It might be economics, but it's not science

No sooner do I coin a well-received definition of economists, to wit: 

 “…the study of economics is not a science. Note that I did not write “exact science”.It is not a science at all. It is a set of beliefs that are held by individual practitioners and invoked under any and all conditions. Economists are Keynesians, Monetarists or follow the Austrian School in the same way as the devout adhere unquestionably to Mohammed or Christ or L.Ron Hubbard. Economists cannot agree among themselves on the right course of action under any given set of circumstances and they most certainly cannot predict what will happen in the future”. (See "Vincent Browne and the Euro) 

than a group of them comes along and seems to make every effort, in the pages of The Irish Times, to support my thesis.

An article in the paper of record on Friday 6th April and signed by no less than 43 academics, many in economics positions, is entitled “Austerity without growth a guarantee of stagnation”. It points out that a subset of the same group argued, two years ago, against spending cuts and tax rises as a means of dealing with the economic crisis on the grounds that it would kill growth and create high unemployment and debt. The current article seems to be claiming that this prediction has been proved correct, 24 months later. But two years is a mere blip in terms of the time required to create the economic conditions that would come close to being defined as normality.

“The evidence is clear”, they say, “contractionary fiscal policy does indeed restrict economic activity and employment”. This is an example of the kind of wooly thinking that's indulged in by those who have misappropriated scientific terminology. The statement is certainly reasonable, and one could even be persuaded to base policy upon it in certain circumstances. There is however no evidence, never mind clear evidence, in this opinion piece to support it.

The article is unscientific in that it never addresses other, feasible, hypotheses. For example, the proposition that taxes on high income groups actually reduce the tax take because they make it economically viable for the rich to simply remove themselves to another tax jurisdiction. Or that the EU / ECB / IMF solution to current woes - austerity now (but nothing like what the global financial markets would impose on countries like Greece and Ireland if they were to have a disordered sovereign default) to repair and consolidate Euro-zone peripheral economies so that the E-zone as a whole can prosper and grow in the future – might be the correct course of action.

The article could conceivably contain contradiction. At the start it is arguing against tax increases on low and average earners as the means of raising the funds for growth in infrastructure and other labour intensive projects. Less than 800 words later it’s calling for …”taxation targeting high-income groups, property assets, unproductive activity and passive income…”, “…stronger local taxation…”, “…the potential of social insurance and local taxation to broaden the tax base…” and claiming that “…PRSI [another form of taxation] can be expanded and combined with general taxation to provide free (sic) universal healthcare and earnings-related pensions”.  Many hold that all these measures simply trickle down as costs to middle and low earners through market forces.

Definitely not science. The scientific method has no room for ideology, for expediency or for plain, old fashioned, wishful thinking.

Science, Magic and Religion

The Internet truly is wonderful. Today I’d like to introduce readers to the possibility of viewing a complete undergraduate course at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), entitled “Science, Magic and Religion”, which is presented to us by Professor Courtenay Raia.

One would need to have a deep interest in the subject and/or rather a lot of time at his or her disposal in order to watch the whole course. However, the introduction video is well worth viewing, all by itself.

It is easy to imagine that it is only in relatively recent times that a clear distinction has arisen between the three elements in the title of this course: Isaac Newton, who discovered gravity, who defined mechanics and the laws of motion that bear his name, and who invented the Calculus, was an ordained clergyman who spent a good deal of his time practicing alchemy, the means by which many people of his day believed base metal could be turned into gold. Johann Kepler, who developed the laws that define the motion of the planets in their orbits around the Sun, had a steady sideline in the preparation of astrological charts which were supposed to tell the fortune of the person who commissioned them. In the Middle Ages astrology was taken so seriously that it was made a capital offence for anyone to attempt to tell the fortune of the King of England.

These videos have an added bonus in that Professor Raia is a joy to watch. She’s a supremely confident lecturer who uses her hands, in particular, to beautiful effect.

The scientific method

The recent news that scientists at the CERN European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva might have observed a sub-atomic particle that was capable of travelling at a speed greater than that of light has given some ammunition to those who would attack science, and scientists, in the interests of furthering their claims for religion. For example, Mr. Gregory Shenkman, in a letter to the Financial Times on Saturday Oct 8th 2011, has written:

“…science changes its mind about many things quite frequently. When it does so, it does not admit it was wrong before, it simply hands down a new tablet of stone. However, the current speculation at the facility at Cern as to whether certain subatomic particles can go faster than the speed of light demonstrates the need for science to keep an open mind”.

The discovery of anything that was capable of travelling at greater than the speed of light would, indeed, throw Einstein’s famous Theories of Relativity into disarray.

But theists, such as Mr. Shenkman, are being selective. For a start, they’re conveniently ignoring the fact that it was scientists who made this news public. That shows they do, in fact, have open minds. As for changing its mind, science is in a constant state of flux. In relation to scientific models that are still with us, such as the First and Second laws of Thermodynamics, Darwinian Evolution, The Germ Theory of Disease, and Special and General Relativity, any modifications that have been made since the original discovery was published have been in order to refine the model, never to negate it, and always on the basis of new evidence. One gets weary of hearing claims that “Darwin has been proved wrong” whenever something like punctuated equilibrium, the assertion that evolutionary changes are not constant over time, but occur in bursts, is postulated on the basis of new fossil discoveries. This is adding a new detail, guys, it doesn’t do anything to discredit the original theory.

There are theories we no longer hear about but which were strongly believed in at one time, such as the existence of the “luminiferous ether”, a substance that was supposed by scientists in the 19th century to occupy all of space. It was believed that it must exist, in order to transmit light waves, in the same way that air is needed to transmit sound. Its existence was disproved by the Michelson – Morley experiment in 1887. We now understand that most of the Universe is composed of a true vacuum.

The Michelson Morley experiment was believed at the time to be a failure because it did not detect the ether, which was part of the belief system of many eminent people who had devoted their lives to science. But it was not a failure. It simply gave us more information than we had before.

And the fact that the scientific community was able to come to terms with its results is therefore a triumph for the scientific method and for evidence based, as opposed to faith based, belief.

And so it goes. There might have been something faulty with the CERN experiment. Or perhaps Einstein was wrong. If he was, that fact will be embraced when all the evidence is in.

Reports of the death of philosophy are exaggerated

In his latest book, “The Grand Design”, the Cambridge professor and author, Stephen Hawking, has declared that “…philosophy is dead”. That seems a bit, um, final, particularly as some of his own work, especially that related to so-called black holes, those regions of space where matter is believed to be so densely packed together that the gravitational forces thus generated will not even allow light to escape from them, is some way from attaining the status of a theory that can be tested by experiment. Hawking originally held that all information about black holes was lost due to their extreme density, but in 2004 he changed his mind and began to argue that certain information could, in fact, escape from them.

In other words, at best black holes are imperfectly understood. They are postulated to exist towards the macro, or very large, end of natural phenomena. At the other extreme, at the micro level, when consideration is given to how atoms are held together, scientists are really little better off. The classic model of the atom, which those of us who did science subjects at school were presented with, has a nucleus which is surrounded by one or more electrons kind of rotating around it, in something like the manner of the planets orbiting the Sun. But this runs into serious difficulties when it is realised that the electromagnetic forces that govern the behaviour of the components of any atom are nothing like the gravitational forces that keep the Solar System intact.

As has been pointed out by David Deutsch in his book “The Beginning of Infinity”, this explanation could not work at all because “…even gravitationally bound objects are, in fact, spiralling towards each other, [but on a time scale that is measured in eons], while the corresponding electromagnetic process [the mutual attraction of the positively charged nucleus with the negatively charged electron] would result in the destruction of all atoms in a fraction of a second”.

According to Deutsch, “…atoms could not exist at all according to classical physics”.

So how are they explained? Not in anything like a definitive manner, it turns out. Deutsch has put forward an hypothesis that is based on the latest work in quantum physics. This involves the existence of a multiverse, which is a collection of parallel universes, but he is careful to acknowledge at the start of his book that this explanation is far from enjoying universal acceptance among practitioners in the field. In fact it is controversial.

To me, all of this indicates that, in terms of things such as black holes and an explanation for the true formation of atoms, thinkers are really only at the stage where they can come up with hypotheses for testing against reality, to be modified or rejected outright if the evidence eventually does not allow them to be sustained, all of which is in accordance with the scientific method.

Which is exactly what the philosophers of antiquity did. When Plato and his colleagues put forward the idea that all matter was made up of four elements – air, fire, earth and water, they were simply starting the process, using the knowledge and methods of observation that were to hand, that was modified and added to by others in a cumulative manner throughout scientific history. This includes Ernest Rutherford, when he came up with his planetary model of the atom described above, in 1911.

On this basis, Stephen Hawking, far from being able to support his assertion about the death of philosophy, is himself one of the foremost modern proponents of it. In other words, science and philosophy are inextricably linked, and have always been so. In fact, in Isaac Newton’s day, when he was musing about the nature of gravitation by, reputedly, reflecting on the convergence of a falling apple with the top of his head, and co-inventing the branch of mathematics known as the calculus, and working out his laws of motion, among other things (one of which was attempting to find the formula that would turn base metal into gold), the work he did was referred to as “natural philosophy”. This later came to be known as physics.