Bit slow today, checking some things off lists. The entirety of Peter Bauer’s “Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion” is quite wonderful, and well worth the read. As I argue constantly, to fail to consider the consequences of actions you conceive to be well intentioned, is to not be well intentioned at all, but self important and narcissistic, if not outright power mongering. YOU MUST CARE ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES, to all people, and over time.
Here are a couple quotes from the concluding chapter of a book in which he has ably demonstrated that foreign aid frequently does little but support income inequalities, autocracy, and continued generalized poverty, all claims that fly in the face of “conventional” wisdom, then (1981) and now.
what explains the curious situation of contemporary economics, especially the acceptance of evidently insubstantial, even bizarre, notions?
The expansion of the subject since the Second World War and the circumstances surrounding it must be considered together. Unlike the expansion in the natural sciences in recent decades, especially in physics and chemistry, the expansion in economics (and other forms of social study) was not an instance of the growth of knowledge leading to a quantum jump in the number of people and money attracted. The expansion resulted from the belief that economists could help significantly in solving social and political problems; and that their capacity to do so depended largely on their numbers and on the money at their disposal. . . But, as the term is usually understood, economic problems are different. Economic problems do not typically present themselves because of perceived gaps or inadequacies of knowledge. Rather economic problems are said to exist wherever there are differences between proclaimed norms and observed reality. Such problems evidently cannot be solved by improvements in knowledge alone. Indeed, as suggested in chapter 1 (and noted repeatedly elsewhere), economists and other social scientists generally create problems rather than solve them [emphasis mine].
In academic study unwarranted claims are apt to inhibit the advance of understanding. Attempts to justify unfounded claims, or to mask the failure to live up to them, encourage the proponents of such claims to shift their ground. For example, when certain policies widely canvassed by development economists as necessary for raising living standards, such as large-scale public investment, domestic production of capital goods, or the collectivization of agriculture, fail to bring about the expected results, the policies themselves come to be regarded as the very stuff of progress rather than as what they are, unsuccessful instruments for its promotion.
“When certain policies widely canvassed by development economists as necessary for raising living standards. . . fail to bring about the expected results, the policies themselves come to be regarded as the very stuff of progress rather than as what they are, unsuccessful instruments for its promotion.”
Can there be a shorter summary of what is wrong with the leftist mindset, which does the same things over and over and over, always getting the same result–failure–and yet which fails to learn the lesson? As Bauer says, economics is not actually complicated. It is made complicated by people whose jobs depend on a lack of transparency.
Consider in that regard this quote he excerpts from a Professor Leontief.
Continued preoccupation with imaginary, hypothetical, rather than observable reality has gradually led to a distortion of the informal valuation scale used in our academic community to access and to rank the scientific performance of its members. Empirical analysis, according to this scale, gets a lower rating than formal mathematical reasoning. Devising a new statistical procedure, however tenuous, that makes it possible to squeeze out one more unknown parameter from a given set of data, is judged a greater scientific achievement that the successful search for additional information that would permit us to measure the magnitude of the same parameter in a less ingenious, but more reliable way. . . a natural Darwinian feedback operating through selection of academic personnel contributes greatly to the perpetuation of this state of affairs. Thus, it is not surprising that the younger economists, particularly those engaged in teaching and academic research, seem by now quite content with situations in which they can demonstrate their prowess (and incidentally, advance their careers) by building more and more complicated mathematical models and devising more and more sophisticated methods of statistical inference without ever engaging in empirical research.
This is how smart people become stupid: they makes things so complicated that the forest is lost for the trees. This is exactly the same dynamic in play with Global Warming. Rather than planting thermometers all over the poles, which is where the warming is supposedly happening, they develop statistical algorithms to in effect guess what the temperatures “must” be, based upon the sensors they have hundreds of miles to the south. This is not science. Statistics can NEVER substitute for measurements, when measurements are possible.
As I have said often, you can “prove” anything, if you start from the right premises. Garbage in, garbage out.