Is Fighting Our Only Recourse?

Milton Friedman and many others have expressed the belief that if all the facts are known, the economist's recommendation (for particular policy or other course of action) is beyond dispute by other economists. I believe Friedman made this statement in a footnote in his highly influential essay on Positive Economics from 1953, and I know he has made similar statements on other occasions. It expresses the Popperian view that empirical observation has the power to reject any scientific theory and Friedman also used this idea to criticize, for instance, the Austrian fixation (most prominently defended by Ludwig von Mises) that economics is an à priori science and that economic facts are reachable only through logic and not through observation.

If neither Austrian (or other disbeliever in the power of observation) party to an intellectual dispute abandons his logic in favour of that of the other fellow, Friedman says that they can only fight (he used this word a number of times). By contrast, if people who believe in the power of observation argue with one another, one can say to the other: "tell me which phenomena you expect not to observe if you are right and I will do likewise". Certainly the latter scenario is more appealing.

I am a great fan of Milton Friedman and he is one of my very favourite economists ever. On this issue, I am sceptical that he was right, however. Now I do not believe he actually meant a proper fight (as in fist fight or other nasty business) in case of disagreement. That belief would have been absurd, since metaphysical questions are not resolved by observation and philosophers engaged in metaphysics do not - to the best of my knowledge - normally engage in fights. Rather, what Friedman must have meant was a "fight" as in an unproductive dispute in which one cannot really gain any ground.

But I do not believe this is really true. Take the issue of free will, for instance. This is a metaphysical issue and believers such as myself can only offer very far-fetched scenarios in which empirical observation would inform the issue, but thinking about it can advance the argument and has done so in the past. I believe it was C. S. Lewis who made the argument that determinism (lack of free will) implies skepticism (and must therefore be false), since if I have no free will, any views I hold are mere products of chemicals interacting in my brain, which epistemically offer no support for my belief in anything. Certainly the case for free will would be weaker today were it not from this contribution, due entirely to logic.

Now Milton Friedman would have been right to argue that this has not settled the argument on free will, but I think it is fair to say that the fact that we can at least advance the debate through means of pure logic does indicate that empirical observation is not absolutely required, though it does of course help a great deal. One could also, of course, ask what empirical evidence there is to support the view that theories falsifiable on grounds of observation are better than are theories which are not falsifiable on empirical grounds. In other words, what observation would reject the idea that observation is epistemically sound basis for rejecting ideas?

The idea that there are moral facts is another reason to be sceptical of the idea that disagreements vanish as empirical facts become known. For instance, if it were made quite clear that immigration restrictions are absolutely required to maximize (let's say global) welfare, I still would not be a fan of them because I believe they infringe upon moral rights. Alternatively, if it were made quite clear to me that I should sentence an innocent Negro to death because otherwise the bigoted people of some town will rebel and cause death and destruction, I still would not kill the Negro. I take moral rights seriously because I believe there are moral facts, of which moral rights form an integral part. Can I prove this? No, but I can offer reasons to think that there are moral facts out there which depend on things other than well-being. If moral facts are facts of the same epistemic status as empirical facts, then maybe they ought to take precedence as guides for action?

I don't want to sound like I reject the power of observation. I absolutely do not. My point in this blog post is merely to defend facts not readily observed empirically, and to highlight the possibility of using logic to advance one's understanding of them.

Counterintuition?

Commonsense tells me that the Earth is flat, but if I climb to the top of a really high mountain, I will notice that the horizon has a slight curvature. Without straining my legs to climb the mountain, I notice that the stars all move in predictable patterns at night, along with a bunch of "round" elements in the sky hinting that maybe the Earth has a similar shape. In Ancient Egypt, Eratosthenes found that a pole cast no shadow on midday in Syene, south of where he lived, whereas at his home in Alexandria a pole orthogonal to the ground did cast one. On a flat Earth, this could happen if the sun were very close so that its rays did not arrive parallel to one another, but the phenomenon was better explained by hypothesizing a spherical Tellus. The great Eratosthenes used his common sense to figure out that the cosmic shores on which we live are those of a round planet, and even calculated its circumference.

 

More commonsense makes for interesting insights, which might seem counterintuitive to those using less of it. To me, it is self-evident that logic is the relentless use of commonsense defined in its ordinary sense as the methods of reasoning available to the common man. Trust in observation that is not gainsaid by other observation is also commonsense. Put the two together and commonsense is really all that one needs to learn anything that is learnable. If two propositions appear inconsistent, commonsense suggests that either at least one of them is wrong or that appearances deceive. More commonsense can find out which, just like Eratosthenes could have used his shadow observations to question his belief (had he ever thought so, which I doubt he did) that the Earth was flat.

 

Then why do people expounding "counterintuitive" results always appear to do it with a great deal of pride? By my reckoning, it must be because they have not grasped that commonsense rightfully occupies the throne in the realm of epistemology. Sure, something might seem counterintuitive, but once commonsense as ordinarily defined has been applied every bit of the way in reaching that "counterintuitive" answer, it will be found that the original "counterintuitive" conclusion was actually pretty intuitive, quite within the reach of commonsense (or it will be found that it was wrong or that one should actually suspend judgement).

 

If something is counterintuitive, it must mean that it "counters", or somehow opposes, "intuition", but if intuition is what we can grasp by use of commonsense (like the fact that Tellus is spherical), it should be regarded a cardinal sin of epistemology to praise anything that is truly counterintuitive. If a researcher has to describe his theses or results by use of such foul words, my guess is he probably has not practised his intuition as much as he should have. But that is not to criticize, because vanishingly few people practise enough.

 

The late Gary Becker once told a story about how he met someone on a journey by aeroplane, with whom my hero (i.e. Professor Becker) had a talk about research, among other things. The fellow passenger told Professor Becker that he meant "no offence, but your [Becker's] ideas seem like plain commonsense". Professor Becker told the story to illustrate that he thought great ideas in Economics are in fact commonsensical, and that he of course had taken no offence at all. The important thing to remember is that the world is a place full of intricate relationships and that commonsense cannot get very far if not applied consistently to dig deeper into the complex. Commonsense does not mean that the yokelry know all that can be known, only that they are capable of it.

(This post is an expansion upon my comment on a recent EconLog blog post.)

On Disagreeable Disagreement

Boston University's 2012 presidential hopeful and Economics Professor Larry Kotlikoff recently pleaded with Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman to stop being so rude to his intellectual opponents. If Professor Krugman's point with his abrasive debating style is to better advocate his opinions (and I don't know if it is, it just seems like one candidate to explain why he writes his popular column and blog for the New York Times), it strikes me that his rudeness may score points with some subset of like-minded folks who, for one reason or another, have no problem with abrasive commentary, but otherwise fail to advance Krugman's views.

 

The reason is that advocacy is futile, but the point of this blog post is not to talk about Professor Krugman's advocacy or his disagreeable debating style in particular, but rather about disagreeable disagreement in general. If somebody were to tell an adherent of Ideology A that he likes Ideology B, the result may be a fierce and infected dispute. The thing is that this makes about as much sense as scolding a driver of an SUV - or whatever those large cars are called - because he contributes to global warming. It makes about as much sense because the impact on policy and the impact on global warming are both less than a drop in the bucket from an individual's liking some ideology or an individual's driving a car which consumes a great deal of petrol. Your having views different from mine will not affect the world I live in, so why should I display anger about it?

 

Of course, the disputants may succeed in changing one another's opinions, but that success is worth very little in combating the disliked ideology or global warming. More to the point, what reason is there to expect hostile argument to be more successful than a pleasant dialectic? I would think that the psychology of the situation suggests that pleasantness encourages further interaction and thereby increases the odds of conversion, since pleasantness makes it more difficult for one of the disputants to throw up his hands and leave. It is hard to be rude to nice folks.

Maybe the reason for disagreeable disagreements is that in small, hunter-gatherer societies, intimidation, while just as epistemically worthless as it always has been and always will be, could win the "policy" debate. Because humans evolved under such conditions, hostile argument has survived. Such a pity.

HT: Greg Mankiw

Lies and Social Desirability Bias

Regarding the low faith they have in survey responses and other evidence based upon anything other than what people actually do, Bryan Caplan laments many economists' rejection of "all-pervasive testimony on lame methodological grounds" Caplan argues that words ought to be trusted far more often, especially when there is no reason to be wary of social desirability bias. I am not sure I agree with Caplan that economists have an unsound attitude to words (I personally trust some surveys), but his blog post reminds me of an interesting approach to this problem, first developed by Judith Droitcourt Miller in her mid-1980's PhD dissertation at George Washington University.

 

In her doctoral thesis, A New Survey Technique for Studying Deviant Behavior, Miller outlines a very clever way of ascertaining the prevalence of lies to protect sensitive information by simple survey methods. Suppose one wants to find out how much one can trust survey responses on, say, how much people recycle. I believe there is widespread pressure on most people to say that they recycle, but it is also quite clear that recycling is a deeply unpleasant activity. As the Simpsons' Mr Burns sarcastically commented on the phenomenon, "Yes, I can't wait to start pawing through my garbage like some starving raccoon".

 

Miller's proposal is to take two groups believed to be statistically the same. Call them Groups A and B and send them  questionnaires containing a series of mainly rather harmless statements, as well as the statement of interest. Group A's form might ask respondents to indicate the number of statements with which they agree out of a list such as the following:

• I remember what I was doing when I learnt of the atrocities of 11th September 2001.
• I prefer the beach to holidaying in cities.
• I always recycle my refuse.
• My favourite colour is blue.
• My favourite film was released in the 1990's.

 

Group B gets the same statements, but the recycling one is separated from the others, requiring its own "yes" or "no" answer; the other statements are grouped together and respondents indicate the number of them with which they agree. One might in addition want to vary the order of the statements, to ease worries that a particular place among the statements will draw extra attention.

 

The effect of social desirability bias can be estimated from looking at the responses from the two groups. If recycling is privately unpleasant and in high regard socially, one should expect social desirability bias to manifest itself in widespread agreement with the single statement among Group B members. At the same time, the average number of statements with which respondents agree should be lower among members of Group A. Because in Group A's survey, disagreeing with the statement that one is an avid recycler does not stand out as much.

 

This is a very clever strategy for getting at lies in survey data. I wish it were original with me.

The Power of Asking

Asking questions is so simple, yet it is not used nearly enough. By posing a question upon hearing some claim, one will learn something new. More precisely, it will be one of three things:

1. The other person has a good answer. In this case, one learns something about what is discussed.
2. The other person has a bad answer. In this case, one might point this out to him and he may revise what he had hitherto thought on the topic.
3. The other person has a bad answer or even no answer. In this case, one can point it out and, if no revision occurs, one is safe to think the other person a fraud.

The best questions are, I think, the ones demanding either a mechanism to back up what was said, or evidence in support of it (including the nature of the evidence so one might judge how believable it is). Except for the risk of appearing a little bit ignorant, (politely) asking questions of this character in no way imperils one's status in front of others and the potential benefits are vast: simply wanting to know stuff can hardly be bad socially as long as one is polite, and getting to learn new things is clearly privately desirable.

 

Frequently in public debates, questions are not asked, particularly not questions of my preferred variety. In lieu of questions, there are attacks on the other person or re-statements of what was said before. Perhaps this happens because the expected retort will insult the asker's intelligence, or perhaps they do not want listeners to hear a potentially very good answer. Not always and everywhere, of course, but this happens a depressingly large fraction of the time I come across such debates. (So I do not watch or attend very many of them.) When this happens, what might have been a Socratic dialogue has turned into something quite ugly. I think in such cases one can conclude that the people involved are not interested in truth but in advancing some agenda of their own.

  

Off the top of my head, here are just some issues in which basic questions can go a long way. The questioned claims may be right or wrong, and I have some tentative answers of my own, but I mention them because I find that there is typically extremely little substance in public discussions about them:

• Why is territorial expansion by one country to be feared by its neighbours? What is the mechanism? What is the evidence?
• Why should we expect men and women to be equally well-represented in most or every occupation, and to earn exactly as much in these occupations? Again, mechanism? Evidence?
• Why is domestic poverty more important to address than poverty in very poor countries?
• Why is it a civic duty to vote?

Lastly, an analogue to the Golden Rule also applies for asking questions: The questions you are asked by others - and by yourself - you should treat as seriously as you expect others to treat the questions you ask them.