Digressions&Impressions

Bad News for some Libertarians and Conservatives on Precautionary Principles

[T]he acknowledgment of uncertainty and unknowability does not lead to a political-philosophical recognition of the fragility of modern life. On the contrary, this uncertainty itself becomes a ground for security action and intervention on the basis of speculation and imagination. As Francois Ewald put it...The precautionary principle invites one to anticipate what one does not yet know, to take into account doubtful hypotheses and simple suspicions. It invites on to take the most far-fetched forecasts seriously."--Marieke de Goede (2012) Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies, 50

The precautionary principle can be understood as follows: "if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action." Prior to reading De Goede's book I had two general reflections on the nature of precautionary principles (PP); first, the application of a PP is a means of pausing action, that is, as a moral tool that (a) could be used by Libertarians and Conservatives to slow down the machinery of government decision-making and (b) could be used by Progressives and Environmentalists to call attention to harmful, social consequences of policies on folk (or non-folk) that lack lobbying power. For, the precautionary principle is a natural accompaniment of uncertainty: if you don't know the wide consequences of an action on bystanders, you should be careful about advocating/pursuing it. It is a way to shift the burden of proof.

And, second, I worried that once Kuhnian ideas of science -- which treat science and consensus as strongly correlated -- are integrated into science's self-understanding, a (manufactured) scientific consensus itself could mask either considerable underlying uncertainty or facilitate further harms (see my piece with Lefevere for more reflections on the moral significance of such consensus). In practice, there are (i) complex judgments about whose risks and harms are counted in the context of justifying a course of action (or inaction) in light of PP (for an excellent example, see Kukla and Wayne's analysis here) and (ii) complex judgments about what possible futures one wants to allow (Arrow and Fisher (1974) showed that even without risk aversion "that the expected benefits of an irreversible decision should be adjusted to reflect the loss of options it entails.")**

Of course, logically the principle also facilitates government action because (and again quoting Wikipedia): PP "is used by policy makers to justify discretionary decisions in situations where there is the possibility of harm...The principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk" (emphasis added). That is, a precautionary principle can also function as a call to action. But because PP is a burden shifting demand, I had always viewed it as a means for slower, more responsible action that I associated with a generally conservative political outlook. (Given that I tend to view environmentalism as a species of conservatism, this fit my priors nicely.)

De Goede's book, which creatively uses Foucault-ian ideas, disabused me of the ideas in the previous paragraph. Rather she shows that precautionary principles are used to justify preemption; they are invoked in the "war on terror in the face of risks that are thought to be at once uncertain or unknowable and catastrophic to the extent that they require immediate action." (De Goede, xxviii)* The most chilling moments in the book are quotes from legal decisions that use the language of "temporary precautionary measure" (167) to deny those suspected of terrorist sympathies normal legal standards of evidence even in the absence of any criminal action (or evidence of intent). To what extent such precaution still falls under the classical precautionary principle (with its emphasis on scientific consensus) is, of course, also tricky; are the security and legal experts as well as the data-miners really representing a genuine scientific consensus?

Now, one might claim that given the-call-to-action-feature of a precautionary principle, we should not be surprised by such abuses; all principles are liable to abuse, after all. It is an open empirical (and contextually subtle) question if the abuses generated by applying precautionary principles are worse than their absence. It is familiar paradox, after all, that where such principles are needed most, they are most likely to be abused.

But rather than debating the merits of the precautionary principle, here I call attention to the key point in De Goede's book: in (urgent) contexts that focus on precaution (e.g., security), "the appeal to uncertainty replaces the demonstration of evidence as grounds for taking action" (174; see also p. 199). If this merely upends familiar habits of thought (and threatens cherished conservative principles), this would not be very disconcerting. But as De Goede notes, once such ideas get widespread bureaucratic uptake (not just in context of terrorism), a state of emergency is normalized and legally recognized. That's not just bad news for Libertarians and Conservatives.

 

On Carnap, Luck and Necessity in Samuelson's *Foundations* of Economics

By 1983 we were all, so to speak, mathematical economists...This is as it should be. Soft and hard sciences are cumulative disciplines. We each bring our contributions of "value added" to the pot of progress. In Max Planck's much-quoted words: Science progresses funeral by funeral. Inside tomorrow's physics treatise will be the lasting truths of Isaac Newton and also of the professor who works down the hall from you. Something of the same goes for economics, where often the dance must proceed Two Steps Forward and One Step Back.--Paul A. Samuelson 1998 (1378-9)

Had I remained on the Chicago Midway, I might well have missed out on the three revolutions that remade mainstream economics: the Keynesian Revolution, the Imperfect-Competition Revolution, and the Mathematical-Economics Revolution. Instead I had a front-row seat.--Paul A. Samuelson (1379)

Had I been a strict constitutionalist, I might well have stopped there. The result would have been a shorter 200-page book with one fully integrated theme.--Paul A. Samuelson (1384)

Reading widely, I was a child of my time, but it was the internal logic of the economic puzzles that guided Foundations' growth.--Paul A. Samuelson (1375 [emphasis in original])

The historian of economics, Roger Backhouse, has long been prodding me to pay closer attention to Paul Samuelson, who was the economist's economist for much of the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, in commenting on my work on the pre-history of Kuhnian ideas within Chicago economics, he insisted that I should not underestimate the significance of Samuelson (the very anthithesis of a Chicago economist, despite having done a BA there). And, indeed, in reading Samuelson's reflections on his own achievement on his seminal Foundations of Economic Analysis a half century later, I was struck by the Kuhnian imagery, including his self-presentation as a would-be-revolutionary (rather than "strict constitutionalist") and the focus on how puzzle-solving  (rather than external influences) led to the breakthroughs. 

But I wondered to what degree the evidence from 1998 wasn't itself a consequence of Kuhn's influence. Nudged by Backhouse I was directed to the following passage in Samuelson's Foundations:

[A]t a time when pure economic theory has undergone a revolution of thought—from statical to dynamical modes. While many earlier foreshadowings can be found in the literature, we may date this upheaval from the publication of Ragnar Frisch’s Cassel Volume essay [1933--ES] of only a decade ago. The resulting change in outlook can be compared to that of the transition from classical to quantum mechanics. And just as in the field of physics it was well that the relationship between the old and the new theories could be in part clarified, so in our field a similar investigation seems in order. (Samuelson 1947, p. 284)

So, Samuelson was very explicit about that fact that he was participating in a scientific revolution that was initiated before him. In an "age of specialization," Samuelson thought of himself as the 'last generalist' because after his framework setting work, the end of "upheaval," there would only be a need for esoteric specialist work. In Samuelson's hands the revolution has an air of inevitability.

Piketty's Modal Economics, or where ideology and historical data meet

The history of income and wealth is always deeply political, chaotic, and unpredictable. How this history plays out depends on how societies view inequalities and what kinds of policies and institutions they adopt to measure and transform them. No one can foresee how these things will change in the decades to come. (Piketty, Capital 35)

In fact, neither economic liberalization that began around 1980 nor the state interventionism that began in 1945 deserves such praise or blame. France, Germany, and Japan would very likely have caught up with Britain and the United States following their collapse of 1914-45 regardless of what policies they had adopted (I say this with only slight exaggeration.) The most one can say is that state intervention did no harm. Similarly, once these countries had attained the global technological frontier, it is hardly surprising that they ceased to grow more rapidly than Britain and the United States or that growth rates in all of these wealthy countries more or less equalized....Broadly speaking, the US and British policies of economic liberalization appear to have had little effect on this reality, since they neither increased growth nor decreased it. (Piketty 99)

The first quoted passage urges us to take political control ("transform") over our economic destiny (see also p. 234 where Piketty endorses the claim that "political forces were central.") In Piketty's book 'chaotic' tends to be used to describe unstable, ad hoc political decision-making in context of great disruptive, social upheaval (war, inflation, "shocks," etc.). (His 'chaotic' is unconnected to the stochastic view of randomness beloved by mathematical economists.) It's precisely because politics has an influence on the economy that the world becomes unpredictable. The italicized passage is the central dogma of the political historian's craft.*

Yet, in the second quoted passage, Piketty embraces a form of technological determinism on growth in which much macro-policy has no discernible influence at all on growth. I am not claiming that the two passages contradict each other. For, Piketty's position seems to be that (a) macro-economic policy is largely impotent on growth; (b) governments can make macro-economic mistakes (embrace too much autarky; embrace too much capital liberalization (71);+ (c) governments can impact the distribution of wealth; (d) ensuring the diffusion of technology and education is key to long-term growth (71;  572; see also the emphasis on productivity at 234). So, while governments can invest in education (307), the impotence of traditional macro-economic policy on growth is also emphasized in the conclusion: "countries at the world technological frontier--and thus ultimately for the planet as a whole--there is ample reason to believe that the growth rate will not exceed 1-1.5 percent in the long run, no matter what economic policies are adopted." (572)

Clearly, the crucial concept in Piketty's analysis here is the 'technological frontier.' Amazingly enough I have just quoted two out of four mentions of the term in the whole (long) book, and these are the most detailed descriptions of it. Curiously, the term is introduced on p. 97 without a footnote or explanation. It is one of the few places in his book where Piketty assumes a background in economics in his reader. But its meaning is clear from context: (i) a country's (world's) technological frontier clearly limits the possibilities for growth. (As we philosophers like to say, it's a modal concept.) And (ii) growth can be faster toward the frontier than being on the frontier, where a "relatively slow pace" is "characteristic" (97).