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Part Two: The Voodoo Sciences

"I wouldn't know anything about politics," my friend said the other day. "I'm only an engineer."

He happens to be a very good engineer, but he named his profession as if ashamed of it. I see this a lot. The social scientists are automatically assumed to know more about society and politics than the hard scientists—even when the subject matter is something like nuclear power.

I wouldn't be so sure.

 

I hear a lot recently about "voodoo economics." The term is most often employed by Democrats in reference to President Reagan's economic policies; but I've also heard professional economists use the term "voodoo economics" in a way that implies there is a real science of economics in contrast to "Reaganomics."

Certainly the official policy is that economics is a science. We have by law a Council of Economic Advisors to report to the President, while the Congress has Alice Rivkin and her staff of economists to tell them what they should do.

From all the evidence I've seen, we'd do as well to give the President a Council of Voodoo Practitioners, and let the Congress consult its Chief Astrologer. In fact, I suspect that a chief hungan and mamba would do less harm than our present economists: we'd be less likely to take them seriously. However much our Chief Voodoo Advisor protested that his work was scientific, we'd demand some kind of track record, some evidence that his predictions might once in a while come true; while we impose no such burdens on economists, which is just as well for them, since their track record is one of universally dismal failure.

One of the first things they teach stock brokers is to stay out of the stock market. Brokers make their pile from selling advice, and from commissions on stock transactions. They can't predict the market, and few risk their own money. They, at least, only affect their clients' fortunes. Economists, though, can ruin the lot of us with their advice—yet if no science can predict a relatively closed system like the stock market, how the devil are you going to "fine tune" something as large as the American economy? I'd think it arrogant to try; as arrogant as the man with three illiterate drug-addicted spoiled brats writing a book on parenting.

But there's worse to come: to the extent that there is a "science of economics", its practitioners must behave in ways that other professions would brand unethical. Example: the Corporate Economist of a large aircraft company is going to give a speech. He has made his analysis (cast lots? examined tea leaves?) and he forsees nothing but bad news. We're in a "downside cycle" and there ain't much to be done about it. So he goes to a meeting of, say, the Airline Owners, and of course when asked for his predictions he gives his honest professional opinion—

In a pig's eye, he does. If he told what he thinks is the truth, he'd be fired. Worse, the Securities Exchange Commission would look at all his financial records and probably charge him with manipulating the value of his company's stock. It would be sure to fall; and if he'd prudently sold any shares recently he would likely go to jail.

No: his speech is predictable. He'll give some nodding acknowledgement to current hard times, predict an upswing, and tell his audience they better be prepared to buy a lot of airplanes.

Dr. Milton Friedman has a Nobel Prize in economics; one assumes he must know something about the subject. He once said, "Every economist knows that minimum wages cause unemployment. That's not a principle, it's a definition." The logic seems clear enough, at least when applied to home economics: if I can get the yard cut for a couple of bucks, I'll pay it; raise THe minimum wage to $17.50 an hour, and I'll cut it myself, or let it grow. Whomever I'd have hired will go jobless.

Of course not all economists agree with that. After all, it's not only possible, but likely that the Nobel Prize in economics will go in alternate years to people who disagree on nearly every fundamental. I have a textbook on macroeconomics, and every chapter essentially cancels out the last, as each "school" presents its theories—and proves the others wrong.

In point of fact, the economists don't have the foggiest notion of what's wrong with our economy or what to do about it; and the very best economics textbook have almost nothing to say about science, engineering, research, development, and technology.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recently said, "The collapse of economic analysis is demonstrated by the hopeless cacophony of economic forecasting, where experts generally disagree with each other and nearly all turn out wrong—a circumstance that, alas, discourages neither economists from making forecasts nor the rest of us from believing them."

So: will someone tell me what, other than one's political preferences, is the difference between "professional" and "voodoo" economics? And why we pay a Council of Economic Advisors while neglecting to have a Chief Astrologer?

 

Go to any U.S. university. You will hear lamentation and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Washington has become unfeeling and stupidly refuses to support higher education: don't those idiots on the Potomac know that education is investment in the future? Don't they know that human resources are our most valuable resources, that public higher education is necessary preparation for a democratic future? That we must invest in the future?

But now wander about the campus, and look at how our typical university allocates that all-important investment dollar. You will find that the "social science" departments are far larger than the "hard sciences," and indeed have more students than are enrolled in liberal arts. You will find that even in states with tens of thousands of unemployed teachers, the Department of Education is among the very largest departments on campus.

The social sciences will be large and important departments, with many members of faculty and much classroom space. One wonders what it is that graduates in the social sciences are prepared to do. It must be an important skill; we are spending a large part of our scarce but all-important investment funds to acquire it. Oddly enough, though, we're not training so many engineers and scientists, physicists and mathematicians. Why?

But of course the answer is well known. In most universities, our education investment funds are allocated by entering freshmen. They go to a kind of oriental bazaar, where they are seduced into choosing a major; the number of majors then determines the department's share of the university's budget funds. It does seem an odd way to allocate an important resource.

One might suppose a better way: that the legislature, or other public authority, determine the number of engineers, biologists, physicists, medicos, sociologists, etc., that might reasonably be required in future, and allocate public funds among the departments accordingly. Students wishing to declare various majors could so do; but when the number that the taxpayers will support is exceeded, the next student to enroll in that major gets to pay tuition accordingly. If tax supported higher education is an investment—and what other theory justifies sending the tax collector, policeman, and ultimately the public hangman to extort funds from the taxpayers?—then might we have some care in the way that investment is allocated? The present scheme looks like a bad parody invented by an inept science fiction writer. Who'd believe it if it weren't happening?

At least, though, the present scheme should give us plenty of social scientists, as well as lots of professional teachers. With all those behavioral scientists we shouldn't have any problems teaching the young to read and write: even if the teachers have problems, the sociologists and psychologists can devise a scientific education program.

Only they don't. They don't even try. And when someone does succeed, as for example Marva Collins of Chicago who built quality private schools in what she called "the allegedly fetid ghetto", the "professional educators" put out reams of material calling her a "hoax" who was "carefully constructed as a media event." It really infuriates the educational professionals to find someone able to do the job they claim they can do.

Mrs. Roberta Pournelle teaches in a juvenile detention facility. Her students are teenage illiterates. Most of them come with five pounds of paperwork that definitely proves that this kid cannot possibly learn to read. The schools, the psychologists, the educators haven't failed; there's something wrong with the kid. Roberta throws the paperwork away and teaches the kid to read. She hasn't failed yet.

Then there's the court system. In the history of trials, there must be about three cases in which the prosecution's psychiatrist said an accused pleading not guilty by reason of insanity was nuts, and none at all in which the defense's psychiatrist said he wasn't. Yet the taxpayers continue to pay for this all too predictable "scientific" expert testimony.

This is professionalism?

 

And yet: we not only excuse gross incompetence among social scientists, we let them give real scientists and engineers an inferiority complex. Somehow we've swallowed whole the myth that you can be well-rounded, an educated person, although knowing no science and mathematics whatever; but engineering and science majors are automatically uncultured boors, hardly fit for polite society.

We have a Council of Economic Advisors, and we debate economic policy, and everyone listens as these soothsayers pontificate about monetary policy; and meanwhile, the President's Science Advisor is a low ranking White House official, there is no Engineering Advisory Council, and there is no cabinet level post held by an engineer. More than a majority of seats in every major legislature in the land is held by lawyers (and we wonder why the law is so complex?); but there are about two engineers in Congress, and no cabinet-level post is held by an engineer or scientist.

Now go again to your typical university. Find an engineering student and a social science student. I'll bet you anything you like that the engineer will have read about as much history and literature and genuine liberal arts as the social scientist; while the social scientist will know nothing of engineering and physics, little of biology, and no mathematics. He may protest that he "took stat"; which will mean that he knows how to do cookbook calculations to produce the mean, median, and mode of a bunch of numbers. Given a little help he may also be able to compute the standard deviation; and with a textbook and a bit of luck he might even be able to do a "T" test, although odds are that he won't have the foggiest notion of what the T test assumes.

Go now to a rally protesting a nuclear power plant. There'll be a lot of students there. How many will be engineers? And how many social scientists? Of the social scientists, how many will understand anything of nuclear physics? How many will know the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation?

Engineering students may apologize for deficiencies in "culture." Social activists glory in their ignorance of science. The man who started the People's Lobby, the first of California's mass anti-nuclear groups, used to say proudly, "The only physics I ever took was Ex-Lax."

The fact is that engineers and scientists will have studied far more of the liberal arts than social scientists will have studied of physics or engineering. (And alas, neither will know any history.)

Isn't it about time we ended this farce? Granted, the social sciences have a tough subject matter; but it isn't made easier by involving us all in a conspiracy to act as if they'd skills they just haven't got. It would be a lot easier to respect them if they made their students take hard courses: calculus through differential equations, real probability and statistics, operations research, basic computer science. Of course if their students mastered those subjects, they'd probably get out of "social science" and into something useful. Meantime, though, they can stop trying to get the rest of us to act as if they know something we don't.

 

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