Will Wilkinson, whom Jane Galt refers to as sickeningly brilliant, attempted a rebuttal of Jonathan Chait’s Fact Finders. He failed. Chait’s article wasn’t exactly a marvel of intelligent discourse, and I’m not going to defend its conclusions, but it was still far better than Wilkinson’s response. Let’s see what’s wrong with the latter.
Jonathan Chait’s article, “Fact Finders,” in the new TNR is one of the most obnoxiously blinkered pieces of self-serving political magazine writing in recent memory. I’m just flabbergasted by the stupidity of this thing.
Mere tone-setting. Do you see anything in there that resembles a fact, or even a reasoned criticism? If you do, have your eyes checked, because it’s not there.
Chait’s claim is that liberals by and large are empiricists, willing to go where the evidence takes them, while conservatives (loosely and irresponsibly identified with free-market types) are dogmatists who will unaccountably but doggedly cling to principle even after being brought low by data.
Not a particularly bad paraphrase, though a little self-serving in the way it presents a stronger and more absolutist contrast than Chait did. Only a whiff of straw, instead of the whole strawman I’ve come to expect from the antisocialists.
The claim is almost self-refuting.
I love self-referential statements. Don’t you?
Liberalism is not a list. It’s just not. And it is not a list that has incoherence as a natural byproduct of being a list that rejects ideological certainty. Green, Hobhouse, Dewey, Rawls, et al did not see themselves as championing incoherent lists of things people might happen to want. They championed a particular conception of the relationship between the citizen and the state based on what they took to be compelling general normative principles.
…which naturally lead to lists of more concrete policies and actions which would shape the real world according to those principles. As soon as we try to apply any principle, instead of just leaving it on the shelf to admire, we end up with a list. Conservatives, libertarians, and so on have their lists too, which anybody can look up in a manifesto or party platform. Rawls et al might not have championed the list itself, but they did not preclude its existence either. In fact, their works are full of examples which could be items on such a list. The fact that people express their interpretation of a principle as a list of consequences is not a failing; it’s a sign that people have actually made the connection between principle and reality. By and large, it’s a good thing.
If God came down and told conservatives that free-markets and smaller government aren’t the best way to get the things on the list kept in the offices of the New Republic (“And I know,” God said, “for it is I who made Nature’s Laws”) and the conservatives said, “Oh, that’s OK God, we’ve got a different list in the offices of Americans for Tax Reform, but then you knew that,” that’s not a failure of empiricism.
Actually it is, and there’s something a bit slippery about Wilkinson’s criticism. When we mention God we think of faith, so we interpret belief in what God says as a matter of faith. Wilinson is trying to make us think that those who disagree with God are the champions of empiricism. However, this God in Chait’s example is a God whose existence has presumably been validated as empirical fact, not a matter of faith. If this God tells us something different than what we already believe, it sets two sets of empirical observations against one another, not empiricism against faith. The correct thing to do when such a contradiction occurs is to attempt a resolution, all within an empirical framework. Accepting either conclusion without making such an attempt would indeed be a failure of empiricism (or, more correctly, of the scientific method) as Chait claims.
is Michael Kinsley Jonathan Chait’s main source of economic theorizing? I swear that just two weeks ago I heard the 2004 Nobel winner say that a system of social security personal accounts would have a monumental effect on the supply of labor, and thus on growth, and national wealth. So what’s an empiricist to do? Throw in one’s lot with Michael Kinsley or Edward Prescott?
This is an ad hominem attack with a red herring. How messy. Kinsley’s beliefs on social security are not relevant to this discussion, and bringing them up is a low attempt to paint Chait as inconsistent (when in fact he might be able to explain the apparent contradiction if given the chance) and thus discredit him instead of the argument he’s making.
In short, what Wilkinson is attempting is not really a reasoned rebuttal but a kind of sneering character assassination. By foregoing the opportunity to enter any empirical debate about the sources of people’s beliefs, he demonstrates exactly the kind of anti-empirical attitude among conservatives that he claims doesn’t exist. His claims of self-refutation are themselves self-refuting.
More on Chait
Canned Platypus offers a rebuttal to Will Wilkinson’s piece on Chait. I’m not generally a fan of the “fisking” format, but the rebuttal isn’t wrong in one easy-to-categorise way; it’s wrong in lot’s of small ways. For example, Mr Darcy, the blog…
I’ll try one time to explain this to you. If G-d verified that the liberals’ economic theories
are the best way to achieve conservatives’ economic goals, and conservatives failed to accept
these economic theories, this would be a failure of empiracism ONLY if these economic goals were
the only important goals conservatives (or even liberals) wish to accomplish, or if the economic
theories touched only on economic matters. To say that economic freedom, or the justice in one
profitting from one’s on labor and/or ideas, have intrinsic value, is not to reject empiracism;
it is merely to say that there are many diverse goals worthy of pursuing.
Liberals do not believe in empirical data; they believe in government solutions, the only
acceptable variable being the size of the funding. Liberals oppose any experimentation in Social
Security, school choice, welfare reform (before the Republicans won control and passed reform
over two Clinton vetoes), or almost any other non-military government program, unless you count
expanding the program or increasing the funding. If you accept no alternatives, there can be no
effective empiracle results, since all results will be seen as a need for increased funding.
Good. That should mean I won’t have to read the same evasions on behalf of conservatives (reminiscent of “it was never about the WMD anyway”) and obnoxious generalizations about liberals. If you’re as good as your word, that’s another minute I won’t have to spend disposing of refuse from the peanut gallery.
That said, I’ll try to explain why your attempted rationalization only results in a different kind of failure – but still a failure – for empiricism. The scenario only results in a success for empiricism if the empirical result is accepted and acted upon. There are two ways this can fail to happen, corresponding to two reasons why conservatives believed what they did in the first place. In the majority of cases, free markets etc. are not touted as good in themselves but as good because they lead to a desired outcome of greater prosperity for all. If it can be shown empirically that they do not lead to such an outcome, clinging to a belief in them represents one failure of empiricism. Let’s also consider the case, though, where someone believes in the inherent goodness of free markets, either originally or ex post facto as you have. This is of course contrary to the philosophical tradition that gave rise to such beliefs, but it’s true that empirical results would have no effect in this case. That’s still a failure of empiricism. It’s a failure to build a bridge, rather than of having built one and having it fall down, but it’s still a failure. You can reject the empirical result because you don’t want to believe it, or you can reject it because you consider it irrelevant, but either is a failure of empiricism.
It’s definitely worth noting that the one thing none of the antisocial-ists have tried to claim is that Chait’s outcome would not occur. They all seem to accept that the statement of an omniscient God (in whom many profess faith) would be rejected; the only question seems to be whether words can be redefined to avoid characterizing the rejection as a failure of empiricism. It’s mere sophistry, explaining or justifying nothing of consequence. In the end it does not refute Chait’s point but reinforces it.
I agree that the God anecdote is problematic and weakens Wilkinson’s argument. Because almost everyone — if certain of the existence of a particular and opinionated omniscient God — would accept God’s values as well as his empirical claims.
But I believe you are mistaken about why most people who value free markets do so. They do so because they value economic freedom, as part of the broader freedom they likewise value. More prosperity or economic growth is just icing on the cake.
Liberals (by the modern US definition, AKA progressives or socialists) do often make the empirical claim that their favored government intervention would increase prosperity. American conservatives and classical liberals (basically, libertarians) tend to disagree with these empirical claims, but more to the point, they also tend to believe that they are irrelevant because freedom is generally more important than economic prosperity. (At least, at this time, and given the likely trade-offs of policies being considered at this time; they might feel differently about government actions during, say, World War II, or in a famine.)
That libertarians value economic freedom more highly than you is not a failure of their empiricism or their metaphorical bridge-building skills, unless the bulk of the empirical evidence actually shows that something which they would define as economic freedom would be increased by a given government intervention, which intervention they nevertheless oppose.
Besides the fact that most libertarians do prefer consequentialist arguments, DW, there’s a problem with what they define as economic freedom. I believe in economic freedom in the sense of everyone having a chance to create value, and to succeed or fail according to whether or not they do so. In order for that to happen, various types of non-value-creating activity – e.g. shifting the costs of one’s operations onto the public, or extortion disguised as investment or “financial services” – must be curtailed. That makes laissez-losers turn all purple, but it’s not an overall reduction of freedom. It’s preserving the most important freedom for all at the expense of less important freedom for some. “Pursuit of happiness” is meaningless if some wear shackles and some wear jetpacks in that pursuit. What libertarians define as economic freedom means less than nothing to me and I deny their right to impose that definition unilaterally. They don’t value economic freedom more than I do; they just value a different kind, and saying that they value freedom more is just empty rhetoric.