“… a philosophy is influenced by facts. So there is a
constant interplay between what do I think and why do I think it…. Now,
if you gather more facts and have more experience, especially with
things that have gone wrong – those are especially good learning tools –
then you reshape your philosophy because the facts tell you you’ve got
to… Ideology is a lot easier, because you don’t have to know anything or
search for anything. You already know the answer to everything. It’s
not penetrable by facts. It’s absolutism.” Paul O’Neill, quoted by Ron Suskind,
The Price of Loyalty, 2004
Paul O’Neill, President George W. Bush’s first Treasury Secretary,
was CEO of Alcoa Aluminum before being asked to serve in the Bush
administration by Vice President Dick Cheney. O’Neill readily agreed,
not aware of Cheney’s long history as a neo-conservative ideologue.
According to Ron Suskind’s must-read book, O’Neill was quite surprised
by the economy of rational thought demonstrated by the entire Bush
entourage. O’Neill describes two approaches to thinking: faith-based,
which characterized the Bush administration and reality or fact-based
thinking which characterizes science.
It may not be that some folks are ideologues and others are critical
thinkers necessarily. There may be some neuroscientific evidence that
associates the amygdala with belief and the anterior cingulated cortex
with critical thinking [1]. We all have an amygdala and an anterior
cingulate cortex wired into our brain structure so we are all at least
capable of ideological as well as critical thinking. Ideology, as
O’Neill suggests, is simply easier. Michael Shermer [1] calls this
observation Spinoza’s conjecture after the seventeenth-century Dutch
Philosopher Baruch Spinoza:
“belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity.”
Skepticism can be disconcerting because a skeptic must always be most
skeptical of his or her own opinions. On this, Richard Feynman wrote:
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
A lazy way to think is to surround ourselves with people and immerse
ourselves in media which agree with our preconceptions, i.e., inputs
which reinforce our ideologies. In this way, we never challenge
ourselves to think critically. One, therefore, should purposefully read
material with which we might disagree and also to be discerning even
about the material with which we think we might agree, since we have
limited time and cannot simply read everything. In any case, print
media is better than TV and peer-reviewed science is better than the
op/ed page of any paper. Where peer-review is not applicable, there are
other ways to identify reality-based thinking from blather. Richard
Feynman gives guidance:
“Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves.”
With this spirit, I read Thomas Sowell’s book
Intellectuals and Society
[2]. Thomas Sowell is a very smart man having a PhD in Economics from
the University of Chicago and having written over thirty books. His
mentor was the late Milton Friedman. He is a very influential
conservative intellectual.
The first sentence Sowell writes is:
“Intellect is not wisdom.”
And if he had stopped there, he would have written a nice little book.
The Thesis of Sowell’s book is that intellectuals are not
“shaping
the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power…but
shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power
holders…” According to Sowell this is a new phenomena associated
with the rise of democratic government. I get the impression he is not
happy about this aspect of the democratic process as the only
intellectuals he identifies are liberals. However, even in the
democratic USA, insider conservative intellectuals, like Sowell, still
hold the lion’s share of influence over policy. His thesis is
ridiculous. Liberal intellectuals could not stop the disastrous
invasion of Iraq in the face of strong support from the defense and
fossil fuels industries; they failed to win even a public option in the
health care bill in the face of strong opposition from the health care
industry; and their influence over the energy and climate debate has
been insignificant compared to that of the fossil fuels industry. On
the other hand, conservative ideologues have dominated policy outcome
with disastrous results. They are splattered all over Rupert Murdoch’s
media empire managing, as a Goebbelesque example, to convince a sizable
number of Americans of the myth that global warming isn’t real despite
the profound scientific evidence.
Sowell characterizes intellectuals as those having achieved a modicum
of success in one discipline, expounding on everything else far removed
from their expertise. He writes:
“Many intellectuals have been
justly renowned within their respective fields but the point here is
that many did not stay within their respective fields.” This is autobiographical.
What does the economist Sowell know about economics? The economist
Dirk Bezemer [3] trawled through the pre-crisis economic literature
looking for economists who warned us about the pending crisis
beforehand. Bezemer came up with only twelve names: Steve Keen, Dean
Baker, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Jakob
Brochner Madsen, Jens Kjaer Sorensen, Kurt Richebacher, Nouriel Roubini,
Peter Shiff and Robert Shiller. Sowell didn’t make the cut. In 2006,
in fact, Sowell wrote that housing prices were cheap completely missing
the housing bubble and subsequent economic meltdown caused largely by
the unregulated financial industry [4]. Figure 1 below showing the
Case-Shiller home price index (source New York Times [5]). Not only did
Sowell ignore fundamental data, he appears total unaware of the
alphabet soup of time bombs which the deregulated financial sector had
created such as Credit Default Swaps and Collateralized Debt
Obligations. In his article, Sowell uses the housing bubble to argue
for even more deregulation as if throwing gasoline on the fire was going
to put it out. Could he have been any more wrong?
Figure 1 Case Shiller home price index normalized to inflation.
Sowell wrote in 2005 that we didn’t have an oil crisis [6]. He used
this crisis to argue for more deregulation of the fossil fuels industry.
Any economist who fails to understand these events is blinded by an
ideology which must be fundamentally wrong. Sowell’s confidence in his
free market ideology which he applies with abandon to fields far removed
from economics is unwarranted.
Sowell is a climate physics denier [7]. A skeptic demands to know
what evidence informs Sowell that he can blithely reject the entire body
of scientific knowledge. What peer-reviewed science does he reference?
As a matter of some curiosity Sowell’s reference is a movie called The
Great Global Warming Swindle; a movie! Sowell complains that this
movie has never been shown in the United States. Assuming Sowell is
correct; then this movie was too dishonest even by Rupert Murdoch’s
standards. There is an important reason why the only evidence Sowell
can cite to defend his denial of fundamental science is a movie starting
among other charlatans Chris The Third Lord Viscount Monckton of
Benchley, who studied journalism in school, is pointedly not a
scientist, and has been warned by the House of Lords to desist claiming
to be a Lord [8]. The reason is the fossil fuel industry cannot find
credible scientists to support their rubbish. Despite being a failure
in his own profession, Sowell feels compelled to spread corporate myths
far afield. Sowell is the intellectual he describes in his book. From
reference [8]:
The House of Lords has taken the unprecedented step of publishing
a “cease and desist” letter on its website demanding that Lord
Christopher Monckton, a prominent climate skeptic and the UK
Independence party’s head of research, should stop claiming to be a
member of the upper house.
The move follows a testy interview given by Monckton to an
Australian radio station earlier this month in which he repeated his
long-stated belief that he is a member of the House of Lords.
Sowell criticizes Noam Chomsky but Chomsky has in fact contributed
substantially to his field of linguistics and unlike economics,
linguistics is a science. Chomsky’s books outside linguistics have been
well researched and verifiably accurate. Chomsky is a non-violent
activist, the bane of our military industrial complex. Sowell by
comparison and to the delight of corporate America glorifies war in his
book. Of Vietnam, he writes that it does not matter why we invaded the
country but we could have won. Won what; another divided nation;
another permanent hot spot; the right to garrison our troops in yet
another country? If he were a competent economist he would at the very
least be aware that the most long lasting impact of that war and Bush’s
Iraq War, was the destruction of the US economy, not to mention the
slaughter of millions of people pointlessly. We didn’t just lose the
war. Of Iraq, he is also dismissive of the reasons we invaded. Like a
pre-teen cheer leader he chants we could have won. We could have
captured the oil? Defeated Islam in this unholy campaign? Why we go to
war isn’t beside the point. It is the point.
Now I understand why ideological thinking has been preferentially
selected for in human evolution. A bad leader, say a Wilson, a Johnson
or a Bush, can convince a nation full of ideologues that god is on our
side and the cause is just. Skeptical thinkers ask too many pointed
questions such as why exactly are we doing this. In war, the country
with the most rabid ideologues has an advantage. And to the victor goes
the spoils. Thus, humans have evolved this possibly fatal flaw: though
we have the capacity to think, it is easier not to.
Sowell describing Sowell writes:
“These places [The Hoover Institute?]
to
which intellectuals tend to gravitate tend to be places where sheer
intellect counts for much and where wisdom is by no means necessary,
since there are few consequences to face or prices to be paid for
promoting ideas that turn out to be disastrous for society.”
Thomas Sowell’s mentor Milton Friedman took incorrect assumptions to
derive incorrect results, according to the economist Steve Keen [8], and
he weaved those incorrect results into an incorrect free market
ideology. Adopting that ideology blinds the student Sowell to physical
reality. As Michael Shermer points out in The Believing Brain [9]
“smart people believe weird things because they are skilled as defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.”
Sowell is right that intellect is not the same thing as wisdom.
Ideology precludes wisdom. Wisdom requires skeptical thinking and
skeptical thinking requires us to first and foremost to question our own
beliefs and if things are not working out the way we thought, we must
revisit our assumptions.
Paul O’Neill again:
“Now, if you gather more facts and have more
experience, especially with things that have gone wrong – those are
especially good learning tools – then you reshape your philosophy
because the facts tell you you’ve got to.”
I don’t recommend Sowell’s book but do recommend Keen’s book to
Sowell. But it may be that an ideologue is immune to self-examination.
[1] Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain, 2011.
[2] Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 2009.
[3] Dirk Bezemer,
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15892/1/MPRA_paper_15892.pdf
[4] Sowell:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell010506.asp
[5]
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/04/case-shiller-100-year-chart-2011-update/
[5] Sowell:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell082305.asp
[6]
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/23/276445/house-of-lords-tehouse-of-lords-monckton-to-cease-and-desist-claim-hes-a-member-of-house-of-lords-u-n-urges-maldives-to-prepare-for-climate-change/
[7] Sowell;
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/220309/global-warming-swindle/thomas-sowell
[8] Steve Keen, Debunking Economics, 2001.
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