Kyle's Rants

Random thoughts on life (this would probably now be called a blog but I started this way before such a thing existed).

• Why I think morals do not require religion.
• Why I think it is a mistake to introduce so called ‘intelligent design’ into the teaching of evolution.
• What I think is wrong with current mainstream economic thought.
• Why we know global warming is real.
• What is science?
  

Religion, Morals and Values.

I am an agnostic in the sense that I don't think the existence of God or the non existence of God either one can be proved. You cannot prove to me that God exists and I cannot prove to you that God does not exist. I am sure Christ existed as a historical figure and he had a great impact on the world. But so did Buddha, Confucius, Mohamed, Abraham, and Hitler. The attribution of divinity is not necessary to think that they existed or had an impact.

Where do morals come from, if not religion?  Morals come from examples you see around you when you are very young (parents, playmates, siblings, religious leaders etc.). Later in life we learn to justify these morals by formalizing them into a system using whatever teachings are available to us. As evidence I site the following:

1. There are people who act very morally who come from every religious (and non religious!) background known. No particular religion is required for people to act morally. Examples are numerous.
2. There are people who act very immorally who claim every religious (and non religious!) background known. Examples are found daily in the news.
3. Different groups claiming to have the same religion sometimes behave differently. For example Christians site the Bible and say "love your neighbor as yourself". Some Christians take this to mean that we should accept gays with open arms. Other Christians take this to mean we should love them enough to try to force them to change their behavior if they are gay since being gay is wrong. This is only one of many examples where two different groups claiming to be from the same religion expound different moral philosophies.
4. Appeals to the authority of scripture can almost always be made, no matter what moral position is chosen. Some Christians say "thou shalt not kill" means just that, don't kill anyone ever under any circumstances. Other Christians can justify war under certain circumstances. Using the same Bible with different interpretations and emphasizing different passages we can argue that something (being gay, not killing) is moral or that it is not moral. So the Bible cannot tell us what is moral. Similar arguments can be made with most of the classical religious literature.
5. We tend to think morals come from the outside, from God or some definitive source like the Bible because when our parents taught us our morals they justified their ideas with appeals to a higher authority. But really morals come first (we construct a sense of what we think is right or fair from interacting with people around us in early childhood ) and they are given justification afterwards (we find a rational or formal explanation based on scripture or other sources for actions we already think are correct).
   

The conclusion has to be that religion does not cause people to be moral, although it can (after the fact) be used to justify any particular moral action.

Further points

• It is just not true that morals come exclusively from one religion, or one particular flavor of Christianity. You can find large numbers of extremely moral, just, kind, fair, generous, giving people of all faiths and at all times in history. One big reason given by Muslims (including Osama Bin Laden!) seeking to expel westerners from the Middle Eastis on moral grounds. They do not share our values; most of them don't want our filthy TV programs, short skirts, bare midriffs, alcohol and lose morals in their country. If you discount the handful of extremists and terrorists my view is that probably the average Muslim is MORE moral than the average so called Christian and certainly more moral than the average American. They certainly have different, possibly higher values. (And not to justify terrorism but I'm not sure that many Americans would not become terribly upset or even become terrorists if they felt there was no way to avoid an onslaught of depredation and morally corrupt culture encroaching on their world. I don't know about you but if I thought my 8 year old daughter was being forced to watch what I considered to be pornography I'd do whatever it took to stop it.)
• Values change with time, even within a particular religious group. It is (currently) morally repugnant to many Muslims for women to go uncovered and work outside the home. Christian values supported exactly the same view 100 years ago in Europe and the US. The view in the US changed and it is changing in the Muslim world too. Some Christians during Inquisition took the view that the best way to love your non- believing neighbor was to torture them until they professed belief. This was considered the morally responsible thing to do because otherwise they would go to hell for eternity. Torture was good for them in the long view. My view is that we should NEVER take any particular moral view as absolute and beyond examination. Morals and values can and should change (hopefully for the better) as we are better informed.
• It is NOT true that a commitment to evolution as a scientific theory implies an anti-moralistic view or a low opinion of humans or is anti-religious. Morals and evolution are not mutually exclusive for many people. It is very possible to believe that humans somehow received an extra blessing from God over and above the other animals at whatever point we evolved from them. In other words the story of creation and the Garden of Eden is allegorical not literal. Many Christians, including many scientists have no problem in holding the view that evolution is a true explanation of the events AND that Christ died for their sins. These are decent, moral, practicing Christians, the 'good' kind.
• Believing that we are directly related to other animals is NOT and anti-moralistic position. For some people, knowing that we have only 3% of our genes different from chimps makes them more sympathetic towards animals, not less sympathetic towards humans. Not only should we not kill and eat humans, but we also shouldn't kill and eat chimps or any other animals. This makes a lot of sense to me. I'm not willing to give up animal research because I do think human lives are worth more than animal lives but I don't think the difference is so great that we shouldn't treat them humanely and perhaps refrain from eating them. (In a similar view I think a pregnant teenager is worth way more than a 4 week old fetus- so while we should work very hard to avoid unwanted pregnancies (educate, hand out condoms, etc.) we should not abolish abortions, particularly where the baby will be raised in a bad situation and be unwanted).
• There is probably an evolutionary component to morals. In all animals, including humans, there is a degree of altruism. Individuals will sacrifice themselves for others in many circumstances. It has been shown that the degree of sacrifice an individual organism is willing to make for another is in most cases directly linked to how closely related they are genetically. We tend to protect people in our tribe because we tend to share genes with them. We have these altruism genes because they have helped us survive over many generations.
• In my view this genetic tendency towards tribalism is the biggest obstacle to peace in the world. As soon as we declare allegiance to a particular tribe and are willing to fight other tribes there is trouble. This is a genetically wired in behavior which explains our loyalty to sports teams, professional organizations, patriotism, and the willingness of a terrorist to kill themselves for their particular cause. The only way out, in my view, is to try to begin to think of all humans as part of the same tribe. Survival of the human tribe requires we stop declaring war on small groups within the larger human tribe. But we should be aware that we are working against our inherited tendencies ...
• Similar to the universal tendency to tribalism, very few species, including humans will eat others in their immediate gene pool and almost all organisms have incest taboos. In the few cases where these taboos are broken there are usually very unusual extenuating circumstances which have explanations related to survival of the gene pool. So it would seem that we have much of our moral system in common with other animals, certainly all other mammals. To a large extent then, many morals are wired in genetically; we could not have survived had they not been.
• As rational animals we also see the world embedded in a rich conceptual scheme. So we have invented rational reasons that explain why we should not eat each other or have sex with our children and why we should fight to defend our neighbor or our tribe. And these rational reasons in turn have helped us further in not crossing those behavioral boundaries which tend to harm the immediate gene pool. Traditionally these reasons have been embedded in religious and philosophical systems. 'Love your neighbor as you love yourself' is really a genetic imperative; your neighbors may return the favor and help your genes to survive. Patriotism is the rational veneer which cloaks our genetic imperative to protect our tribe.
• In my view religion (of any particular flavor) makes a convenient framework for values but is not required. My father (who was not religious) used to bug the hell out of me by saying 'do what you think is right'. He did not say 'do what the bible says' or 'do what Christ would do' he said, basically, look around and figure out what you should do. My mother added things like, how are you going to feel about yourself if you make other people feel bad?  I think probably the golden rule was in there somewhere but this can be found in almost all societies (Confucius said it before Christ did and I'm sure it was around long before that). The modern philosophical pragmatists have basically a more sophisticated version of this same view. People should encouraged to act (and I should act personally) in such a way as to yield the greatest good for all people. Society should be constructed in such a way as to facilitate this (or at least not make it any more difficult). Exactly how to arrive at the greatest good (how to ‘lover our neighbor’) is of course problematic and will probably change over time as we learn about unintended consequences and more about human behavior but we should work towards that goal.
• But now I think we are into a discussion of values and method (cost benefit analysis), rather than morals. You and I might both be very moral (very committed to our conceptual rationalization of our moral behavior) yet disagree on values (is the war in Iraq wrong or not). Or we may agree on values (Saddam Hussein was bad) but disagree on method (should we start a war or impose economic restrictions). These questions all require debate.
  
• There is a distinction between being "good" in a moral sense and being "good for something" in a utilitarian sense. Frank Sinatra was a good singer but he was probably not very good in a moral sense. Science has a similar distinction. Scientific theories are good at explaining nature but have no moral content. Technology, on the other hand can be good for doing something (i.e. effective) and also good for something in a moral sense (e.g. vaccinations versus atomic bombs).
  
• Why do we maintain any particular set of values? Why don’t we rationally decide to jettison those values we were taught as children and cheat our neighbors as much as we can get away with? I feel that if you grew up in an environment where you were told what was right and wrong AND you were caught often enough doing something wrong to come to believe there is no percentage in trying to cheat, you gradually internalized both those values and a sense that you cannot cheat. As you grow up you begin to rationalize these internal feelings. You look for reasons to justify your actions. Sometimes you find that a particular religion or philosophical position makes a good framework or rationalization for your internal moral feelings so you adopt it as your own, discarding the parts that don't fit. As a result of this new framework you may change your moral outlook somewhat but probably not much (you are just as likely to discard parts of your own morals as parts of the religion you have adopted but don't agree with). Your intellectualization of those early values most likely has the biggest effect on your kids: you set out to teach them right from wrong based partly on what you learned as a child and partly on what you have rationalized since then. And of course you want to correct the mistakes you perceive in your parents' instruction of you. This is how values change over time.
• I think many Christians feel that a person will only be good (moral) if they think they will be held accountable for their actions by God. And initially as I grew up I behaved well for much the same reason; I thought some more powerful being (my parents, my teachers, God) would eventually hold me accountable. Gradually though I came to see a different form of accountability, one not connected to parents, teachers or God at all. I stopped thinking that it would be God who held me accountable for my actions. Instead I began (and still think) that it is me who is accountable for my actions. I have an image of myself as basically a good person (sorry, although I won't claim to be perfect I emphatically reject the Christian idea that I am inherently bad, a sinner by nature). I like that image of myself, it makes me proud of myself, it helps me get through the day. I feel good about myself when I do the 'right thing' (things I learned as a child and/or later rationalized as the right thing). I feel bad about myself if I don't (and I always say to myself I will do better next time- and there a plenty of examples of good behavior around to emulate). I don't do good things to get public approval, the recognition of God, nor even to feel smug or superior about myself (and I don't feel superior- I'm just an average guy, morally speaking). I do good because I will be miserable with myself if I act otherwise. This is enough motivation for me.
• If you grow up in a ghetto with drugged out parents who don't teach you those things then you very possibly could grow up without morals or with very different morals. Perhaps you can learn better morals later in life if you are lucky but if you do not, you are likely to become a criminal. I think it is a mistake to say that criminals are making choices to go against their natural moral values. They really don't have the values that you and I have. Sure they choose to commit crimes but they don't have as many internal reasons not to. They were never taught not to behave that way, they never learned (like you and I did) that this is not a good way to behave. They may even have external reasons to behave badly (acceptance by peer groups for example). And this is a chain that continues, you can't teach morals to your kids if you yourself don't have any. Now how to fix that problem is another story.

About Evolution.

Why we should teach evolution and not teach Intelligent Design or creationism in school. Think about the following description before reading the next paragraph:

It is not just a hypothesis since there is a large body of data which supports it and no data which contradicts it. It is a theory in the sense that it is a network of connected ideas (concepts) each with supporting factual evidence, no one of which could be wrong without doing serious damage to the other concepts. In this sense it provides an explanation of the existing data: all the data have places that fit coherently in the theory (without fudging) and no data is left out. It predicts further data of a specific type will be found. As new data is found scientists are able to make sense of the new data in light of the current theory. Sometimes slight modifications to small details of the theory are made in light of new evidence but the overarching principles are maintained and even strengthened. Scientists are confident the theory will explain (possibly with minor modifications) new data as it is uncovered (i.e. new data will fit in a logical place in the theory without fudging).

Now, in the last paragraph was I talking about evolution or quantum mechanics? The paragraph applies equally well to development of evolution AND quantum mechanics in the past 100 years so how can we make a distinction and say evolution is not scientific or does not provide scientific explanations but quantum mechanics does?

Further points:

• It is very dangerous to discredit a theory which provides us with a framework and the tools for understanding both genetic diseases and mutations in infectious diseases such as AIDS and flu. Molecular biology, the fossil record, genetic engineering, why we have to get a different flu shot every year, animal breeding, natural selection and evolution all fit together in such a way that stripping out evolution would destroy the coherency of our understanding. Evolution has given us a framework within which we understand and can begin to treat any number of diseases; discounting it or removing it from the educational process leaves future scientists and doctors with the neccessary tools for understanding many very serious health issues.
• Basically genetic theory predicts evolution and evolution predicts genetics. They are two sides of the same coin, you cannot split them. It would make no sense to have one without the other. Trying to remove evolution from the science curriculum would do serious damage to the teaching of genetics (our principle basis for understanding disease).
• We do have clear fossil records of gradual changes in thousands of cases; the fossil record clearly shows an increase in complexity and number of species over time; we also have fossil records of humanoid like creatures which used tools like humans bur are clearly not homo sapient (Neanderthal and homo erectus have very pronounced skeletal and DNA differences but used tools- there are hundreds of these fossils). If you go to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington you can see a large sequence of skeletons dating over many thousands of years starting from something the size of an opossum and ending with the modern horse. Each stage of change is shown and several branches to other extinct lines are shown. What are we to make of all these facts, how do we explain them? We don't have every 'missing link' for every organism but Occam's razor says the simplest explanation is evolution.
• There are more biologists than physicists in the world. So the amount of biological research done today is probably about 10 times that done in physics. All of this research uses evolution as the explanatory framework (nearly every biology article in Nature, Science, Scientific American etc. will have the word evolution in it, go look if you don't believe this).  99.9% of these biologists find the data in support of evolution convincing but every single one of them would jump at the chance to disprove the theory (just think what that would mean- more than just a Nobel prize, you'd go down in history!). Are these people stupid? Are the ignorant? Are they misinformed? Are they just not clever enough to come up with an alternative (because surely they are trying)? No, the current explanation is the best we've got, there is nothing better.
• There is at least as much evidence in support of evolution as there is for any of the other theories in science. General relativity has had only three serious tests and confirmations. So why doesn't relativity come under attack? This clearly shows that the attacks on evolution are religious, not scientific.
• There is very good empirical evidence in favor of the big bang. The cosmic microwave background, the red shift of distant galaxies, the proportion of hydrogen versus other elements detectable in the universe are interlocking evidence for the big bang. The same nuclear theory which tells us how to make nuclear bombs and reactors tells us the correct ratio of hydrogen in the universe today but only if the big bang happened. Nuclear physics can't be right if the big bang didn't happen. We have no other theory which explains these facts.
• Evolution does NOT violate the second law of thermodynamics. There is nothing wrong with an organism or a sequence of organisms over time becoming more complicated at the expense of an increase of entropy elsewhere in the universe. An egg growing from a single cell into a complicated organism is an example of decreased local entropy at the expense of a net, global increase in entropy.
• What is lacking in the science that would require further explanations based on ID? Biology seems to be doing quite well without any help from the ideas found in ID. Just as Einstein argued that the aether was not needed to explain electromagnetic wave propagation, Occam's razor says we do not need the additional explanations provided by ID. We might feel better psychologically to imagine an intelligence directing things but as far as explaining the science we don't need ID.
• In the market place of ideas the good concepts eventually win and the bad ones die off. Evolution has definitely won, there are no serious competitors. Mandating that creationism or ID be taught is a bit like bad governmental decisions like tariffs or subsidies; mandating something be included or supported because it is too weak to make it on its own. I don't think we want government mandating how we think.
• Contrary to opinions expressed in a recent popular movie, so called "intelligent design" has not been forbidden from academia (see http://www.expelledexposed.com/); it isn't taught in biology because it isn't a testable scientific theory.

Arguments against evolution fall into several broad categories:

1. The earth isn't as old as scientists say, certainly not old enough for evolution. We had better hope this argument is wrong. If scientists don't understand radioactive dating, one of the many methods that tells us the age of the earth, we should be very worried. The same theories that tell us how nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons work tell us how radioactive dating works. So if we are wrong about radioactive dating we also don't really understand how nuclear bombs work so Hiroshima and Nagasaki were flukes.
2. The fossil record is incomplete, there is no fossil of a "missing link". There are three problems with this argument.
   • This argument demonstratesa lack of understanding of the completeness of the fossil records. We do have complete records of hundreds of species covering millions of years. If you go to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington you can see a large sequence of skeletons dating over hundreds of thousands of years starting from something the size of an opossum and ending with the modern horse. Each stage of change is shown and several branches to other extinct lines are shown. We also have fossil records of humanoid like creatures which used tools like humans bur are clearly not homo sapient (Neanderthal and homo erectus have very pronounced skeletal and DNA differences but used tools- there are hundreds of these fossils). What are we to make of all these facts, how do we explain them? ID cannot explain them but evolution can.
   • The second problem with the missing link criticism is that critics are not satisfied with missing links when they are found. Suppose we have two specimens which are separated in time and are thought to be related. The ID people say "but where is the missing link?". So the scientist finds a specimen between the two. Now the ID people say "but now there is a missing link between the first original specimen and the new one". The scientist can never win this game because he or she must produce an infinite number of missing links.
   • The third response to the missing link criticism is technical and it involves the rate of change of a species. A species may remain stable for a long period of time producing many fossils. Changes in the environment may then cause the species to evolve into another species over a shorter period of time (still millions of years). This leaves fewer fossils of the so called "missing link" which makes them harder to find.
3. It has been argued that life is too complex to have come about by the random processes described in evolution, there had to have been a designer or creator. One example often given in the past by creationists is the eye; how can such an exquisitely complex organ as the eye have come about because of random mutations? But this question has been answered. Every stage of development from a patch of light sensitive skin through hollow light sensing pits to pits covered with transparent coverings is found in nature. Nature has provided examples of all the intermediate stages between very simple structures and the complex eye. The complexity of the eye, including the genetic components is now well understood by evolutionary biologists. So ID proponents have come up with other examples of complexity, questions which have not yet been answered. But biologists would be out of a job if there were no unanswered questions. Just because a question about how a particular structure came about has not yet been answered does not mean there will be no answer. But this is what ID proponents are saying, that an explanation will never be found. They ignore the fact that historically every time questions about complex structures have been raised they were eventually answered.
4. Some people argue that we should be able to prove evolution in the laboratory. This vastly underestimates the amount of time required for evolution. Even with something like the fruit fly with generations lasting only a month it would take tens of thousands of years to see a fly evolve into another species. We do see the beginnings of evolution in the laboratory and in the field. We see how changes in the environment cause small shifts in the average features of a population (for example the increase in genes responsible for milk digestion in european peoples over the past few thousand years as humans domesticated dairy cows). This is evolution at work, humans just haven't been around long enough to see the completion of this slow change from one species to another.
5. Some people try to make a distinction between micro evolution (short term such as breeding animals or germs) and macro evolution (the evolution of one species into another). A close examination of the body of biological facts makes it clear that you cannot make this distinction in any meaningful way. Why would gradual changes suddenly stop happening at some point? There is no evidence that this is the case.
6. Some people argue that fossils aren't proper scientific data since they don't come from a controlled experiment. If we disallow any evidence that is discovered today but happens to have originated at a different time then all astronomy is eliminated as a science since light travels at a finite speed so almost all the data we get from the universe is 'pre-historic'. Surely this doesn't make any sense. When the same fossil progression is found over and over in many different places we conclude that nature has repeated the experiment for us over and over.
7. Some people argue that evolution makes no predictions. There are many predictions in evolution. It predicts an increase in the number and complexity of species in the fossil records over time. It predicts the evolution of anti-biotic resistant bacteria. It predicts that the fossils of isolated populations will diversify to take advantage of different ecological niches. These predictions and many others are confirmed by the data.
8. Some people argue that we should give creationism or ID a chance as an idea to compete with evolution. The problem is those ideas have been aired and died out in science long ago but local school boards and governments (who are not part of the scientific process and may not be informed of the latest ideas) keep trying to mandate that textbooks include those ideas. Should we teach phlogiston theory in high school today? At the time (300 years ago) it was seriously considered even among scientists as a viable theory. So was astrology (Kepler was an astrologist as well as astronomer). Newton practiced alchemy. But we don't teach those things anymore in a science class because we have much better theories. Scientists discarded creationism about the same time they gave up on phlogiston and alchemy. The school board mandating that ID be taught is equivalent to mandating that science teachers teach about phlogiston or alchemy. As history, fine but it is not science.

Web pages on the ID/Evolution debate.

• A good general reference: The Talk: Origins Archive.
• The Dover trial transcripts.
• An essay in the New Yorker.

What I think is wrong with capitalism.

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”   - John Kenneth Galbraith

When contrasted with state controlled economic systems, capitalism is and has been a good thing for the world. This is mainly because it fosters competition and in many (but not all!) cases competition is the most efficient way to accomplish something (assuming economic efficiency is the only goal). There is plenty of evidence that the more or less free competition of ideas coupled with low restrictions on entrepreneurship has help create many of the amenities of modern life (although the measures of this success are often biased; see below). However when I talk to economists about capitalism I sense a certain slavish commitment to the ‘free market’; an almost religious commitment to Laissez-faire economics and the promotion of self interest (greed) as the most important human motivation. Global warming? Poverty? Disease? Pollution? Don't worry, “The invisible hand of the market will solve all our problems.” I think there are many problems being swept under the rug here and I think those problems should be discussed. As useful antidotes to mainstream capitalistic thought I offer the following references:

• Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan.
• Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment by P. Dasgupta.
• John Kenneth Glabraith by Richard Parker.
• The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig.
• Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen.
• Wealth and Democracy : A Political History of the American Richby by Kevin Phillips.
• The Environmental Endgame by Robert L. Nadeau.
• The rise and fall of the GDP by John Gertner.
• The State of the USA web site (an effort by the government to replace GDP as the sole indicator of progress).
• Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.

Markets never act in a vacuum. As all economists point out, a stable government, an honest court system, an honest banking system, adequate patent laws, an adequate transportation system and a healthy information flow are all needed for an efficient market. All of this infrastructure impinges on the flow of trade and creates a market structure, as do societal morals and social goals. As pointed out by Marshall Stahlins, the entire agricultural market in the US would make a radical shift if people suddenly found it acceptable to eat dogs rather than keep them as pets. It is absurd to claim markets should or even can operate freely with no structure or cultural framework. Why then is there almost no discussion of these extra- market structures? Here are extra-market questions which must be answered before markets can do their job:

• What kind of patent laws work best? How do we protect intellectual property?
• What kind of court system gives rise to the most efficient markets? Who should be allowed to sue whom?
• What is the best role for government to play in market structure?  Most businesses want governments to protect them abroad but leave them alone at home. Is this how it should be?
• Surely laws to protect people from unscrupulous business practices are needed. What form should they take to be most effective? (See Secret History of the War on Cancer by Devra Davis or Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway for a rundown of unscrupulous business practices in the recent past.) What about taxes and regulations to prevent businesses from acting unscrupulously?
• What is the role of information in market structure? How much is enough and who should provide it? Should we trust multinational corporations to be forthcoming with information which shows their product in an unfavorable light? The tobacco industry supported a decades long program to hide the fact that tobacco causes cancer, creating institutes and hiring scientists to sow doubt among voters about the dangers of tobacco. The fossil fuel industry is now doing the same thing about global warming (see Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway). Should they be allowed to do that?
• What is the best way to limit monopolies? Sometimes a big monopoly (or near monopoly) can provide more through economies of scale than a collection of smaller entities. How do we know when this is the case? Are 10 companies enough to prevent a monopoly? Five? How do we decide?
• How should ‘commons’ (common goods) be introduced into the market? Surely everyone should be allowed to have clean air. How clean and how do we protect it?
• What about the environment (and other so called external costs), can they be included in mainstream economics and if so, how?
• Surely we should measure economic efficiency by more than just raw wealth. What other factors should be used? Health? Longevity? Happiness? How do we measure these things and how do we assign them proper weight?
• How do we value natural and non-renewable resources such that they will be protected in a capitalist system?
• Do humans really only act out of greed as Adam Smith claimed in The Wealth of Nations? Probably our entire business structure would fail if most of the people involved weren't honest, at least most of the time. Humans are motivated by honesty and many other emotions besides greed which flies in the face of the most basic assumption of economic theory.
• How should the markets be structured to maximize the attainment of social goals and what are those social goals anyway?

Mainstream economic theory purports but be a 'scientific' theory. As such it gains great a great deal of respect. But is it really?

• Mainstream economic theory (equilibrium theory) began being constructed as a mathematical theory about the same time as Newton's mechanics. In fact much of our current economic theory was modeled very closely on the thermodynamic theory of that epoch by substituting physical variables such as energy with economic variables such as utility. The creators of this economic theory thought that they had constructed a scientific theory of economics (partly because it was highly mathematical). It was widely believed at that time that both physical scientists and economists were discovering natural laws laid down by God (this is in fact where the 'invisible hand' originated; economists of the time were referring to the hand of God as the creator of the natural laws at work in economics and this is why many conservatives adhere so tightly to free market concepts; they believe it is the will of God). Since this time, thermodynamics has been significantly overhauled as has much of science. Economic theory, however, has kept its original concepts, based on now out modeled physical theory, and has simply tacked on more mathematics. So basically, economic theory today is a version of physical theories from 300 years ago which have since been abandoned.
• Cases where the 'invisible hand' has apparently worked to provide an effective market are given as scientific evidence that the free market works. But there are two problems here because these examples are nearly always after the fact (unlike true scientific theories which make predictions of future events).
  • Cases where the invisible hand has not worked well are cited, not as failures of the theory but rather as cases where the market hasn't had time to work or the market has been constrained in some way (government, laws, tax, other market structure, etc.). What, exactly, would constitute a clear and unarguable example of the failure of the invisible hand? If we wanted to set up an experiment or situation where we could say "if x happens under these conditions, y and z the theory of the invisible hand is just plain wrong" what would that experiment look like? The fact that such a test is not available indicates that, just as in the cases of psychoanalysis and horoscopes, we have a theory which is not scientific because it cannot be tested. Nonscientific theories may be useful (as is psychoanalysis) but we must be careful about pinning too much faith in them as a way to plan for the future.
• Much of the evidence for the success of capitalism is based on figures which come out of economics, for example GDP. But some people have suggested that GDP is not a useful measure of growth because (for one) it does not include the possible depletion of natural resources (see the article by John Gertner, above). For example it has been argued that reported growth in the US during certain periods actually came from using up irreplaceable resources rather than any real economic development. Selecting data in a way that supports your theory while omitting data to the contrary is definitely not a scientific approach.

If economic theories represent natural laws, what exactly is a 'market failure'?

Some further problems with mainstream economic rhetoric (i.e. the ‘invisible hand’):

• Classical economic theory is based on the idea that humans are predominately motivated by cost and in a rational way so that if left to their own devices (with no interference whatsoever) they would make good economic decisions. Clearly this is not true. People are motivated by moral sense, altruism, greed, advertising. None of these is rational. Stock market bubbles would not occur if humans were rational. If suicide bombers are any indication, religious motivation can be and often is much stronger than economic self interest. I would venture to say that most humans act morally and ethically, most of the time. In fact the entire premise of most religions is that humans must NOT be motivated solely by economic self interest (i.e. greed). If economic theory and religious moralists are both right, one can only conclude that capitalism would not work in any society with strong moral behavior. The opposite sentiment, that a society which is strongly capitalistic cannot be moral, seems to have more evidence.
• It is simply not true that “a rising tide lifts all boats”. As Kevin Phillips points out in Wealth and Democracy, the gap between the wealthiest people and the bottom 10% in this country has been widening over the past 30 years. Globally the economic differential between the top one fifth and the bottom one fifth has grown from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1995. Real waves have fallen over the past 50 years: Real Wages (or see Wikipedia).
  
• There are plenty of examples where collaboration achieves more than competition. A prime example is open source software which is free and owned by no one. The vast majority of Internet servers in the world run Apache web servers with open source Linux operating systems because they are by far more stable and robust compared to available commercial products.
• There are many examples where a particular social goal cannot be achieved only by market mechanisms. We would never have had the Internet if it had been left only to businesses. Nor the atomic bomb, nor universal education (literacy), nor universal health care in Europe, nor the end of smallpox in the world. All of these projects were carried out by rational choices made by governments and inter-governmental agencies. Capitalism is successful in China in the absence of democracy, which tells us that free markets do not need democracy (let alone create democracies). If we want a democracy and the freedoms that come with it we must look to mechanisms beyond the market. From these examples it should be clear that many important projects must be planned and carried out entirely outside the realm of the markets.
• Corporate America is not at all an example of a competitive capitalist system. Large corporations are not run by entrepreneurs they are run by CEOs who arguably have more of a commitment to their own short term economic well being (e.g. a golden parachute) than the long term economic well being of the stock holders. Large corporations also are able and willing to distort the markets using law suits, lobbying, and misinformation in the form of advertising in a way that is contrary to the assumptions of a free market of equal competitors and buyers.
• In some cases (because of economies of scale) monopolies (which are non-capitalist by nature) or near monopolies produce products more efficiently than would a larger collection of smaller competing entities. The car industry is an example.
• Growth in consumer products is assumed to be not just desirable and foremost but absolutely necessary for a capitalistic system. As interpreted in modern American economic practice this slants the economy towards consumption and greed while overlooking two important topics:
  • Growth of non-consumer products such as health care, infrastructure (roads, electrical system, Internet), leisure time, preservation of natural resources (e.g. clean drinking water) is neglected. Tangible goods are over emphasized in the current system whereas the non tangible benefits of modern society tend to be under emphasized.
  • The military industrial complex is overlooked entirely. This large portion of the US budget (around a quarter of the GDP) is not allowed to be part of the ‘free market system’ and until very recently has seldom scrutinized at all by economists involved in government planning. President Regan managed to spend nearly $3 trillion dollars in the biggest military build up since the second World War with almost no objections from the economic sector. War is bad economic policy yet it is clear from history that any government that possesses an army will eventually use it. If economists really think that capitalism will make the world a better place (in contrast to war) why don’t we do away with the military and instead use economic leverage in the world (e.g. a Marshall plan)?
• It is not true that planned economies always fail or are always bad. The US was successful in World War II in large part due to a totally planned economy, devoted exclusively to the war effort. Socialist economies such as the Scandinavian countries have done better than 'pure' capitalist economies in general. History also shows us that taxing corporations and the wealthiest few percent does not do economic harm. For example, in spite of much higher tax rates the European economy has outstripped the US economy in several periods of time since the second World War. A mixed economy, with large measures of government interference, can be very successful. For example the US became a great economic power during a period in which it strongly protected its markets with stiff import tariffs. The pressure on third world countries to open their markets to unrestricted trade seems a bit unreasonable if not unfair given the economic histories of the most successful countries in the world.
• In general economists tend to use linear modeling which assumes incremental (i.e. linear) changes. But a parable shows this isn't a good way to proceed. If you start out lifting a baby calf every morning you cannot assume that sometime in the future you will be able to lift a full grown bull. There are two problems here:
  • Often economic changes are not incremental and when they aren't, normal economics breaks down (e.g. natural disasters, market crashes, etc.). In these cases we should NOT rely on economics to solve these problems, at least in the short term. As an example, the free market has not yet, fiver years later, repaired the economic damage done in Louisiana by hurricane Katrina. As another example, global warming is a gradual process but could, at some point, reach a tipping point where change would happen very quickly. A solution to global warming which uses incremental economics will fail in this case. As a final example, in general famines don't occur because of lack of food. What happens in most cases is a group of people, due to a natural disaster, cannot afford to buy food. In fact there are several cases where famine regions continued to export food because people outside the region could pay and those inside could not. Surely we should not step back in these cases and 'let the market take care of the problem'. It is immoral to let people starve.
  • Secondly, reasoning based on incremental changes does not deal well with long term effects. It may make perfect economic sense in the short term to pollute a stream  or the atmosphere under the theory that we can incrementally reverse the process but go far enough and the long term effects may be irreversible.
• Humans have the capability to plan for the long term. We know oil will run out sometime in the relatively near future. So why wait until there is an economic pinch to start planning on alternatives? Surely it does not make sense to sit on our thumbs and say, oh, well, when oil gets expensive enough someone (that would be the so called ‘alarmist’ scientists I guess) will figure out an alternative. Surely it does make sense for some entity with a much longer vision than the typical business model 10 year strategic plan to invest in the exploration of alternatives. The history in the USof nearly level energy consumption but with increased economic development for 10 years is a good example of how governmental incentives can prime the pump for development of new technologies; we should use this as a model and not be slaves to a purely capitalistic idealism.
• Classical economic theory assumes consumers have, and act on, good information: individuals seeking their own advancement is what makes the whole thing work. However decisions made by individuals are not necessarily always for their own good nor made with good information. Romans in 200 AD placed a high value on lead eating utensils and lead water pipes but we do not because we have information about lead poisoning which they did not have. Individuals cannot always be expected to know what is best for them, particularly in the case of long term problems such as pollution which will affect future generations. Economics does not deal well with the situation where a significant number of people are misinformed. And it is often the to the economic advantage of a particular business to not be forthcoming with information about their products (e.g. the tobacco industry and now the fossil fuel industry has spent a lot of money to generate mis-information about the cancer risks of smoking and global warming- see Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway). In these cases it seems appropriate for the government to, at the minimum, supply the information if not actively protect people from their own ignorance.
• The value of used books, vinyl records, antiques and many other items changed drastically when eBay started helping buyers and sellers communicate. This shows that market structure (a human decision) affects market success. Will there be other examples in the future of new communication instruments which make the market even more efficient? eBay is structured to allow competitive bidding on a certain time scale. There are other ways to set up this market (other bidding strategies could be implemented). Might some of them make this market even more efficient? How do we find out? The stock market is likely to go all electronic in the next few years. Will that help or hinder trade? These decisions have NOTHING to do with capitalism, per say and everything to do with human imagination and emotions, things which are not factored into classical economics.
• Property rights are important because they give incentive and time for a person or company to develop a product and see a return for their effort. But what about drug companies which buy up patents to stifle competition so that prices remain high? Property rights protect innovations but also inhibit competition so how do we decide where the proper balance is?
  • Capitalism and the science that supports much of today’s technological advances thrive on the free flow of ideas yet we see that some drug companies have policies of refusing to release important research information about their drugs for fear this information will impact sales or reduce their competitiveness. How can we protect the free exchange of ideas yet also protect intellectual property rights?
• Monopolies stifle competition. But how do we decide how many independent companies are needed to foster competition? One single giant computer company in the world is too few but is two enough? How about 10? How do we decide and if we did decide that 10 were the right number how would we achieve that? Should we have 10 car makers in the world, is this enough? How do we know?
• The perception of well being (happiness if you will) seems to have other factors than wealth.
  • By some measures Americans are not as happy as people in some other countries. One reason appears to be the differential in wealth between the richest and poorest. In countries where the gap is lowest the perception of well being is the highest, regardless of total wealth. In other words there are people in countries which are poorer than the USwho report that they are happier and better off than people in the USreport themselves to be. In the USthis income gap is widening. So should the goal of our economic system be wealth or well being (as measured with instruments other than wealth)? After all, we all know there is more to life than money.
  • Likewise people in some other countries find health to be a much more important issue than wealth. They are willing to pay more in taxes to support universal free health care. People in these countries report a higher satisfaction on health issues than do people in the US. Again, should the goal of our economic system be wealth or well being (as measured with instruments other than wealth)? In these cases wealth is not a proxy for happiness.
  • There are other measures of economic well being. The UN uses the Human Development Index which includes GDP, average life span and education levels. Other suggestions are to include some measure of natural resources, both renewable and non-renewable which are not typically included in GDP. An index which took into account the rate at which a country is using its natural resources might more accurately reflect the result of these kinds of economic decisions (e.g. A country could temporarily boost GDP by squandering a natural resource on the short term. A recent analysis of the American economy (NPR report) suggests this may be occurring in this country, we are using resources in a non-sustainable way, much like living a more affluent life by running up debt.) The Key National Indicator System is being developed in the US to remedy this problem.
• To date, standard economic theory has been very unsuccessful in including environmental issues or problems of limited resources (resources, including environmental ones) are considered infinite. These issues are treated as "externalities". In other words, the theory doesn't know how to deal with them, they have to be included ad hoc. What is the value of clean air? What about wild animals. One study came up with a value of $11 for a bald eagle (based on what people were willing to pay to see one at a national park). Does this sound reasonable? Are they still worth that if they totally disapear?
  • Capitalists often claim that when a particular natural resource is exhausted another resource will be found to replace it. The parable often told is that crude oil replaced whale oil when whale oil ran short. What is not mentioned is that the number of oil producing species of whale was reduced to (and remains at) 5% of their original numbers or less. The point is that allowing the market to exhaust a particular resource (as opposed to providing incentive for the market to find a different source before the resource is exhausted) is a decision. Not to decide is to decide. Should we wait until all the forests are gone before looking for alternatives to wood? Should we wait until all the fresh water is polluted before looking for alternatives to water?
    • Economics typically under values natural resources. Companies that use the water in a river or air rarely pay for the use of those resources, in many cases even when they cause a significant amount of pollution. History shows it is not true that individual consumers can apply enough pressure to a company to keep it from ecological damage, only an aggregate such as a government can do that. Some economists turns this argument around and say that this is an argument which says that we should not have commons (all animals should be owned) and not worry about external costs (the government or economic pressure such as boycotts of polluters will take care of things). But maybe instead these examples are telling us something else, namely that economic theory is flawed, that some economic decisions are best made outside of the free market. It does not seem to be possible for anyone to own the world’s collection of wild geese or a pod of whales. Water flowing underground cannot be contained (or even tracked in some cases) and so cannot be owned. Just as monopolies have to be limited by the intervention of government, natural resources must be inserted into the market by government regulation.
    • It IS possible to set up markets in such a way that problems such as pollution are taken into account. The buying and selling of air pollution shares for sulfur dioxide has worked extremely well in cleaning up that particular problem. But notice this requires setting up an artificial market. The market works (is the most efficient way to get things done) in this case but only when it is structured appropriately. The government had to step in and create the market for air pollution shares. The lesson is that markets CAN solve problems but not without some help from institutions which act outside of the market.
• Drug companies today do not develop cures for diseases which only affect the third world because they cannot make money on them. Insurance companies want to drop members who are sick because they cost the company money. Some individuals want to receive their Social Security money directly, not realizing it was created to be more like an insurance policy than a retirement fund. It does not appear that the health care market, operating on pure free market principles can handle these situations. So how do we encourage the health care market to effectively take care of individuals who cannot afford to take care of themselves?
• Do we always want markets to be efficient? Jarred Diamond in his 2003 after word to 'Guns Germs and Steel' mentioned the German Beer industry as being very inefficient. Because of purity laws and regulations basically each small town has a beer monopoly with very little possibility of competition with other beer manufactures either within Germany or from the outside. Because these breweries remain small they gain no economy of scale and are thus inefficient. This could be changed by removing the laws that stifle competition. But evidently the German people would rather suffer this inefficiency and remain loyal to their local brewery. And I can't blame them, why would they want to switch to mass produced beer like Bud Light?
• A problem with large multinational companies is that it is difficult to get good information about them. Are they running sweatshops in China? Are they selling below cost to take over a market? Are they treating their employees fairly (and what does that mean)? Are they treating the environment fairly? What about service, something you don't always need much of but when you do is very important? Too often people only look at the cost of a certain item without thinking about these other issues. You may switch to a different cell phone company based on price but then find out you don't get the service of your old company. Regulation is a way to force disclosure of information. The dairy industry should be forced to tell us the expiration dates of the milk they sell. Food producers should be forced to tell us what is in their product and maybe even more (was the food produced in an environmentally conscious way? Were the employees at the plant treated fairly? etc.)
• Economics would dictate that allowing children to work 80 hrs a week in unhealthy conditions is ok if it allows a business to compete. According to economic theory this has the merit of increasing employment and gradually raising incomes, thus eventually insuring economic success with concomitant improvements in life situation. However, most societies agree that child labor, unhealthy working conditions, insufficient food and shelter are not desirable. Most societies would agree that labor supply and demand should be left to follow free market dictates once basic needs are met (and a discussion of basic needs is needed here). So for moral (extra economic, social) reasons free markets must be limited in situations where basic needs are not being met. It is a social value (one many societies admire) to decide to have a slower growth for all than a rapid growth for some and starvation for others. To mandate ‘free trade’ with no restrictions and unlimited growth no matter what the social consequences is to make a different social (non economic) decision. These are not choices as to whether economics is to be applied or not, economics acts in both cases but on different market structures.
• Paul Wiess in Physics Today, July 2004: "In the 1970's Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen tried to demonstrate the relationship between economics and thermodynamics, the basic physics of energy. He observed that most economists believe that "the economic process can go on, even grow, without being continuously fed low entropy", which in a thermodynamics context means "without receiving new energy". As we approach the end to our easy access to energy, the defining economic currency will be dominated by availability of energy units rather than by an artificial currency, be that gold or dollars. The point here is that there IS such a thing as an exhaustible resource, that being energy.
  "This change in economic theory is well illustrated by the silicon photo voltaic cells that brilliantly accomplished their mission in space flight in 1972 at an affordable economic cost. Yet, if they had to provide us with indispensable alternative energy, they would have had to operate continuously for at least 20 years just to replace the energy invested (or consumed) in their production. By 1999, photo voltaic cells were reported to produce their investment energy in about 3-7 years."  There is a difference between the economics of energy and the physics of energy, and in the long term, the physics of energy will limit the supply of energy, not the economics. In this case economic theory has to fail (or be modified).

An interesting example of the failure of the capitalistic ideal is Argentina. In the late 1980s Argentina tried to follow the textbook example of low government involvement, privatization of companies and low barriers to trade; Reganomics as formulated and promulgated by the IMF. The result was an economic crash in 2001 with people dying due to food shortages, not to mention a bank freeze on all private funds for a year (imagine if you couldn't take your money out of the bank for a year) and an eventual devaluation of the peso to 30% of its original value (imagine if a dollar was suddenly only worth 33 cents at the store). The following articles are an analysis of what occurred. If this was an example of the invisible hand making market corrections, can't we do better?

• The easy explanation: Robert Kuttner.

• Backup article: Michael Mussa.

• The gory details: Wikipedia.

• Social unrest caused by the collapse: Roger Burbach.

What is science?

Contrary to what many people think (and often want) of science, science is not a body of 'facts' and/or laws that are 'true' in some absolute sense. Instead it is a process where the 'facts' and 'laws' may change, be evaluated in a different light or discarded altogether. This scientific process includes the following features:

• Empirical data. Science is applicable only to events in the physical world that can be demonstrated repeatedly and/or under controlled situations. It is very unlikely that science will ever tell us what beauty is, what is moral, whether capitalism is better than socialism, whether to have nuclear weapons or what we should do about world hunger. It can inform those questions (for example science can tell us how to grow more food and how to build a nuclear weapon) but it cannot tell us what the answers are to those questions or even whether we should pursue them.
• Skepticism. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in The Invisible Gorilla: And other ways our intuitions decieve us tell us that humans have a propensity to assign cause and effect and to search for data to confirm their hypothesis. Scientists work the other way around; they spend much more time trying to disprove hypothesis. Confirmations of a theory are not as important as evidence that a theory is wrong. Our neighbor Joe is a cell phone user and is diagnosed with brain cancer to we immeadiately conclude that the phone caused the cancer. But a skeptic looks at the millions of people who have started using cell phones over the past 15 years and the fact that there has not been a rise in brain cancer and concludes that Joe's cancer is most likely not related to cell phones. A few confirmations of a hypothesis does not make it correct but a few unambiguous pieces of data to the contrary means there is a problem with the hypothesis. A handful of incontrovertible mammalian fossils found in the early Paleozoic era (before dinosaurs) would do serious damage to the theory of evolution. Many scientists have tried to disprove evolution (think of the Nobel prize if they could!) but so far all of the objections raise against it have been explained.
• Risky predictions. A scientific theory makes risky predictions, specific projections about what will happen under a given circumstance or the precise way in which data from the past will fit together. If the prediction fails it greatly weakens the hypothesis or theory. Einstein's theory of relativity predicted a specific amount bending of light by gravity; had this not turned out as he predicted the theory would have been wrong. Horoscopes, psychoanalysis and the invisible hand of the market generally do not make risky predictions, but often we may point to examples of confirmation afterwards. A theory that explains everything (prices go up when supply is limited) but predicts nothing specific (tomorrow the price of oil will go up by 50%) is not a scientific theory.
• Consensus. Scientific hypotheses that are not completely agreed on, theories which are still under debate by scientists do not go into the text book. Consensus wins; the alternative theories do not go into the textbook until there is overwhelming data to support them. There are several alternatives to Einstein's theory of gravity but they are still being debated in the technical literature so they do not appear in the text books. More than 99% of the scientists in the world think evolution is correct and less than 1% disagree so alternatives to evolution are not (and should not be) taught in schools. Global warming is another hypotheses which has very strong scientific consensus. Peer review of published scientific papers (where generally three experts review a submitted paper before it is accepted) is part of the process of gaining consensus.
• Informed criticism. You cannot accurately critique a theory until you understand it. I often meet people who don't believe in relativity or quantum mechanics ("it is just too weird to be true") or global warming ("humans can't possibly be affecting the climate"). But this comes from people who do not understand these theories or the immense quantity of data that support them. Before you can make a useful criticism of any idea or theory you have to understand what it is your are criticizing. Most scientists hope that their students will eventually make improvements and corrections in the current understanding but first those students have to understand the theory in order to know where the problems are. The consensus mentioned above is a consensus of informed experts. In order to disprove global warming you first have to understand all of the theories and data that go into making the claim in the first place.
• Fruitfulness. One judge of a scientific theory is how it guides research and how it suggests new avenues for development in the field. The framework of evolution is and has been an important part of our understanding of biology as a whole. It is a very rare scientific article in the field of biology that does not invoke evolution as the framework for understanding the question at hand. Evolution suggests new lines of research and provides tools to tackle new problems. It is very dangerous to discredit a theory which provides us with a framework and the tools for understanding both genetic diseases and mutations in infectious diseases such as AIDS and flu. Even incorrect or partial theories can be scientifically useful if they lead to new areas of research.
• Coherency. Science is a whole piece, you cannot reject part of it and keep the rest. For example evolution is part and parcel of the rest of the body of scientific knowledge. Genetics does not make sense without evolution and vice versa. Molecular biology, the fossil record, genetic engineering, why we have to get a different flu shot every year, animal breeding, natural selection and evolution all fit together in such a way that stripping out evolution would destroy the coherency of our understanding.The same laws of physics that give us cars and cold beer apply in the biological world. The idea of coherency is used to test ideas in science. If we do an experiment to test a new idea we assume (for the time being at least) that other concepts are to be trusted. So for example we assume that we understand how voltmeters and electric circuits (i.e. electromagnetism) work when we do an experiment in quantum mechanics. Hypothesis are always tested using other (generally more accepted) facts and theories.
• Progress. At one time alchemy was considered a possible field of science as was astrology. As our understanding of chemistry and astronomy improved we discarded alchemy and astrology. It was perfectly reasonable that Newton did alchemy and Kepler did horoscopes because there were no alternative theories that were better. It would make no sense today to teach alchemy or astrology in a science class because those ideas are obsolete. Perhaps in a history class but alchemy and astrology are no longer considered science. It is important that we teach our children the very best theories we have, not the discarded alternatives.
• Rationality. Notice that if there is progress, some of what we think we know will eventually be proved to be wrong. When and if that occurs we should be willing to change our point of view. We now know that Newton was wrong about some things but that doesn't mean he was not a scientist. Was he  irrational to believe in alchemy? Crazy? No, he just didn't have good information. It is perfectly rational to change our minds when we get better information (even if the change is diametrically opposite to our previously held view). Scientists should be rational in the sense that they are willing to admit they are wrong when confronted with the evidence and be willing to change their point of view. [Of course, being humans, this is very hard to do and historically we often see famous scientists holding some pretty strange views, even after confronted with better data (some people say that old theories don't ever die, just old scientists). Consensus and the peer review process is part of the mechanism that helps force scientists to be rational.]
• Persistence. Scientists do not discard a theory until there is a clearly superior alternative. We might not like a particular theory, we may not believe a particular theory, we might work very hard to disprove a particular theory and we might even know for sure that a theory is flawed in a certain way but until there is something definitively better we present that theory as the winner. Our current understanding of super conductivity is one such case. It works well for some superconductors but doesn't explain everything. It is still in the textbooks and is still taught because, currently, it is the best we have.

All opinions are those of the author, Kyle Forinash. They do not reflect the opinions or policy of IUS or any other entity or person (but they should!).