relativism

Against Moral Anti-Realism

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 22 JDN 2460576

Moral anti-realism is more philosophically sophisticated than relativism, but it is equally mistaken. It is what is sounds like, the negation of moral realism. Moral anti-realists hold that moral truths are meaningless because they rest upon presumptions about the world that fail to hold. To an anti-realist, “genocide is wrong” is meaningless because there is no such thing as “wrong”, much as to any sane person “unicorns have purple feathers” is meaningless because there are no such things as unicorns. They aren’t saying that genocide isn’t wrong—they’re saying that wrong itself is a defective concept.

The vast majority of people profess strong beliefs in moral truth, and indeed strong beliefs about particular moral issues, such as abortion, capital punishment, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, contraception, civil liberties, and war. There is at the very least a troubling tension here between academia and daily life.

This does not by itself prove that moral truths exist. Ordinary people could be simply wrong about these core beliefs. Indeed, I must acknowledge that most ordinary people clearly are deeply ignorant about certain things, as only 55\% of Americans believe that the theory of evolution is true, and only 66\% of Americans agree that the majority of recent changes in Earth’s climate has been caused by human activity, when in reality these are scientific facts, empirically demonstrable through multiple lines of evidence, verified beyond all reasonable doubt, and both evolution and climate change are universally accepted within the scientific community. In scientific terms there is no more doubt about evolution or climate change than there is about the shape of the Earth or the structure of the atom.

If there were similarly compelling reasons to be moral anti-realists, then the fact that most people believe in morality would be little different: Perhaps most ordinary people are simply wrong about these issues. But when asked to provide similarly compelling evidence for why they reject the moral views of ordinary people, moral anti-realists have little to offer.

Many anti-realists will note the diversity of moral opinions in the world, as John Burgess did, which would be rather like noting the diversity of beliefs about the soul as an argument against neuroscience, or noting the diversity of beliefs about the history of life as an argument against evolution. Many people are wrong about many things that science has shown to be the case; this is worrisome for various reasons, but it is not an argument against the validity of scientific knowledge. Similarly, a diversity of opinions about morality is worrisome, but hardly evidence against the validity of morality.

In fact, when they talk about such fundamental disagreements in morality, anti-realists don’t have very compelling examples. It’s easy to find fundamental disagreements about biology—ask an evolutionary biologist and a Creationist whether humans share an ancestor with chimpanzees. It’s easy to find fundamental disagreements about cosmology—ask a physicist and an evangelical Christian how the Earth began. It’s easy to find fundamental disagreements about climate—ask a climatologist and an oil company executive whether human beings are causing global warming. But where are these fundamental disagreements in morality? Sure, on specific matters there is some disagreement. There are differences between cultures regarding what animals it is acceptable to eat, and differences between cultures about what constitutes acceptable clothing, and differences on specific political issues. But in what society is it acceptable to kill people arbitrarily? Where is it all right to steal whatever you want? Where is lying viewed as a good thing? Where is it obligatory to eat only dirt? In what culture has wearing clothes been a crime? Moral realists are by no means committed to saying that everyone agrees about everything—but it does support our case to point out that most people agree on most things most of the time.

There are a few compelling cases of moral disagreement, but they hardly threaten moral realism. How might we show one culture’s norms to be better than another’s? Compare homicide rates. Compare levels of poverty. Compare overall happiness, perhaps using surveys—or even brain scans. This kind of data exists, and it has a fairly clear pattern: people living in social democratic societies (such as Sweden and Norway) are wealthier, safer, longer-lived, and overall happier than people in other societies. Moreover, using the same publicly-available data, democratic societies in general do much better than authoritarian societies, by almost any measure. This is an empirical fact. It doesn’t necessarily mean that such societies are doing everything right—but they are clearly doing something right. And it really isn’t so implausible to say that what they are doing right is enforcing a good system of moral, political, and cultural norms.

Then again, perhaps some people would accept these empirical facts but still insist that their culture is superior; suppose the disagreement really is radical and intractable. This still leaves two possibilities for moral realism.

The most obvious answer would be to say that one group is wrong—that, objectively, one culture is better than another.

But even if that doesn’t work, there is another way: Perhaps both are right, or more precisely, perhaps these two cultural systems are equally good but incompatible. Is this relativism? Some might call it that, but if it is, it’s relativism of a very narrow kind. I am emphatically not saying that all existing cultures are equal, much less that all possible cultures are equal. Instead, I am saying that it is entirely possible to have two independent moral systems which prescribe different behaviors yet nonetheless result in equally-good overall outcomes.

I could make a mathematical argument involving local maxima of nonlinear functions, but instead I think I’ll use an example: Traffic laws.

In the United States, we drive on the right side of the road. In the United Kingdom, they drive on the left side. Which way is correct? Both are—both systems work well, and neither is superior in any discernible way. In fact, there are other systems that would be just as effective, like the system of all one-way roads that prevails in Manhattan.

Yet does this mean that we should abandon reason in our traffic planning, throw up our hands and declare that any traffic system is as good as any other? On the contrary—there are plenty of possible traffic systems that clearly don’t work. Pointing several one-way roads into one another with no exit is clearly not going to result in good traffic flow. Having each driver flip a coin to decide whether to drive on the left or the right would result in endless collisions. Moreover, our own system clearly isn’t perfect. Nearly 40,000 Americans die of car collisions every year; perhaps we can find a better system that will prevent some or all of these deaths. The mere fact that two, or three, or even 400 different systems of laws or morals are equally good does not entail that all systems are equally good. Even if two cultures really are equal, that doesn’t mean we need to abandon moral realism; it merely means that some problems have multiple solutions. “X2 = 4; what is X?” has two perfectly correct answers (2 and -2), but it also has an infinite variety of wrong answers.

In fact, moral disagreement may not be evidence of anti-realism at all. In order to disagree with someone, you must think that there is an objective fact to be decided. If moral statements were seen as arbitrary and subjective, then people wouldn’t argue about them very much. Imagine an argument, “Chocolate is the best flavor of ice cream!” “No, vanilla is the best!”. This sort of argument might happen on occasion between seven-year-olds, but it is definitely not the sort of thing we hear from mature adults. This is because as adults we realize that tastes in ice cream really are largely subjective. An anti-realist can, in theory, account for this, if they can explain why moral values are falsely perceived as objective while values in taste are not; but if all values are all really arbitrary and subjective, why is it that this is obvious to everyone in the one case and not the other? In fact, there are compelling reasons to think that we couldn’t perceive moral values as arbitrary even if we tried. Some people say “abortion is a right”, others say “abortion is murder”. Even if we were to say that these are purely arbitrary, we would still be left with the task of deciding what laws to make on abortion. Regardless of where the goals come from, some goals are just objectively incompatible.

Another common anti-realist argument rests upon the way that arguments about morality often become emotional and irrational. Charles Stevenson has made this argument; apparently Stevenson has never witnessed an argument about religion, science, or policy, certainly not one outside academia. Many laypeople will insist passionately that the free market is perfect, global warming is a lie, or the Earth is only 6,000 years old. (Often the same people, come to think of it.) People will grow angry and offended if such beliefs are disputed. Yet these are objectively false claims. Unless we want to be anti-realists about GDP, temperature and radiometric dating, emotional and irrational arguments cannot compel us to abandon realism.

Another frequent claim, commonly known as the “argument from queerness”, says that moral facts would need to be something very strange, usually imagined as floating obligations existing somewhere in space; but this is rather like saying that mathematical facts cannot exist because we do not see floating theorems in space and we have never met a perfect triangle. In fact, there is no such thing as a floating speed of light or a floating Schrodinger’s equation either, but no one thinks this is an argument against physics.

A subtler version of this argument, the original “argument from queerness” put forth by J.L. Mackie, says that moral facts are strange because they are intrinsically motivating, something no other kind of facts would be. This is no doubt true; but it seems to me a fairly trivial observation, since part of the definition of “moral fact” is that anything which has this kind of motivational force is a moral (or at least normative) fact. Any well-defined natural kind is subject to the same sort of argument. Spheres are perfectly round three-dimensional objects, something no other object is. Eyes are organs that perceive light, something no other organ does. Moral facts are indeed facts that categorically motivate action, which no other thing does—but so what? All this means is that we have a well-defined notion of what it means to be a moral fact.

Finally, it is often said that moral claims are too often based on religion, and religion is epistemically unfounded, so morality must fall as well. Now, unlike most people, I completely agree that religion is epistemically unfounded. Instead, the premise I take issue with is the idea that moral claims have anything to do with religion. A lot of people seem to think so; but in fact our most important moral values transcend religion and in many cases actually contradict it.

Now, it may well be that the majority of claims people make about morality are to some extent based in their religious beliefs. The majority of governments in history have been tyrannical; does that mean that government is inherently tyrannical, there is no such thing as a just government? The vast majority of human beings have never traveled in outer space; does that mean space travel is impossible? Similarly, I see no reason to say that simply because the majority of moral claims (maybe) are religious, therefore moral claims are inherently religious.

Generally speaking, moral anti-realists make a harsh distinction between morality and other domains of knowledge. They agree that there are such things as trucks and comets and atoms, but do not agree that there are such things as obligations and rights. Indeed, a typical moral anti-realist speaks as if they are being very rigorous and scientific while we moral realists are being foolish, romantic, even superstitious. Moral anti-realism has an attitude of superciliousness not seen in a scientific faction since behaviorism.

But in fact, I think moral anti-realism is the result of a narrow understanding of fundamental physics and cognitive science. It is a failure to drink deep enough of the Pierian springs. This is not surprising, since fundamental physics and cognitive science are so mind-bogglingly difficult that even the geniuses of the world barely grasp them. Quoth Feynman: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” This was of course a bit overstated—Feynman surely knew that there are things we do understand about quantum physics, for he was among those who best understood them. Still, even the brightest minds in the world face total bafflement before problems like dark energy, quantum gravity, the binding problem, and the Hard Problem. It is no moral failing to have a narrow understanding of fundamental physics and cognitive science, for the world’s greatest minds have a scarcely broader understanding.

The failing comes from trying to apply this narrow understanding of fundamental science to moral problems without the humility to admit that the answers are never so simple. “Neuroscience proves we have no free will.” No it doesn’t! It proves we don’t have the kind of free will you thought we did. “We are all made of atoms, therefore there can be no such thing as right and wrong.” And what do you suppose we would have been made of if there were such things as right and wrong? Magical fairy dust?

Here is what I think moral anti-realists get wrong: They hear only part of what scientists say. Neuroscientists explain to them that the mind is a function of matter, and they hear it as if we had said there is only mindless matter. Physicists explain to them that we have much more precise models of atomic phenomena than we do of human behavior, and they hear it as if we had said that scientific models of human behavior are fundamentally impossible. They trust that we know very well what atoms are made of and very poorly what is right and wrong—when quite the opposite is the case.

In fact, the more we learn about physics and cognitive science, the more similar the two fields seem. There was a time when Newtonian mechanics ruled, when everyone thought that physical objects are made of tiny billiard balls bouncing around according to precise laws, while consciousness was some magical, “higher” spiritual substance that defied explanation. But now we understand that quantum physics is all chaos and probability, while cognitive processes can be mathematically modeled and brain waves can be measured in the laboratory. Something as apparently simple as a proton—let alone an extended, complex object, like a table or a comet—is fundamentally a functional entity, a unit of structure rather than substance. To be a proton is to be organized the way protons are and to do what protons do; and so to be human is to be organized the way humans are and to do what humans do. The eternal search for “stuff” of which everything is made has come up largely empty; eventually we may find the ultimate “stuff”, but when we do, it will already have long been apparent that substance is nowhere near as important as structure. Reductionism isn’t so much wrong as beside the point—when we want to understand what makes a table a table or what makes a man a man, it simply doesn’t matter what stuff they are made of. The table could be wood, glass, plastic, or metal; the man could be carbon, nitrogen and water like us, or else silicon and tantalum like Lieutenant Commander Data on Star Trek. Yes, structure must be made of something, and the substance does affect the structures that can be made out of it, but the structure is what really matters, not the substance.

Hence, I think it is deeply misguided to suggest that because human beings are made of molecules, this means that we are just the same thing as our molecules. Love is indeed made of oxytocin (among other things), but only in the sense that a table is made of wood. To know that love is made of oxytocin really doesn’t tell us very much about love; we need also to understand how oxytocin interacts with the bafflingly complex system that is a human brain—and indeed how groups of brains get together in relationships and societies. This is because love, like so much else, is not substance but function—something you do, not something you are made of.

It is not hard, rigorous science that says love is just oxytocin and happiness is just dopamine; it is naive, simplistic science. It is the sort of “science” that comes from overlaying old prejudices (like “matter is solid, thoughts are ethereal”) with a thin veneer of knowledge. To be a realist about protons but not about obligations is to be a realist about some functional relations and not others. It is to hear “mind is matter”, and fail to understand the is—the identity between them—instead acting as if we had said “there is no mind; there is only matter”. You may find it hard to believe that mind can be made of matter, as do we all; yet the universe cares not about our incredulity. The perfect correlation between neurochemical activity and cognitive activity has been verified in far too many experiments to doubt. Somehow, that kilogram of wet, sparking gelatin in your head is actually thinking and feeling—it is actually you.

And once we realize this, I do not think it is a great leap to realize that the vast collection of complex, interacting bodies moving along particular trajectories through space that was the Holocaust was actually wrong, really, objectively wrong.

Against Moral Relativism

PNRJ core principles, development economics, ethics, Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Moral relativism is surprisingly common, especially among undergraduate students. There are also some university professors who espouse it, typically but not always from sociology, gender studies or anthropology departments (examples include Marshall Sahlins, Stanley Fish, Susan Harding, Richard Rorty, Michael Fischer, and Alison Renteln). There is a fairly long tradition of moral relativism, from Edvard Westermarck in the 1930s to Melville Herskovits, to more recently Francis Snare and David Wong in the 1980s. University of California Press at Berkeley.} In 1947, the American Anthropological Association released a formal statement declaring that moral relativism was the official position of the anthropology community, though this has since been retracted.

All of this is very, very bad, because moral relativism is an incredibly naive moral philosophy and a dangerous one at that. Vitally important efforts to advance universal human rights are conceptually and sometimes even practically undermined by moral relativists. Indeed, look at that date again: 1947, two years after the end of World War II. The world’s civilized cultures had just finished the bloodiest conflict in history, including some ten million people murdered in cold blood for their religion and ethnicity, and the very survival of the human species hung in the balance with the advent of nuclear weapons—and the American Anthropological Association was insisting that morality is meaningless independent of cultural standards? Were they trying to offer an apologia for genocide?

What is relativism trying to say, anyway? Often the arguments get tied up in knots. Consider a particular example, infanticide. Moral relativists will sometimes argue, for example, that infanticide is wrong in the modern United States but permissible in ancient Inuit society. But is this itself an objectively true normative claim? If it is, then we are moral realists. Indeed, the dire circumstances of ancient Inuit society would surely justify certain life-and-death decisions we wouldn’t otherwise accept. (Compare “If we don’t strangle this baby, we may all starve to death” and “If we don’t strangle this baby, we will have to pay for diapers and baby food”.) Circumstances can change what is moral, and this includes the circumstances of our cultural and ecological surroundings. So there could well be an objective normative fact that infanticide is justified by the circumstances of ancient Inuit life. But if there are objective normative facts, this is moral realism. And if there are no objective normative facts, then all moral claims are basically meaningless. Someone could just as well claim that infanticide is good for modern Americans and bad for ancient Inuits, or that larceny is good for liberal-arts students but bad for engineering students.

If instead all we mean is that particular acts are perceived as wrong in some societies but not in others, this is a factual claim, and on certain issues the evidence bears it out. But without some additional normative claim about whose beliefs are right, it is morally meaningless. Indeed, the idea that whatever society believes is right is a particularly foolish form of moral realism, as it would justify any behavior—torture, genocide, slavery, rape—so long as society happens to practice it, and it would never justify any kind of change in any society, because the status quo is by definition right. Indeed, it’s not even clear that this is logically coherent, because different cultures disagree, and within each culture, individuals disagree. To say that an action is “right for some, wrong for others” doesn’t solve the problem—because either it is objectively normatively right or it isn’t. If it is, then it’s right, and it can’t be wrong; and if it isn’t—if nothing is objectively normatively right—then relativism itself collapses as no more sound than any other belief.

In fact, the most difficult part of defending common-sense moral realism is explaining why it isn’t universally accepted. Why are there so many relativists? Why do so many anthropologists and even some philosophers scoff at the most fundamental beliefs that virtually everyone in the world has?

I should point out that it is indeed relativists, and not realists, who scoff at the most fundamental beliefs of other people. Relativists are fond of taking a stance of indignant superiority in which moral realism is just another form of “ethnocentrism” or “imperialism”. The most common battleground of contention recently is the issue of female circumcision, which is considered completely normal or even good in some African societies but is viewed with disgust and horror by most Western people. Other common choices include abortion, clothing, especially Islamic burqa and hijab, male circumcision, and marriage; given the incredible diversity in human food, clothing, language, religion, behavior, and technology, there are surprisingly few moral issues on which different cultures disagree—but relativists like to milk them for all they’re worth!

But I dare you, anthropologists: Take a poll. Ask people which is more important to them, their belief that, say, female circumcision is immoral, or their belief that moral right and wrong are objective truths? Virtually anyone in any culture anywhere in the world would sooner admit they are wrong about some particular moral issue than they would assent to the claim that there is no such thing as a wrong moral belief. I for one would be more willing to abandon just about any belief I hold before I would abandon the belief that there are objective normative truths. I would sooner agree that the Earth is flat and 6,000 years old, that the sky is green, that I am a brain in a vat, that homosexuality is a crime, that women are inferior to men, or that the Holocaust was a good thing—than I would ever agree that there is no such thing as right or wrong. This is of course because once I agreed that there is no objective normative truth, I would be forced to abandon everything else as well—since without objective normativity there is no epistemic normativity, and hence no justice, no truth, no knowledge, no science. If there is nothing objective to say about how we ought to think and act, then we might as well say the Earth is flat and the sky is green.

So yes, when I encounter other cultures with other values and ideas, I am forced to deal with the fact that they and I disagree about many things, important things that people really should agree upon. We disagree about God, about the afterlife, about the nature of the soul; we disagree about many specific ethical norms, like those regarding racial equality, feminism, sexuality and vegetarianism. We may disagree about economics, politics, social justice, even family values. But as long as we are all humans, we probably agree about a lot of other important things, like “murder is wrong”, “stealing is bad”, and “the sky is blue”. And one thing we definitely do not disagree about—the one cornerstone upon which all future communication can rest—is that these things matter, that they really do describe actual features of an actual world that are worth knowing. If it turns out that I am wrong about these things, \I would want to know! I’d much rather find out I’d been living the wrong way than continue to live the same pretending that it doesn’t matter. I don’t think I am alone in this; indeed, I suspect that the reason people get so angry when I tell them that religion is untrue is precisely because they realize how important it is. One thing religious people never say is “Well, God is imaginary to you, perhaps; but to me God is real. Truth is relative.” I’ve heard atheists defend other people’s beliefs in such terms—but no one ever defends their own beliefs that way. No Evangelical Baptist thinks that Christianity is an arbitrary social construction. No Muslim thinks that Islam is just one equally-valid perspective among many. It is you, relativists, who deny people’s fundamental beliefs.

Yet the fact that relativists accuse realists of being chauvinistic hints at the deeper motivations of moral relativism. In a word: Guilt. Moral relativism is an outgrowth of the baggage of moral guilt and self-loathing that Western societies have built up over the centuries. Don’t get me wrong: Western cultures have done terrible things, many terrible things, all too recently. We needn’t go so far back as the Crusades or the ethnocidal “colonization” of the Americas; we need only look to the carpet-bombing of Dresden in 1945 or the defoliation of Vietnam in the 1960s, or even the torture program as recently as 2009. There is much evil that even the greatest nations of the world have to answer for. For all our high ideals, even America, the nation of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the culture of “liberty and justice for all”, has murdered thousands of innocent people—and by “murder” I mean murder, killing not merely by accident in the collateral damage of necessary war, but indeed in acts of intentional and selfish cruelty. Not all war is evil—but many wars are, and America has fought in some of them. No Communist radical could ever burn so much of the flag as the Pentagon itself has burned in acts of brutality.

Yet it is an absurd overreaction to suggest that there is nothing good about Western culture, nothing valuable about secularism, liberal democracy, market economics, or technological development. It is even more absurd to carry the suggestion further, to the idea that civilization was a mistake and we should all go back to our “natural” state as hunter-gatherers. Yet there are anthropologists working today who actually say such things. And then, as if we had not already traversed so far beyond the shores of rationality that we can no longer see the light of home, then relativists take it one step further and assert that any culture is as good as any other.

Think about what this would mean, if it were true. To say that all cultures are equal is to say that science, education, wealth, technology, medicine—all of these are worthless. It is to say that democracy is no better than tyranny, security is no better than civil war, secularism is no better than theocracy. It is to say that racism is as good as equality, sexism is as good as feminism, feudalism is as good as capitalism.

Many relativists seem worried that moral realism can be used by the powerful and privileged to oppress others—the cishet White males who rule the world (and let’s face it, cishet White males do, pretty much, rule the world!) can use the persuasive force of claiming objective moral truth in order to oppress women and minorities. Yet what is wrong with oppressing women and minorities, if there is no such thing as objective moral truth? Only under moral realism is oppression truly wrong.

What good are macroeconomic models? How could they be better?

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, macroeconomics , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 11, JDN 2457734

One thing that I don’t think most people know, but which immediately obvious to any student of economics at the college level or above, is that there is a veritable cornucopia of different macroeconomic models. There are growth models (the Solow model, the Harrod-Domar model, the Ramsey model), monetary policy models (IS-LM, aggregate demand-aggregate supply), trade models (the Mundell-Fleming model, the Heckscher-Ohlin model), large-scale computational models (dynamic stochastic general equilibrium, agent-based computational economics), and I could go on.

This immediately raises the question: What are all these models for? What good are they?

A cynical view might be that they aren’t useful at all, that this is all false mathematical precision which makes economics persuasive without making it accurate or useful. And with such a proliferation of models and contradictory conclusions, I can see why such a view would be tempting.

But many of these models are useful, at least in certain circumstances. They aren’t completely arbitrary. Indeed, one of the litmus tests of the last decade has been how well the models held up against the events of the Great Recession and following Second Depression. The Keynesian and cognitive/behavioral models did rather well, albeit with significant gaps and flaws. The Monetarist, Real Business Cycle, and most other neoclassical models failed miserably, as did Austrian and Marxist notions so fluid and ill-defined that I’m not sure they deserve to even be called “models”. So there is at least some empirical basis for deciding what assumptions we should be willing to use in our models. Yet even if we restrict ourselves to Keynesian and cognitive/behavioral models, there are still a great many to choose from, which often yield inconsistent results.

So let’s compare with a science that is uncontroversially successful: Physics. How do mathematical models in physics compare with mathematical models in economics?

Well, there are still a lot of models, first of all. There’s the Bohr model, the Schrodinger equation, the Dirac equation, Newtonian mechanics, Lagrangian mechanics, Bohmian mechanics, Maxwell’s equations, Faraday’s law, Coulomb’s law, the Einstein field equations, the Minkowsky metric, the Schwarzschild metric, the Rindler metric, Feynman-Wheeler theory, the Navier-Stokes equations, and so on. So a cornucopia of models is not inherently a bad thing.

Yet, there is something about physics models that makes them more reliable than economics models.

Partly it is that the systems physicists study are literally two dozen orders of magnitude or more smaller and simpler than the systems economists study. Their task is inherently easier than ours.

But it’s not just that; their models aren’t just simpler—actually they often aren’t. The Navier-Stokes equations are a lot more complicated than the Solow model. They’re also clearly a lot more accurate.

The feature that models in physics seem to have that models in economics do not is something we might call nesting, or maybe consistency. Models in physics don’t come out of nowhere; you can’t just make up your own new model based on whatever assumptions you like and then start using it—which you very much can do in economics. Models in physics are required to fit consistently with one another, and usually inside one another, in the following sense:

The Dirac equation strictly generalizes the Schrodinger equation, which strictly generalizes the Bohr model. Bohmian mechanics is consistent with quantum mechanics, which strictly generalizes Lagrangian mechanics, which generalizes Newtonian mechanics. The Einstein field equations are consistent with Maxwell’s equations and strictly generalize the Minkowsky, Schwarzschild, and Rindler metrics. Maxwell’s equations strictly generalize Faraday’s law and Coulomb’s law.
In other words, there are a small number of canonical models—the Dirac equation, Maxwell’s equations and the Einstein field equation, essentially—inside which all other models are nested. The simpler models like Coulomb’s law and Newtonian mechanics are not contradictory with these canonical models; they are contained within them, subject to certain constraints (such as macroscopic systems far below the speed of light).

This is something I wish more people understood (I blame Kuhn for confusing everyone about what paradigm shifts really entail); Einstein did not overturn Newton’s laws, he extended them to domains where they previously had failed to apply.

This is why it is sensible to say that certain theories in physics are true; they are the canonical models that underlie all known phenomena. Other models can be useful, but not because we are relativists about truth or anything like that; Newtonian physics is a very good approximation of the Einstein field equations at the scale of many phenomena we care about, and is also much more mathematically tractable. If we ever find ourselves in situations where Newton’s equations no longer apply—near a black hole, traveling near the speed of light—then we know we can fall back on the more complex canonical model; but when the simpler model works, there’s no reason not to use it.

There are still very serious gaps in the knowledge of physics; in particular, there is a fundamental gulf between quantum mechanics and the Einstein field equations that has been unresolved for decades. A solution to this “quantum gravity problem” would be essentially a guaranteed Nobel Prize. So even a canonical model can be flawed, and can be extended or improved upon; the result is then a new canonical model which we now regard as our best approximation to truth.

Yet the contrast with economics is still quite clear. We don’t have one or two or even ten canonical models to refer back to. We can’t say that the Solow model is an approximation of some greater canonical model that works for these purposes—because we don’t have that greater canonical model. We can’t say that agent-based computational economics is approximately right, because we have nothing to approximate it to.

I went into economics thinking that neoclassical economics needed a new paradigm. I have now realized something much more alarming: Neoclassical economics doesn’t really have a paradigm. Or if it does, it’s a very informal paradigm, one that is expressed by the arbitrary judgments of journal editors, not one that can be written down as a series of equations. We assume perfect rationality, except when we don’t. We assume constant returns to scale, except when that doesn’t work. We assume perfect competition, except when that doesn’t get the results we wanted. The agents in our models are infinite identical psychopaths, and they are exactly as rational as needed for the conclusion I want.

This is quite likely why there is so much disagreement within economics. When you can permute the parameters however you like with no regard to a canonical model, you can more or less draw whatever conclusion you want, especially if you aren’t tightly bound to empirical evidence. I know a great many economists who are sure that raising minimum wage results in large disemployment effects, because the models they believe in say that it must, even though the empirical evidence has been quite clear that these effects are small if they are present at all. If we had a canonical model of employment that we could calibrate to the empirical evidence, that couldn’t happen anymore; there would be a coefficient I could point to that would refute their argument. But when every new paper comes with a new model, there’s no way to do that; one set of assumptions is as good as another.

Indeed, as I mentioned in an earlier post, a remarkable number of economists seem to embrace this relativism. “There is no true model.” they say; “We do what is useful.” Recently I encountered a book by the eminent economist Deirdre McCloskey which, though I confess I haven’t read it in its entirety, appears to be trying to argue that economics is just a meaningless language game that doesn’t have or need to have any connection with actual reality. (If any of you have read it and think I’m misunderstanding it, please explain. As it is I haven’t bought it for a reason any economist should respect: I am disinclined to incentivize such writing.)

Creating such a canonical model would no doubt be extremely difficult. Indeed, it is a task that would require the combined efforts of hundreds of researchers and could take generations to achieve. The true equations that underlie the economy could be totally intractable even for our best computers. But quantum mechanics wasn’t built in a day, either. The key challenge here lies in convincing economists that this is something worth doing—that if we really want to be taken seriously as scientists we need to start acting like them. Scientists believe in truth, and they are trying to find it out. While not immune to tribalism or ideology or other human limitations, they resist them as fiercely as possible, always turning back to the evidence above all else. And in their combined strivings, they attempt to build a grand edifice, a universal theory to stand the test of time—a canonical model.