment to prevent a deafening shock-wave.

Creating a whale would be even more challenging; a large volume of water would have to be removed in an instant, and not by converting it into energy, or the planet would be blown away.

The difficulties don't stop there. All the delicate inter-relationships between species would have to be immaculately planned, and there would have to be fully-grown trees (the third day), ready-rotted wood and dead animals for scavengers; nests, burrows and much else. And this for the whole world, down to the last ant and pine-needle, rotifer and bacillus.

That's zoology, anatomy, physiology, psychology, physics (newtonian and nuclear) and ecology.

David Ridge

London N19

===

Hugh Dower (letter, 13 September) asserts that "creationism is a legitimate theory, which means that natural evolution is only a theory too". Unfortunately, this is a completely false comparison.

His dismissal of evolution as "only" a theory confuses the general understanding of the word theory (a conjecture or hypothesis) with the scientific understanding (a testable and thus potentially falsifiable explanation). And this latter point is precisely where creationism falls down: it can never be a legitimate theory because it is unfalsifiable, and by Karl Popper's test is not scientific.

It would be both pointless and misleading to attempt to teach it in science classes; we might as well teach astrology or the existence of the tooth fairy.

Dr Richard Carter

London SW15

[Sep 14 2008]  Our scientists must nail the creationists Comment is free  by Robin McKie

Was Michael Reiss appointment a special operation of  the Templeton Foundation

The Observer

The Royal Society should take a much stronger stance in opposing religion in the school lab

All comments (137)
 

There are two ways of reacting to the Royal Society's claim that its education director Michael Reiss was misrepresented in reports alleging he thought creationism should be taught in science classrooms. Either journalists got it wrong or Reiss - an ordained Church of England clergyman - did indeed suggest religious dogma be mixed with science teaching. I tend very much to the latter view.

As Sir Harry Kroto, a society fellow, and a Nobel prize winner, pointed out in a letter to the Royal Society, Reiss was an accident waiting to happen: 'I warned the president ... that his was a dangerous appointment. I did not realise just how dangerous it would turn out to be.'

Now the society has been caught out, though in the short term it may ride out the current controversy. In the wake of Reiss's remarks, most commentaries have focused, quite reasonably, on the issue of how science and religion should be taught at school. At the same time, the Royal Society has rushed to assure scientists that it still believes creationism has no place in school laboratories.

There is a second, more important issue at stake, however. How should the Royal Society, the world's oldest and most prestigious scientific organisation, treat religion within the confines of its own headquarters?

Science and religion do mix, though the combination is often volatile - the reaction often depending, intriguingly, on the discipline studied by a particular researcher, according to Sir Tim Hunt, winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for medicine. 'Cosmologists and physicists dwell on cosmic forces which - if altered only slightly - would prevent many chemical reactions, and life, from occurring. The sheer improbability of our universe makes them all a bit spiritual and soft on religion. By contrast, biologists see evolution constantly at work in their research and are more hard-nosed about God.'

The idea is not without exceptions, of course. Hunt, a biologist, is scarcely hardline about Reiss's creationism call, for example. 'I am not worried about this one, though I am definitely anti-religious.'

But if he is unworried about God getting a foot in the Royal Society's door, many other fellows find recent developments troubling. Scientists such as Kroto, Sir Richard Roberts (another UK Nobel winner), and Richard Dawkins look with horror upon the spread of faith schools; the growing influence of bodies such as the Templeton Foundation, a conservative US organisation which constantly seeks to establish links between science and religion; and the prospect of creationism being taught in Britain's science classrooms. They expect the Royal Society to take a tough stand on these issues.

Many of their fears are based on their American experiences, it should be noted. Kroto and Richards now work there while Dawkins is a frequent visitor on the US lecture circuit. And what they see in America unnerves them: school science teachers who firmly believe the world and humanity are the 6,000-year-old handiwork of God and who cannot accept what DNA tells us about our close relationships with the animal world, what isotope research reveals about the deep antiquity of our planet, what astronomical studies tell us about the size and age of the universe; and what fossils reveal about our own species' multimillion-year lineage. The prospect of such ignorance spreading to Britain quite rightly appals them.

'I don't know if it is too late to stop the slide in Britain but I think it is in the US where they [the religious right] have now almost complete control over politics, the judiciary, education, business, journalism and television,' says Kroto. 'And it will only take a presidential victory by McCain, followed by him having a heart attack weeks later, and Sarah Palin, a creationist supporter, will become head of the world's most powerful country.'

It is the duty of scientists to fight such onslaughts and be examples of rationality in a darkening world, it is argued. Hence the anger at the Royal Society for failing to firmly nail its colours to its mast. The organisation has a motto: 'Nullius in verba' (roughly, 'Take nobody's word for it'). In other words, verify everything by experiment and think for yourself. Both are noble aspirations. It is therefore baffling how an ordained minister - a man committed to believing the word of God without question - could have been asked to play a senior role in the society. Equally, the society's acceptance of money from the Templeton Foundation raises further concerns.

The Royal Society - which should set the fiercest of examples in its commitment to rationality - has shown worrying signs of spiritual sloppiness. (Its current president, Lord Rees, is a cosmologist who attends church 'as an unbelieving Anglican', it should be noted.) Those of a religious persuasion might welcome this softening. I would sound a note of caution, however. Britain is still a broadly secular society which guarantees freedoms not just to atheists but to all religions, no matter how few its adherents. If we follow the example of America then all are threatened by the rise of a powerful Christian right.

We badly need our premier scientific society to stand firm and present a clear vision of how our planet, our species, and the cosmos came into existence. It needs to be unequivocal about the wonders of nature as revealed through rational, scientific investigation. As Douglas Adams put it: 'Isn't enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there are fairies at the bottom of it too?'

[Sep 11, 2008] September 11th Defeat Terrorism by Reacting Rationally (Skeptical Inquirer September 2002)

At the one-year anniversary, we examine reactions to the September 11, 2001, attacks in the context of other causes of premature deaths. An objective of terrorism is to multiply damage by inducing irrational fears in the broad population. One defense is to learn to evaluate such situations more objectively.

Clark R. Chapman and Alan W. Harris

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Human beings might be expected to value each life, and each death, equally. We each face numerous hazards-war, disease, homicide, accidents, natural disasters-before succumbing to "natural" death. Some premature deaths shock us far more than others. Contrasting with the 2,800 fatalities in the World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2001 (9/11), we barely remember the 20,000 Indian earthquake victims earlier in 2001. Here, we argue that the disproportionate reaction to 9/11 was as damaging as the direct destruction of lives and property. Americans can mitigate future terrorism by learning to respond more objectively to future malicious acts. We do not question the visceral fears and responsible precautions taken during the hours and days following 9/11, when there might have been even worse attacks. But, as the first anniversary of 9/11 approaches, our nation's priorities remain radically torqued toward homeland defense and fighting terrorism at the expense of objectively greater societal needs. As we obsessively and excessively beef up internal security and try to dismantle terrorist groups worldwide, Americans actually feed the terrorists' purposes.

Every month, including September 2001, the U.S. highway death toll exceeds fatalities in the WTC, Pentagon, and four downed airliners combined. Just like the New York City firefighters and restaurant workers, last September's auto crash victims each had families, friends, critical job responsibilities, and valued positions in their churches and communities. Their surviving children, also, were left without one parent, with shattered lives, and much poorer than the 9/11 victims' families, who were showered with 1.5 million dollars, per fatality, from the federal government alone. The 9/11 victims died from malicious terrorism, arguably compounded by poor intelligence, sloppy airport security, and other failed procedures we imagined were protecting us. While few of September's auto deaths resulted from malice, neither were they "natural" deaths: most also resulted from individual, corporate, and societal choices about road safety engineering, enforcement of driving-while-drunk laws, safe car design, and so on.

A Lack of Balance

Why does 9/11 remain our focus rather than the equally vast carnage on the nation's highways or Indian earthquake victims? Some say, "Oh, it was a natural disaster and nothing could be done, while 9/11 was a malicious attack." Yet better housing in India could have saved thousands. As for malice, where is our concern for the 15,000 Americans who die annually by homicide? Apparently, the death toll doesn't matter, not if people die all at once, not even if they die by malicious intent. We focus on 9/11, of course, because these attacks were terroristic and were indelibly imprinted on our consciousness by round-the-clock news coverage. Our apprehension was then amplified when just a half dozen people died by anthrax. Citizens apparently support the nation's sudden, massive shift in priorities since 9/11. Here, we ask "Why?"

Suppose we had reacted to 9/11 as we did to last September's auto deaths. That wouldn't have lessened the destroyed property, lost lives and livelihoods, and personal bereavement of family and associates of the WTC victims. But no billions would have been needed to prop up airlines. Local charities wouldn't have suffered as donations were redirected to New York City. Congress might have enacted prescription drug benefits, as it was poised to do before 9/11. Battalions of National Guardsmen needn't have left their jobs to provide a visible "presence" in airports. The nation might not have slipped into recession, with resulting losses to businesses, workers, and consumers alike. And the FBI might still be focusing on rampant white-collar crime (think Enron) rather than on terrorism. While some modest measures (e.g., strengthening cockpit doors) were easy to implement, may have inhibited some "copycat" crimes, and may even lessen future terrorism, we believe that much of the expensive effort is ineffective, too costly to sustain, or wholly irrelevant.

Some leaders got it right when they implored Americans after 9/11 to return to their daily routines, for otherwise "the terrorists will win." Unfortunately, such exhortations seemed aimed at rescuing the travel industry rather than articulating a broad vision of how to respond to terrorism. We advocate that most of us more fully "return to normal life." We suggest that the economic and emotional damage unleashed by 9/11, which touched the lives of all Americans, resulted mostly from our own reactions to 9/11 and the anthrax scare, rather than from the objective damage. We recognize that our assertion may seem inappropriate to some readers, and we are under no illusion that natural human reactions to the televised terrorism could have been wholly averted and redirected. We, too, gaped in horror at images of crashing airplanes and we contributed to WTC victims. But from within the skeptical community there could emerge a more objective, rational alternative to post-9/11. Citizens could learn to react more constructively to future terrorism and to balance the terrorist threat against other national priorities. It could be as important to combat our emotional vulnerability to terrorism as to attack Al Qaeda.

Terrorism, by design, evokes disproportionate responses to antisocial acts by a malicious few. By minimizing our negative reactions, we might contribute to undermining terrorists' goals as effectively as by waging war on them or by mounting homeland defenses. We do not "blame the victims" for the terrorists' actions. Rather, we seek that we citizens, the future targets of terrorism, be empowered. As Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." We can help ensure that terrorists don't win if we can minimize our fears and react more constructively to future terrorism. We don't suggest that this option is easy or will suffice alone. It may not even be possible. But human beings often best succeed by being rational when their emotions, however tenacious and innate, have let them down.

[Sep 8, 2008] http://minnesotachris.blogspot.com/2008/09/ron-paul-speech-on-youtube.html

Ran Paul raises important questions relevant to this topic

[Jun 19, 2008] Hip Heterodoxy Christopher Hayes

It might be that the most instructive part of the article was the Card portion.

May 24, 2007

"Card, a highly esteemed economist at the University of California, Berkeley, caught flak for his heresy not on trade but on the minimum wage. In 1994 he conducted a study to see whether an increase in the minimum wage in New Jersey had the negative effect on employment that basic neoclassical theory would predict. He found it didn't. In fact, his regression analysis showed that, controlling for other factors, New Jersey gained fast-food jobs after increasing its minimum wage, compared with Pennsylvania, which hadn't raised wages. The paper attracted a tremendous amount of attention and criticism, and Card himself largely abandoned working on the minimum wage. In a 2006 interview, he explained his decision to leave the topic behind this way: "I've subsequently stayed away from the minimum wage literature for a number of reasons. First, it cost me a lot of friends. People that I had known for many years, for instance, some of the ones I met at my first job at the University of Chicago, became very angry or disappointed. They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole."

What this brings to mind is not mafia style omerta as much as soviet science under Stalin. The very notion that economics as a whole has a "cause" is revealing. As is the fact that Card felt compelled to drop that area of research. Not exactly a model for the free market of ideas.

[Jun 19, 2008] Is neoclassical economics a mafia

Freakonomists (aka neoclassical economists) might be probably considered to be a group close in the ideology to Lysenkoists...  At least people with views similar to Milton Freedman's views (as expressed in Capitalism and Freedom) definitely  belong to the church of  "free market fraud" as John Kenneth Galbraith put it in 1999. He also warned that ""Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups." "

May 26, 2007 |  Dani Rodrik's weblog

Sort of, says Christopher Hayes in a very well-written and very interesting piece in The Nation. He says orthodox economists are a close-knit group and are quick to penalize those among them or from outside who overstep the boundaries. Here is an excerpt:

So extreme is the marginalization of heterodox economists, most people don't even know they exist. Despite the fact that as many as one in five professional economists belongs to a professional association that might be described as heterodox, the phrase "heterodox economics" has appeared exactly once in the New York Times since 1981. During that same period "intelligent design," a theory endorsed by not a single published, peer-reviewed piece of scholarship, has appeared 367 times.

It doesn't take much to call forth an impressive amount of bile from heterodox economists toward their mainstream brethren. John Tiemstra, president of the Association for Social Economics and a professor at Calvin College, summed up his feelings this way: "I go to the cocktail parties for my old schools, MIT and Oberlin, and people are all excited about Freakonomics. I kind of wince and go off to another corner or have another drink." After the EPI gathering, Peter Dorman, an economist at Evergreen State College with a gentle, bearded air, related an e-mail exchange he once had with Hal Varian, a well-respected Berkeley economist who's moderately liberal but firmly committed to the neoclassical approach. Varian wrote to Dorman that there was no point in presenting "both sides" of the debate about trade, because one side--the view that benefits from unfettered trade are absolute--was like astronomy, while any other view was like astrology. "So I told him I didn't buy the traditional trade theory," Dorman said. "'Was I an astrologer?' And he said yes!"

Hayes makes a number of good points about how ideology permeates a lot of thinking by orthodox economists. Anybody who strays from conventional wisdom is in danger of being ostracized. Some years ago, when I first presented an empirical paper questioning some of the conventional views on trade to a high profile economics conference, a member of the audience (a very prominent economist and a former co-author of mine) shocked me with the question "why are you doing this?" 

On the other hand I have never found neoclassical methodology too constraining when it comes to thinking about the real world in novel and unconventional ways. See the Carlos Diaz-Alejandro rule here. To me it represents nothing other than a methodological predilection for deriving aggregate social phenomena from individual behavior--and as such it is a very useful discipline for any social science. You say people have some preferences, they face certain constraints, take others' actions into account, and go from there. Neoclassical economics teaches you how to think, not what to think.

So it has always been a bit difficult for me to understand the critique that neoclassical economics is necessarily driven by ideology or leads to foregone conclusions. Just as it puzzles me why so many neoclassical economists are ready to jettison what they teach in the classroom and espouse simplistic rules of thumb on policy.

UPDATE: Fadi, you guess right, and you win this.

UPDATE: Peter has some very perceptive comments in the thread below. I recommend them to all.

UPDATE: Christopher Hayes responds in an e-mail:

Your point about neoclassical economics as an approach as opposed to a substantive set of principles is an important one, and gets at the crux of the issue. To what point does the toolbox determine what the carpenter fashions? If all you have is a hammer, does everything begin to look like a nail?

[Jun 2, 2008] Supply-Side Fairy Tales by Steve Waldman

Supply side economic (aka "voodoo economics") is a classic example of cargo cult science. Steve Waldman insiteful comments on Greg Mankiw's proposal to cut corporate taxes... (hat hit to Mark Thoma)

Supply side fairy tales, by Steve Waldman: Greg Mankiw offers a strong endorsement of a proposal to cut the corporate income tax from 35 to 25 percent, claiming "It is perhaps the best simple recipe for promoting long-run growth in American living standards." ... A good case can be made for cutting or even eliminating the corporate income tax. But Mankiw's argument does not cohere.

Let's start positive. Mankiw is right to point out that the "incidence" of the corporate income tax might not in fact be as progressive as its proponents would wish. He quotes studies suggesting that workers end up paying 70% to 92% of the taxes in the form of lower wages. I'm skeptical of those numbers, but it is surely true that some fraction, perhaps even a large fraction, of the corporate tax burden falls on workers and customers rather than presumptively wealthier investors. Mankiw does us all a service by reminding us of this.

Then he tells us a fairy tale ...

... ... ...

Supply side economics is a nice story, a hopeful story. It offers a clean, plausible policy framework: encourage investment, always and everywhere, and prosperity is sure to follow. But this decade has been about a pure a test of that idea as we could hope for. Capital in the United States was incredibly cheap, and what did we do? We destroyed a lot of wealth. We don't need more capital (although we might soon, if our foreign backers get skittish). We need more discriminating capital. In the meantime, the only thing I'm sure "works" about the supply side story is that it shifts the tax burden from richer to poorer. I'd rather that stop working so well.

See also discussion Economist's View Supply-Side Fairy Tales

[May 18, 2008] Asia Lysenkoism - American style

Asia Times

... Milton Friedman and their followers will be lumped together with Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, stooge and sycophant of Josef Stalin.  Lysenko sent his fellow biologists to the Gulag, never to be heard from again, for opposing his hare-brained theories of genetics. Lysenko betrayed science as he betrayed humanity. He was, no less than Stalin, a monster.

Antal E Fekete is professor emeritus, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John's. Further information on the Gold Standard University can be obtained by writing to GSUL@t-online.hu.

(Copyright 2007 by A E Fekete. All rights reserved. Used by permission.)

[Apr 20, 2008] 'Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda' by Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net

4. Now, to the matter of Darwin. The first thing to say is that natural selection is a scientific theory about the way evolution works in fact. It is either true or it is not, and whether or not we like it politically or morally is irrelevant. Scientific theories are not prescriptions for how we should behave. I have many times written (for example in the first chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave. I have several times said that a society based on Darwinian principles would be a very unpleasant society in which to live. I have several times said, sta