Archive for the ‘Philosophy of Social Science’ Category
Politicized Prognostication at the Congressional Budget Office
posted by Frank Pasquale
Back in 2007, wise wonks were already warning that the Congressional Budget Office could torpedo health reform. The CBO dealt Clintoncare a heavy blow by saddling it with huge cost projections — and failing to take into account the savings the program would realize for individual citizens and the private sector. Current CBO director Doug Elmendorf has been riding a wave of notoriety as an objective “referee” in an increasingly bitter reform battle. But as his office’s one-sided estimates enervate reform, it’s beginning to risk its reputation for impartiality. Consider the following observations about CBO’s work:
Bruce Vladeck: “The CBO’s track record in predicting the effects of health legislation is abysmal. Over the last two decades, the CBO has routinely overestimated the costs of expanded government health care benefits and underestimated the savings from program changes designed to reduce expenditures. Most recently, it overestimated the five-year cost of Medicare Part D — the prescription drug benefit — by more than 35%. Even more dramatically, the CBO’s estimates of the Medicare savings from the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 underestimated the impact, on average, by a full 100%. That’s right: In the BBA’s first three years, Medicare spending fell fully twice as fast as the CBO had projected.”
Timothy Stoltzfus Jost: “[A] moment’s reflection would lead one to realize that the CBO’s guess that [a reform proposal] would save [only] $2 billion is about as worthless as an estimate that a loaf of bread will cost $5.65 in 2019, or a gallon of gasoline $4.73. Indeed, the CBO admits as much, stating that it actually believed the proposal would save nothing, but “there is also a chance that substantial savings might be realized.” . . .[T]he media needs to stop reporting CBO reports as though they reflect the real costs of reform.”
Maggie Mahar: “When I read Elmendorf’s testimony suggesting that the [House] bill wouldn’t bend the trajectory of federal health spending, I couldn’t help but wonder: Did he understand how the proposals in the 1,018 page bill dove-tailed with the excellent recommendations that the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPac) has made in recent years? Has Elmendorf read the lengthy MedPac reports?”
When respected experts like Maggie Mahar are wondering if Elmendorf has understood key literature in the area, something’s gone wrong at CBO. The media’s uncritical acceptance of his figures can only last as long as it fails to report the true complexity and uncertainty involved in both substantive reform and the do-nothing option that CBO’s handiwork is unintentionally advancing.
July 28, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Posted in: Health Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics
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Post on Legal Scholarship
posted by Frank Pasquale
Yale announced today that Robert Post will succeed Harold Koh as Dean of its Law School. I am thrilled to hear the news. I read Post’s book Constitutional Domains: Democracy, Management, Community while I was in college, and it helped convince me to go to law school. During my recent visit at Yale, Post struck me as one of the most intellectually interesting and friendly faculty members. Virtually every student I talked to who worked with him described him as an outstanding mentor.
Many of our readers might be interested in Post’s take on legal scholarship.
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June 22, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Posted in: Law and Humanities, Legal Theory, Philosophy of Social Science
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McCain–Sage of Stability
posted by David Gray
During the ending days of the Presidential campaign it seemed to those on both sides of the Red-Blue divide that we might be facing the end of days; some because a man of African heritage with documented exposure to Muslims might be elected, and others because he might not be elected because he is a man of African heritage with documented exposure to Muslims.
John McCain took an uncomfortably agnostic position in this battle of the social apocalypses. He suggested in the offing that Barack Obama was a man of mystery who had known associations with terrorists that had yet to be fully explained. Yet, Senator McCain was always cautious to stop short of overtly plucking the strings of lingering racism and well-nurtured xenophobia. His running mate was famously, and perhaps shamelessly, much more reckless, as were a substantial portion of his official and unofficial champions. His supporters in the electorate quickly connected the dots marked by the candidates, their deputies, and members of the media who regard the seeding of dark and seething suspicion as simply part of “showbiz,” to conclude that then-candidate Obama was, himself, a terrorist, a “sleeper cell,” a “racist . . . loon” and, quite famously, an “Arab,” and therefore unworthy of trust.
Senator McCain’s response to the “Arab” allegation was not to overtly deny the claim. Rather, he emphasized that Obama is “a decent family man, citizen, [with whom] I just happen to have disagreements . . . .” Senator McCain was criticized for that reaction by some who thought he should have more firmly denied the claim itself, or corrected the underlying assumption of the speaker that Arabs are not to be trusted, but I think McCain’s instincts were right, revealing a pretty sophisticated political theory of social stability with which I agree. More on why after the jump.
January 31, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Posted in: Philosophy of Social Science
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LawProf as Philosopher-King
posted by Frank Pasquale
Carlin Romano’s fascinating profile of Harvard Law Prof Roberto Unger should prove inspiring for any academics who long for a policy role. Here’s a taste:
His political involvement in Brazil dates to the late 1970s, when military dictatorship gave way to a “political opening.” Unger offered his services to the united opposition party. In 1978 he became that party’s chief of staff . . . . In those days, he says with a grin, he consoled himself “during solitary evenings … with readings and translations of Chinese imperial poetry, one of the themes of which is the presence of the exiled intellectual in the dusty steppes.” . . .
In April 2007, [Socialist President] Lula invited Unger for two long conversations in Brasília, then offered him a new position running a “Secretariat for Long-Term Actions.” Unger accepted, informing Lula that he’d start after finishing his Harvard semester. . . .
“I have the only position in the government that is about everything, except for the position of the president,” Unger exults. “He has all power, and I have none. But I have one advantage over him. I don’t have to manage daily crises. I’m therefore free — as he is not — to deal with the future and to deal with our direction. It’s been fantastic.”
Unger’s ideas for change are interesting, though the scholarship that underlies them has gotten a mixed reception in the American academy.
June 30, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Posted in: Culture, International & Comparative Law, Jurisprudence, Philosophy of Social Science
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Defense Spending as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
posted by Frank Pasquale
In a recent editorial, Robert Scheer wonders “Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any time since the end of World War II?” Scheer further wonders:
Maybe one can make a case that it is appropriate that more than half of the discretionary funds in the 2009 budget go to defense, and all the other federal programs for science, education, infrastructure, global warming and nonmilitary international programs compete for the rest. But isn’t it bizarre that the biggest peacetime military budget in U.S. history — 35% higher than when Bush came into office and larger than the military budgets of all other nations combined — is not even discussed in the current presidential contest?
I found Scheer’s questions particularly interesting as I read another article (this time from economists) challenging the view that the US can afford to spend 30% of its GDP on health care in 2050. If health spending reached such a level, the authors predicted a productivity crisis that would drag down the US economy in comparison to other countries’. We see glimmers of such arguments in periodic panics over the Medicare and Medicaid budgets at Washington think tanks.
I think it’s helpful to think about defense and health spending together because they reveal there is no objectively correct answer as to how much public spending there should be in any given category. In a world of escalating military tensions, military budgets may well have to rise. When a general “pax” prevails, there can be more investment in health and safety. Sadly, the perception of rising military tensions (and ensuing buildups) may well become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If your neighbor gets more arms, you’re well-advised to arm yourself. In such cases, the wasteful and destructive potential of positional competition is most evident.
June 10, 2008 at 9:10 am
Posted in: Philosophy of Social Science, Politics
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The Ideology of Privatization
posted by Frank Pasquale
When a majority of doctors back a national insurance plan, how do we keep getting health care that is more fragmented, private-insurer-driven, and risky? Zygmunt Bauman offers an insightful look at the ideology of privatization that cripples “collective responses” to problems like these:
May 14, 2008 at 9:33 am
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Health Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics
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“In much wisdom there is much grief . . .”
posted by Frank Pasquale
Conservative pundit Arthur C. Brooks has been discussing his book Gross National Happiness in a number of venues, including the NYT Freakonomics blog. Having criticized the progressive Robert H. Frank for using such data to support egalitarianism, I’ll now question Brooks’s subjectivism (which has led him in exactly the opposite direction as Frank on the inequality question).
Brooks is happy to report that his political allies are “winning the happiness game hands down.” He gives several hypotheses for conservative joy; stronger religiosity, more time with family, a preference for “simplicity” over “complexity,” and less likelihood to see oneself as a victim. Brooks occasionally concedes Mill’s argument that it is “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” But he appears most amenable to the view that liberals are likely to be whiny, complaining, resentful people, while conservatives resolutely consider themselves in control of their fate and satisfied with their lives.
Brooks’s research raises a number of interesting policy questions. First of all, what’s his root concern–happiness or virtue? We might map the classic tension between freedom and virtue to the present case: is it good action or the subjective feeling (Brooks alleges) it creates the desideratum here? If the latter, why not just provide people with soma? If the former, it’s a bit odd to introduce the “happiness evidence” as a reason for being, say, conservative, or good. Who’s Brooks’s audience? Exhausted hedonists just on the brink of giving up their Don Juan days to find more lasting pleasure at anti-tax rallies?
May 6, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Feminism and Gender, Philosophy of Social Science
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Department of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, Women in Science Edition
posted by Frank Pasquale
Recently Ben Barres, a professor of neurobiology, gave a fascinating talk at Harvard titled “Some Reflections on the Dearth of Women in Science.” His talk was based on his Nature article “Does Gender Matter” (to achievement in the sciences). I found the talk an extraordinary confirmation of my earlier worries about self-fulfilling prophecies and bias in the blogosphere.
Barres was responding to Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which, according to Barres, argues that men are innately “more aggressive and ambitious” and women innately “feel emotions more strongly” and “prefer to take care of children.” Barres explored how Rosalyn Barnett and Carolyn Rivers’ book Same Difference: How Gender Myths are Hurting our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs extensively undermined such ideas, exploring the numerous “nurture” based rationales for differences Pinker saw as innate. Barres recited several studies evidencing “gender prejudice” that influences choices from the very earliest stages of child development. His slide show (available here) also raised serious questions about Pinker’s neo-Darwinian agenda, tracing bias in it all the way back to Darwin’s 1871 Descent of Man, which argued that “The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman.” (In 1985, Richard Lewontin responded that “biological determinists have never found any credible concrete basis for such differences.”).
After punching various holes in Pinker’s scientific program, Barres concluded that “When faculty tell their students that they are innately inferior based on race or gender they are crossing a line that should not be crossed –the line that divides responsible free speech from verbal violence.” His comments bring to mind a struggle for the soul of academia–whether the university is defined by either a) a libertarian willingness to entertain *any* idea or b) a communitarian belief that academics are part of a larger process of social inquiry designed to improve the world. The former idea is a tempting for many, but when we try to recognize the range of research programs that are actually worthwhile to accomplish, we quickly see that such rules of recognition are themselves parasitic on situated concepts of what is important to us and what aspects of our tradition are most worth promoting. Barres points out that the mere act of setting an agenda of inquiry can itself not merely manifest, but also promote, the very biases the inquirer claims merely to be exploring.
Consider, for instance, an academic department set up to explore Pinker’s hypothesis that “Religion is a desperate measure that people resort to when the stakes are high and they have exhausted the usual techniques for the causation of success.” Or the question of whether academics should study the propriety of torture in the service of national security. We may all want to pat ourselves on the back for being brave enough to consider such inquires. (In the same manner as, say, Pinker appears to be proud to consider dangerous ideas.) Yet as Raimond Gaita has argued, sometimes an “open mind” can also be a (morally) empty one. Gaita argues that “Society is in fact defined by what is undiscussable.”
May 5, 2008 at 9:55 am
Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Philosophy of Social Science
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Stopping the Spin Cycle: Recognizing Bent Science and Stealth Marketing
posted by Frank Pasquale
American University’s conference last Friday “Does Red Lion Still Roar?” (about the past and future of media regulation) featured a number of great speakers, including Tara Malloy of the Campaign Legal Center, Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Media Access Project, and Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge. My talk focused on the type of social science considered by regulators, as did those of Catherine Sandoval and Philip Napoli. I think their perspectives could help us sort through a number of recent controversies in the media.
Sandoval highlighted some deeply troubling practices at the FCC, including decisions based on deficient data. Napoli noted that given government retrenchment in basic recordkeeping, and copyright challenges for private archives, it’s sometimes easier to study media of the 1920s than to get a good sense of what is going on today. Napoli noted that Europe has established “cultural observatories” which make such efforts easier. Both speakers suggested that it is essential for there to be some separation between data-gathering and policy-making arms of administrative agencies.
Their work reminded me of the pervasiveness of the phenomenon Ellen Goodman has deemed “Stealth Marketing“–and its power when combined with “bent science.” Just today the NYT reminds us of the degree to which we may be mis-evaluating biased data as “objective:”
April 20, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Posted in: Health Law, Philosophy of Social Science
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Should Public Intellectuals Appear on YouTube?
posted by Frank Pasquale
Leiter Reports notes a new Danish television program on philosophy, which reminds me of this review of a book on French programs on similar topics. The French were apparently way ahead of the curve in worrying about the future of philosophy as mere written words:
[In] the thirty years after the radio broadcast of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 essay “Republic of Silence,” philosophers in France were peculiarly concerned with their changing media. Declaring the book inert—“written by a dead man about dead things,” Sartre wrote in 1947, “it no longer has any place on this earth”—he advised contemporary writers to “learn to speak in images” and to work for newspapers, radio, and film.
Tamara Chaplin’s vivid, thorough, and irreverent cultural history Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television presents [programs featuring philosophers]. . . from [the] point of view . . . of a Parisian couch potato. . . . .The most charming scene in [one such program, The Teaching of Philosophy] is the attempt by the show’s director, Jean Fléchet, to capture “the philosophical event” in the “act of its becoming,” by putting Jean Hyppolite and Georges Canguilhem together in a taxi, where they debate the nature of truth.
Should philosophers (and public intellectuals generally) take to the airwaves? I think a few schools of thought on the topic are developing.
March 18, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Posted in: Philosophy of Social Science
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The Epiphenomenal Soul
posted by Frank Pasquale
Jeff Lipshaw has a good discussion of the recent journalistic obsession with experimental philosophy (x-phi). He also promotes a less modish work by Susan Neiman, entitled Moral Clarity. The x-phi crowd is very interested in recording the brain activity of subjects who are asked questions about whether, say, they would divert a trolley that was going to kill two persons onto a track where it would only strike one person. Neiman asks the following questions (among others):
What kinds of heroes are modern heroes? How do we talk about evil without slinging curses and mud? Learn to make moral judgments without clear instructions? Where does optimism end, and hope begin?
Having skimmed Neiman’s introduction, I hope her questions get at least the level of attention that the x-phi crowd gets.
February 5, 2008 at 9:30 am
Posted in: Legal Theory, Philosophy of Social Science
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Ten Favorite Books Read in 2007
posted by Frank Pasquale
I admit it: despite criticizing rankings here and in articles, I like a good “Top 10″ list as much as the next guy. As Harold Bloom opined in a recent podcast, there are more great books out there than you can possibly read in a lifetime, so you have to make choices. Since I get a lot of my reading from used book stores, not all of these were published in 2007. Without further ado, here are my picks:
10. David Feige, Indefensible: One Lawyer’s Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice. As I noted before, it’s a briskly written, insightful work by someone trying to do the right thing in impossibly difficult situations. Feige whisks you through a single day of his life as a public defender in the South Bronx. Most events in the day bring up some memory of past clients, who take on an almost palpaple presence in the narrative despite being limned in a series of fast-paced sketches. If you like “The Wire” or other crime dramas, you will almost certainly enjoy this book (and you might also like this podcast from Judge Nancy Gertner).
9. Frank Ackerman & Lisa Heinzerling, Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing. Ackerman & Heinzerling have an enviable knack for combining rigorous analysis with accessible prose. They do a great job exposing misuses of economic analysis.
December 31, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, Culture, Economic Analysis of Law, Legal Theory, Philosophy of Social Science
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This is Your Brain on … the New York Times
posted by Jeremy Blumenthal
A recent NY Times bit talks about “neurorealism,” that is, people’s increased tendency to believe psychological or other scientific assertions when those assertions are accompanied by images from brain scans. The piece quotes Deena Weisberg, who wrote an article in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience documenting this empirically (in both laypeople and, if I remember the article correctly, in experts, though to a lesser extent), and the neologizer, Eric Racine. The piece mentions a newspaper article “about how high-fat foods activate reward centers in the brain,” and asks, “Couldn’t we have proced that with a slice of pie and a piece of paper with a check box on it?” Brian Leiter also noted the Times piece, with a plug for his paper criticizing legal academics’ use of evolutionary biology.
But the Times bit, and these scholars, conflate two very different points. The first is the “credulousness” issue—that people believe the assertions when accompanied by brain images. That’s an important point, especially in the legal context, where judges, jurors, or policy-makers might be exposed to such scans and misled by such scientific “explanations” of behavior. (Of course, it’s not enormously surprising, given past concerns about jurors’ understanding of complex scientific evidence.)
But that’s quite a different point from the dismissive “check box” question, criticizing even the usefulness of such neurological research. fMRI and other such scans can of course provide important and useful evidence, and certainly can tell us more than simple self-reports or even other behavioral studies. Matt Lieberman, a psychologist at UCLA [disclosure: we were in grad school together] and one of those most prominently associated with the newish field of social cognitive neuroscience, has addressed this well, in answering whether SCN provides something more than conventional social psychology. Summarizing just one of his papers on the issue: he points out that fMRI can provide evidence that “two psychological processes that experientially feel similar and produce similar behavioral results, but actually rely on different underlying mechanisms,” such as memory for social and non-social information. It can document “processes that one would not think rely on the same mechanisms, when in fact they do,” such as the common neurological pathways in the experience of both physical and social pain. And more speculatively, he suggests, as “more is learned about the precise functions of different regions of the brain it may be possible to infer some of the mental processes that an individual is engaged in just from looking at the activity of their brains.” This is an important advantage to overcome potential difficulties in, for instance, self-report.
There is of course danger in over-selling fMRI and similar neurological evidence—whether evaluating psychiatric patients, capital defendants, or others—and documenting people’s susceptibility to such over-sell is important. But it’s quite a different question whether such scans can be useful, and to dismiss them out of hand is just as obviously a mistake.
December 19, 2007 at 10:57 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Behavioral Law and Economics, Blogging, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law and Psychology, Philosophy of Social Science
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The Place of the Humanities in Politics and Law
posted by Frank Pasquale
I just wanted to highlight two very insightful articles on the humanities I should have read earlier. First, here’s part of the abstract of Balkin & Levinson’s Law and the Humanities: An Uneasy Relationship:
Law’s professional orientation pushes legal scholars toward prescriptivism – the demand that scholars cash out their arguments in terms of specific legal interpretations and policy proposals. These tasks push legal scholars toward technocratic forms of discourse that use the social and natural sciences more than the humanities. Whether justly or unjustly, the humanities tend to rise or fall in comparison to other disciplines to the extent that the humanities are able to help lawyers and legal scholars perform these familiar rhetorical tasks of legitimation and prescription.
Laura Kalman has observed a similar tension between advocacy and academic research in the legal academy, and I’m happy to see B&L moving the conversation forward.
Second, here is Harvey Mansfield writing in First Things on How to Understand Politics:
Politics is not an exchange between the bargaining positions of a buyer and a seller in which self-interest is clear and the result is either a sale or not, all without fuss. As it happens, self-interest does not explain even commercial transactions. That we get angry if we feel cheated, or that we succumb to the charm of salesmanship, shows that more than a small measure of ego enters into the behavior of those who pride themselves on calculation.
Self-interest, when paramount, cools you off and calms you down; thumos pumps you up and makes you hot. In politics there is bargaining, as in commerce, but with a much greater degree of self-importance. People go into politics to pick a fight, not to avoid one.
A provocative and passionate take on a subject that many have tried (and failed) to reduce to transactional logics.
December 19, 2007 at 12:09 am
Posted in: Law and Humanities, Philosophy of Social Science
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Understanding Resistance to Redistribution
posted by Frank Pasquale
Over at Balkinization, Professor Brian Tamanaha worries that the “fabled American Dream, the supposed glue that holds our society together across its many fault lines, is a delusion for many.” He points to “new research [that] suggests the United States’ much-ballyhooed upward mobility is a myth, and one that’s slipping further from reality with each new generation.” (Even The Economist has recognized the problem!) Tamanaha wonders why the issue has so little visibility in national political debates, and gives several good reasons. I’d like to focus on one of them: the sense that increasing inequality “feels irresistible, the product of structural factors beyond our control.”
First, though this sense may be widespread, it is highly contestable empirically, and doesn’t really “ring true” at an intuitive level. Let’s not even talk about the justice or appropriateness of an executive making hundreds of times more than line workers–what about people who almost got to the top spot? As Eduardo Porter reports, “widening disparities in business, which show up in a variety of other ways, reflect a dynamic that is taking hold across the economy: the growing concentration of wealth and income among a select group at the pinnacle of success, leaving many others with similar talents and experience well behind.”
A form of “legitimation theodicy” has become important for some at the top, who reach for sports metaphors:
[Some] very wealthy men in the new Gilded Age talk of themselves as having a flair for business not unlike Derek Jeter’s “unique talent” for baseball, as Leo J. Hindery Jr. put it. “I think there are people, including myself at certain times in my career,” Mr. Hindery said, “who because of their uniqueness warrant whatever the market will bear.”
The flip side of this is a well-cultivated sense among the “losers” in the new economic order that their fates are their own fault. This is one reason why the SCHIP battle is so hard-fought right now: it is very important for those pursuing an inequality-enhancing agenda to insist that some people do not deserve health insurance. . . . and that that sin is so egregious as to be visited even upon their children.
December 18, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Tax
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Reprise of Son of “Hume v. Kant” Redux Again
posted by Jeffrey Lipshaw
Pardon my redundancy, but some debates just aren’t going to go away. Dennis Overbye, the very fine science writer for the New York Times, has an article/essay today that once again poses the essential Kantian-Humean issue – is there a priori knowledge by which we order sensory data (Kant) or is what we presume to know of the universe’s regularities merely a conclusion we reach by induction from all the past regularities (Hume)? Here’s a taste:
Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University and author of popular science books. . .asserted in [a New York Times op-ed piece] that science, not unlike religion, rested on faith, not in God but in the idea of an orderly universe. Without that presumption a scientist could not function. His argument provoked an avalanche of blog commentary, articles on Edge.org and letter to the Times, pointing out that the order we perceive in nature has been explored and tested for more than 2,000 years by observation and examination. That order is precisely the hypothesis that the scientific enterprise is engaged in testing.
I think the latter view (i.e. the Humean view) simply ignores too many unresolvable questions and paradoxes, like whence come scientific hypotheses, and the relationship of the scientific hypothesis to categories, analogies, and metaphors, but I also recognize that you don’t have to engage in meta-thinking about hypotheses to come up with hypotheses. Apropos of this is another quote in the article, this one attributed to Richard Feynman: “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”
I have been thinking about that quote this morning and trying to decide if philosophy of law or jurisprudence is about as useful to lawyers as ornithology is to birds. Is it a good analogy for either scientists or lawyers? We start with the relationship of the two concepts in the source which are linked by “usefulness”: ornithology is the science concerned with the classification and the properties and vital phenomena of birds; is it ornithology not useful to birds because they are incapable of thinking about ornithology, or because ornithology wouldn’t help them flourish as birds even if they could think about it? I think the former is the primary characteristic of birds, and I am hoping it’s the latter Feynman (if in fact he’s the author) wanted to imply about the primary characteristic of scientists as the target of the analogy.
To flip it around, suppose I said ornithology is about as useful to birds as physiology and anatomy are to human beings. That can’t be right, because physiology and anatomy are important to human beings. And I do think there are ethics of science and ethics of law that are part of meta-reflection about those disciplines, even for pure doers, that go beyond being birdbrained.
I guess my main problem with pure empiricism and pure pragmatism is that they give a great big shrug to the paradoxes and inconsistencies, probably because they are, for many people, too disturbing to consider. And to judge by a number of my family members, who roll their eyes and head for their iPods when I bring up these subjects, they are probably happier for it!
December 18, 2007 at 10:31 am
Posted in: Philosophy of Social Science
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Posner: Show Me the Money (and Little Else)
posted by Frank Pasquale
Many scholars are interested in new ways of measuring well-being that go beyond crude measures of income. I have thought of the UN Human Development Index as a good step in this direction, but Richard Posner has come out against it.
I agree with Posner’s critique of commensurability implicit in such a ranking, and his points about the distortions that can be caused by the “bunching” of many countries around one indicator. But if there are going to be rankings by income, I would think he would welcome alternative perspectives. Instead, he frets that the US loses out in the UNHDI because its life expectancy figures are lower than many other countries. I found this section of his critique troubling:
If a country devotes resources to improving life expectancy, it has to give up some other good. It is hard to say that the United States is making a mistake in not spending more resources on extending life expectancy; many Americans think that we spend too much on health care already. One reason (though by no means the only one) that the United States ranks only 44th in life expectancy is that our large black population has an abnormally high death rate; the average life expectancy of black male Americans is only 69. This shockingly high death rate reflects deep-seated problems of American blacks that would probably cost an enormous amount of money to solve. The political will to expend those resources does not exist. This may be a misfortune, a tragedy, or even a sin, but to use it to push the United States down in an index of human development is a political judgment, rather than anything determined by neutral social science.
Query: is the UN constrained to measure well-being only via neutral social science? Is that even possible? Well-being and development are inherently normative concepts. Their capacity to reflect a society’s “misfortunes, tragedies, or sins” is a feature, not a bug.
December 17, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality, Legal Theory, Philosophy of Social Science
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How the Economics of the Well-Off Can’t Help the Uninsured
posted by Frank Pasquale
Two of the most perceptive health policy analysts, Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein, provide a good “reality check” for those who think a Massachusetts-style health plan can fully handle the problem of the uninsured. (Though it took me a long time to figure out their title, “I am not a Health Reform,” was a play on Nixon’s “I am not a Crook.”)
Woolhandler and Himmelstein observe that the past twenty years of failed state-based health care reform (and mandates) do not bode well for the plans now being discussed among presidential candidates:
In 1971, President Nixon sought to forestall single-payer national health insurance by proposing an alternative. He wanted to combine a mandate, which would require that employers cover their workers, with a Medicaid-like program for poor families, which all Americans would be able to join by paying sliding-scale premiums based on their income.
Nixon’s plan, though never passed, refuses to stay dead. Now Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all propose Nixon-like reforms. Their plans resemble measures that were passed and then failed in several states over the past two decades.
W&H are particularly disappointed by the recent Massachusetts plan; “even under threat of fines, only 7 percent of the 244,000 uninsured people in the state who are required to buy unsubsidized coverage had signed up by Dec. 1. Few can afford the sky-high premiums.” W&H should also acknowledge that in some cases the uninsured themselves are responsible; according to one recent study, “twenty-five percent are eligible for public coverage.”
W&H suggest that mandates will not work, but do not have the space to fully explore why. I think they are right to emphasize lack of affordability in plans, but a recent book suggests some deeper issues. Charles Karelis’s The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can’t Help the Poor argues that we cannot expect impoverished individuals to react to economic incentives the same way that middle- and upper-class people do.
December 16, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Posted in: Health Law, Law and Inequality, Law and Psychology, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Tax
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Models and Games
posted by Jeffrey Lipshaw
This seems like an auspicious occasion to announce that, following in the Larry Solum model of developing a paper from blog post to short idea piece to full-blown article, I’ve posted on SSRN the complete version of what was known in a prior iteration as “Aboutness, Thingness. . . .” The last thing to go was the old title, and the second to last were the first several paragraphs of the old introduction, I suppose because the words are like children, these particular words had been around since I first put fingers to keyboard, and, if truth be known, I thought they were really clever. But these are all aspects either of self-deception or unwillingness to make choices, and who of all people inspired me but Katie Holmes (or at least her character in Wonder Boys, Hannah Green) who observed to Michael Douglas (as Grady Tripp) that writing was about making choices and he had made none in the manuscript of his second novel.
The gist of the piece, if I were to put it blog-colloquially, is how some modes of making sense of cause-and-effect, particularly in the realm of human behavior, just plain miss the boat. In natural science, an example would be trying to explain dog behavior and conditioning at the level of physiology. That level of explanation might suffice for a physiologist who is interested in measuring muscle contractions at feeding time, but it doesn’t tell the microbiologist much, nor does it do much to explain at the level of operant conditioning. In the social sciences, the distinction would be (courtesy of historian Thomas Haskell), the difference between explanatory cause and attributive cause. If you ask the thug why he beat the old man, an answer that involves neural pathways and muscular contractions may explain cause and effect at one level, but it doesn’t make sense in the same way this answer does: “because I wanted his wallet full of money.”
The part of the piece with which I had the most fun was where I applied the foregoing to the 2003 Yale Law Journal article by Alan Schwartz and Bob Scott on contract interpretation. In a nutshell (but you will have to read the piece to see why), my claim was that their mode of explanation simply missed the boat in the same explanatory versus attributive way.
The article is Models and Games: The Difference Between Explanation and Understanding for Lawyers and Ethicists. The abstract follows the fold.
November 29, 2007 at 10:30 am
Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Economic Analysis of Law, Legal Theory, Philosophy of Social Science
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Social Science Star: Randall Collins
posted by Frank Pasquale
Via Tyler Cowen, I’ve found out that sociologist Randall Collins has a new book coming out: Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. Here’s a provocative excerpt:
As popular music consumption became the central identifying point of youth cultures, it also came to support greater pluralism in student status hierarchies. . . . Moshers became the leading edge of punk culture, the attention-getters within their chief cultural rituals and gathering places. Not surprisingly, there is strong antagonism between moshers and jocks, their chief counterparts in the use of controlled violence in the conventional youth culture.
I heard Collins lead a class once while I was in college, so I’m unsurprised by Cowen’s raves about his work. He struck me as one of the most insightful, humble, and funny lecturers I encountered. His “Skeleton Key” to Max Weber masterfully condenses Economy and Society. I’ve been picking my way through his The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change for years. Inspired by that work, I have a few thoughts on how the radical reorganization of knowledge via the web and the blogosphere might affect our lives as academics.
November 8, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Posted in: Philosophy of Social Science
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