Digressions&Impressions

Friedman and Mill on the Art of Economics (with some J.N. Keynes)

IN HIS admirable book on The Scope and Method of Political Economy John Neville Keynes distinguishes among "a positive science ... [,] a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is; a normative or regulative science . .. [,] a body of systematized knowledge discussing criteria of what ought to be... ; an art . .. [,] a system of rules for the attainment of a given end"; comments that "confusion between them is common and has been the source of many mischievous errors"; and urges the importance of "recognizing a distinct positive science of political economy."--Milton Friedman (1953) “The Methodology of Positive Economics” in Essays on Positive Economics, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 5. [The ellipses are in Friedman. Hereafter: Friedman 1953][1]

According to Milton Friedman the art of economics is a system of rules for the attainment of a given end. Implied in Keynes’ definitions is a division within the art of economics into two: first, if the given ends follow from normative economics then the art of economics is the system that generates normative policy. This way of putting it stipulates that the art is – like a deductive logic – moral truth preserving from input to its output. The implied nature of the second part of this division within the art is left unclear. For, unless normative science is completed, it is possible, of course, that a given end is moral but not part of a body of systematized normative knowledge. In fact, when one starts musing on it, more combinations between given ends and the output of an art are possible (from a-moral ends to moral output; from a-moral ends to a-moral output, etc.) One can even entertain the possibility that an immoral given end (say, state enforced birth-control) may lead to welcome policy results. So, it is by no means obvious what the status of the output of the art is when the given ends do not follow directly from normative economics.

Much of Friedman essay is devoted to the nature and defense of the possibility of positive economics and, while less important, how it contrasts with normative economics. In fact, the art of economics seems so little pertinent to Friedman’s essay, that in a (1992) paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, David Colander comments, “Friedman placed Keynes' tripartite distinction in the open and then he lost it.” (p. 192)

But, as Colander notes, Friedman does address the art of economics at least once more in his 1953 essay. It is worth quoting the passage in full:

Normative economics and the art of economics, on the other hand, cannot be independent of positive economics. Any policy conclusion necessarily rests on a prediction about the consequences of doing one thing rather than another, a prediction that must be based-implicitly or explicitly-on positive economics. There is not, of course, a one-to-one relation between policy conclusions and the conclusions of positive economics; if there were, there would be no separate normative science. Two individuals may agree on the consequences of a particular piece of legislation. One may regard them as desirable on balance and so favor the legislation; the other, as undesirable and so oppose the legislation.

I venture the judgment, however, that currently in the Western world, and especially in the United States, differences about economic policy among disinterested citizens derive predominantly from different predictions about the economic consequences of taking action-differences that in principle can be eliminated by the progress of positive economics-rather than from fundamental differences in basic values, differences about which men can ultimately only fight. (Friedman 1953: 5)

Friedman treats the art of economics as dependent on empirical science. For it’s this science that provides the knowledge that constitute at least part of the rules of how one gets from given ends to proper outcomes. That is, the dependence of the art on positive science is epistemic in character.

This dependence claim can also be found in the relevant chapter of J.N. Keynes’ (1891) book, but he argues for it slightly differently (than Friedman does): “it is both possible and desirable to discuss [positive] economic uniformities independently of [normative] economic ideals, and without formulating economic precepts [of the art], although the converse cannot be affirmed.”[2] From this quote it is not quite clear in virtue of what the art is dependent on positive science, but Keynes claims elsewhere that the dependence is “logical…for we cannot satisfactorily lay down rules for practical guidance expect on the basis of knowledge of facts.”[3]

Of course the passage just quoted from J.N. Keynes is rather important: for Keynes consensus over facts is eminently possible, but elsewhere it may be “prevented by conflicting ideals, as well as by divergent views as to the actual and possible.” (Keynes 1891: 51.) And so, on Keynes’ view, conflict over given ends and disagreement over feasibility will prevent consensus over the art of economics according to Keynes.[4] A view like this – there is natural value conflict but relatively easy agreement over facts and theory -- we also find in Keynes’ colleague Sidgwick and a generation later in Robbins, and is used to argue for a disciplinary distinction between economics and ethics.[5]

By contrast, and strikingly, on Friedman’s picture, rather than disagreeing about the given ends that are the inputs of the art of economics, it is likely people will disagree about the outputs of the art. And that is because Friedman presupposes that in the context he is writing (“the Western world, and especially in the United States,”) there is kind of basic value unanimity over the given (major) ends while there is disagreement over what science predicts.

Because the main aim of Friedman’s essay is to explore “whether a suggested hypothesis or theory should be tentatively accepted as part of the "body of systematized knowledge concerning what is,"” (Friedman 1953: 3) while Friedman assumes consensus over the input of the art of economics and treats its output as dependent on empirical/positive science, he does not really pause to reflect on the contents of the art. Colander seems to think this is due to a lack of interest. But there may be a rather obvious reason for Friedman’s silence (which also points to an important difference with Colander).

If we reflect a bit on the form of the art of government, which (when we plug in Keynes’ definition as quoted by Friedman) just is a rule “for the attainment of a given end;” this is highly reminiscent of Robbins’ famous characterization of the nature of positive economics, which just is “a relationship between [given] ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”[6] So, if in the context of consensus over given ends, one takes this relationship between ends and means to be known, as supplied by positive economics, then a fortiori there is no further fact of the matter that enters into the rule of the art of government.

That is to say, on Friedman’s account there is no substantive difference between positive and the art of economics. For the art of economics is then just a proper subset of its science restricted in scope by a more limited set of given ends and dependent on the development of the relevant positive science! So, for example, Friedman explicitly affirms “there is an underlying consensus on the objective of achieving a "living wage" for all, to use the ambiguous phrase so common in such discussions.” (Friedman 1953: 5.) And it is pretty clear he thinks there is a similar consensus over the importance of economic growth as one of the main “long run objectives.”(“Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability” in Friedman 1953: 133. He tends to ignore disagreement over distribution!)

Colander does not offer the reconstruction of this second passage I have just given, but I suspect he does recognize something like the position I have ascribed to Friedman. Because he writes,

The problem with this statement is the inserted phrase, "differences that in principle can be eliminated by the progress of positive economics." This phrase assumes that policy conclusions flow directly from positive economics. However, as Keynes argued, the art of economics is contextual and as much dependent on non-economic political, social, institutional, and historical judgments as it is on economics. (Colander 1992: 197.)

I hedge my interpretation of Colander because he also claims that Friedman’s lost the art of economics. Whereas it is more accurate to say, as an interpretation of Friedman, that he differs in his understanding of what the content of the art of economics is from Keynes (and Colander), and that for Friedman [Thesis A] the art of economics just is a subset or extension of positive economics. Or to be more precise, in societies with a fundamental consensus over ends, the art of economics is a subset or modest extension of positive economics. Friedman tacitly denies there is a significant difference between applied economics and economic science.

I mention this for two reasons. First, Colander’s analysis has been influential on those that notice Friedman mentions an ‘art of economics. For example, while citing Colander, Thomas Mayer writes that “in stressing the positive–normative distinction Friedman furthered the unfortunate tendency to ignore a third category of economics, J. N. Keynes’s (1891) art of economics, that is the knowledge required to apply positive and normative economics in a way that results in successful policies.”[7] (Emphasis added.)

Second, Friedman's account of the art of economics matters because while it would be wrong or misleading to treat Friedman as a kind of rational choice theorist in the way familiar from Becker & Stigler 1977,[8] I want to suggest that by implying that [Thesis A] the art of economics just is a subset or extension of positive economics, Friedman does give voice here to – and now I am stipulating -- a distinctly and broadly agreed upon Chicago understanding of the art of economics as continuous with its (positive/empirical) science.[9]

An anticipation of Friedman's position can, indeed, be found in Keynes’ Scope an Method. When the “end at which the art of political economy aims” at is agreed upon (as Friedman stipulates, recall, is the case among disinterested citizens in the ‘Western world’) – say, “simply the increased production of wealth” – “its scope is certainly definite.” (Keynes 1891: 76.) And in such cases statements of positive science in the “indicative mood” can be transformed into statements “in the imperative.”[10] Colander is right to suggest that Keynes does not accept this position in his own voice because Keynes denies such unanimity over ends in the wider context of the passages I have just quoted. But the position does have an important earlier advocate: J.S. Mill.

In the final Chapter XII of (the final) Book VI of Mill’s Logic, after distinguishing between a science and art, Mill writes:

the reasons of a maxim of policy, or of any other rule of art, can be no other than the theorems of the corresponding science.

The relation in which rules of art stand to doctrines of science may be thus characterized. The art proposes to itself an end to be attained, defines the end, and hands it over to the science. The science receives it, considers it as a phenomenon or effect to be studied, and having investigated its causes and conditions, sends it back to art with a theorem of the combination of circumstances by which it could be produced. Art then examines these combinations of circumstances, and according as any of them are or are not in human power, pronounces the end attainable or not. The only one of the premises, therefore, which Art supplies, is the original major premise, which asserts that the attainment of the given end is desirable. Science then lends to Art the proposition (obtained by a series of inductions or of deductions) that the performance of certain actions will attain the end. From these premises Art concludes that the performance of these actions is desirable, and finding it also practicable, converts the theorem into a rule or precept.[11]

So, unlike Keynes (and Friedman), Mill includes the setting of ends within the art. But as it happens, the end (growing a nation wealthy) the art of political economy pursues is treated as given in the fifth essay of some Unsettled Questions. But anticipating Friedman, Mill treats the art and science as sharing content.[12] And while Friedman and Mill have slightly different conceptualizations of what an economic theory is and Mill surely should not, I think, be treated as a proto rational choice theorist, Mill, too, endorses [Thesis A]. (As an aside, while my argument for this conclusion is wholly distinct from Foucault’s, at a high level of generality the position echoes Foucault’s understanding of Chicago economics as a kind of radicalization of the radical-Benthamite tradition. ) 

Mindful of inductive risk, Mill is cautious to remind the reader that what I have called '[Thesis A]' presupposes a mature science. Imperfect or incomplete science will generate bad rules:  “If, in this imperfect state of the scientific theory, we attempt to frame a rule of art, we perform that operation prematurely.” (Mill 1882: 654) Of course, one may not know that one’s science is incomplete or one must act on imperfect knowledge. So, for “a wise practitioner, therefore, rules of conduct will only be considered as provisional.” (Idem) As an aside, for Mill, then, there is also no difference in kind in the art of political economy and the of government. In the Logic, in the very next paragraph, Mill goes on to offer a sketch of the art of political science.

That Friedman appeals to the existence of (an idealized) ‘disinterested citizen’ as a theoretical posit may be surprising given that the rest of his paper argues for the legitimacy for positing firms that behave as if they are maximizing returns. (Friedman 1953: 21.) And since later Chicago economics became associated with a theory of rent-seeking, it might seem odd to see him posit a disinterested citizen. In addition, that the disinterested citizen agrees over values is by no means obvious if one thinks that modern society is intrinsically pluralist.

But it’s clear that in the 1940s and 50s, the idea circulated among Chicago economists with reference to J.N. Keynes. For example, in the context of a polemical exchange with Samuelson over the new welfare economics, Friedman’s friend, George J. Stigler wrote a decade earlier:

Talcott Parsons probably had economists in mind when he wrote: “For it is a fact that social existence depends to a large extent on a moral consensus of its members and that the penalty of its too radical breakdown is social extinction. This fact is one which the type of liberal whose theoretical background is essentially utilitarian is all too apt to ignore—with unfortunate practical as well as theoretical consequences.” At the level of economic policy, then, it is totally misleading to talk of ends as individual and random; they are fundamentally collective and organized. If this conclusion be accepted, and accept it we must, the economist may properly exceed the narrow confines of economic analysis. He may cultivate a second discipline, the determination of the ends of his society, particularly relevant to economic policy. This discipline might be called, following J.N. Keynes, applied ethics.[13]

Parsons attributes the claim to Durkheim, who, on Parsons’ view, advocated “moral conformity.”[14] (To be sure with a minimal use of compulsion.) Even in the passage quoted by Stigler it’s clear that Parsons is contrasting Durkheim with a position one might associate with the liberal interpretation of Mill for whom increasing moral “diversity” is an “increase in happiness” not social instability.[15] So what follows may be a bit counter-intuitive because I  claim that in addition to both embracing [Thesis A] Friedman’s position is itself in in the ambit of Mill’s philosophy in more ways than one here.

To the best knowledge, J.N. Keynes would never posit the existence of a kind of value unanimity among citizens. But the ‘disinterested citizen’ that Friedman appeals to is an entity that is posited, as a normative ideal, in Mill’s Utilitarianism, where “as between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.” In general, Mill praises disinterestedness.

In addition, Friedman clearly is presupposing a conception of progress such that in the ‘Western world’ there is a moral consensus and possibility for disinterestedness conception of citizenship. The implied contrast are communist states and less developed countries, of the sort that Mill infamously thought (temporarily) lacking in capacity for self-rule. I don’t mean to suggest Friedman agrees with Mill’s imperial policies. But Friedman does embrace a model of development. (Friedman 1953: 202.)

Now, ordinarily, among liberal interpreters, Mill is usually not associated with moral consensus. He is considered the great advocate of individuality, spontaneity, and authentic experiments in living that see moral conformism as oppressive. Nothing I say undermines that reading.[16]

But some conservative critics of Mill take him to be an advocate of a revisionary moral consensus to be propagated initially by the clerisy, and eventually adopted by the disinterested citizen.[17] The two interpretations of Mill are, incidentally, not necessarily in conflict with each other if the experiments in living are treated as a means toward the discovery of moral truth and so a new consensus. And I do not mean to suggest this interpretation is exclusive to conservatives. For example, late in life, Rawls seems to have understood Mill as advocating a “comprehensive philosophical and moral doctrine” that involved “a society united on a form of utilitarianism.”[18] I do not want to suggest that Friedman must be echoing Mill here. [19]

In the fifth essay of some Unsettled Questions, Mill contrasts sharply between the science and art of economics. And according to Mill,

These two ideas [of science and art] differ from one another as the understanding differs from the will, or as the indicative mood in grammar differs from the imperative. Science is a collection of truths; art, a body of rules, or directions for conduct. The language of science is, This is, or, This is not; This does, or does not, happen. The language of art is, Do this; Avoid that…An art would not be an art, unless it were founded upon a scientific knowledge of the properties of the subject-matter…Rules, therefore, for making a nation increase in wealth, are not a science, but they are the results of science. Political Economy does not of itself instruct how to make a nation rich; but whoever would be qualified to judge of the means of making a nation rich, must first be a political economist. The one deals in facts, the other in precepts. [20]

In context, with an appeal  to Adam Smith, the ends of political economy are taken as given (that is, growing a nation rich). This pretty much anticipates the material Friedman quoted from Keynes.

 

Conversation is a Surprisingly Difficult Skill; the Covid Blues, part #28752

I wrote my most recent entry in my 'covid diaries' (here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here) a week ago, just as a noticeable upswing occurred. Since, I am clearly capable of more physical activity -- I often clock an hour of intermittent walking each day now -- and I have a few 'clear' hours each day where I feel 'normal.' This despite the fact that my chronic insomnia is ongoing. I still can be struck by sudden head-fatigue out of the blue without any apparent trigger, but more often than not the head fatigue and occasional headache is a consequence of too much activity. I still sometimes awake to a headache (almost certainly partially responsible for the insomnia), but I now can be more confident it will dissipate during the day. 

The lecture course I was responsible for has ended; I now spend some of my good morning hours copy-editing proofs, which had been piling up, in twenty minute spurts and answering emails from the brilliant crew creating an index for one of my monographs. The department has been pretty good in leaving me alone during my officially sanctioned incapacity, but it is noticeable that beyond the many generous inquiries about my health, any business message I receive tends to be some bad news or an annoying issue that requires my relatively urgent attention.

Three days ago, during one of my insomniac mornings, I picked up Keynes's Essays on Persuasion. Despite his evident antisemitism, and the sense he is talking to a different audience than me, I read it with great deal of pleasure. I had forgotten what a wonderful stylist he is! And I was struck by how much he anticipates what came be to known as neo-liberalism, and how astute on the major political fault-lines around sexual identity of what we now call post-keynesian society (especially amazing because he never witnessed the keynesian version). (More about that some other time.) After an hour, as my family was awakening, I noticed with a quiet ecstasy that I had read him for a full hour without any headaches. Sadly, the feat has not been repeated since. 

One nice thing about my relative improvement -- not a moment too early, I have been bedridden for over three months now -- is that I have time to reflect on some of the symptoms that escaped my notice earlier. What follows was prompted by the aftermath of a nearly hour long phone conversation with a friend over the week-end. I had been needing some professional advice, so I made a phone-date with a trusted academic friend whom I have known forever. I felt in safe hands, and was grateful for his insight. There was not a single note of dissonance during the conversation and for most of it I just listened. (My wife later told me that it was noticeable that I said less and less as the conversation went on.)

I should mention that when I could, I had been avoiding zoom/phone conversations since a few weeks after I fell ill. But that was because of my extreme irritability to human voice and sensitivity to certain (not all) sounds that I had developed alongside my Covid. But while the irritability and pseudo-misophonia has not disappeared altogether, in my good hours it's no worse than normal. 

After we hung up. I was drained, and a pale green. I laid in bed for three hours uninterested even in a Jason Statham movie. I was also in a kind of shock. It had never occurred to me that listening to somebody and remain engaged with what they say, when you like them and they are talking about something you care about (Ceteris paribus), is work. (Yes jokesters, I am open to the suggestion I have never tried my hand at listening before!) 

Most of my cognitive incapacitation I interpret through the filter my GP handed me a few weeks (months?) ago, when she pointed out that anything that requires my brain to multi-task or split attention creates a kind of overload now. (As an aside, I have been bemused that both my GP and my occupational physician have deployed a set of metaphors -- 'energy'; 'force'; 'etc. -- to help me grasp my own situation that can only be described as new-agey.) And I have become rather disciplined in avoiding situations in which that is likely. So, even at home I avoid conversations or rooms with more than one other person. This is also why, on the whole, I am not watching complex drama's on Netflix, but action movies.

In 2006, when I first met Vernon Smith, I had the kind of interaction that in the hands of a better writer would be comedy gold. I had just landed my first tenure track position, and I was eager to talk about my paper in which I modestly criticized his methodological views, while Vernon's agenda was to learn from me about Adam Smith.   At some point during the conversation, I realized Vernon Smith (who had just won the Nobel in economics) was a very deep reader of Smith. (I warmly recommend Vernon's book with Bart Wilson.)* Since I had already learned quite a bit about Smith from Buchanan in the preceding years, and was then a respectful reader of Sen on Smith, this gave me the wholly false impression that economists as such cared about Smith. 

Anyway, during this conversation, he planted the idea in my head that Adam Smith might have been an Asperger. (Later I learned Vernon had shortly before revealed himself ('come out'?) as an Asperger.) Vernon's remark never guided my interpretation of Adam Smith (although it seems plausible hypothesis to me), but like many readers of (Adam) Smith I find his phenomenology of daily life astute, and I have been taught to see what he calls 'situations' or interactions in a new kind of light. As it happens, on my interpretation of Adam Smith, for Smith many of our interactions occur while we are simultaneously making rapid judgments ground in and about counterfactuals several layers deep about the agents' principally concerned (which might include ourselves). If this is confusing or too terse go read my book!

Now while I admire Adam Smith's description of social life, it is by definition not something you can quite introspect. (In some respects Smith's reliance on sub-conscious processing goes much further than Hume's.)+ So, I have always treated this part of Smith's moral psychology as an interpretation of his text not necessarily obvious truth. 

As I was reflecting on my total exhaustion after a kind and nurturing conversation, I wondered in silent amazement how much cognitive skill goes into a simple (low stress) conversation. And before I knew it I heard myself saying to myself that tacitly keeping track of all the boxes and, especially, diamonds during a conversation must be quite (ahh) energy intense. :)

Before hands-free calling opened the floodgates of people talking while walking on the street, the only people seen mumbling to oneself were the people you tried to avoid and the elderly (sometimes the same person). In fact, and I close on this, one side-effect of my covid is that I am starting to grasp some of the elements of what it's like to be elderly. 

For the first time in decades, I have no agenda each day; and I am incapable of doing anything quickly. (That still doesn't stop all the mishaps; while I didn't burn down the kitchen, last week I broke the microwave plate.) I also can't jump into any activity my son might tempt me with. His cheer, which ordinarily I would find lovely, now may in its exuberant expression may well discomfort me. And when, after reflecting on this and sundry matters,** I asked my wife whether I had aged these last few months, she said in the kindest possible way, 'I just had that thought last week;' she must have sensed the bullet pierce my heart before I registered it, so she quickly added for good measure, "but maybe with a haircut we can de-age you." 

 

 

Guest Post by Eric Winsberg: Discounting the Future in Pandemic Mitigation Ethics

[This is an invited Guest Post by Eric Winsberg [The University of South Florida]--ES]

“I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” J. Wellington Wimpy

Much of the political debate about how strict our measures to mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 ought to be has fallen along partisan political lines. People who generally favor strong climate mitigation practices also favor strict legally-mandated social distancing practices and the closure of segments of the economy. This alignment has been natural for a number of reasons. First, both climate mitigation and disease mitigation arguably involve personal sacrifice for the common good and a healthy respect for the advice of experts. Second, Donald Trump, who says climate change is a hoax, appeared to downplay the seriousness of the virus early on. This surely played a role in solidifying, among the people who take climate mitigation seriously, the view that the ethically correct response to the oncoming pandemic was to suppress it at almost any cost.

I would argue that this alignment is far more superficial than it seems. Never mind that the science, and the advice of experts, with regard to the basic parameters of the Covid-19 pandemic, has been far more mixed than the science of climate change. This is to be expected since the problem of climate change has been studied extensively for over thirty years, while the pandemic is only 4 months old. And we still remain ignorant of basic facts about the virus and its degree of spread. The greater strain on the alignment between climate mitigation and pandemic mitigation lies at the heart of a fundamental ethical quandary: how much should we value our present interests against our future interests and the interests of our children? 

In climate ethics, this is often framed in terms of the question of how much we should ‘discount the future.’ Like J. Wellington Wimpy, most of us, at least in our less reflective moments, will gladly sacrifice goods for our future selves in order to receive goods of equal value today.  That’s why people who lend or invest their money expect a positive return in exchange for deferring their consumption until the future. Economists call the rate of return that we ought to use to determine the present value of future cash flows the “discount rate”.  The idea is that I should discount, by a certain amount, the value of the dollar J. Wellington Wimpy is going to give me Tuesday, even if I am morally certain he is going to pay that dollar promptly and in full when Tuesday comes.

Debates about the discount rate loom large in climate ethics. Those who oppose expensive climate mitigation measures, or argue for a very low carbon tax (those, that is, who do not simply deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change) often argue that the discount rate ought to be high.  For such people, even if climate change is going to cost us 20% of GDP in 2120, we should only be willing to pay a small amount for mitigation efforts today to prevent that damage, just as we might expect to have to pay $1.10 on Tuesday for a $1 hamburger today.  Arguments about climate mitigation are sometimes arguments about what the best science says, and sometimes about how much we can trust governments to enact useful regulations, but mostly, they reflect profound disagreements about just how much we ought to discount the future.

Even though it is an observable sociological fact that proponents of climate change mitigation overlap considerably with people who support the current aggressive suppression strategies for SARS-CoV-2, it’s also undeniable that with respect to the question of how much we should discount the future, these two political positions are at odds with each other.  Current Covid-19 mitigation measures massively discount the future. They are diminishing our civil liberties for an unforeseeable length of time, severely damaging the economy, and burning through debt in a way that will cost the younger generations a great deal for a long time. The benefits, in places where the hospital systems are not over-taxed, are to postpone infections for what can at best be a very short period of time--almost surely not long enough to get us to a vaccine. 

Why think that the primary costs of Covid-19 mitigation are born by our future selves?  Many seem to think that there is no cost to shutting down if we simply compensate those who lose their economic opportunities. Or they complain that people who bring this up are only worried about spending money to make up for the loss of economic output. That such people are arguting for austerity. But this is mistaken. The worry here is about the loss of economic output and the loss of the opportunity for young people to participate in it. When you take on debt to compensate those who are locked out of their jobs and businesses, you are giving the people you borrow from a claim on your future economic output.   You are promising them a hamburger Tuesday in exchange for giving you a hamburger today. We can hope that political action will help to direct economic losses so that they will disproportionately fall on those who can bear them best, but this is optimistic.  The US Federal Reserve has just done a study that said that 40% of households with less than $40k/year in income have lost at least one job. And there are wide reports of the stimulus money being raided by the best-positioned and largest American companies.

The point here is completely independent of what you think about the wisdom of the federal government taking on more debt.  $2 trillion (or much more) that we borrow today to offset that loss of economic output is money that could have been spent on new hospitals, schools, green energy, public transportation, etc. So if you believe in modern monetary theory (MMT), or are a Keynesian, then good for you. You think we can absorb the debt. I'm not arguing about that here. I'm simply pointing out that this is consumption being pulled forward from the future in exchange for forcing people to sit idle rather than in exchange for investment in schools, roads, green energy, etc that could benefit the future. And no economic theory, Keynesian, MMT, or otherwise, denies this. 

Spending trillions of dollars mitigating the economic fallout from the shutdowns means not spending trillions in fighting climate change. At some point, we are going to have to spend trillions on climate change, but Covid mitigation means it is not going to happen now or anytime soon. The further we delay climate mitigation in order to address Covid mitigation, the closer the climate gets to points of no return.

There are also many children whose schooling will be disrupted for a long time; and this is something that will meaningfully diminish life prospects for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.  Students who are putting off college for financial reasons are students who may never be able to attend college again. Graduating seniors whose internships and jobs have disappeared will start their working lives later and at a financial deficit.  This leaves aside costs that will be difficult to measure:  children who grow up with inadequate socialization, lack of outlet from domestic abuse, late immunizations, etc. 

And all of this is only looking at things from the point of view of the impact of decisions by states with developed economies on their own states of affairs.  When developed economies go into deep recessions, it causes large harms at home, but it also causes massive harms in developing economies.  In the US, it means people lining up in foodbanks.  In India and the rest of the global south, it means starvation, death from preventable diseases, missed immunizations of children on a mass scale, and so on.

In climate ethics, it is well understood that a frank discussion of how much to discount the future is vital to making good policy choices.  It is time to bring that awareness to pandemic mitigation ethics.

On Haberler, Bretton Woods, Keynesianism vs Neoliberalism, reconsidered

The recent movements toward integration are often regarded as an entirely new development which has been envisioned and proposed by many but has never before made headway on a significant scale. I submit that this is true only in a formal and narrow sense. Looking over the evolution of the world economy during the last two hundred years or so, we can clearly discern three big waves of integration-preceding and dwarfing the regional integration movements of the last ten years. The secular trend toward integration and growth of the world economy was interrupted by one period of sharp decline and disintegration...

The first wave was the internal integration of the economies of the nation states which we find today on the map of the world. The economy of Great Britain was the first to be unified and integrated, the French and American followed soon after. Later came other Continental European and overseas countries.
The second wave overlapping or, if you prefer, superimposed upon the first was the free trade movement that reached its high point at the end of the 1870's. The movement towards freer trade was reversed in 1878, but despite the fact that in most countries tariffs became higher and higher, world trade continued to grow rapidly up to World War I. For the underlying forces of rapid technological progress in transport and mass production, as well as massive migration of labor and capital toward the regions of "recent settlement" in the Western Hemisphere, Oceania, and South Africa, still dominated over increasingly protectionist commercial policies in many parts of the world...

The third wave of world-wide integration and growth started soon after the end of World War II, gathered momentum after 1948, and is still in progress. It has been centered on and propelled by the spectacular recovery and rapid growth of all industrial countries, including the United States and United Kingdom, notwithstanding their recent troubles and their lower growth rates compared with the Continent of Europe and Japan. Contrary to what is often said, the prosperity of the "industrial centers" of the world economy did spread, though not as rapidly and fully as one would wish, to the "periphery" of the less developed countries, to use Raul Prebisch's picturesque designation of the two areas. This wave of world-wide integration has had more powerful and beneficial effects than the much more advertised and talked-about series of regional integrations.--Gottfried Haberler Integration and Growth of the World Economy in Historical Perspective, The American Economic Review, Vol. 54, No. 2, Part 1 (Mar., 1964), 2-3

One of the really great features of (recall) Quinn Slobodian's (2018) Globalists : The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, is his recovery and insistence on the significance of people associated with so-called Geneva school of neoliberalism. A central figure in his narrative and, this school, is Haberler (who spent most of his professional life at Harvard--the quoted lecture is a Presidential address of the AEA.) A key point Slobodian makes is that by working through international institutions, the guided development of international law became a means to constitute a neoliberal order. I think this is right, and also helps explain much about the contemporary global order and the European Union.

Now, if we turn to the quoted passage Haberler, he offers a stylized historical account of three waves of world integration.* Haberler thinks such world integration is a good thing. In the first, the mercantile state creates national markets with freedom of movement of people and goods. In the second, such (partially liberal) states create (relatively) free, globalizing trade regime as part of their imperial projects. There is much to be said about the role of illiberal agents producing liberal outcomes.

Crucially, for my present purposes, Haberler thinks he is (ca 1964) living through the third such wave of world integration. As my students noted, this entails that he views the Bretton Woods regime as a positive era of world integration. Since they associate Bretton Woods with the age of Keynesianism, they were surprised by this because they tend to see neoliberalism and keynesianism in contrasting terms. 

But upon reflection Haberler's on balance positive evaluation of the Bretton Woods regime is not surprising because it has many characteristics that neoliberals pined for during the disintegrating age between 1914-1945. In particular, Bretton Woods operates under a (modified) gold standard and is committed to free trade with the lowering of barriers that prevent it). Haberler plays a crucial role in developing the GATT framework that facilitates this latter point.

As an important aside, I do not mean to suggest only neoliberals could endorse this. After all, Haberler's famous (1958) report, Trends in International Trade, was co-authored with Jan Tinbergen (later the first Nobel laureate in economics), who was no neoliberal (but social democrat) and James Meade (another Nobel laureate) also no neoliberal. (The fourth co-author Roberto de Oliveira Campos is harder to classify, but I am willing to grant he may be thought neoliberal.)

That is to say, it makes sense to see the Bretton Woods system as, in part, a neoliberal project because that is how people like Haberler see it. But one that also fit the aspirations of cosmopolitan social democrats and neo-Keynesians in many ways. (I don't mean to suggest all neoliberals would agree with all elements of Bretton Woods.) When Bretton Woods collapsed, neoliberalism had to reinvent itself or at least it opened the door to more radical policies (now associated with names like Milton Friedman and even Hayek). But if we see Bretton Woods as neoliberal, then we can discern how over time the EU became a kind of mini Bretton Woods. But about that some other time more.

One final observation (connected to the thought I just left hanging): the polemical point lurking in Haberler's ideal-type history is worth mentioning: he thinks regional integration -- such as the one associated with European Union -- risks undermining world integration. And his lecture can be understood as a plea for sticking with the global multilateral project as distinct from both nationalist protection, which he thinks is a recurring temptation Stateside, and regional integration, which he thinks risks protectionism at the expense of exports of the developing world.

The road to serfdom before Hayek (Knight, Lippmann, and a note on Weber today)

The author insists earnestly and at length that a regime of collectivism will inevitably be a dictatorship, a tyranny over the whole cultural and personal life of man as well as over economic activity, however defined. The turning-point from liberalism as laisser faire to liberalism as collectivism, miscalled liberalism, is set at about 1870.

The current phase of the movement toward collectivism in the United States, as regards the structure and process of government, is the active development of pressure groups under the wing of the government itself, together with the displacement of the activities of legislature and courts by administrative organs and processes. The original liberal movement was, more than any other one thing, a struggle for an effective legal order. Our self-styled liberals of today are doing their utmost to get away from legality. Ostensibly they would have the administration operate under a general legislative grant of power. But it is obviously a short step to a condition in which the legislative mandate will be under the control of the administration of the day itself-and then a shorter, relatively immaterial step to the adjournment "without day" of all lawmaking by elected representatives as a superfluous formality or an impediment to action. This means the end of all popular control of government, all "responsibility." Only an omnipotent and irresponsible state can deal with or suppress the organized pressure groups-or all but one of them, which one would become the state. All this seems to the reviewer as clearly as it does to Mr. Lippmann not only historically inevitable but actually necessary if there is to be any political order at all in a country where the leading economic and (perhaps other) special interests have been taught to think that it is the business of government to fight their battles against "business" and have been organized, or encouraged or allowed to organize, to get "justice" for themselves, or their "rights" -or simply what they want. [p. 865]...

Perhaps even more "glaring" is the absence of any real argument on the question as to why a collectivist regime must be a despotism. Even in a book of this sort, intended for a wide audience, it is somewhat jarring to have it simply asserted as the proclamation of an "inexorable law" (or a plain dogma), not merely that collectivism means tyranny but apparently that it is impossible, or at least theoretically incompatible with social life above the level of savagery. We read: "The really inexorable law of modern society is the law of the industrial revolution, that nations must practise the division of labor in wide markets or sink into squalor and servitude." ...... And again, "There is no way of practising the division of labor, and of harvesting the fruits of it, except in a social order which preserves and strives to perfect the freedom of the market" (pp. 206 and 207).--Frank Knight  (1938) reviewing Walter Lippmann's The Good Society in the Journal of Political Economy. 867 [Ht Ross Emmett]

Frank Knight, who is now primarily known as author of Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit and the Godfather of Chicago economics, was also one of the first, prominent Weberians Stateside. (Among other things he published a translation of Weber's Wirtschaftsgeschichte (General Economic History)—as Ross Emmett (the greatest Knight scholar) taught me --,the first book by Weber to appear in English in 1927.) I return to Weber below.

Knight is clear that by 1938, by then then in the second FDR administration, the sense of the state of crisis in liberalism had not been abated. The idea of crisis frames the review; and as he puts it near the end of his review, "It is not too much to say that the history of modern democratic systems leaves the issue unsettled as to whether representative machinery of any kind, or government based in any way on popular discussion, can meet such a crisis and survive." (271) On the very page cited by Knight above (207), Lippmann himself speaks of "the debacle of nineteenth-century liberalism."  According to Lippmann (this is not in Knight), liberals started to loose the battle of ideas from 1848 onward, and subsequently to loose political battles, too.* It was not at all obvious, subsequent the first world war, the Russian revolution, and the great depression, that liberalism would survive the century. It is no surprise that much of the most arresting writing of the period is so illiberal in character. 

In the review, Knight treats liberalism as primarily characterized by three features: the rule of law (an "effective legal order"), representative democracy, and government by "popular discussion." Contemporary readers may suspect that "the rule of law" is primarily about property rights, but Lippmann is explicit that he thinks of something more expansive with an "effective legal order;" that is, it involves commitment to the idea that "individuals have equal and reciprocal rights and duties." (The Good Society, 267) In fact, Lippmann is extremely critical of late nineteenth century liberal jurisprudence which, disguising the role of power and utility in generating property rights, had turned property rights into a universal law (e.g Good Society, 258). I mention this because both Lippmann (and Knight) are notable among liberals of the crisis-ridden age for their continued adherence to democratic norms.** 

Knight's response to Lippmann's book is notable because he calls attention to (what we may call) the road to serfdom before Hayek thesis he attributes to Lippmann. I am not just making a joke. Hayek read The Good Society (he participated in a famous colloquium on the book in 1938 in Paris). And as scholars have noted he engaged with Lippmann's writings in the period prior to the Road to Serfdom (1944). Lippmann almost wrote the preface to the Road to Serfdom. And Hayek almost added a "postscript to The Road to Serfdom, written in 1948," in which Hayek noted that "although he had written the book chiefly on the basis of his knowledge of Britain and Germany, he was aware that American writers had made similar points about the situation in the United States, including ‘‘such well known books as Mr Walter Lippmann’s Good Society, which of course I knew and to which I ought to have acknowledged greater indebtedness.’’"+  

I take the 'road to serfdom thesis' to entail that once one switches to an extensively planned economy ('collectivism" in Knight's and Lippmann's terminology), the needs of planning and stability will ensure that a dictatorship will follow. I read Knight as attributing a version of this thesis to Lippmann. [There are passages that suggest Hayek may have flirted with the idea that even the welfare state would inevitably generate dictatorship (as Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail argue), but for present purposes I remain agnostic on that more expansive version of thesis.]

What's striking about Knight's interpretation of Lippmann is that the road to serfdom is taken to be immanent in the New Deal policy of organizing interest/pressure groups. In Lippmann's book, however, pressure groups precede the New Deal by "sixty years."His main example of the role of pressure groups in what he calls "gradual collectivism" is the tariff of the Hawley-Smoot Bill in 1930. It is the case, however, that Lippmann claims that "the one certain thing is that in a democratic society the granting of some privileges must be followed by the granting of more privileges." (116) This suggests an open-ended process to ever more collectivism.

Even so, the thrust of Knight's review is peculiar because after thanking Mises and Hayek, Lippmann writes in his acknowledgments of his indebtedness to "John Maynard Keynes, who has done so much to demonstrate to the free peoples that the modern economy can be regulated without dictatorship." (viii) That is to say, from the start of his book Lippmann thinks democracies can find ways to prevent the road to serfdom. 

In fact, the very pages in The Good Society that Knight cites and quotes also claim "the renascence of liberalism may be regarded as assured." And Lippmann thinks this is the case because he thinks (i) something like liberalism is the natural accompaniment of an economy with advanced division of labor (206); (ii) he thinks collectivism, "in practice" (that is peace-time) is impossible and leads to a decline in living standards, terror ("brutality" 2o6). In addition, (iii) he thinks the collectivist states become "prey" and risk "conquest." (207)

Somewhat striking, and ironically, Lippmann's confidence that collectivism in practice is impossible (ii) is grounded in the apparent retreats from communism by Lenin and Stalin (205-8). Knight clearly suspects (867), however, that Lippmann's confidence is influenced not just by these historical developments in Russia, but also, and primarily, by Mises' contributions to the socialist calculation debate ,which Lippmann had discussed earlier in the Good Society and had praised (94ff; in fact, Lipmann's accompanying footnote treats Hayek and Weber as fellow contributors to this argument. (It is the only mention of Weber  and one of two mentions of Hayek in text of the The Good Society.) 

Knight uses the occasion of the review to lampoon Mises's argument ("wishful thinking"). The core point of Knight is that Mises argument is entirely too abstract, and that science lacks the expertise to make any claims about what is possible or not in reality: "No one knows at all definitely what is politically possible....There is practically no science in terms of which any fairly certain prediction can be made as to how a government will operate under any given conditions." (868) While I do not want to imply that Hayek read the review, what is striking about Hayek's great breakthrough in the social calculation debate in "the use of knowledge in society" is to turn away from questions of possibility, and, instead, to turn the attention to the nature of the "a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired" (Hayek 1945: 530).  [We might say the debate went from metaphysics/modality to epistemology.]

Knight, by contrast, thinks there is no reason to be sure that collectivism is impossible. So, in this respect he is much more pessimistic than Lippmann. And he is confident that full blown collectivism must devolve into dictatorship (868-869). So, Knight clearly holds a point of no-return version of the road-to-serfdom. However, he does not think that point has been reached yet or that reaching that point is especially likely.

So, here's my hypothesis. The road to serfdom thesis was if not inspired by Lippmann, at least prompted, in part, by him. But Lippmann did not hold the thesis; it is articulated by Knight in his review of Lippmann and (mistakenly) ascribed to Lippmann. Knight, however, thinks there is nothing inevitable about the thesis because he thinks the future is still very much open. I cannot prove that Hayek read Knight's review of Lippmann. (Knight was later a somewhat ambivalent referee for The University of Chicago Press of Road to Serfdom.) But Knight articulated several major challenges to liberal self-reflection in his review of Lippmann. And some of Hayek's major contributions to the liberal self-imagine, for good and ill, can be fruitfully interpreted as responses to that review. 

This Digression is somewhat long. But even so, I promised a comment on Knight's Weberianism. It can be discerned in the following passage:

It might have been thought self-evident, if anything in the field of politics can be called such, that the first essential function and task of government is to preserve unthreatened its own monopoly of political power, and that this means prevention of the development of dangerous power groups outside itself.

Knight has turned Weber's "monopoly of legitimate violence/force" (in Politics as a Vocation) into a "monopoly of power." The substitution may be thought innocent given that one may reasonably hold that power equals possible violence. But in Knight's hand the state does not tolerate what we may call ([recall]) following Bagg) concentrated power. And so one of the tasks of the state is to prevent the growth of concentrated power and doing so without devolving in fascism.

Liberalism, Politics, and the Spirit of Mercantilism (Crisis of Liberalism: V)

The widely read, widely traveled, superlatively observant author of the Wealth of Nations need not be told so obvious a thing as that self-interest entered also political life....

Smith gave a larger role to emotion, prejudice, and ignorance in political life than he ever allowed in ordinary economic affairs. The mercantile policies directed to the improvement of the balance of trade with particular countries have their origin in “national prejudice and animosity” (I, 497 [441]). The legislation against corn traders is so perverse as to lead Smith to compare it to laws against witchcraft (11, 41 [ 5001 ) ; indeed, “the laws concerning corn may every where be compared to the laws concerning religion” (11, 48 [507]). In fact all unwise economic legislation from which no politically strong constituency drew benefits must be nonrational legislation....

In general, however, Smith’s attitude toward political behavior was not dissimilar to that of a parent toward a child: the child was often mistaken and sometimes perverse, but normally it would improve in conduct if properly instructed...

One may give--for generations of economists have given-advice lavishly without taking account of the political forces which confine and direct policy. In the absence of knowledge of these political forces, the advice must often be bad and usually be unpersuasive. Why tell the sovereign that free trade is desirable, if one has no method of disarming the merchants and manufacturers who have obtained the protectionist measures ? Why tell the French sovereign to abandon the taille and capitations and increase the vintiemes, when only a revolution could dislodge the tax-favored classes? Why believe that better turnpikes await only the appointments of a better class of commissioners (11, 248 [ 684-851 )? George J. Stigler (1971)  "Smith's Travels on the Ship of State" [HT Glory Liu]

This post is part of a larger series on the Crisis of Liberalism (recall here;  here; here; (see also here, here, here, and here).

Here's a useful, undoubtedly mythical narrative about the origins of liberalism: it arose as an ameliorative project in opposition to mercantilism in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. (Yes, there were other targets, including feudalism and certain species of theocracy.) Here mercantilism is understood as a theory of state capture by interested classes who use the state to promote their own economic interests either through so-called rents, conquest (imperialism), slavery, or the tax system (or all of them). In the Wealth of Nations, Smith calls the whole violent ideology against which he hones his fire, "the Mercantile Spirit." From that vantage point, liberalism is a reformist appeal to the interests of other classes as well as enlightened self-interests of the business classes.  The key conceptual move is to turn zero-sum logic into a win-win agenda that promotes, as a political program, a moral vision (the good society) that is all about the expansion of individual freedoms (note the plural). Depending on one's taste one may well come to privilege particular features of the liberal program (free trade, rule of law, individual choice, harm reduction, mutual respect, free press, free speech, elections, separation of powers, freedom of religion, etc.)

Notice that the mythical narrative presupposes the existence of states with non-trivial capacities and societies with complex division of labor and different perspectives on their interests. (This narrative is not identical to ones one finds circulating among some kinds of libertarians.) Notice, too, that what is commonly called capitalism is neutral between liberalism and mercantalism. So, for example, many (recall) of the ills that Marx (and Engels) diagnose in capitalism, are, from the vantage point of a liberal, really ills of mercantile variant thereof (e.g., "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.") This is one reason why, for example, social democracy (which borrows from liberalism and Marxism) is conceptually possible.

Now, one historical (stylized) fact is that the very success of liberalism can give rise to forces that make a worse form mercantilism possible. This is really the story of the first wave of liberalism during the 19th century and its collapse in World War I (recall). And this has generated throughout the development of liberalism other important intellectual and institutional innovations, including ideas about anti-trust (to prevent concentrated market power), the progressive tax rate (to prevent concentrated economic power), the promotion of meritocracy in government hiring, the development of international law, and, alongside many attempts at liberalizing the economy, the mobility of people (open borders, etc.), the development of many international institutions (so characteristic of the second wave of liberalism). 

Notice that the mythical narrative now reveals, which was also true at first, that sometimes liberalism entails strengthening the state institutions and their functioning, even attacking (to use a useful term coined by Samuel Bagg) concentrated powers in the private sector (or, as Gorden Arlen reminds me, 'sinister interests') and sometimes entailed strengthening the forces of civil society, including of businesses and religions. (Jacob T. Levy has nicely articulated a more sophisticated version of the tactical vacillation in (recall) his book Rationalism, Pluralism & Freedom.)

At any given time, the ameliorative, mitigating spirit of liberalism demands from us imperfect judgments about what the greatest/most urgent dangers are and what the right way to respond to them might be (see Peter Boettke on that very challenge today). At no point does liberalism expect to destroy the spirit of mercantilism because this would require a reform of human nature and (as anarchists urge) the total abolition of the political power of the state. 

What liberalism then also requires is a theory of how politics operates (which can constrain the judgment). As Stigler notes, the very idea of state capture presupposes that people are self-interested and know what they are doing when they influence or have power.  One may say then that the diagnostic use of public choice economics is co-extensive with the history of liberalism. (Of course, public choice insights were known to critics of democracy and liberal ideas before liberalism was invented.) This was obscured a bit in the long period when utilitarianism was dominant because it often presupposed philanthropic legislators.  Alongside his paper on Smith, in 1971 Stigler published a piece on the nature of rent-seeking, "The Theory of Economic Regulation" on the demand and supply of regulation that itself became  wildly influential (this morning it had over 12,000 citations). For those who wish to amuse themselves, they can compare Stigler's  two brief essays (the Smith one and the one on rents) and note that they include the same kind of examples and the same rhetoric against the mistakes of economists.

Now, sometimes liberalism is tempted -- and this Stigler diagnoses -- by two other theories of politics (which are opposed even if the same side of the coin because they tend to black-box politics): one suggests that in politics unreason rules. I think one finds this attitude in some Hayekians, but, as Stigler notes correctly, one can find traces of it going back to Smith (even if I think Stigler misreads some of his own examples). On this view, politics is simply unpredictable and corrosive to any rational ideals (or both)--it often is accompanied by the idea to keep one's distance from politics and reduction of state power. The other [black-box theory] is one that implies that good normative ideas are automatically implemented [by benevolent and truth apt legislators] and then executed by a rule following bureaucracy. As Stigler notes nobody would assent to holding such a theory explicitly, but a lot of policy advice assumes it in practice. 

As an aside, part of the inside-baseball joke of the closing line of the quoted passage by Stigler is not just that economists are volunteering themselves as a particular class of (rent-seeking) job-seekers, the impartial and truth-apt commissioner, who is not to be found in his models, but that Smith -- the apostle of free trade -- himself ended up as a high customs commissioner to the British Crown.

Short of revolution (which liberals tend to abhor), Stigler advocates a different (fourth) understanding of policy. It requires not just the diagnostic features of  public choice, but also knowledge of "the political forces which confine and direct policy." This requires knowledge of the sort that empirical political science and sociology can supply. So, from this perspective, any policy advice must include a constituency or coalition that can promote the policy effectively (and have a grasp of the ways bureaucracies may react to them). Recent political philosophy can treat these as belonging to a certain class of feasibility constraints. Obviously, the promise is that this may increase the chances of uptake; it also makes all policy proposals much more status-quo friendly. Sometimes the concession to feasibility makes liberalism appear as a handmaiden to conservatism even if the path is honorable. 

What Stigler refuses to countenance, and I think here he underestimates Smith, is that morality itself can be mobilized.+ In addition, alongside most readers of Smith, he misses the role systematic theory has in shaping long-term policy. 

Let me wrap up. When liberal solutions to the problem of mercantile spirit (rent-seeking, state violence, etc.) themselves generate worse problems than the one they were aiming to solve then liberalism runs the risk of collapsing and becomes unattractive if not unpersuasive to the young. As regular readers know I think we have reached such a stage in the wake of the great financial crisis. The very survival of the financial system was taken to require great handouts to the rich and powerful. Few believe, when listening to self-described libertarian billionaires plotting interplanetary escape, that capitalism can solve the environmental/climate challenges ahead. It is no wonder that the spirit of mercantilism with its embrace of national state sponsored violence against immigrants and trade barriers with its fondness for grand building projects (etc.), has grown so bold since. But since that is the very ground of the existence of liberalism this is no reason for despair; it's our permanent challenge. 

On Solana's Civic Anarchism; or a liberalism for free spirits

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.--Valerie Solanas (1967) SCUM Manifesto [HT Petra Van Brabandt]

The second paragraph is so arresting, as revolutionary transitions are wont to be, that it is easy to overlook, or deliberately pass over, the first sentence of SCUM manifesto. To do so would miss the extraordinary ambition of the text: it aims to establish the conditions of life worth living within a true society. The whole text is structured around two kinds of societies; the false or unauthentic one -- denoted 'society'-- and the true one to come after the civic-minded females have done their revolutionary work. The manifesto sharply distinguishes among three stages: the boring status quo; the thrilling revolution, which makes possible, a grooving society (society is the repetition that holds the manifest together). But it does it in the name of life and (thrilling) civic-mindedness. 

For, a true "society" consists "of rational beings capable of empathizing with each other." Today I wish to articulate the nature of such a true society. In so doing, I pass over what is most exciting in her work: the critique of patriarchy, the unmasking of the art industry, the stinging attack on the corruption of science for life-destroying ends (go read SCUM Manifesto for yourself). This society, which is essentially "complete" and lacking competitive principles is anarchic in character without "a government, laws or leaders." Solanas associates philosophy, not unfairly, with pompous prattle, but she echoes (recall) Socrates' true city and Spinoza that the best political community is one with true companionship and no hierarchy (she also refers to it as "eternity and Utopia"). For in a true society, true community is possible: 

A true community consists of individuals -- not mere species members, not couples -- respecting each others individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally -- free spirits in free relation to each other -- and co-operating with each other to achieve common ends. Traditionalists say the basic unit of `society' is the family; `hippies' say the tribe; no one says the individual.

I do not wish to irritate more radical readers of Solanas (they can console themselves that before long my type is dispensable), but what she advocates here is the liberal good life.* She just thinks that men as they have been bred are incapable of it. Of course, she is not a thoroughgoing liberal; she embraces illiberal even thrilling means to solve the transition problem. But in this she is little different than those liberals who pine for Enlightened despots to help escape the cul-de-sac that is everyday politics. 

The point for Solanas of stressing the individual is not to make possible possessive individualism, but to promote the better kind, "to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplaceable by anyone else." And "like conversation, love can exist only between two secure, free-wheeling, independent groovy female females, since friendship is based upon respect, not contempt." Of course, the material conditions  for this better kind of individualism "requires complete economic as well as personal freedom, leisure time and the opportunity to engage in intensely absorbing, emotionally satisfying activities which, when shared with those you respect, lead to deep friendship."

Not unlike Keynes, Solanas thinks the material conditions to make a true society possible are easily within reach. In fact, she advocates big data computing half a century before it became fashionable ("There now exists a wealth of data which, if sorted out and correlated, would reveal the cure for cancer and several other diseases and possibly the key to life itself. But the data is so massive it requires high speed computers to correlate it all.")

Before I close, I wish to prevent two misunderstandings: first, I do not mean to minimize Solanas's rejection of reform. Hers is a revolutionary program. As she writes, "SCUM will always operate on a criminal as opposed to a civil disobedience basis, that is, as opposed to openly violating the law and going to jail in order to draw attention to an injustice. Such tactics acknowledge the rightness overall system and are used only to modify it slightly, change specific laws. SCUM is against the entire system, the very idea of law and government. SCUM is out to destroy the system, not attain certain rights within it."**  The destruction is menacing for those attached to the status quo.

Second, I do not mean to suggest that for Solanas the best community is only love and conversation. Near the end of her manifesto, she points to a range of activities presupposed in it "to explore, discover, invent, solve problems, crack jokes, make music -- all with love. In other words, create a magic world."

There is, thus, a lush gentility in Solanas's vision. In fact, it is so gentle that one wonders how the civic thrill-seekers will adjust to it once they can repose from their revolutionary work.  

On Understanding Without Mathematics and the Slums of Sociology

I must confess that my own first reaction to the General Theory was not at all like that of Keats on first looking into Chapman's Homer. No silent watcher, I, upon a peak in Darien. My rebellion against its pretensions would have been complete except for an uneasy realization that I did not at all understand what it was about. And I think I am giving away no secrets when I solemnly aver-upon the basis of vivid personal recollection-that no one else in Cambridge, Massachusetts, really knew what it was about for some 12 to 18 months after its publication. Indeed, until the appearance of the mathematical models of Meade, Lange, Hicks, and Harrod there is reason to believe that Keynes himself did not truly understand his own analysis.
Fashion always plays an important role in economic science; new concepts become the mode and then are passé. A cynic might even be tempted to speculate as to whether academic discussion is itself equilibrating: whether assertion, reply, and rejoinder do not represent an oscillating divergent series, in which-to quote Frank Knight's characterization of sociology-"bad talk drives out good."
In this case, gradually and against heavy resistance, the realization grew that the new analysis of effective demand associated with the General Theory was not to prove such a passing fad, that here indeed was part of "the wave of the future.--Paul Samuelson (1946) "Lord Keynes and the General Theory," Econometrica. 187-188.

As I noted yesterday, an invited comment on Backhouse's biography of Samuelson has had me take a second look at Samuelson's biographical sketches and obituaries. It's testimony of Samuelson's confidence and rhetorical abilities that his lack of initial understanding of the General Theory is treated as a problem of the General Theory (and even Keynes). It is notable that he does not consider the obvious alternative suggestion that Cambridge, MA, was a relative intellectual backwater in 1936 (the year the General Theory appeared) and so unfamiliar with the new thinking developing in Cambridge England. (To his credit, in the rest of his essay, Samuelson provides some evidence for the latter half of that claim.)

As an aside, it is a bit peculiar to see a low estimation of sociology attributed to Frank Knight, the man most responsible of generating initial interest in (and translation of) Weber Stateside. One wonders if, perhaps, Samuelson's memory is failing him and that he is importing his own negative characterization of sociology (recall) into his memory of Knight's acerbic wit. My evidence for this suggestion is that when in a different obituary, he discusses Jacob Viner's ferocious use of the Socratic Method (indebted to the Harvard economist Taussig), Samuelson adds that graduate students who did not meet Viner's exacting standards "had no choice but to drop out or to transfer to the slums of political science or sociology." (JPE, 1972: 6) It's not impossible that the low estimation of sociology was more common among economists in Chicago, but we know from Stigler's citation practices that some read sociology and social theory rather seriously, and that it even influenced Milton Friedman's methodology. 

Some other time I'll explore the significance of the proto-cyclical-equilibrium model of scientific fashions, a model that would certainly have some significance (recall) for professional philosophy (where the idea that ideas cycle in and out of fashion is itself a recurring fashion.)* I mention it here because the whole obituary is framed in proto-Kuhnian terms in which Keynes generates a scientific revolution (and in which differential response to the revolution is explained in terms of generational differences.) Later in the piece, Samuelson notes that textbooks break the cycle: "most important from the long-run standpoint, the Keynesian analysis has begun to filter down into the elementary textbooks; and as everybody knows once an idea gets into these, however bad it may be, it becomes practically immortal." (189) Samuelson was just finishing up his mega-influential textbook. (Luckily, in philosophy textbooks are not the dominant mode of instruction yet.)

Okay, let me get to the main point. Samuelson claims here that mathematics is the language in which by way of a model one understands an analysis. (The previous sentence is compatible with the further thought -- pressed by Samuelson's ironic critic -- that mathematics may well be many languages.) This is true not just of the readers of the General Theory, but also its author. Samuelson emphasizes the point later: "In it the Keynesian system stands out indistinctly, as if the author were hardly aware of its existence or cognizant of its properties."** Now, to be sure, there are two important truths lurking in Samuelson's position: first, that the meaning of a text may well escape or go beyond an author (and sometimes even may be so intended by an author)--I made that same point when discussing the debate between Plantinga and Hazony over biblical meaning. Second, sometimes, maybe often, an analysis in non-mathematical language is fuzzy or unclear or equivocal in ways that are only made transparent by a mathematical model. (A claim Samuelson would repeat regularly later in his rejection of verbal economics as opposed to mathematical economics.)*** Only later in life (1972), when discussing Viner's significance (he calls him both the "greatest neoclassical economist" and a "great eclectic"), does Samuelson relent on the point: "Jacob Viner was a respecter of mathematics, but also both critical and defensive about it. Let me make clear that Viner possessed in superlative degree what might be called native mathematical ability....But I now realize in retrospect that the subject of economics gained from having Viner concentrate upon those areas of wisdom and erudition for which he had a unique comparative advantage, and that more mathematical facility might merely have diverted him from his appointed task."

Samuelson does not consider an alternative interpretation: that in different ways,  Meade, Lange, Hicks, and Harrod may have offered models inspired by the General Theory, but  in their very formulation changed the meaning of the 'Keynesian' analysis.+ One can recognize the previous point while allowing that the new models may have had all kinds of uses (teaching, policy, transferring knowledge, etc.) made difficult by the General Theory. To argue that case is not my present charge (and I would have to re-familiarize with all the relevant models), although I have already suggested that Keynes's insights about the nature of true uncertainty were lost in the way his views got formalized. (I made some such point in a different context when discussing Carnapian explication.) 

Strikingly enough, and Samuelson often buries his most important points in footnotes, he adds the following observation:

8 Indeed only in connection with Frank P. Ramsey's "A Mathematical Theory of Saving"...does he show interest in an esoteric theoretical problem; there he gave a rather intricate interpretation in words of a calculus-of-variations differential-equation condition of equilibrium. His reasoning is all the more brilliant -- and I say this seriously! -- because it is mathematically unrigorous, if not wrong. The importance which Keynes attached to this article is actually exaggerated and can be accounted for only in terms of his paternal feeling toward Ramsey, and his own participation in the solution of the problem. (196)

An uncharitable reading of Samuelson may suggests that he is committed to the idea that wrong mathematical reasoning is better than no mathematical reasoning (even if not wrong). A more charitable reading would suggest that he recognizes that sometimes insight does trump a wrong mathematical formulation, especially -- and this is not meant as criticism -- if it takes a Samuelson to discern the kernel of insight.

 

On The Sociology and Philosophy of Science in and by Economists

Just prior to Hayek's departure from post World War II mainstream economics came what must be hailed as his greatest important contribution to economic science. It can be well understood if I make reference to the famous debate between Lerner–Lange and Ludwig von Mises (1935) over the role of the supply-and-demand mechanism in a socialist state. Lerner (1934), as well as Lange and Taylor (1938) quasi-independently, suggested that playing the game of parametric supply–demand auctioning could optimally organize a socialist society that had evolved beyond historic capitalism.

Arguably this general notion might be traced back to Adam Smith's legendary Invisible Hand, which led society unconsciously to achieve the maximal “general good.” Individual avarice, under market checks and balances, achieved this happy state. A more sophisticated version of the same idea came in the 1890s from Pareto (1896–97) and Barone (1908), long before Arrow-Debreu breakthroughs. Pareto deduced the mathematical theorem that the determinative equations of Walrasian general equilibrium mimicked exactly the maximizing welfare conditions for utopias.

By contrast, Mises in his polemics prior to Lerner–Lange, had contended that only under actual capitalism could one even define a post-Bentham welfare economics. Autobiographically, I can testify that most economists born after 1910 at that time would have voted Lerner and Lange to be the debate winner, with Mises as the prime loser. (Even my Harvard mentor Schumpeter saw some merit in the Lerner–Lange conjectures.¹)

In the 1940s Friedrich Hayek in an invited Harvard lecture introduced a new dynamic element into the debate. Call it “information economics.” The broad competitive markets, Hayek proclaimed, were the recipients of heterogeneous idiosyncratic bits of individuals’ information. Playing for matches rather than for real money or blood was as different an economic dynamics as night is from day.

I was not at all the only one to be converted to the view that, as between Abba Lerner, Oskar Lange and Ludwig von mises, Friedrich Hayek was actually the debate's winner. (After the U.S. State Department persuaded Lange to go back to Stalinesque Poland, Lange reportedly lost his lust for auction markets.)

The jury of history judges innovators not by adding linearly their plus and minus contributions. Hayek's 1974 Stockholm Nobel Prize was importantly won for him by his notions about decentralized information economics discussed that day in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Never mind that Hayek over-praised the optimality of individualistic spontaneity. Charles Darwin's genius long earlier had eclectically enumerated both the plusesand minuses of individualistic natural selection.

I do not know how much George Stigler had ever been influenced by Hayek when later Stigler's work on information economics helped bring him his Nobel medal. Senior Robert K. Merton, as sociologist, historian and philosopher of history of science, taught us again and again that great things come in pairs and triplets. Darwin had his Wallace. Newton had his Leibniz. Leibniz had his Newton. Thomas Kuhn documented the case that the fundamental Law of Conservation of Energy had a dozen different fathers. Although what each had discovered was not precisely the same thing, maybe at most one of the dozen did understand all the nuances.--Paul Samuelson (2009) "A few remembrances of Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992),"  Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

Two long-running themes of my blogs on the philosophy and history of twentieth century economics, are (a) that ideas from the philosophy of science played a big role in cutting edge discussions among leading economists, and (b) that some ideas we associate with philosophy of science were developed or articulated within economics. On (b) I have primarily focused on the role of Kuhnian ideas within economics (between 1870-1960) [for an overview see here]. One reason to mention Kuhn is to note the otherwise peculiar fact the leading and influential ,professional economists of the age (Samuelson, Stigler, Buchanan, -- all Nobel laureates --) were serious and leading historians of economics, while simultaneously arguing for and writing textbooks with a conception of a professional economist that left little relatively room for the history of economics inside the discipline. 

Because, yesterday, I was asked to comment on a précis of Roger Backhouse's first part of his biography of Paul Samuelson, the aptly titled, Founder of Modern Economics: Paul A. Samuelson, I returned to some of Samuelson's many biographical sketches of others. He excelled in the genre, in which he mixed personal memory, character sketches, and a kind of summing up of theoretical significance. In one of his earliest contributions to genre, his (1946) obituary of Keynes, he pretends as if the significance of a biographical sketch is merely short term: "The personal characteristics of the scientist can only be captured while memories are still fresh; and only then, in all honesty, are they of maximum interest and relevance." Yet, he closes the 1946 obituary with a footnote (#15) in which he writes, " should like at this point to pass a clue on to the future historian of economic
thought." What follows is a rather clever suggestion of the influence by Keynes on Joan Robinson 1933--the effect of which is to diminish the originality of Robinson and, thereby (because Samuelson is a canny operator) to diminish her would be future influence. Because Keynes is dead, he can't set the record straight on her behalf (if he would have been so inclined). So, in stroke he has undercut one of the sharpest operators of his time.  Even if you don't agree with my interpretation of the footnote, the wording of the footnote shows that is also playing a long game in the service of posthumous fame and score setting.

Samuelson exhibits here the marks of a Kuhnian legislator, who can operate at multiple dimensions, short term and long term, but also bring together different kinds of concerns (recall this post on Samuelson's biographical sketch of Viner). This ability to play chess on multiple boards at once is characteristic of Samuelson's command of the discipline even at a young age. (He  was 31 in 1946.) While Samuelson pioneered many techniques, his greatest skill was, in my opinion, to write the paper that would help the rest of the economics discipline understand what the issues were on any topic. He did this time and again, and his citation score is monstrously large.   

As an aside, Samuelson's biography of Keynes is full of gems, but the most revealing about Samuelson is this one:  Keynes, who became a celebrity outside academia with the Economic Consequences of the Peace, "met the practical men of affairs on their own ground and won the reputation of being an economist who knew how to make money." Samuelson would become a celebrity and wealthy with his textbook and trading success.

Okay, let me now turn to the final paragraph I quoted above from the Hayek biography. If we ignore the interpretation of Adam Smith (and the amusing and not wholly false proposal that Smith is the founder of Socialist Utopias as opposed to the Stalinist kind),* the comment on the context and significance of Hayek's greatest contribution to economics is judicious. But it is a bit surprising to see Samuelson take yet one more pot-shot at George Stigler (who had died in 1991). Now, you need to know that Samuelson and Stigler knew each other from the The University of Chicago of the mid 1930s, where Samuelson was a precocious undergraduate and Stigler one of the leading graduate students. They were both greatly influenced by Frank Knight and Jacob Viner. But Samuelson developed into the leading 'centrist' (his own words in the biography of Hayek) technocrat, whereas Stigler became one of the leading lights of the Chicago school. (As Samuelson makes clear Hayek pretty much left professional economics after 1945.) I have repeatedly explored their debate that originated in the status of welfare economics (see here, and follow the links back) in 1943.

But Samuelson does not merely suggests that Stigler won the Nobel for not quite original, cutting edge work. He also introduces the great sociologist of science Robert K. Merton to reinforce his point. Now, Merton had been a colleague of Stigler's at  Columbia and (together with Talcott Parsons) a great influence on Stigler's conception of science (recall also this post.) Stigler loved to quote Merton in his methodological papers, and there is no doubt that when Stigler wrote Kuhn just after Structure appeared to inform Kuhn that Kuhnian ideas were developed by economists like himself, they had drawn on Mertonian insights. But the plot thickens (as Backhouse gently reminded me yesterday) because Merton was also the father of the economist Robert Merton (and another Nobel laureate which he won for his contribution to the famous option price formula named after Black and Scholes). Merton and Samuelson wrote an important and widely cited text  from the "perspective of a model in which agents can revise their decisions continuously in time." 

It's quite clear that Stigler, who was something of an attack dog, is being treated as the lesser light and being likened to Wallace (and that Hayek is more akin to Darwin). And then for good measure, the reader is reminded that there are good odds that neither Stigler nor Hayek truly understood what they had contributed: there can be only one who understands all the nuances, and that's Samuelson.

 

Should Policy Relevant Researchers Stay Out of Politics?

To lock yourself up in an ivory tower is impossible and undesirable. To yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer. We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is.--Orwell (1948) "Writers and Leviathan."

Liam Kofi Bright ignited discussion on Facebook of a (fairly) recent paper by (BHLer) Bas van der Vossen. This paper argues for a normative conception of the division of labor, between "consumers," that is, "activists," and producers, that is, political philosophers (19), of political philosophy such that pure specialization between them should be maintained:

for precisely those academics that work on politically relevant topics, most prominently among them political philosophers. For them, the university should become more like an Ivory Tower, not less.... the problem with these [political] activities is that they encourage us to think about ourselves in partisan terms. And this is incompatible with our academic professional responsibilities.--Bas van der Vossen (2015) "In Defense of the Ivory Tower: Why Philosophers Should Stay Out of Politics" (1-2)

Before I get to his main argument, I want to note, first, that throughout his paper Van der Vossen equivocates among (i) 'working on politically relevant topics' and (ii) "those who are serious about thinking through political issues" and (iii) being "paid to think about politics." (On (iii) he notes that political philosophers do not have a monopoly and he also lists "sociology, political science,  economics, gender studies, psychology." (2)) By this I do not mean that (i-iii) are not synonymous in the strict sense (they are not). Rather, there are quite a few sciences (genetics, climate-science, epidemiology, civil engineering, IT, etc.) that are politically extremely relevant, but that are not, in the first instance, about thinking about political issues (although, interestingly enough, it does happen).  Because Van der Vossen ignores those latter sciences he can escape having to think about difficult, hybrid contexts where the distinction between consumer/producer is not so easy to draw. In what follows, where necessary, I distinguish between policy relevant research and research about politics and political issues.

Second, Van der Vossen's paper presupposes non-trivial commitments about the good life: "Many people stay out of political activism and they do just fine. Activism is not a necessary ingredient of a good life." (18) One need not be an elitist, a Republican-thinker, or a follower of Hannah Arendt to see that appealing to what "many people" do and that they are doing fine is an odd standard. The paper is also oddly complacent about the status quo (b) "many people in even the healthiest democracies around the world are not politically active and, in the grand scheme of things, these democracies seem to do just fine." (19) Even if this were true (when the paper was published in 2015 [i would reject this]) a cosmopolitan, political philosopher may take an interest in the health of transnational political subjects and promote these via transnational activism.

Third, and this is more important, Van der Vossen takes for granted that the bridge between consumers and producers of political philosophy can be bridged without the producers being politically active. His is a magical theory of dissemination; if you produce it, it will be  consumed. This may be true for (lots of) highways, but it is rarely true otherwise. While there are many different ways in which the gap can be bridged between policy relevant research and politics, a key way is by way of what Merel Lefevere and I call aggregators. Aggregators are distinguished researchers, whose professional function is, in part, to act as an interface between research and policy. There are many different kinds of aggregators (journal editors, science policy-advisors, science-journalists, etc.) and not all of them maintain active research profile or need to do so. But because cutting edge research is often extremely complex/subtle it is important that some of the  best researchers are also aggregators. In practice, these researchers-aggregators often have high prestige within the field (think of Singer, Pogge [sic], Nussbaum, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, Norman Daniels, etc.). (This is not the place to explore all the tricky issues pertaining to this class of researcher-aggregator, especially if they deviate from professional consensus and advocate their own views, but recall this post.) In some grant-driven environments, researchers are, in fact, expected by the grant agency to play some role as an aggregator or actively disseminate their research.

That he misses the very issue becomes clear when we turn to his argument (which he has helpfully summarized):

(1) People who take up a certain role or profession thereby acquire a prima facie moral duty to  make a reasonable effort to avoid those things that predictably make them worse at their tasks

(2) The task of political philosophers is to seek the truth about political issues

(3) Therefore, political philosophers have a prima facie moral duty to make a reasonable effort to avoid those things that predictably make them worse at seeking the truth about political  issues

(4) Being politically active predictably makes us worse at seeking the truth about political issues

(5) Therefore, political philosophers have a prima facie moral duty to avoid being politically active (17-18)

Aggregators clearly violate the  conclusion of the argument, But one could accept all the premises of the argument, even its conclusions, and still see a need for aggregators in practice. That is, (5) is at best a defeasible duty. It becomes defeasible for two interesting, interdependent reasons: (a) research is esoteric, and so requires expertise to navigate; (b) political activists lack time to explore and master an esoteric realm.

In addition, it is, of course, also an empirical question if aggregators really become worse at their research. (This is not to deny that Van der Vossen draws on rich empirical research on the effects of partisanship and also about motivated reasoning and rationalization--including work by Dan Sperber that I happen to be reading this week, too.) I bet the most admired 20th century professional economists -- by other economists -- were Samuelson, Arrow, Friedman, and Keynes.* While the first two cultivated a decidedly technocratic image, it's hard to say they stayed out of politics--they certainly functioned as aggregators in the sense I use the word. Would they have been better at their craft if they stayed clear of policy relevance? That's hard to imagine. Their biases animate their research. Would they have been even better researchers if they stayed clear of policy and the role of aggregator? That's a tricky counterfactual. I am not confident it can be answered.

So, far I have pretended to accept  all his premises. Regular readers, who may discern a skeptical strain in these Digressions, may suspect that I would hesitate at (2). But, for the sake of argument, I accept it. As it happens, I think there are also aesthetic goals of research that are not properly captured by 'truth.' (Not unlike Marcus Arvan I think there are also excellent reasons to think that there are other very respectable, epistemic and moral goals of research that may have  to be balanced.)

But I close with a final objection that is directed at the way Van der Vossen cashes out premises (3-4). For, he thinks that biased research is incompatible with the pursued of truth. That is, he conflates unbiased (and partisan) research with truth-apt research.**  As the previous paragraphs make clear individual researchers are part of a larger epistemic process in which motivated reasoning may well have some use. In fact, this theme is a feature, not a bug, of the law, which is an adversarial process in which the conflict between motivated reasoning, advocacy, helps uncover the truth. Obviously, academic research is not fully analogous with that (and being lawyer-ly is, in an important sense, inimical to a proper, collaborative research ethos). But if we think of research as a community-activity, then we can immediate see that's compatible with individual bias--as long as these individual biases contribute to a social, epistemic process that is truth-conducive. (Regular readers will recognize in the previous sentence my interest in combating biases -- purportedly truth-apt status quo and hierarchy biases -- with other biases in research.) That is, the process requires mechanisms and filters that help to transform the biases in truth-conducive activity. There is a nice formal (see here for useful discussion) and empirical literature on the role of diversity in  research, when it is or is not apt. [So, I am certainly not saying that all individual biases are good!] So, for (4) needs to be rewritten as follows:

(4+)Being politically active predictably makes us worse at seeking the truth about political issues unless the research institutions in which we operate are designed to prevent our biases from undermining the epistemic process.

 

I started this post with a quote from Orwell. Throughout his writings, Orwell discusses the problems of partisanship and its relationship to (artistic) integrity (recall, for example, this post; and here). And he discerned that we should not conflate partisanship and group-think with all political activism. That is to say, he recognizes that party-politics and group-enforced ideology do corrupt (he was primarily interested in writing, but his arguments carry over easily to research). But the answer to this need not be political quietism or withdrawal into the ivory tower. The problem is party-politics and ideologies.

For, there are lots of ways one can be politically active in which one's research (artistic vision) need not be undermined at all. Sometimes this is due to functional role (e.g., recall the stuff above aggregators above). But sometimes is due to the fact that corrupting elements can be avoided. This is most clear in advocacy work on single issues (death penalty, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, basic income, human rights, racism, etc.). The researcher can be uncompromising in her single-issue advocacy and maintain her integrity. (Grant me the distinction between single-issue and systemic ideology.) Often this generates a kind of lack of moderation, even fanaticism in the name of truth. While there are problems with that, these are political problems not research problems.