Scientism and the Fraud of Economic Incantations

How we pretend our choice of values is objective

In The Dismal Kingdom: Do Economists Have Too Much Power? Paul Romer argues that prior to the 1970s economists typically worked in the basement of firms, because they overestimated the value of their mathematical models. But eventually, governments came to rely on economists to act as philosopher-kings, to answer normative questions about what exactly government should do, questions which were often left unanswered by voters.

For example, whereas religions ascribe infinite value to each human life, economists believe human life has a finite dollar value, and the U.S. Department of Transportation used the economists’ models to reject the idea that truck companies should install certain safety measures on their vehicles to prevent accidents. This was because a cost-benefit analysis showed the measures would be more expensive than the lives that would likely be lost in the accidents, according to the economist’s math.

When billions of dollars were at stake in government policy, such as in the matter of whether the financial industry should be regulated, corporations exploited the government’s overreliance on economists, by hiring mercenary economists who would act as advocates for the company’s interests rather than even pretending to be scientists looking for the truth. As a result, the financial industry was left poorly regulated, which led to massive fraud in the American real estate bubble which burst in 2008.

Romer notes that these hired-gun economists “used the unfamiliar language of economics to obscure the moral judgments that undergirded their advice.” And he concludes that, “No economist has a privileged insight into questions of right and wrong, and none deserves a special say in fundamental decisions about how society should operate. Economists who argue otherwise and exert undue influence in public debates about right and wrong should be exposed for what they are: frauds.”

All of which seems to me cogent. But in the context of criticizing Alan Greenspan, who was one of the fake economists who was “invulnerable to evidence,” Romer says something more questionable which is that, “If economists continue to let people like him [Greenspan] define their discipline, the public will send them back to the basement, and for good reason.”

On the contrary, I expect that the nature of the mathematical abstractions economists hide behind gives us reason to doubt there will ever be such a public reckoning.

Our Ultimate Values are Non-Rational

To see why that’s so, consider that it’s not just science which is incapable of discovering what we ought to do; it’s reason in general that’s irrelevant to the fundamental questions of value. To be sure, philosophers after the Scientific Revolution have been busy attempting to reconstruct a moral framework in the nontheistic context, after Nietzsche famously declared that God is effectively dead, meaning that religion no longer has cultural force to justify anything in a developed society.

To take a contemporary example of this over-reliance on science, Sam Harris claims in The Moral Landscape that utilitarians have solved the problem of what morality has always really been about, since it’s self-evident that we strive to be happy in the sense that we prefer to maximize pleasure in the world.

How do we know the highest value is the maximization of happiness? Harris appeals to intuition, asking the reader to imagine two scenarios, one in which someone is miserable, the other in which she’s as happy as could be expected, these being The Bad Life and The Good Life. Harris stamps his feet and announces that anyone who doesn’t take that distinction to be morally decisive doesn’t value anything.

Indeed, Harris thinks the question of what our ultimate values should be has an obvious answer, as dictated by the intuition summoned by his thought experiment; the more interesting questions, for him, are the instrumental ones of how we can build a society that actually makes us happy, and that’s where science comes to the fore.

Alas, in explaining in the first footnote to Chapter 1 why he doesn’t bother to address the naturalistic fallacy, Harris says this is because that would require a philosophical discussion which would render his book boring! And it’s precisely because Harris eschews the philosophical background in his book that he gives such short shrift to an opposing view, called “deontology,” which says that duty matters more than happiness.

If the world is full of injustice, for example, we may be obliged to try to improve matters, but if we go on to feel happy under such imperfect circumstances, we might be doing a disservice to those who are less fortunate. Feelings of pleasure can depend on ignorance, short-sightedness, and insufficient compassion, which characteristics we might be ethically obliged to rectify. In a godless world, happiness might be for sheep, simpletons, and callous drones.

Look at the religious ascetics who renounce the pursuit of happiness to testify to their conviction that the present world order is flawed beyond repair. The fact that such renunciation is even possible proves that the search for happiness isn’t psychologically necessary.

Moreover, reason isn’t crucial to the decision whether to value happiness or duty or anything else. Typically, we just follow our social programming, but if we’re in the odd habit of philosophizing, we can rationalize our preference for this or that moral theory or we can admit — with David Hume and the existentialists — that the ultimate decision of whom we should strive to be is nonrational, that at some point we take a leap of faith.

Sam Harris’s Scientistic Hand-Waving

The reason I think Harris’s case for utilitarianism is worth considering here is that his approach has something in common with economics, which is scientism or science-envy. If you think science alone answers all meaningful questions or that deferring to science is useful even in morality and philosophy, because science has the most cultural credit, you’re bound to be disappointed. When your “arguments” prove inconsequential, as the nonrationality or even absurdity of the issues rears its ugly head, you’ll be reduced to waving your hands frantically to distract attention and reassure your audience.

Harris engages in hand-waving by pretending his appeals to intuition refute alternatives such as deontology, while he buries in a footnote his apology for not engaging with the voluminous philosophical literature on morality. His snide remark that he’s ‘convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “antirealism,” “emotivism,” etc., directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe’ is scientistic, since it evinces a baseless prejudice against a rival to the overreliance on science. The reason it’s baseless is that the average article from a science journal would be just as likely to put to sleep the nonspecialist reader as would a text that employs philosophical jargon.

Harris’s footnote is only making an excuse to cover for the fact that the questions of fundamental value are open-ended. At the outset of his book, Harris concedes that, “No one expects science to tell us how we ought to think and behave. Controversies about human values are controversies about which science officially has no opinion.”

But he follows that admission by saying he “will argue, however, that questions about values — about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose — are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood: regarding positive and negative social emotions, retributive impulses, the effects of specific laws and social institutions on human relationships, the neurophysiology of happiness and suffering, etc.” (my emphasis).

Presumably, the weight must fall, then, on the word “officially” in his admission that “science officially has no opinion” about questions of value.

More scientistic subterfuge is found in the second footnote to his Introduction, where he says, ‘For the purposes of this discussion, I do not intend to make a hard distinction between “science” and other intellectual contexts in which we discuss “facts” — e.g., history. For instance, it is a fact that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Facts of this kind fall within the context of “science,” broadly construed as our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality’ (my emphasis).

The tactic here is to pretend to broaden the relevant sense of “science” so that science can be given credit, say, for rational progress in philosophy. The broadening is only a pretense, as I pointed out, since Harris dismisses the history of the philosophical discussion of morality with an attack on its tedious jargon.

The Magic of Religious Distractions

Scientistic secularists are hardly the only ones who pretend to be solving the problem of ultimate values by mere hand-waving. Indeed, the tactic is easier to discern in the case of religion.

According to Judaism, for example, we ought to follow God’s commandments as these are set out in the Jewish scriptures. Many Jews are highly educated and secular in terms of their mindset and lifestyle. Nevertheless, they’re often unwilling to give up entirely on their religious traditions, because of the social value of celebrating the high holidays with family and because the endless stories of the history of Jewish hardships guilt-trips Jews into practicing more or less empty displays of religiosity.

What this means in practice is that although Reform Jews don’t think the Torah solves the problem of morality, they’re willing to tolerate standing in synagogue while the rabbi and cantor chant at length in Hebrew, in a language which most Jews outside of Israel don’t speak. That, at least, was my experience as a young Jew.

But the point is that the religious institution’s retaining of Hebrew acts as yet more hand-waving or even as an exercise in magic or mass hypnotism. If instead of Hebrew, the rabbi were to speak in a nonsensical language he made up on the spot, the audience would think him or her mad. But because they’re used to the sound of Hebrew, they give the rabbi a pass even though the two languages would be equally empty as far as those Jews would be concerned. (Yes, the book you read from in synagogue has the English translations, but have you tried reading in English while someone is chanting in Hebrew at you? That’s a good way to give yourself a headache.)

Hebrew operates like the convoluted old English from the King James Bible. The mellifluous ring to the biblical phrases adds to their mystique and even shuts off the reader’s critical faculties. The language acts more like music or a magical spell than like a rational presentation of information.

So here again we have empty gestures covering up the insufficiency of an answer to the question of what our ultimate values should be. From the rigmarole of voodoo spells, to the ritual sacrifice of animals, to the televangelist’s demagogic patter, we have so much nonsense on stilts or lipstick on a pig. By pretending we have an objective solution to the problem of how we should live, we “yada yada” our way around the inevitable letdown (as in the Seinfeld episode); that is, we wave our hands or babble or chant sing-songy soporifics to cover up the arbitrariness of our life plan.

Economic Abstractions as Mumbo Jumbo

Let’s return, finally, to economics and to its weapon of choice, mathematics. Thomas Carlyle called economics “the dismal science” because of the pessimistic predictions made by political economists such as Thomas Malthus. But I wonder whether the epithet should be reinterpreted to mean that economics as it stands now is dismal in the same way that Bernie Madoff must have felt dismal in perpetrating his Ponzi scheme, because many economists employ the secular equivalent of magic spells to hide the fraud of their enterprise.

Suppose you asked someone what the meaning of life is, and the person answered by writing down a stream of incomprehensible mathematical symbols. If you imagine you’d be at least momentarily comforted in that moment, as you’d be thankful that this evident expert may have finally solved the grand problem, just as a physicist uncovers how nature works, you’ve been influenced by the lingering climate of scientism.

It’s as easy to hide the truth as it is to reveal it with mathematical abstractions. Consider, for example, the nature of a scientific model. A model is a simplification, a strategic generalization that abstracts away from certain details to focus on a relationship between variables that might be explained. We explain things in nature piecemeal, then, breaking up the world into parts by objective reasoning, putting the world as a whole on the operating table and dissecting it, as it were.

As a result, scientific generalizations are typically ceteris paribus, meaning that they assume their subject matter exists in a vacuum so that the thing being explained isn’t diverted by the circumstances brought on by all those other parts of the world that aren’t the subjects of this particular model. Although this is somewhat controversial, the fundamental laws of physics are supposed to be perfectly general and time-symmetric, since they apply regardless of the time, place, or special circumstances.

In any case, the economist apes the physicist, implicitly treating society as if it were a physical system that can be objectively analyzed and mathematically mapped to provide the basis for deterministic predictions. As Philip Mirowski shows in More Heat than Light, the neoclassical economists went as far as to borrow metaphors from physics in formulating their fundamental concept of utility or value. Earlier economic thinkers such as Karl Marx and Adam Smith were at least more openly philosophical in their presentations, even if Marx, too, expected a scientific theory of history (just as Freud heralded psychiatry as a science).

To sustain the illusion that her models aren’t just self-reinforcing delusions, the economist has to make various unrealistic assumptions such as that people are robots operating with perfect information at their disposal, and she has to ignore “externalities” or complexities such as pollution. Again, all models simplify, but there’s a difference between ignoring some processes because you’ve put your finger on a real, quantifiable pattern in the world, and ignoring them because you intend to perpetrate a scam, to produce corporate propaganda for private gain and to camouflage the ruse with pseudoscientific (anti-empirical) gibberish.

With respect to the economist’s objectification of value, the math may lend credibility to the scheme because a simplification can come across as an idealization and thus can seem to have normative force. But the naturalistic fallacy stands in the way of assuming that just because you can narrow your focus and talk about a part of a whole, you’re automatically talking about the best part, about something like a platonic ideal that’s only imperfectly realized in practice.

The economist’s misuse of math should be compared to the broader charade of bureaucratese. Whether it’s in academia, business, government, or the military, experts often resort to jargon not just because the technical terms are useful in special contexts, but because the experts wish to ward off prying eyes. Indeed, I suspect that the root cause of this charade is that we’re ashamed whenever we succumb to purely animal patterns of behaviour, because we aspire to be “people.”

Here’s an anecdote to illustrate what I mean. While studying philosophy at university, I visited a government-supported center to get help with writing my résumé. After being so immersed in philosophical reflections, learning how to write a résumé was like learning another language. In short, I had to figure out how to describe my skills and job experience in bureaucratese.

If you spoke like a philosopher in a job interview, telling the blunt truth, eschewing delusion and self-deception like the plague, you’d be laughed out of the office. So you have to sell yourself with the résumé, meaning you have to fudge, spin, and bullshit perhaps to impress the potential employer, since those skills are in far greater demand than philosophical purity or artistic integrity.

However business practices may be rationalized, the main point of looking for a job is to compete to survive, which makes us like the very same animals we hunt or enslave. That comedown is psychologically intolerable, so with culture we disguise the unpleasant reality.

The disguise in economics, as in scientistic morality and religious mumbo-jumbo is like the green screen on a special effects movie set. To perform their roles, the actors have to see past the emptiness of the set or the foolishness of their bright green, skin-tight outfits. The greenness is meant to be covered up in post-production. Likewise, the intimidating math in economics is so much filler that allows the reader to do the real work (the post-production) of self-hypnosis: we fill in the blanks, taking the math as our cue to assume the economist is as legitimate an expert as a physicist or a chemist.

It’s clear what the economist means to conceal with her mathematical “yada yadas”: she means to get from (a) making tawdry excuses for the plutocracy wrought by “deregulation,” which plutocracy makes for a giant, animalistic dominance hierarchy, to (b) celebrating those excuses as if they were religious revelations or laws of nature. The bridge between (a) and (b) is sheer hand-waving shenanigans or absent-minded, “yada yada” spell-casting.

If math is based on unrealistic assumptions, it’s garbage in, garbage out. No matter how fancy its abstractions seem, a model based on such assumptions is worthless as a representation of reality. But the economic models that license the betrayal of humanistic values by a societal recursion to animal levels of inequality and domination seem prized by the same magical thinking that used to compel the tribe to look on with awe as the priest slit the chicken’s throat with a flourish to please the rain god.