The GOP Crusade Against Science

Last week, Paul Krugman wrote a column entitled "Republicans Against Science," noting matter-of-factly that the Republican candidate for President of the United States of America will almost certainly profess doubt regarding evolution, global warming and "fancy" economic theories. Although Republican anti-intellectualism is certainly not limited to these topics (these days the Party's know-nothingism seems boundless), willful ignorance on these topics - evolution, global warming and economics - is fast becoming the price of admission.

Fellow Kossack swellsman recently directed me to this 2004 blog post wherein the author waxes nostalgic for the pro-science, realist, buzzkill Republicans that most of us are old enough to remember:

Remember Republicans? Sober men in suits, pipes, who'd nod thoughtfully over their latest tract on market-driven fiscal conservatism while grinding out the numbers on rocket science. Remember those serious-looking 1950's-1960's science guys in the movies -- Republican to a one.

They were the grown-ups. They were the realists. Sure they were a bummer, maaaaan, but on the way to La Revolution you need somebody to remember where you parked the car. . . .

How did they become the party of fairy dust and make believe? How did they become the anti-science guys? The anti-fact guys? The anti-logic guys?

Tellingly, the author went on to expressly exclude John McCain from the anti-rationalist wing of the Republican Party. McCain's eventual (and for some heartbreaking) capitulation was a signal that the party's transformation was complete. At this point, the shining stars of the party - Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry - are aggressively anti-intellectual and even the previously sensible members of the party are forced to toe the anti-science line.

So how did this happen? How in such a short span of time did the Republic party go from being the wet blanket, adults in the room to being a party in open rebellion against science and reason?

Economics

Matt Yglesias believes he has pinpointed the precise date when Republicans jumped the shark on economics (my good friend Nate informs me the phrase "jump the shark" has jumped the shark; apparently, the new phrase is "nuke the fridge.") So now that we're all up-to-date on our pop-culture references (thanks Nate!), here is Matt Yglesias identifying one of the milestones on the GOP road to willful ignorance:

It seems to me that it’s possible to date the moment that conservative movement thinking on tax and budget issues jumped the shark. The date? August 6, 1996. The issue—Bob Dole’s economic plan:

In the face of a steady stream of solid economic news – low unemployment, mild inflation and rising wages – Dole will argue this fall that high taxes are keeping the American economy from realizing its full potential. . . . Dole said it’s the preamble to an even more ambitious and unspecified plan to restructure the tax system and “end the IRS as we know it” – all while keeping Social Security, Medicare and defense “off the table” from budget cuts.

“The real Bob Dole would wonder how you were going to pay for it,” said Martha Phillips . . . .

What you have here is a political movement that no longer understands its own theory. Flash back to the 1970s. You have high unemployment. But you also have high inflation. Because inflation is already high, you can’t boost growth by boosting aggregate demand. You need reforms that operate “on the supply side” and lower marginal tax rates count. Now we can debate ’till the cows come home whether or not Ronald Reagan’s 1981 budget actually had important supply side benefits, but the basic story makes sense. But by 1996, what is the problem that Bob Dole is trying to solve with this tax cut? . . . We need supply-side reform because . . . why? Ever since then, conservatives haven’t really answered “why” questions about their economic prescriptions. Instead they prescribe a cure for stagflation regardless of the situation. And over time, this scenario has become more and more toxic, such that today they’ve decided that we are experiencing high inflation even though we’re not.

I think there's something to this. We all know Reagan's supply-side rhetoric was mainly rhetoric (he raised taxes aplenty), but politically, the Two Santas strategy was a winner. So, for a long time, most Republicans would pay lip service to some form of supply-side, tax-cuts-pay-for-themselves nonsense, but once elected would appoint economists (like Greg Mankiw) who knew better. As late as 2004, Republican policy-makers were capable of making economic sense.

However, it's hard to maintain a separate public and private face and before you know it Plutocrat Pete can't control Tea Party Tim. So now we have beloved Tea Party politicians like Michelle Bachman who are utterly unfazed by fancy, schmancy economic theories. She swears that default would've been fine because . . . well, just because. And think about her position on the debt ceiling for a moment. The idea was to use the debt ceiling vote as leverage; it was a hostage-taking strategy. But Bachman didn't seem to understand even this much; her position was to vote against raising the debt ceiling no matter what. A hostage situation was created and her position was to shoot the hostage: Not shoot the hostage unless "x" demand is met, just shoot the hostage to shoot the hostage.

This is a serious contender for the GOP nominee for President of the United States of America - someone who doesn't even understand the mechanics of negotiation and who pines for a return to the Dark Ages. No really, she does:

I’m loving the New Yorker Michele Bachmann profile . . .this especially:

[In 1977, the Bachmans], . . . experienced a . . . life-altering event: they watched a series of films by the evangelist and theologian Francis Schaeffer called “How Should We Then Live?”

[.....]

The first five installments of the series are something of an art-history and philosophy course. The iconic image from the early episodes is Schaeffer standing on a raised platform next to Michelangelo’s “David” and explaining why, for all its beauty, Renaissance art represented a dangerous turn away from a God-centered world and toward a blasphemous, human-centered world.

Any right-wing hack can say that everything was fine before Lady Gaga and the hippety-hop, but it takes a real conservative intellectual to blame it all on the Renaissance.

Global Warming

The faux global warming debate is interesting because it's an utterly inorganic PR campaign. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway document in Merchants of Doubt (can't say enough about this book), the original global warming deniers (a group of four physicists) were former Cold Warriors who found themselves suddenly without a cause when the Berlin War fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated. Having prevailed, these anti-communists didn't pop the champagne and revel in their victory; instead, they moved seamlessly to protecting Americans from the reds-under-the-bed, environmentalists.

It appears they sincerely believed that environmentalism was a form of creeping communism that would lead inexorably to socialism and tyranny. But rather than having this insane, but sincere political debate, they insincerely attacked the science vis-a-vis the Tobacco Strategy, which had been cunningly engineered by PR firms when they found out their client's product killed people. Unlike other anti-scientific "debates," the global warming denialists played not to religious or cultural prejudices, but rather, to the skeptical values of science: Don't rush to judgment, consider all of the evidence, consider both sides - although this was a relentlessly anti-scientific campaign, it's effectiveness was based on exploitation of the values of science. And it worked for decades. One of the more surprising things about Merchants of Doubt is how long there's been scientific consensus regarding global warming (it's earlier than you think).

But what puzzles me is why members of the religious right (particularly those living on the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast) don't want to do something about global warming. The only way I can explain it is to see it as the consequence of anti-intellectualism: Once science, logic and facts are rejected, reasoned discourse is no longer an option; politics is based on power and with-us-or-against-us tribalism. So as long as a politician agrees with the touchstones of their theological agenda (Creationism, pro-life, anti-gay, with the occasional nod to school prayer), they'll uncritically adopt the other, non-theological planks of the platform. And not just half-heartedly, mind you. It always shocks me when poor people get red faced about government-provided health care and corporate welfare. But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, with-us-or-against-us tribalism is a deep-seated, primal instinct. The Enlightenment aspiration of societies based on reason is not the default; such societies are hard won and always precarious.

Evolution

To me evolution denialism is the crown jewel of the GOP crusade against science. I mean didn't we decide this in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925? And there isn't even a faux scientific debate - at it's top-dollar best Creationism is an article of faith that consciously ignores all of the evidence to the contrary.

If I had to guess its origin (and this is just a guess), I think I would pin it on William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale. It's kind of ironic given that Buckley would be horrified by Creationism - one gets the feeling Buckley was a Catholic in the Augustine-Aquinas-Jesuit tradition, not a redneck simpleton who believed the earth had a four-figure history, evidence be damned. But there are certain lines that once crossed have a life of their own and once you consciously start blurring the line between church and state, it's just a hop, skip and a jump to the What's-the-Matter-With-Kansas Republicans that comprise the increasingly powerful wing of the Republican Party known as the religious right.

By 2007, during the first GOP primary debate, three out of ten candidates were willing to unequivocally state that they did not believe in evolution. But these candidates - Mike Huckabee, Tom Tancredo and Sam Brownback - were not the front runners; they could be dismissed as representing a small, albeit vocal minority of the Republican Party. The religious right was loud (and obnoxious), but they were usually thrown under the bus when it came down to actual governing. The pro-business faction of the Republican Party takes their votes, but mocks them in their more literate publications.

But as the discussion of economics and global warming suggests, this Faustian bargain is not easily undone and soon the rejection science is obligatory. Thus, four short years later, the only candidate to side unambiguously with science, John Huntsman, isn't a serious contender. Rick Perry, Michelle Bachman, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum flatly reject science (Ron Paul doesn't even understand what all the fuss is about) while Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are trying to split the baby, claiming Creationism and science are compatible. So the elites of the Republican Party can look down their noses all they like; at this point, it is almost certain that the Republican nominee for President of the United States of America will reject (or at least publicly doubt) evolution, a subject on which there is absolutely no scientific controversy.

And that's the thing, that's what the elites mocking the rabble fail to understand - ideas have consequences. If you pay lip service to Creationism, global warming denialism and crackpot economic theories, why should science, logic or facts ever matter? For now, the elites are still able to prevail (by the skin of their teeth), but the anti-intellectualism of the Republican Party is gaining momentum and it's not at all clear that this trend can be contained, let alone reversed.

Cross-posted at Daily Kos.

The GOP Crusade Against Science

Technical Difficulties

I'm having a few problems with the site (namely, I erased a bunch of HTML code and now I'm having to backtrack and repost). And, of course, Daily Kos is simultaneously updating their site...so, could be a few.

Sorry if you received a bunch of silly email.

Technical Difficulties

The Flaw

Have you ever seen the black-and-white footage of school children being drilled to take cover under their desks in the event of nuclear attack? It always reminds me that my generation had no nuclear war drills. Not because we no longer feared nuclear war, but because we no longer believed we could survive. What kept the peace in the final years of the Cold War was mutually assured destruction (MAD), the certainty of complete annihilation kept both sides from initiating nuclear conflict. Other than anti-communism in popular culture (Wolverines!), that's pretty much the sum total of my experience with the Cold War - I spent my childhood all too aware that a massive arsenal of ICBMs, enough to destroy the world many times over, was aimed at my country.

Then, the year I turned 18, the Berlin Wall fell and two years later, the Soviet Union disintegrated. Very suddenly and much earlier than anyone expected, the Cold War was over and communism was defeated. It was touted as the penultimate triumph of free-market liberal democracy. It was, as Francis Fukuyama famously declared, the "end of history."

The official story was that capitalism had triumphed - not through force, but through superiority. Communism had collapsed under its own dead weight. This wasn't entirely true - it's too one-dimensional to be true - but it wasn't entirely false either: There was a stark, visible difference between those living in Western democracies and those living in the Eastern Bloc.

The political atmosphere was triumphant. Bleeding-heart, tax-and-spend liberals were out and Third-Way, DLC Democrats were in. Democrats were no longer soft on crime, they were willing to "reform" social services and they were pro-business in a way they had never been before. In light of this capitulation, it's hardly a wonder that capitalism ran riot. Radical laissez-faire ideologies gained increasing influence and markets were heralded as the solution to almost every problem.  

I certainly had doubts along the way and, in fact, those doubts were mounting. Increasing inequality, decades-long stagnation of wages, decimation of manufacturing at home, sweatshops abroad, an inability to protect the environment, a failed health care system - the idea that markets were the great panacea was becoming less and less believable.

For me these doubts were reaching a critical mass when, in 2008, the market failed. The first-world economy crashed and has yet to recover. In a defining moment, Alan Greenspan appeared before Congress and admitted his Randian ideology had a "flaw":

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: The question I have for you is, you had an ideology, you had a belief that free, competitive -- and this is your statement -- "I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We've tried regulation. None meaningfully worked." That was your quote.

You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price.

Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to -- to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.

And what I'm saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw. I don't know how significant or permanent it is, but I've been very distressed by that fact.

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality...

ALAN GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.

It was a stunning admission really. And my instinct is that it's true (he has since equivocated, but that doesn't make it less true). I say instinct because I have not yet fully come to terms with its meaning. What precisely is the flaw?

Freedom and Free Markets

What the triumph-of-capitalism, end-of-history story required - among other matters - was that the brutal history of capitalism be whitewashed. The ruthless, Lord-of-the-Flies reality of capitalism gave way to an unshakable and dogmatic faith in free markets. Capitalism was no longer just about profits, free markets equaled freedom.

This coupling of free markets and political freedom had long been promoted by Milton Friedman and it is the theme of his anti-government manifesto, Capitalism and Freedom. Once this dubious connection is made - and in those heady days after the fall of communism it became entrenched - any regulation, any taxation, any state ownership is not just economically unsound, it's a blow to freedom and an affirmation of tyranny and oppression.

This sounds like an exaggeration, but it's really not - the purest of the pure equate government-provided health care with Nazism. And it's not just those on the fringe (if Ron Paul can be considered the fringe). Friedrich von Hayek - who is beloved and revered by adherents to the free-market movement - argued that central planning would lead inexorably to totalitarianism. Milton Friedman - though willing to tolerate significantly more government intervention than the purists - tirelessly promoted the idea that free markets were a precondition of political freedom.

But the thesis is simply not supported by the evidence. It is not the case that there is a hard-and-fast correlation between free markets and free societies. We've seen highly-regulated economic systems in free societies (high-regulation, high-tax European countries) and highly-deregulated economic systems in autocratic societies (China and Russia). For the free-marketeer, the answer to such anomolies is always more purity. Free-market fundamentalists simply do not acknowledge the possibility of market failure. The answer is always freer markets.  

The Real Battle

In 2002 - less than one year after religious fundamentalists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - Jon Stewart suggested that the battle between liberals and conservatives had become anachronistic:

My view is that the liberal/conservative battle doesn't matter anymore; it's sort of a dinosaur. The real battle is actually extremism versus moderates.

When I heard this in 2002 I thought it was exactly right. That's the problem with our country - it's being overrun by right-wing extremists. And it's not just the problem with our country, it's the problem with the world - look at the terrorists responsible for 9/11. In fact, find some really ugly shit anywhere at any time and there you'll find some batshit crazy extremists.  

Although I still believe Stewart is getting at something very important, the term extremism is misguided because, as I've discussed at length elsewhere, the extremist/moderate construct is logically incoherent. The terms I've chosen, the terms I believe to be the least loaded, are Utopians versus Pragmatists - so to rephrase in those terms, I would agree with Stewart: the liberal/conservative battle doesn't matter anymore, the real battle is between Utopians and Pragmatists.  

Utopianism and Pragmatism: Burke and Popper

‘Everything has got to be smashed to start with. Our whole damned civilization has got to go, before we can bring any decency into the world.’ —‘Mourlan’, in Du Gard’s Les Thibaults.

Utopians are true believers. They're doctrinaire ideologues who have arrived at a radical prescription for society through deductive, a priori reasoning. They're levelers who have come to believe piecemeal change will never suffice. They have faith that their utopian vision would work if only they could wipe the slate clean.  

Pragmatists, as I'm using the term here, are perhaps best represented by Edmund Burke (the father of conservatism). For Burke, the Utopian project of the French Revolution was profoundly arrogant - human beings and society are far too complex to be encapsulated by an abstract theory. Societies which evolved over millenia shouldn't be leveled; reform should be gradual:

[Burke's] conservatism was rooted in a deeply ingrained suspicion of any radical politics that was based on abstract principles derived solely from the operations of reason; or as he put it, on an “insuperable reluctance to destroy any established system of government, upon a theory.” There is a basic idea here that is quite straightforward: Society is complex, and human nature unpredictable; therefore, it is not prudent to mess around with political and social arrangements that have stood the test of time. . . .

The French revolution . . . aimed simply to slough off the past. It was an attempt at a root and branch reconstruction of society on the basis of an abstract philosophy of natural rights. There was no recognition of the importance of tradition, custom and sentiment. It was, Burke argued, bound to end in bloody failure.

While Burke, interpreting events through the lens of the French Revolution, saw a battle between revolutionary levelers and conservative defenders of tradition, historian of science Karl Popper railed against Hegelian/Marxist historicism - specifically, the expressed or tacit belief that “history develops inexorably . . . towards a determinate end.” According to Popper, such radical determinism is the enemy of the open society and the foundation of all forms of totalitarianism. Popper thus rejects Utopian engineering in favor of pragmatic, piecemeal change:

[T]here is a certain approach towards politics which, I believe, is most dangerous. . . . The. . . approach I have in mind can be described as that of Utopian engineering, as opposed to another kind of social engineering which I consider as the only rational one, and which may be described by the name of piecemeal engineering. . . .

[The problem] is the sweep of Utopianism, its attempt to deal with society as a whole, leaving no stone unturned. It is the conviction that one has to go to the very root of the social evil, that nothing short of a complete eradication of the offending social system will do if we wish to ‘bring any decency into the world’ (as Du Gard says). [The problem with Utopianism] is, in short, its uncompromising radicalism.

Utopianism Versus Pragmatism in Iraq

In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein argues that free-market reformers, discouraged by the slow pace of democracy, became international ambulance chasers, homing in on countries so racked by crisis they wouldn't be able to resist the standard panoply of radical free-market reforms. Klein convincingly described how, in war-torn Iraq, the Utopian free-market reformers won out over the Pragmatists:

Iraqi exiles pushing for the invasion were divided, broadly, into two camps. On one side were “the pragmatists,” who favored getting rid of Saddam and his immediate entourage, securing access to oil, and slowly introducing free-market reforms. . . . On the other side was the “Year Zero” camp, those who believed that Iraq was so contaminated that it needed to be rubbed out and remade from scratch. . .

A parallel battle between pragmatists and true believers was being waged within the Bush Administration. The pragmatists were men like Secretary of State Colin Powell and General Jay Garner. . . . On the other side was the usual cast of neoconservatives: Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who lauded Bremer's “sweeping reforms” as “some of the most enlightened and inviting tax and investment laws in the free world”), Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and, perhaps most centrally, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.  . . . .

The Iraqi Year Zeroists made natural allies for the White House neoconservatives. . . . Together, they came to imagine the invasion of Iraq as a kind of Rapture: where the rest of the world saw death, they saw birth—a country redeemed through violence, cleansed by fire. Iraq wasn't being destroyed by cruise missiles, cluster bombs, chaos, and looting; it was being born again. . . .

On May 9, Bush proposed the “establishment of a U.S.-Middle East free trade area within a decade”; three days later, Bush sent Paul Bremer to Baghdad to replace Jay Garner, who had been on the job for only three weeks. The message was unequivocal: the pragmatists had lost; Iraq would belong to the believers.

As Klein details, the Utopian believers did in fact institute sweeping reforms - described by The Economist as a capitalist's dream - and yet, the experiment failed miserably. But failure - even abject and total failure - does not deter the Utopian. And in this regard, as Ms. Klein asutely recognizes, Utopians and religious fanatics are cut from the same cloth:

Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would think that the bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign, where there was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch. And yet the Green Zone neocons and their masters in Washington are no more likely to reexamine their core beliefs than the Taliban mullahs were inclined to search their souls when their Islamic state slid into a debauched Hades of opium and sex slavery. When facts threaten true believers, they simply close their eyes and pray harder.

The faith-based insistence that failure is never a flaw in the model, but rather, a symptom of impurity is perhaps the most chilling and defining feature of the Utopian mindset. One of the ironies - and there are many - is that the end-of-history construct presupposes the fundamental soundness of the Hegelian-cum-Marxist framework. Free-market fundamentalists define themselves as a rejection of communism, but they're really just the flip side of the same Utopian coin. They accept the determinist march-of-history analysis and simply believe Marx misapprehended history's culmination. In the end, Marxists and free-market fundamentalists are equally rigid and doctrinaire: If we don't currently live in Utopia it's because we're not pure enough - we need more deregulation, freer trade, lower taxes; and if that doesn't work, we need even more.

The Utopian Mirage

As Naomi Klein has documented, the quixotic quest for free-market purity led to what Klein has dubbed the Shock Doctrine. The Utopian free-market agenda required a degree of purity that cannot be achieved through the piecemeal democratic process. But Friedman realized that in the wake of a crisis, the citizenry is too preoccupied with survival to resist radical economic reforms; thus, crises became the springboard for the global neoliberal project. Contrary to the claim that free markets and freedom go hand-in-hand, free-market fundamentalism has spread not through democratic processes, but through coercion (IMF imposition of the Washington Consensus) and through opportunistic exploitation of crises (the Shock Doctrine).

And even this hasn't been enough. Economic shock therapy has been disastrous. Free-market Utopia has not been achieved. Predictably, some of its adherents believe the ideal society is just out of reach - the obstacle, they believe, is democracy. Accordingly, they are determined to create a free-market Shangri-La by seasteading:

I deeply yearn to live in an actual free society, not just to imagine a theoretical future utopia or achieve small incremental gains in freedom. . . . I recently began trying to create free societies as my full-time job, and this has given me a dramatic perspective shift from my days of armchair philosophizing. My new perspective is that the advocacy approach which many libertarian individuals, groups, and think tanks follow . . . is an utter waste of time.

Democracy . . . is ill-suited for a libertarian state. . . .  

Seasteading is my proposal to open the oceans as a new frontier, where we can build new city-states to experiment with new institutions. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for forming a new government, because expensive though ocean platforms are, they are still cheap compared to winning a war, an election, or a revolution. . . .

There is so much to unpack here - there's the deep yearning to live in an actual free society and not just imagine a future utopia (his word, not mine), there's the point-blank recognition that libertarianism and democracy are incompatible and then, of course, there's the seasteading. They've exploited crises for several decades, but have fallen well short of Utopia. But to the Utopian, failure doesn't suggest a problem with their ideology, the problem is democracy. So, the solution - obviously! - is an artificial island on the high seas. (You really can't make this stuff up.)

As Burke and Popper warned (and as the disastrous Iraqi experiment has shown), the Utopian dream is a mirage. Moreover, as economist Paul Krugman observed, the quest for Utopia is more than just futile or misguided, the Utopian crusade is the road to hell. It is simply not the case that any government intervention will lead inexorably to totalitarianism. It is not the case that free markets and political freedom rise and fall in precise unison. What history shows, in fact, is that the best and most decent societies history has thus far created aren't based on a Utopian ideal, but on an imperfect and pragmatic compromise.

The open society as thus conceived of by Popper may be defined as ‘an association of free individuals respecting each other's rights within the framework of mutual protection supplied by the state, and achieving, through the making of responsible, rational decisions, a growing measure of humane and enlightened life’ As such, Popper holds, it is not a utopian ideal, but an empirically realised form of social organisation which, he argues, is in every respect superior to its (real or potential) totalitarian rivals.

It would be hard to imagine a better symbol of free-market fundamentalism than the Maestro, Alan Greenspan. He openly acknowledged his reverence for Ayn Rand and he, probably more than any other person, was responsible for deregulating the financial markets. He was, in the end, wrong and the world will pay the price for his errors. But for one brief moment Mr. Greenspan was right about one thing: his Randian ideology - like all Utopian ideologies - is fatally flawed.

Author's Note

My original thoughts on this topic were inspired by fellow Kossak Dale, who suggested the historical link between Fukuyama's end-of-history thesis and the knee-jerk reliance on traditional free-market policies. Additionally, I was pointed to Karl Popper's critique of historicism by fellow Kossack Noziglia. This diary owes much to their contributions; any mistakes are my own.  

Cross-posted at Daily Kos

The Flaw

Inequality and the Envy Thesis

Since we're in the Lesser Depression and since inequality is at historic highs, inequality is finally on everyone's mind (though sadly, not yet on the agenda). The push back is definitely noticeable among the usual suspects - Fox News, Heritage Foundation - but it has also roused a traditional libertarian argument; namely, that concern regarding inequality is an expression of envy. This is absolutely backwards - not only is concern regarding inequality not a pathology, failing to be concerned about inequality is deeply immoral.  

The proto-libertarian Austrian economists fully embraced the "envy thesis" - the notion that advocacy for redistribution of any kind is an expression of envy.  The idea is so simplistic and backwards as to be laughable - it has only survived (and, in fact, thrived) because it's useful to robber barons.  Therefore, when Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises expressed the "envy thesis" in 1957, The Economist and even the National Review were appropriately dismissive:

The Economist said of von Mises: "Professor von Mises has a splendid analytical mind and an admirable passion for liberty; but as a student of human nature he is worse than null and as a debater he is of Hyde Park standard." Conservative commentator Whittaker Chambers published a similarly negative review of that book in the National Review, stating that Mises's thesis that anti-capitalist sentiment was rooted in "envy" epitomized "know-nothing conservatism" at its "know-nothingest."

As Noah Smith recently noted, this "envy thesis" is ubiquitous among self-styled libertarians.Here is Bryan Caplan of the Koch-funded Cato Institute:

If people envy people richer than themselves, I say we should fight envy, not inequality.

And in a separate publication, Mr. Caplan argued - in complete seriousness - that people who express concerns regarding inequality should be socially shunned:

Instead of praising those who "raise awareness" about inequality, perhaps we should shame them, like the office gossip, for spreading envy and discontent.

The underlying assumption of the "envy thesis" is that inequality should be supported - indeed we should shun those who "raise awareness" about inequality - because the wealthy earnedtheir wealth. Here is Dave Henderson, also of the Koch-funded Cato Institute, making this assumption explicit:

Then, in my late teens, I started to learn economics. I started to understand that the vast majority of income in a relatively free society is earned.

Oh, where to start? First off, the idea that the rich earned their wealth is so dubious as to be laughable. Let's take George W. Bush, for example. I don't even think I need to unpack that, right? Dubya - like most of America's aristocracy - "was born on third base and thought he had hit a triple."    

Next, even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that the wealthy did earn their wealth, there's a problem with the numbers. As wealth becomes increasingly concentrated, there are going to be many talented people who aren't rewarded. The spoils go to a handful of people and even if they are exceptionally talented (a dubious claim), they are not the only talented members of society. Clearly, many with equal, if not greater, talents lose out through no fault of their own. It's really just the maths.

Now I suspect, if pressed, most libertarians (almost all Koch-funded these days) would agree that there should be equality of opportunity. In fact, that's always the plutocratic mantra - equality of opportunity, not of outcomes. However, I sincerely doubt they'd be willing to take even the first steps towards that very radical solution. For example, I doubt they'd be willing to completely eliminate inheritance. And that would be required - inheritance would have to be abolished altogether, as would separate schools for the wealthy. In fact, as Paul Krugman notes, the project of creating even approximate equality of opportunity would require radical changes to American society.

But even if libertarians would agree to such radical changes, that's not the point. Even if we could create a perfect meritocracy, we shouldn't. Such a society would be deeply immoral. As John Rawls (and before him J.S. Mill) emphasized, it's not just inherited wealth that's not earned - merit has nothing to do with our nationality, our gender, our race, our intelligence, whether we're able-bodied or attractive and on and on. Even if the wealthy did earn their wealth (which they didn't), does that mean someone who is mentally or physically impaired should be required to fend for themselves? Shouldn't we all contribute to make sure the sick, the elderly, the infirm, the unlucky don't suffer? That's not envy. It's not a pathology. It's decency.

To think about those concerned with inequality as "envious" (and thus, pathological) is absolutely backwards - to be unconcerned with inequality is immoral. Distribution of goods in society is a question of justice (known as distributive justice - see e.g. John Rawls, but also every political philosopher ever). And the social unrest that accompanies this growing inequality is not an expression of envy, it's a reaction to fundamental injustice. And that's why inequality matters.

Cross-posted at Daily Kos

Inequality and the Envy Thesis

Why Bad Ideas Win Out: Crackpots and Billionaires

If you follow Paul Krugman, you know he says things like this all of the time:

Why do bad ideas flourish in policy discourse, even though a few minutes of thought and research would show just how bad they are? Why do they often become not just widely accepted but absolute orthodoxy, the things you have to believe in order to be a Very Serious Person?

I don’t have a full answer; self-interest is part of it, but not, I think, the whole story, since some bad ideas — like expansionary austerity — hurt even most of the elite.

What is this about? I think we all know money is part of the story, but what about policies that don't help business (think debt ceiling)? I believe Merchants of Doubt, a book by historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, provides important insight about the influence of crackpots and the role of billionaires.

Merchants of Doubt chronicles the global warming debate. As Oreskes and Conway document, a small group of scientists (not climate scientists, but physicists) were on the other side of numerous "debates," including second-hand smoke, global warming, acid rain and DDT.  

What Oreskes and Conway discovered is that these scientists weren't initially bought, but rather, were virulent anti-communists who believed that environmental regulation was a form of creeping communism that threatened our liberty. However, rather than debating whether we should have regulation, their strategy was to attack the science.  Although the original group of global warming deniers weren't funded by the fossil fuel industry, polluters certainly had common cause with their efforts and eventually, the think tank they founded (The Marshall Institute) was heavily funded by the the fossil fuel industry.  

Professor Oreskes explained in an interview that she really started to understand the story when she noticed that R.J. Reynolds was donating to the Ludwig Von Mises Cultural Foundation. For those of you who aren't already familiar, Ludwig Von Mises was an Austrian economist. Without going into too much detail, Austrian economic theory supports very limited government. So, they're generally anti-tax and anti-regulation. Also - and I'm sure I'll get some hostile comments - Austrian economics is a crackpot economic theory (a/k/a a heterodox economic theory).  As Paul Krugman once colorfully noted, he considered Austrian economic theory about "as worthy of serious study as the phlogiston theory of fire." However, the limited-government, laissez faire philosophy of such groups made them very useful to a host of monied interests and therefore, many of these crackpots were very well-funded.

So, industrialists fund various anti-government groups, but for the most part these groups aren't really "pro-business" - they get funded because they have a specifc common cause with business (taxation or regulation), but promoting business interests is not their reason for being. Thus, their reaction to a new event is not necessarily pro-business.

I think this is what happened with the debt ceiling - big business supports certain fringe groups and ideologies and then can't control them. What this means is that the story is money, but in an indirect way - it's about monied interests giving disproportionate influence to crackpot groups because, at some juncture (tobacco regulation, environmental regulation), the ideology of these groups was useful to big business.  However, when a new circumstance arises, the ideology may not be useful to business. But the ideology already has influence - big business can't just shut that influence down.

The anti-government complex - which, at this point, is massive* - is a Frankenstein monster that is generally aligned with business, but not always and not in a predictable way. And it turns out that when an economic crisis occurs, it's not a good thing - even for business - that a bunch of economic crackpots have significant political influence.    

*  The Kochs are libertarians and promote a soft form of Austrian economics (preferring Hayek to Von Mises). There was apparently a split between those who consider themselves purists (represented by the Mises Institute) and the Kochs (who fund various libertarian think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the Mercatus Center of George Mason University).

Cross-posted at Daily Kos

Why Bad Ideas Win Out: Crackpots and Billionaires