Crocodile Tears over Ethanol Subsidies
posted by Frank Pasquale
The following broadcast is one of the most compelling and succinct briefs against ethanol subsidies I’ve seen:
The only problem is that the group that sponsors it has helped create the problem they’re now decrying. It’s as if someone had surrounded a house with gasoline, then put up a sign asking passers-by not to throw any cigarette butts there.
Consider: why do we have a fuel crisis presently? Who have been shouting down CAFE standards for years on end? Who would go to the barricades to defend to the death any individual’s right to own and drive an SUV, Hummer (or perhaps a tank, post-Heller)? And who, while decrying politicians for trading ethanol subsidies for political donations, turns around and says the First Amendment prevents any real campaign finance reform?
The libertarians’ consistent opposition to progress in any of these areas makes their sudden concern about ethanol and the food crisis highly suspect. It also highlights a larger issue in what are misnamed “conservative” politics today (for many of its most influential figures hope to revolutionize basic aspects of our national security policy and welfare state).
Libertarians will complain bitterly about being taxed to support the war in Iraq, while helping dismantle the very regulatory policies that could reduce our dependence on oil in the Mideast. National security conservatives realize that tax cuts help hollow out our defense capabilities and social services for soldiers, but gladly sign on to ally politically with those who push them. Many thoughtful social conservatives realize that it is economic insecurity and mass marketing of trash culture that do the most to undermine families–but in the end find it’s just too hard to part ways with their tax-cutting pals. Michael Tomasky, Jonathan Chait, and Thomas Edsall have all noted the strangeness of this ad hoc alliance–but perhaps its key sustaining element is a tacit agreement to give each group total sway in its sphere of influence.
Philip Tetlock helps us more fully understand how an anti-tax animus unites the groups:
Be it conservatism or liberalism, Marxism or libertarianism. . .- all ‘isms’ come with conceptual boundaries – and litmus tests for which opinions fall inside or outside the bounds of reasonableness for that ‘ismatic’ worldview. . . . . Political psychologists have a longstanding interest in how communities of cobelievers define the boundaries of the thinkable and where they set their thresholds for issuing fatwas, excommunicating deviants, excluding former participants from coalitions, or just shunning someone at a cocktail party. Our starting point is Tetlock’s sacred value protection model (SVPM), which takes as its starting point an undeniable fact of political life: the tendency of like-minded souls to coalesce into communities of cobelievers dedicated to defending and advancing shared values.
The SVPM accepts that people are often sincere when they express moral outrage and engage in moral cleansing. But the model also portrays a delicate mental balancing act. People regularly run into decision problems in which the costs of upholding sacred values become very steep – arguably prohibitive. If parents dedicated their net worth to reducing to a probability of zero all threats to their children’s safety, for example, they would rapidly impoverish themselves. . . . The model predicts that when there is no pressure to confront secular/sacred trade-offs, people and political movements will adopt the low-mental effort solution of accepting their own side’s no-trade-off rhetoric at face value.
Thus a pledge of “tax relief”–no matter what the country’s fiscal situation, and no matter how high inequality may get–becomes the “sacred value” of libertarian politics. As students of political framing, we might begin to understand exactly how important this shibboleth is:
Lakoff found that people tend to vote not on specific issues but rather for the candidate who best reflects their moral system by evoking the right “frames.” Consider the phrase “tax relief,” an effective staple of the Republican lexicon. According to Lakoff, the word “relief” elicits a frame in which taxes are seen as an affliction. And every time the phrase “tax relief” is heard or read by people, the relevant neural circuits are instinctively activated in their brains, the synapses connecting the neurons get stronger, and the view of taxation as an affliction is unconsciously reinforced.
The great danger posed by libertarian thought is a relentless obsession with the threats posed by government–and corresponding refusal to recognize problems posed by corporate entities or uncoordinated consumption–combine to reinforce a cynicism toward collective action that poisons all hope of cooperating to solve tough problems. Those in the legal profession should be particularly worried, as we are all too often written off in the libertarian mindset as a needless transaction cost. In fact, any solution to the great problems we face in energy, health, and even defense policy requires serious thought about proper procedures and extra-market allocation of resources–precisely the type of training a good legal education provides.
Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan.
August 19, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law
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Responses (31)
Orin Kerr - August 19, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Frank,
So the people who oppose harmful subsidies are responsible for harmful subsidies because their opposition to other regulations induced the people who wanted there to be some regulation to enact the harmful subsidies? I have to say, that sounds kind of convoluted to me.
Frank - August 19, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Orin, your characterization of my post is needlessly convoluted itself. How hard is it to see that we have two choices here: conservation or efforts to expand the supply of oil. Do you really think that we can get to conservation without regulation?
Orin Kerr - August 19, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Frank,
Given your consistent opposition to libertarian views, perhaps the less convoluted version is, “the libertarians are right here, but I blame them for it anyway.”
Seriously, though, shouldn’t you blame harmful subsidies most directly on the people who advocated harmful subsidies, rather than the folks who opposed harmful subsidies? Why not just say that you strongly oppose libertarianism for many reasons, but that in this one small case you think they had it right? Or, to flip it, why not say that they had it right here, but that you don’t think they were right elsewhere?
Joel - August 19, 2008 at 3:51 pm
We can easily get to conservation without regulation, just look at the massive drop in vehicle miles as the price of gas went up. It’s the regulation crowd (McCain and the “tax holiday”, Obama and the “windfall profits tax”) who are preventing any true changes by protecting consumers from the true costs of NOT conserving. Was there a regulation that led to the development of the Prius? Then why should more regulation be needed to show companies that many consumers are looking for low-energy alternatives?
JP - August 19, 2008 at 5:34 pm
What aspect of modern legal education makes lawyers good philosopher-kings (or extra-market resource allocators)?
Also, libertarians are actually very big on collective action. We just think voluntary collective action will more often than not result in better outcomes than coercive collective action. Ethanol subsidies (which libertarians have long opposed) are a good reminder of why. (They are also probably a result of the Iowa caucus and Illinois primary as much as any campaign contributions).
Finally, you set up a straw man when you assume libertarian = anarchist. libertarians understand the necessity of public provision of public goods; we just don’t assume everything is a public good. As an example, and I have no evidence for this, my impression is that libertarians are more likely than others to support a carbon tax (a tax!). IF TRUE more generally, this would seem to be a strong counterpoint to several points in your post.
GD - August 19, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Frank, your obsession with dissing libertarians is getting extremely tiresome, and often makes you seem like a fool. Give it a rest.
Frank - August 19, 2008 at 9:47 pm
To GD, JP, and Orin: What I am trying to prevent is the metastasis of a fringe political view into the mainstream of political thought. None of you will come out in favor of basic regs like tougher CAFE standards, or discouragement of SUVs, or conservation policies–the types of energy planning put into place in much of the developed world years ago. Just look at the stats collected here:
http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/05/suing_big_energ.html
The problem I see is that the US is the world’s libertarian-leaning outlier on issues ranging from energy to health care. When extant policies in the US are already so skewed by individualism, it strains credulity to claim that “balance” can be achieved by having a debate between defenders of the status quo and advocates of more libertarian, market-based approaches.
Orin Kerr - August 19, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Frank, your sense of what is a “fringe political view” is quite surprising. I personally oppose tougher CAFE standards, and while I don’t know what it means to “discourage SUVs”, I don’t want the government trying to regulate the size of cars that people drive.
I suppose that makes me a fringe wacko extremist who is a danger to all that is good in the world? I would be genuinely interested to know if you think that. In general, I find your writing remarkably uncharitable to those who don’t share your personal ideology; I suppose I want to know if you see me as “the enemy” that must be stopped and cannot be reasoned with.
Jonathan H. Adler - August 20, 2008 at 1:15 am
Frank –
There is nothing “sudden” about libertarian concern about ethanol subsidies. I’ve been writing about the economic and environmental problems with ethanol mandates since 1992, and organizations like the Cato Institute decried ethanol subsidies well-before that. When the 1990 Clean Air Act was adopted and first implemented, many environmental groups were willing to look the other way, because they thought signing on to ethanol mandates bought “progress.” Only later did they recognize they had made a deal with the devil (much as they had in 1977 when they signed onto the provisions that subsidized high-sulfur coal, chronicled in Ackerman & Hassler’s Clean Coal, Dirty Air), and only later did they sign onto political and legal action to try and reduce the damage. The fact is that it was us crazy libertarian types who predicted at least some of the awful consequences for air pollution and species habitat (no one realized initially how oxygenate mandates designed to help ethanol would result in massive MTBE contamination of groundwater), and it is hard to argue that the country would not be better off economically or environmentally had we never embarked on the ethanol train.
I also oppose CAFE standards, and hardly think it’s a wacko view (it’s hardly more fringe among experts in this area than calling for “energy independence”). CAFE standards distort vehicle markets, create massive cross-subsidies across vehicles users, penalize those with legitimate needs for larger vehicles, reduce the net crashworthines of the automobile fleet, and (in some cases) make it more difficult to produce low emission vehicles (particularly for NOx, emissions of which can increase as an engine becomes more fuel efficient). It also just so happens that CAFE standards are largely responsible for the SUV boom as they overly penalized large cars, but contained a “loophole” for light trucks, which automakers (and consumers) rationally exploited by seeking out vehicle designs that could substitute for large cars but meet the regulatory definition of light trucks for fuel efficiency purposes.
And before you go off on how the U.S. is so off-the-charts on energy and environmental issues, you should consider the massive differences in population density, which explain substantial differences in energy use patterns, as well as Europe’s comparatively poor historical record in addresing automotive air pollution (e.g. their delay in eliminating lead from gasoline and co0ntinued reliance on particulate-spewing diesels). If there’s an area in which we should be following Europe, it would be in reducing regulatory barriers to alternative energy sources from nuclear to tidal to offshore wind, but I suppose you’ll reject that because it sounds too libertarian. Nonetheless, it seems to me that more libertarian energy policies across the board would produce significantly better results on net — economically and environmentally — than the non-libertarian statist quo.
Cheers,
JHA
Frank - August 20, 2008 at 8:27 am
To JHA: I never said the libertarian opposition to ethanol subsidies was sudden. I acknowledge they are opposed to all subsidies, and take them to task for that, because some subsidies to alternative energy are almost certainly necessary to get us out of the mess we’re in. And yes, I have “consider[ed] the massive differences in population density,” and I don’t accept them as a natural aspect of the world. You can easily get more density in the US if you have different rules about zoning, noise abatement requirements, public transit, etc.
To Orin: All I am trying to do is to get reflexive individualists/anti-government types to realize that just saying “get the government out of our lives” is not a coherent political ideology–and is often a quite dangerous one. What’s so fascinating about your rhetoric above is how clearly you are doing what you say I am doing–i.e., trying to depict an ideological opponent as unhinged or dangerous. I’m talking about ideas here, not people, and I’d appreciate a similar effort to avoid personalizing the topic.
Frank - August 20, 2008 at 8:28 am
To JHA: I never said the libertarian opposition to ethanol subsidies was sudden. I acknowledge they are opposed to all subsidies, and take them to task for that, because some subsidies to alternative energy are almost certainly necessary to get us out of the mess we’re in. And yes, I have “consider[ed] the massive differences in population density,” and I don’t accept them as a natural aspect of the world. You can easily get more density in the US if you have different rules about zoning, noise abatement requirements, public transit, etc.
To Orin: All I am trying to do is to get reflexive individualists/anti-government types to realize that just saying “get the government out of our lives” is not a coherent political ideology–and is often a quite dangerous one. What’s so fascinating about your rhetoric above is how clearly you are doing what you say I am doing–i.e., trying to depict an ideological opponent as unhinged or dangerous. I’m talking about ideas here, not people, and I’d appreciate a similar effort to avoid personalizing the topic.
Frank - August 20, 2008 at 8:57 am
Two other points to JHA: Did the US become larger since 1980? Consider these stats on how countries’ oil consumption moved since then:
Denmark: Down 33%
Sweden: Down 32%
Germany: Down 20%
France: Down 14%
Finland: Down 14%
Italy: Down 13%
Japan: Up 0.2%
UK: Up 2%
US: Up 21%
Moreover, as for the loopholes in CAFE standards: I see them as an artifact of our laissez-faire campaign finance system. I never cease to be amazed that some people will decry some government action relentlessly, then propose to give carte blanche to its puppeteers.
Orin Kerr - August 20, 2008 at 10:45 am
Frank,
You claim to be talking about ideas, not people. So let’s review what you actually said. Quoting from your post:
All of this is very much directed at people, it seems. It’s “the other,” the people with dangerous ideas who are the threat. If you would now like to say that was inappropriate of you, then that’s one thing; I would appreciate it. But your claim that you weren’t criticizing people but rather were just questioning ideas seems pretty clearly contradicted by your own words in the post.
Orin Kerr - August 20, 2008 at 10:49 am
Frank,
You claim to be talking about ideas, not people. So let’s review what you actually said. Quoting from your post:
All of this is very much directed at people, it seems. It’s “the other,” the people with dangerous ideas who are the threat. If you would now like to say that was inappropriate of you, then that’s one thing; I would appreciate it. But your claim that you weren’t criticizing people but rather were just questioning ideas seems pretty clearly contradicted by your own words in the post.
Frank - August 20, 2008 at 11:10 am
Orin, I don’t think of you as an “ideal-type” libertarian (what do they think of the national surveillance state?), and that’s what I thought your comment referred to: you yourself. Your move here, and it is a classic one, is to shift from substantively engaging the issue to having some sort of meta-debate about civility, hurt feelings, and the bounds of discourse. It is an attempt to “other” me as someone incapable of respecting opponents, when all I am trying to do is to point out some uncomfortable implications of libertarian ideology as a whole.
If the rules implicit in your critique were adopted universally, think about the types of silliness they would degenerate into in, say, debates over communism when that was a viable and debated political option. A communist would say to anyone criticizing communist beliefs: “hey, you’re inappropriate to criticize me personally.” A commitment to civility as robust as the one you’re suggesting puts us on the road to relativism.
JP - August 20, 2008 at 11:35 am
Frank,
“Did the US become larger since 1980?” Well, yes. And by more than 20%, and substantially more than those European countries. Of course, even accounting for population changes, I’m sure US oil usage increased disproportionately. This has plenty of causes, and blaming it libertarians without argument is silly. One contributing factor might be the difference in reliance on nuclear power (limited in the US by, you guessed it, government regulation!).
And here’s the secret behind libertarian opposition to 1) “some government action” and 2) campaign finance restrictions. If there are real limitations as to what the government can do, if it doesn’t have the power to create and destroy and micromanage businesses and industries, there will be limited incentives to wastefully spend billions on political campaigns. If there are no rents to seek, there is no rent seeking. (Indeed, if you honestly assessed libertarian ideas, you’d probably find that our opposition to rent seeking and your opposition to excessive corporate power creates a lot of common ground).
Your opposition to libertarian ideas all-too often relies on pointing to a bad outcome and blaming it the market, often without argument. (I note that in the post you link to at 9:47AM, you claim that despite Prof. Mankiw’s support for a carbon tax, he doesn’t really care about the energy problem because he advised President Bush. Again, you’re talking about people and ignoring ideas).
Orin Kerr - August 20, 2008 at 11:47 am
Frank,
If you’ll go back and read the thread, you’ll notice that I tried to get you engage on the substance. You declined to respond — you simply wouldn’t engage me on the substantive criitque — instead changing the topic to your efforts to stop the fringe. I then tried to get you to clarify what you meant by the fringe, and now your response is to accuse me of trying to change the topic away from the substance of the post.
I guess I give up.
A.J. Sutter - August 20, 2008 at 12:37 pm
As someone who is just coming in on this tedious debate, I don’t think Frank’s references to “libertarians” add up to references to “people” in the sense of ad hominem attacks. Rather, his reference struck me as a metonomy for people who hold libertarian ideas. Nor do I read the shift of the discourse from the ad ideam “fringe political view” to the ad hominem “I suppose that makes me a fringe wacko extremist” as being a ball hit out of Frank’s side of the court. In any case, it’s far too trivial a squabble to justify so many posts and so much space.
As for the video’s being “compelling and succinct,” it’s filled with so many de-contextualized images (that same melting iceberg or glacier; the starving children; the supermarket shelves), and the choice of a bluegrass music track is so manipulative, that I found myself deeply distrusting it even though I agreed with a lot of what the main speaker was saying.
As for whether “those in the legal profession should be particularly worried, as we are all too often written off in the libertarian mindset as a needless transaction cost”: there is something of the same irony in this claim as Frank sees in the libertarians’ policy positions. If law professors would be less energetic in pushing an economics-based approach to the law onto their students, there would probably be somewhat fewer libertarians.
Frank - August 20, 2008 at 12:46 pm
I think that a substantive response to my points would require pointing me to some libertarian plan for addressing the present energy/fuel/food crisis that does not rely on markets/technology as dei ex machina. If the response is that libertarians dogmatically have no “plan” because that would require central planning, then we have indeed reached the end of the road in the argument.
But that’s not to say it’s a waste of time. As Geertz and other interpretive social scientists have said, often the best “resolution” of a discussion is a clearer understanding of the nature of the disagreement. Or, as David G. Post suggested in What Larry Doesn’t Get: Code, Law, and Liberty in Cyberspace, 52 Stan L Rev 1439, 1442–48 (2000), the value lies in illuminating the conflicts in values that make dialogue so difficult.
Orin Kerr - August 20, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Frank,
It is true that I did reach a conclusion about the nature of the disagreement. Further, that conclusion led me to plan to change my conduct that I believe will solve the problem: I won’t read your posts any more, and therefore I won’t feel the urge to comment on them and I won’t waste your time anymore with my comments. I think that’s probably for the best.
Frank - August 20, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Orin, I appreciate your willingness to read my posts for some time, in spite of the fact you’ve disagreed with my point of view. I hope someday we can get a filter set up on this blog so that people who don’t want my posts can set it to “exclude” for me.
I regret that someone as esteemed and notable as you has committed to avoid my blogging, but given that virtually all your comments on it have been critical, I’m not too surprised you’re not reading it in the future. And frankly, had you taken a sympathetic interest in virtually any of the things I’d blogged on here, I’d feel more regret at this turn of events than I happen to at the moment.
In the end I guess that I am more interested in building a conversation within a community that shares some common foundational premises, rather than the “Sunstein-ian” ideal of bringing people on far opposing sides together. I applaud your blog for having Sunstein on, but I have a sense that he is, in the end, too optimistic about possibilities for consensus.
Orin Kerr - August 20, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Frank,
Your comment about wanting to communicate with those who share foundational premises with you makes a lot of sense. That’s the problem with a general-interest law blog, I think: It draws readers across the ideological spectrum who can and will challenge ideological assumptions and characterizations, and that may not be what you’re looking for when you blog. You and I differ on this: most of the blogs I read are written by people whose politics I don’t share. My view is that I read blogs to learn new perspective and to reach consensus and understand disagreements, which I find tends to work pretty well. (Not much point in reading the opinions of people who think like me, as I already know what I think!) But I understand that you look at blogging differently and with different ends in mind.
JP - August 20, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Wow. Good to know. I apologize for cluttering up the comments on this and previous posts. Perhaps some kind of disclaimer will keep others from intruding with their dangerous ideas in the future.
Jonathan H. Adler - August 20, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Frank –
Re-read your initial post. You wrote: “The libertarians’ consistent opposition to progress in any of these areas makes their sudden concern about ethanol and the food crisis highly suspect.” That certainly sounds to me like you accused libertarians of having “sudden concern” about ethanol subsidies. Am I mistaken?
Second, if you don’t accept differing population densities as a “natural” aspect of the world, what do you propose? Requiring everyone in the U.S. to live east of the Mississippi? Even something that drastic would not produce the population densities of Western Europe and Japan (and increasing mass transit subisidies or trying to reverse engineer the zoning policies that ecouraged sprawl would not be even a drop in the bucket). No, the U.S. did not grow in physical size in the 1980s, but it did experience dramatic population and economic growth, and dramatic growth in some energy intensive industries (like truck transportation). Despite this, energy use per unit of GDP continued to decline. Comparisons between the U.S. and other nations will equivalent geography (e.g. Canada, Australia) are far more revealing, as are comparisons between U.S. population centers and those in Europe. Comparing the U.S. — complete with its spacious landscapes and long transportation differences — to Denmark is simply meaningless.
Also, calling the differential standard for light-trucks that led to the proliferation of SUVs an “artifact of our laissez-faire campaign finance system,” is an interesting take on the history of CAFE standards. The “loophole” was in place for well over a decade before automakers effectively discovered its potential and started making SUVs to meet consumer preferences.
As for how to get out of the “mess we’re in,” there’s plenty of evidence that eliminating existing market distortions, including regulatory impediments to the expansion of alternative energy sources would do more than government energy subsidies ever have. But I suppose such an argument would make me too much of an “ideal-type” libertarian to be taken seriously.
JHA
JHA
Frank - August 20, 2008 at 10:34 pm
We law profs have argued about this a long time. Why don’t we listen to the scientists?:
from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/opinion/13friedman.html
“As Richard K. Lester, an energy-innovation expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, notes, “The best chance we have — perhaps the only chance” of addressing the combined challenges of energy supply and demand, climate change and energy security “is to accelerate the introduction of new technologies for energy supply and use and deploy them on a very large scale.”"
“This, he argues, will take more than a Manhattan Project. It will require a fundamental reshaping by government of the prices and regulations and research-and-development budgets that shape the energy market. Without taxing fossil fuels so they become more expensive and giving subsidies to renewable fuels so they become more competitive — and changing regulations so more people and companies have an interest in energy efficiency — we will not get innovation in clean power at the scale we need.”
Orin Kerr - August 21, 2008 at 1:09 am
Frank,
I think there’s actually a very good reason not to listen to the scientists, or at least to think they have any expertise here. My conclusion after five years of engineering education (B.S.E. at Princeton, M.S. at Stanford) was that engineers actually know much less about government and economics than most otherwise educated people. Further, the structure of engineering and science often tends to instill a naive faith in government planning among many scientists and engineers (myself included, back when I was an engineering student). So while it’s one thing to listen to a scientist about questions of science, it’s essential not to imagine expertise in one area implies expertise in another.
Jonathan H. Adler - August 21, 2008 at 8:50 am
Frank –
Why do we think government subsidies and mandates are an effective way “to accelerate the introduction of new technologies for energy supply and use and deploy them on a very large scale.”? The Manhattan Project model works well to solve an engineering problem if cost is little (or no) concern. It’s a terrible way to try and develop commercially viable and cost-effective technologies. That’s just one of the many reasons why decades of massive energy subsidies and federal R&D have produced very little. If you want to unleash innovation, you should look at what stands in the way — and it’s not a lack of ex ante government support. If we don’t want to repeat the failures of the past (which include efforts to mandate technological innovations that never materialized) we should first reduce obstacles to energy innovation, and then seek to enhance the incentives for successful innovation without unnecessarily screwing up the parts of energy markets that function well.
Oh, and what Orin said too.
JHA
Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 21, 2008 at 9:26 am
While I would agree that we should not let scientists and engineers have the final say in questions of public policy, it seems irresponsible not to consult them on the topics broached in Frank’s post. Lester himself seems well suited to the task as his background, research, and expertise deal with real world applications of science and technology:
Richard Lester is the founding director of the Industrial Performance Center (IPC) and a professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on industrial innovation and the management of technology, with an emphasis on the energy and manufacturing sectors. He has led several major studies of national and regional productivity, competitiveness and innovation performance commissioned by governments and industrial groups around the world. His book on the sources of creativity and innovation in advanced economies, Innovation – The Missing Dimension, co-authored with Michael J. Piore, was published by Harvard University Press in 2004. Other recent books include Making Technology Work: Applications in Energy and the Environment (2004), jointly authored with John M. Deutch, and The Productive Edge: A New Strategy for Economic Growth (2000).
There are *some* scientists whose training and research does spill over into public policy applications (especially those conversant in the history and sociology of science and technology and what is known as science and technology studies).
Experts are fallible (Douglas Walton has specified the kinds of questions essential to the interrogation of expertise in argument in his Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority, 1997), but appeal to Lester’s expertise should, I think, be accorded the weight of presumption.
Those who make public policy proper can launder cases of “naive faith in government planning” but that does not rule out a belief in the value and efficacy of government planning as such, the converse of which is a naive faith in the virtues of incrementalism (or ‘piecemeal social engineering,’ a nice evaluation of which, together with an appreciation of social planning, is found in Robert Goodin’s Political Theory and Public Policy, 1982; cf. too the methodological lessons Jon Elster derives from Tocqueville’s evaluation of the social consequences of American Institutions in Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality, 1983: 93-97).
Our concerns might be more properly directed to the contemporary profession of economics, which is prone to pretensions of “scientific” expertise and fealty to ideology and yet public policy is fashioned, and politicians act, in an overweeing and fawning deference to its rhetoric (hence the trump card of *homo economicus*; cf. Hausman and McPherson, Amadae, Mirowski, McCloskey, Throsby, Dupre, among others).
Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 21, 2008 at 9:34 am
erratum: “overweening” (although I admit to liking ‘overweeing’!)
Orin Kerr - August 21, 2008 at 11:19 am
Patrick,
I don’t think anyone suggests that we shouldn’t listen to scientists for science questions. The key is realizing when someone who is an expert on one thing is pontificating about something else; it is exactly he pretensions of “scientific” expertise” that I’m trying to point out.
Here’s an example. I’ve often had a debate with my father, a retired engineering professor, who believes that all legal questions could be answered by running a computer program. You could have a user enter in the input, he argues, and the computer will spit out the correct answer. I then ask, “ok, so what do you instruct the computer to do?” To which my father responds, “you enter in the law, of course, and tell the computer to follow it.”
To my father, lawyers are just pretending to complicate things: They’re missing the obvious scientific solution to legal problems. But that’s because he’s treating legal questions like scientific questions, without recognizing that he doesn’t actually know much about the law (and that scientific wisdom isn’t useful for all types of problems, especially essentially human ones). I think the same goes for Professor Lester’s proposal.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 21, 2008 at 11:40 am
Orin,
One point (e.g., in the third para.) I was trying (and apparently failed) to make is that Lester is not pontificating outside his areas of expertise, that his work and background reveal him well-suited to speak to public policy questions. I of course agree that scientific knowledge (both natural and social) isn’t useful for all types of problems (especially philosophical–ethical, aesthetic, metaphysical and religious–ones), although I do happen to think it is in fact designed for “essentially human ones!”
Small quibble: your father appears to have faith in mathematical (i.e., in algorithms) rather than scientific solutions (although of course many fields of science increasingly resort algorithms).
Point of agreement: the pitfalls of scientism.
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