M2RB: John Lennon
I’ve had enough of reading things
By neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
Experts manufacture whatever facts an activist, politician, or bureaucrat needs.
By Ronald Bailey
"Everyone is entitled to his
own opinion, but not his own facts," the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan
(D-N.Y.) famously quipped. But when it comes to social and environmental
problems nowadays, nearly everyone thinks he is entitled to his own
facts, and an army of experts is on hand to manufacture and promote the
carefully curated truths they require. The Progressive Era dream of empowering
nonpartisan experts to solve social, economic, and environmental problems has
failed spectacularly. What happened?
Breakthrough
Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael
Shellenberger grapple with this question in their recent essay "Wicked
Polarization: How Prosperity, Democracy, and Experts Divided America,"
which in turn highlights insights from a 1973 paper
by the urban planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber. Rittel and Webber drew a
useful distinction between "tame" and "wicked" social
problems. Tame problems are the sorts of issues that are routinely addressed by
scientists and engineers: sanitation, higher agricultural productivity,
electrification. They aren't necessarily easy, but they can be clearly defined,
relevant information can be gathered, and the effectiveness of proposed
solutions can be tested. Solving such problems resulted in improved health and
greater affluence, leaving the public and policymakers to focus on less
tractable social and environmental problems—that is, wicked ones.
The hallmark of a wicked problem is
that the way an expert conceives of it determines the solutions she recommends.
For example, Rittel and Webber observe, "'Crime in the streets' can be
explained by not enough police, by too many criminals, by inadequate laws, too
many police, cultural deprivation, deficient opportunity, too many guns, phrenologic
aberrations, etc. Each of these offers a direction for attacking crime in the
streets. Which one is right?" Forty years later, each theory still has its
devotees.
Rittel and Weber conclude that
people's judgments "are likely to differ widely to accord with their group
or personal interests, their special value-sets, and their ideological
predilections." When claims about a social or environmental problem do not
agree, the duo noted, "The analyst's 'world view' is the strongest
determining factor in explaining a discrepancy, and, therefore resolving a
wicked problem."
In the years since the planners'
paper appeared, Nordhaus and Shellenberger point out, "wicked problems
would proliferate along with experts in think tanks, universities, and
government agencies who set out to define them." Partisans can find
copacetic experts to affirm what
they already believe about vaccination, genetically modified
crops, drug policy, nuclear power, salt consumption, public transportation,
international trade, AIDS, R&D subsidies, school curricula, synthetic
chemicals, automobile safety, organic crops, fracking, and so on, practically
ad infinitum.
Progressives who believe that
corporations are unfairly denying workers a living wage can point to research
by analysts at Institute
for Research on Labor and Employment to argue that higher
minimum wages do not increase unemployment. Free marketeers can turn to the Employment
Policies Institute for evidence that boosting minimum wages
increases unemployment among the youthful and poor. The pro-immigrant Migration
Policy Institute can report
that Washington "spends more on its immigration enforcement agencies than
on all its other principal criminal federal law enforcement agencies
combined." The Center for Immigration Studies, which favors strict
immigration enforcement, can denounce
the study as "bogus" and "riddled with false statements,
cherry-picked statistics, and inappropriate comparisons." Climatologists
at the University of Alabama in Huntsville can assert
that the atmosphere "has not warmed noticeably since the major El
Niño of 1997–98—giving us about a decade and a half of generally stable
temperatures." Researchers associated with the Potsdam Institute for
Climate Impact Research can report that the warming rate has been "steady"
since 1979.
Rittel and Webber also observe that
"many societal processes have the character of zero-sum games"—that
is, they are processes in which one group's gains result only from another
group's equivalent losses. That fact, I suspect, explains why wicked problems
are proliferating.
For decades, an increasingly large
percentage of our economic output has been moved from the positive-sum game of
markets and private property to the zero-sum game of government and politics.
According to the Office of Management and Budget, total government spending in
the U.S. rose
from 17 percent of GDP in 1948 to 35 percent in 2010. As public
choice theory predicts, the more resources government
bureaucracies control, the more lobbyists, crony capitalists, and entitlement
clients will appear seeking to divert handouts into their pockets. Such
would-be beneficiaries need experts to construct the facts that they use to
justify to political patrons and agency bureaucrats why they deserve a share of
the government's largesse. To the extent that we live in a "post-truth
era," it is in good measure because it pays so well to dissemble,
exaggerate, and spin for government grants and favors.
Ultimately, Rittel and Webber
conclude, "There are no value-free, true-false answers to any of the
wicked problems governments must deal with." Nordhaus and Shellenberger
agree. "The problem is not that we are in a post-truth age," they
suggest, "but rather that we have not learned to adapt to it. Perhaps a
good place to begin is by recognizing our own biases, perspectives, and agendas
and attempting to hold them more lightly."
That would indeed be a good start,
but Rittel and Webber hit on a better way to adapt. One "approach to the
reconciliation of social values and individual choice," they note,
"is to bias in favor of the latter. Accordingly, one would promote widened
differentiation of goods, services, environments, and opportunities, such that
individuals might more closely satisfy their individual preferences."
Instead of entrusting decisions to purportedly "wise and knowledgeable
professional experts and politicians" who aim to impose the "one-best
answer," individuals should be allowed to pursue their own visions of the
true and the good.
The institution best known for
increasing the differentiation of goods, services, environments, and
opportunities and for enabling people to express their differing values is the
free market. Markets don't need to be run by experts. Any entrepreneur with a
new idea, service, or product can pursue and try to profit from what they
believe to be the truth.
Give Me Some
Truth – John Lennon
I’m sick and
tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
I’ve had enough of reading things
By neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky dicky
Is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of hope
Money for dope
Money for rope
No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky dicky
Is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of hope
Money for dope
Money for rope
I’m sick to death of seeing things
From tight-lipped, condescending, mama’s little chauvinists
All I want is the truth now
Just gimmie some truth now
I’ve had enough of watching scenes
Of schizophrenic, ego-centric, paranoiac, prima-donnas
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky dicky
Is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of hope
It’s money for dope
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
I’ve had enough of reading things
By neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky dicky
Is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of hope
Money for dope
Money for rope
No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky dicky
Is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of hope
Money for dope
Money for rope
I’m sick to death of seeing things
From tight-lipped, condescending, mama’s little chauvinists
All I want is the truth now
Just gimmie some truth now
I’ve had enough of watching scenes
Of schizophrenic, ego-centric, paranoiac, prima-donnas
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky dicky
Is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of hope
It’s money for dope
Money for
rope
Ah, I’m sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
Ah, I’m sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
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