Andrea Widburg
Too often, scientists and academics believe their mastery over data gives them moral authority.Scientists are increasingly taking on the role of dictating morality. Academic papers are full of pronouncements about how their touted research improves society. The field of economics is an excellent example. Economists create “utility functions” to study human behavior. A “good” is simply something that makes a person happier, as expressed by a higher utility. However, the devil is in the details.
In economics, a pedophile and a child both have utility functions. Suppose that the pedophile really enjoys abusing a child, while the child is so abused that he hardly notices the abuse anymore. Are we to add their utility together and decide that the overall effect is positive? If not, should we weight their happiness? Perhaps the pedophile should only be given a 30% weight to his feelings while the child gets a 70% weight.
In an organized society, decisions must get made about how to weight one person’s happiness against another’s. However, scientists have no more moral authority to determine those weights than any other member of society. Nevertheless, in a razzle-dazzle of complex and obscure equations and statistical results, they attempt, through sleight of hand, to suggest that their scientific methods qualify them to determine what those weights should be.
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Weighting predator versus prey by Andrea Widburg using AI.
Academic authors are encouraged to add sections to their papers proposing new policies and discussing the societal impacts of their research, preferably with the latest approved buzzwords. To do otherwise is to be judged as lacking in morality. The punishment is rejection.
Even worse, there is significant money to be made from coming to some conclusions over others. Governments and corporations, imbued with their own agenda, spend oceans of money to fund research. Academics are no less resistant to monetary temptations than anyone else, though they enjoy pretending otherwise. Their scientific “discoveries” somehow always seem to bend with the wind. The more economically and politically sensitive the topic, the more shrill the declarations of morality. It is pure deception.
The history of economics is one of humility, where economists were constrained to stay within the bounds of what science is capable of. For instance, economists did not add the utility functions of different people together. When judging what is right, they relied on what they could measure. “Economic efficiency” became a standard. Stated simply, a policy is economically efficient if it could theoretically improve at least one person’s welfare (through the consumption of more goods) without harming the welfare of any other person (through reduced consumption.) One person’s happiness was not weighed against another’s, and judgments were made based on whether people were happier without trying to quantify each person’s happiness.
Arguments to buttress the case were made that those who benefit from economically inefficient policies tend to be very visible and vocal. The harmful effects of inefficiency tend to be wide-ranging and difficult to observe and quantify. These effects are nonetheless very real and potentially very large. While each vocal group receives a benefit, the economy stagnates into widespread poverty through a thousand cuts.
Some policies have the desirable result of no conflict—some people benefit while no one is hurt. Economic efficiency reigns. However, many policies do not have this happy result. Shall we tax people to help a hungry child? Should we install expensive talking traffic signals to help the blind?
Academic finance papers are now replete with policy proscriptions and pronouncements about how to help particular groups, often referred to as “stakeholders.” These prescriptions typically extoll the benefits to favored stakeholders while ignoring, downplaying, or delegitimizing the costs to other groups.
The smug moral superiority of these pronouncements seeps through, along with the political bias of the authors. The fact that their proposals are economically inefficient and that groups are harmed is an uncomfortable subject that can be avoided by focusing on which “stakeholders” benefit.
Asserting that economic efficiency is the only legitimate criterion suffers from the same flaws. It is a criterion that can be quantified, but it is not the end of the discussion.
Taxing people to care for a hungry orphan is not economically efficient. Economists may be able to measure the economic losses of taxing people, but they cannot weight the welfare of those involved. The temptation is to assert that we should judge based only on what economists can tell us.
The Government Accounting Office (GAO) provides a microcosm of this problem. It is tasked with measuring the economic impacts of legislation and not making recommendations about whether legislation should be enacted. Decisions about legislation are supposed to be left to a representative republic to judge before God.
A lack of trust begins when people suspect that the GAO is shading the numbers to promote an agenda. How much worse would that lack of trust be if the GAO also expressed opinions on the merits of legislation?
Not surprisingly, public trust in academia has been plummeting. However, the malaise extends far beyond the hallowed halls of universities. Our society has increasingly turned from Christianity, leaving a terrible void that demands to be filled. The expansion of equations, statistical results, and learned academic prophets to fill that void has left deep dissatisfaction in its wake. How sterile and cold, heartless, and lacking in discernment those equations are.
Many famous scientists were Christians—not because they were pressured to espouse Christianity or because they were too ignorant to know any better. It was because they recognized that while science could study the workings of God, it could not quantify God’s love. Christianity and science work together for the benefit of the whole. Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, and Galileo Galilei, just to name a few, submitted themselves to this essential truth.
Even an academic staring at a monitor full of statistics may have a lovely daydream. In it, academics strive to fully measure policy effects without bias or inserting their own moral judgments or opinions in the name of science. Our pluralistic society, fully informed with the facts, then wrestles with those difficult decisions that pit one person’s happiness against another’s. Academics keep their personal opinions out of their research but, otherwise, fully participate in those judgments as equal members of that pluralistic society. God is the ultimate judge of right and wrong and guides his imperfect people towards moral choices.
However, in the world of academia, this daydream is hopeless romanticism.
