Thomas Sowell: Skeynesianism vs. Consequential Knowledge

In the 1980s two intellectual traditions died. Both had been elegant in theory. Neither worked in practice. Both had been highly illiberal--leaving no room for the individual. But both captured the imaginations of the intelligencia. And both had been dangerously wrong.

Once dead, these two traditions descended into the Underworld. There they found each other and engaged in unholy acts. The product of that union is with us today -- having climbed from out of the darkness -- first to suckle at the bosom of academe, then later, as an adolescent, it crept into the marbled domes to eat at the taxpayers’ trough.

The first tradition was Behaviorism, which was killed by the ascendancy of cognitive science. The second tradition was Keynesianism, which was killed by the election of Ronald Reagan.

Skinner thought you could tweak people into ideal behaviors. The mind, brain and the genes could simply be cut away in his methodology. To perfect people would be to stimulate them in the appropriate ways.  But that required lobotomizing them in a way. The baby that Skinner threw out with the bathwater -- cognitive neuroscience -- has come a long way since Skinner orphaned it. And, though Skinner has been pretty thoroughly discredited by contemporary science since Beyond Freedom and Dignity, strands of his thinking have re-emerged in the work of some behavioral economists.

Where Skinner discarded the mind, brain and genes at the local level, Keynesian turned individuals and their behavior into aggregates and abstractions at the macro level. Sophisticated mathematical models were enough, it seemed, to limn the important aspects of a deterministic economy. Generally, it doesn’t matter if that economy is made up of thinking, feeling, acting individuals with different predispositions. Circumstances of time and place -- individual actions and local knowledge - are not important from the perspective of expert policymakers.

Skeynesian takes the worst of these two dead traditions. And it's thriving. To qualify for appointment in academy or government these days, you have to be willing both to lobotomize and to abstract people. As Thomas Sowell says above, there are rarely any consequences for your actions. Your expertise is not a product of trial, error and refinement out in the real world. Your expertise is a "vision" and you are the "anointed." Your theory's rubber hits the road in places one cannot easily see. And that allows you to hide there behind all that marble, enjoying the fruits of tenure, getting the ear of the powerful, and holding the microphone of minor fame.

Comments

[Troy Camplin]

Behaviorism has been alive and well in education for a long time. They still use behaviorist assumptions. Which is one of the reasons education is also fad-driven -- because as each behaviorist-informed fad fails, another one is put in its place.