Democrats: the party of science?

Plus a brief detour into the philosophy of science

Matthew Yglesias has just tweeted this observation regarding the Democrats becoming the party of the intellectual elite:

“It’s darkly comic that as Democrats have become the party of “the experts,” basic economic knowledge has become lost in favor of just-so stories from random lawyers.”

Of course, we would expect a movement that embraces Carlson harping on about demons, or even arguably long before MAGA with the GOP’s embrace of creationism or climate-change denial, is going to repel intelligent folk of all kinds. Before MAGA’s assault on political pluralism, it was possible for free-marketeers to overlook these flaws; the GOP was a broad-church before it became a fusion of Groyperism and Trump’s cult of personality.

You could invoke whataboutism, and highlight the Democrats embrace of gender ideology (extending to support for gender-affirming care for children!), defunding the police, or critical race theory. Yet these positions were mostly confined to the more extreme leftist activists, and were always far from representative of the median Democrat policymaker (despite yielding a worrisome influence on them during primary season). Moreover, technically speaking, none of these positions have been unrefutably falsified, if we are to invoke a Popperian understanding of science. Indeed, critical race theory is not itself a falsifiable hypothesis, and defunding the police is an inherently subjective viewpoint.

On the other hand, where the GOP has rejected the scientific consensus, it has been on positions that have been unambiguously falsified. Creationism is unequivocally false. A model other than anthropogenic global warming; consistent with the trends in global temperatures since the 19th century, and what we know regarding classical mechanics, is incredibly unlikely to be true. Ex-ante, the predictions of anthropogenic global warming have held up incredibly well, so invoking Friedman's instrumentalism, we can take this theory to be a valuable model of the world.

So if the Democrats have become the party of intelligent folk, then why do they yield a tendency to embrace economic illiteracy. I think the answer lies in the tendency to treat economics as less of a science than the natural sciences. My response to Hanania on economic misinformation is relevant for summarising my views here:

“I'll have to disagree. Gauging from economists active on X, we seem to do a pretty good job at voicing the consensus, or critiquing misguided policy.

I think the issue is, economists seem to yield a preference towards speaking to their own. The insular nature of the profession is well known. We need to be better at communicating with the wider public. Likewise, given our speciality is evaluating tradeoffs, we tend to equivocate or qualify our statements. How many times have you heard an economist say "it depends" or "on the other hand"?

Likewise, the media disproportionately promotes partisan hacks (e.g. Krugman) for obvious reasons (selection according to the platform's leanings, and selection w.r.t. economists likely to act as an advisor to politicians), yet this isn't representative of the profession. We have our biases, but the math makes this transparent (hence why recent criticisms of too much maths in econ is misguided). For instance, on a paper on optimal taxation, you can see the social-welfare function, and the weights, used. Of course, this requires some mathematical literacy. Then of course the usual issues with empricial research (e.g. p-hacking to produce a politically desirable result) are well-known, but require some statistical literacy. Yet this transparency demonstrates that most of the time, we make an effort to be objective. Again, the problem can be reduced to communication: better emphasising the consensus (e.g. on trade/migration) and where/why we disagree (e.g. redistribution or the min wage).

Finally, econ is a social science, so it will inevitably always be seen as less objective than the natural sciences, no matter how strong a consensus is. You'll always find some fringe figure (e.g. Navarro or Mazzucato) who'll go against the consensus, complain about too many assumptions (which are again transparent, can be relaxed, and arguably most new publications in econ today are precisely about relaxing these assumptions), and get support from anyone who dislikes economists. The demand for MMT or other heterodox schools will always be nonzero, no matter how often we debunk them.”

I think a cursory understanding of the philosophy of science is a useful clarification here. Ultimately, economics is concerned with the same process of generating testable hypothesis then providing empirical support as the natural sciences. If your conception of science is “the set of statements that are unambiguously true” and you believe this statement to be true for physics, then this framework must account for, amongst other things: the irreconcilably of general relativity and quantum mechanics, the inherent probabilistic indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, the entropy of black holes, string theory, whether a cosmological constant (and what value it takes) predicts the expansion of the universe well, and whether the cosmological inflation theory holds. On the other hand, laboratory experiments of market design (for e.g. see the work of John List) are as close to the public perception of science as one can get.

In fact, the precise implication of Gödel's theorem is that if we seek to understand everything, then our model for understanding is going to be logically inconsistent, and if we insist of logical consistency, then we cannot “be God” and know everything. Science will always contain matters of disagreement or uncertainties: Gödel's theorem makes this inevitable. If this applies to mathematics and the “hard” sciences, then there is no inherent reason to elevate those fields over the social sciences.