Tag Archives: review

Experts and values

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What is the scientific method? How does science advance? Why did modern science emerge when it did about 300 years ago? Will it continue? All questions addressed by Michael Strevens’ interesting and enjoyable The Knowledge Machine: How an Unreasonable Idea Created Modern Science.

The book begins by setting out two competing theories about the scientific method: Popper’s claim that scientific knowledge progresses through falsfication of hypotheses and Kuhn’s even more famous claim that it occurs through revolutionary changes in paradigm. These are incompatible explanations – if falsfication happened, how could scientists hold on to an incorrect paradigm – and both wrong, the book argues. The falsfication hypothesis not states that ‘facts’ are only tentatively true, always vulnerable to falsification – so we can be no more confident that the sun will rise today (Hume’s induction problem) than that a human born today will live forever. The paradigm revolution hypothesis seems to rule out progress or at least doesn’t account for why the scientific community jumps from one paradigm to another with better predictive power. Strevens is even more critical, though, of the radical subjectivists who argue that there is no scientific method, that science is fundamentally all about the status of scientists, how they exercise power within the scientific institutions so that certain ideas come to dominate.

It is not that scientists are not subjective, he says; of course they have personal priors in evaluating evidence. However, the key point is that in the official public discourse in scientific publications and seminars is that there is an iron rule: only empirical evidence with predictive power counts. The evidence will often be microscopic or concern minute differences in measurement: much scientific endeavour is super-dull, detailed collection of measurement. Scientists have to be trained to have a high tolerance for this painstaking work, because it is the only way progress happens – much as in their private lives they are fascinated by the big philosophical theories or the beauty of the universe. In scientific debate, “Victory does not come through smooth rhetoric, metaphysical inquiry, moralizing, or any other sort of sweet talking or big thinking. To win, players must front up with meticulous observations.” The subjectivists, the book argues, overlook this actual scientific method – which was cemented as the way to do science by Newton.

Is this immensely successful scientific method secure? The book ends with a section on the need to retrain every genertion of scientists in this approach – dull meticulousness in disciplinary debate whatever their private philosophical flights of fancy. And on the need to sustain the institution of modern science in the face of the challenges facing humanity today, from covid to climate.

It’s a very enjoyable book, with plenty of stories of science past and present. The argument certainly persuaded me. Economics differs substantially in that the social processes we investigate do not generate data in the same way as physical or biological ones, but the ideal method is the same: of course we bring our own values to evaluating evidence but it is the evidence that wins the official disciplinary debate. We cannot ultimately be objective and impartial but we can and should set objectivity as the standard for evaluating claims. So I recognised the book’s description of the iron rule as the way researchers (try to) operate. And similarly, I reject the subjectivism of those who say economics should be pluralistic – can only be so – because there is no way of testing claims against each other.

419TbK7hZPL._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_My other reading this week has been Behold, America by Sarah Churchwell. Having been comforted by the arrival or President Biden, the book got me worried all over again about the long and strong roots of American fascism – shocking and startling photos of the swastika flying in Madison Square garden rallies. The book analyses the histories of the slogans America First and the American Dream – tracing the more-or-less constancy of the first (white supremacy) and the evolution of the second (from an evocation of equality and civic participation to a claim about material prosperity) through newspapers and other records. Along with this evidence about the persistence of populism, perhaps we should stay worried.

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My week in books

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It’s been an eclectic mix of reading this week, as I plough on through this endless grey winter with a significant birthday approaching. First, Antonio Damasio’s Descartes Error. I’m completely unable to evaluate the argument, being no neuroscientist, but I find it very plausible. As the title suggests, the book argues against the Cartesian mind-body dualism, and furthermore proposes that emotions and reason are complements, not substitutes. Sense perceptions cause chemical and electrical circuits in the body which trigger emotional signals enabling reason to operate. Often unnoticed, sometimes these manifest as intuition or gut feelings. Adam Smith of The Moral Sentiments would surely have agreed. It made me wonder what we mean by artificial intelligence. Robots can have sensors, but not emotions: are they going to be like the kind of patients Damasio describes? Not a comforting thought.514GEC4ZTML._SX324_BO1,204,203,200_Then it was Amin Maalouf’s Adrift, a sort of memoir and sort of reflection on how a moment when it looked like the world could be an open, tolerant sort of place has decisively passed. Growing up in the Lebanon, the author centres on the degeneration of that country and the wider Middle East as its vibrant cultural centres were overwhelmed steadily by factionalism and violence. But his gloom extends globally now. It reminded me of Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, a book that’s been much on my mind of late.

81cbNLhShWL._AC_UY436_QL65_Then, prompted by an enthusiastic tweet from a colleague, Michelle Murphy’s The Economization of Life. It’s a critique of the way economics counts people as aggregates and averages, drawing on the history of the links between US overseas aid and population control policies, with Bangladesh as the case study. Economists of the mid-20th century saw rapid population growth as the reason for the poverty trap, in a quasi-Malthusian, tainted-by-eugenicism way, Murphy argues. Population dynamics were modeled to ‘prove’ the problem, including the introduction of the idea of the demographic transition. This kind of thinking peaked with books like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Time Bomb. Whatever the role played by intrusive aid policies aiming to control women’s and men’s fertility, the ‘transition’ has duly happened in most countries. Modern growth theories imply exactly the opposite, that more people means faster per capita growth because ideas come with people attached. Perhaps it’s the theory for our (western) population ageing and decline times. Anyway, the book was interesting despite its OTT rhetoric.

71aFfbkTSTL._AC_UY436_QL65_My book pile is a bit low – I’m hoping for some joy from the borthday sprite – although with proofs of Philippe Aghion’s The Power of Creative Destruction and Sam Gilbert’s Good Data to read before their April publication dates. Suggestions welcome!

412rqRRw6ULAnd meanwhile I’ve been revising the manuscript of my next book: it looks like Cogs and Monsters: Economics for the 21st Century will be out in the autumn.

Is weird wonderful?

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I’ve been slowly reading The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Henrich. Slowly because I’ve dipped into a reading group and that gave me an excuse to dawdle. And also because it’s one of those too-heavy-to-lift books that need an arrangement of cushions to read. Perhaps it’s because of this dilatory pace that I found myself decreasingly impressed by the book as I went on.

Or perhaps it’s because the freshest part of the argument is in the early sections, which document the different responses to psychology experiments from different kinds of people around the world and make the argument about the origins of the unusual ‘western’ psychology lying in the mediaeval Church’s prohibitions on kin marriage. Henrich callis it the ‘Marriage and Family Programme’, although doesn’t really explain where it came from. For those still unaware of the acronym, ‘weird’ stands for ‘western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic’. The book’s accumulation of evidence that there is a distinctive ‘weird’ psychology, correlated with the footprint of western Christianity, is reasonably persuasive – although it is far from obvious to me that an accumulation of individual experimental results and survey correlations of this kind amounts to decisive evidence. Many chapters are a list of: here’s one study in place X; here’s another at another time in place Y; then Z; and here are some scatter plots with regression lines.

The trouble is that the book then dissolves into a less convincing argument that this attitude to kin marriage – which drove people in the west to look for social relations and build trust outside their immediate clan – explains everything. My firm view is that history is over-determined and nothing has only one cause. As the chapters went by, the book more and more seems to be an amalgam of all those other Big Histories such as Guns, Germs and Steel, or Why the West Rules for Now. Inevitably, it has to engage with feedback loops. Having said that, highlighting the feedback loop between psychology and institutional change is interesting and productive.

And oh yes, one last point. There’s the implicit teleological determinism in Weirdest. It always refers to “development” in inverted commas, but there is a value judgment; the west has progressed more than the rest. Cast the argument forward and it’s another matter: will the west stay democratic and prosperous? Aren’t there worrying signs of family dynasties in the US and jobs (only) for mates in the UK (couldn’t one see Eton and Oxbridge as tribal?). Yet this sits oddly with the book’s avoidance of any explicit normative discussion. Is weird good? If it really does correlate with prosperous, surely yes? As a WEIRD person, I htink so.

I think it’s well worth a read, there’s plenty of food for thought and economics tends to underplay psychology and culture. But maybe wait for the paperback.

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Big Tech – the contrarian view

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There’s a torrent of material to read about competition (lack of) in digital markets, which of course goes much wider than economics and law. Indeed, I’ve contributed to the many pages written, including in the form of being a member of the Furman Review team. The general theme is that Big Tech does indeed pose a challenge for competition policy, with the individual conclusions running from ‘some adjustment within current framework is needed’, all the way to ‘destroy them’.

What makes Big Tech and the Digital Economy by legal scholar Nicolas Petit so refreshing is its absolutely contrarian perspective. He has coined the phrase ‘moligopoly’ to describe Big Tech, and argues that while there has certainly been increasing competition in digital markets, there is also vigorous competition unremarked by all the commentators. I’d describe what he calls competition as oligopolistic rivalry, but the book does document the ways in which the GAFA and others compete with each other.

Some of the emprical evidence is rather interesting. For example, the book looks at what the big companies describe as the major risks facing them in their SEC filings and all but Facebook claim competition is their 1st or 2nd biggest threat – they would say that of course, but it intrigues me that Facebook doesn’t bother (number 4 or 5 in its ranking). The others do all see each other as their main rivals. Among the book’s other evidence is their high rate of spending on R&D – but I’d like to know about what it is they’re researching, though.

The ultimate question is not about current competitors, however, but about potential competitors. If you believe digital markets tend to winner-takes-all because of network effects, and you can live with concentration because of the large consumer benefits, then what matters is whether new rivals with great technology and products can take the current Big Tech markets. In that case, moligopolistic rivalry along various dimensions is not only fine but anyway inevitable.

The book didn’t win me over in the sense that I concluded there is no reason to be concerned about digital competition. Without intervention, it’s hard to see anybody rivalling Google in search, or Apple and Android in mobile operating systems. To be fair, the author doesn’t argue that there’s no cause for concern, quite. He is issuing a useful warning that we should think carefully and in detail about what harms we believe Big Tech is causing. This book is a distinctive corrective against the current tendency toward groupthink on this subject. As we said right at the start of the Furman Review, Big Tech has brought many benefits, and there is growing evidence about how much people value its products. Anyone certain they know Big Tech needs fixing should read this more nuanced argument with an open mind.

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Are humans or computers more reasonable?

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This essay, The Long History of Algorithmic Fairness, sent me to some of the new-to-me references, among them How Reason Almost Lost its Mind by Paul Erickson and five other authors. The book is the collective output of a six-week stint in 2010 at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. That alone endeared it to me  – just imagine being able to spend six weeks Abroad. And in Berlin, which was indeed my last trip Abroad in the brief period in September 2020 when travel was possible again. I started the book with some trepidation as collectives of academics aren’t known for crisp writing, but it’s actually very well written. I suspect this is a positive side-effect of interdisciplinarity: the way to learn each other’s disciplinary language is to be as clear as possible.

The book is very interesting, tracing the status of ‘rationality’ in the sense of logical or algorithmic reasoning, from the low status of human ‘computers’ (generally poorly-paid women) in the early part of the 20th century, to the high status of Cold War experts devising game theory and building ‘computers’, to the contestation about the meaning of rationality in more recent times: is it logical calculation, or is it what Herbert Simon called ‘procedural rationality’? This is a debate most recently manifested in the debate between the Kahneman/Tversky representation of human decision-making as ‘biased’ (as compared with the logical ideal) and the Gerd Gigerenzer argument that heuristics are a rational use of constrained mental resources.

How Reason… concludes, “The contemporary equivalents of Life and Business Week no longer feature admiring portraits of ‘action intellectuals’ or ‘Pentagon planners’, although these types are alive and well.” The arc of status is bending down again, although arguably it’s machine learning and AI – ur-rational calculators – rather than other types of humans gaining the top dog slot nowadays. As I’ve written in the economic methodology context, it’s odd that computers and also creatures from rats to pigeons to fungi are seen as rational calculators whereas humans are irrational.

Anyway, the book is mainly about the Cold War and how the technocrats reasoned about the existentially lethal game in which they were participants, and has lots of fascinating detail (and photos) about the period. From Schelling and Simon to the influence of operations research (my first micro textbook was Will Baumol’s Economic Theory and Operations Analysis) and shadow prices in economic allocation, the impact on economics was immense. (Philip Mirowski’s Machine Dreams covers some of that territory too, although I found it rather tendentious when I read it a while ago.) I’m interested in thinking about the implications of the use of AI for policy and in policy, and as it embeds a specific kind of calculating reason, thought How Reason Almost Lost its Mind was a very useful read.

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