Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

The voodoo science of stimulus

Most social “science”, and macroeconomic modeling in particular, suffers from serious epistemological and methodological problems.  In a recent article for Reason Peter Suderman discusses the questionable models that are used to evaluate the effects of the stimulus:

According to the CBO’s estimates, depending on how the money is spent, one dollar of government spending can produce [...]

Scientific consensus

Scientific consensus seems a reasonable concept. If a great number of individual scientists arrive at a similar opinion this is generally a sufficient reason to have confidence in those views. Skeptics about scientific consensus often use examples of scientific views that started out as a minority view to become the majority view later. Although these [...]

A satire of the weather

Man the unknown

In a recent review of two new Ayn Rand biographies Daniel J. Flynn makes the following observation:
Ayn Rand’s midcentury novels continue to strike a chord because they read as though culled from today’s headlines. Here, Rand’s “looters” raid government coffers to bail out their poorly performing industries; there, Rand’s “moochers” demand that the “producers” pay [...]

Liberty and oblivion

In 1991 the Libertarian Alliance published an article called “Immortality: Liberty’s Final frontier” (PDF) by David Nicholas. In this article the author argues that “the continuing fact of death renders all talk of liberty ultimately futile.” The author further argues that our concern for the future will diminish as we approach death. But instead of [...]

Ages of laborious research

Terence W. Hutchison’s Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938) quotes John Elliott Cairnes on the methodology of economics as saying, “The economist starts with a knowledge of ultimate causes. He is already, at the outset of his enterprise, in the position the physicist only attains after ages of laborious research…”.
Hutchison responds to his [...]

Carl Menger and the exact science of economics

In Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938) Terence W. Hutchison presents a logical-empiricist perspective on economic methodology and takes specific issue with Austrian economists who believe that economic theories cannot and should not be falsified through empirical testing. In the chapter “The Application of Pure Theory” Hutchison criticizes Carl Menger’s view of what [...]

Arthur R. Jensen against politics

At one point in the conversations between Frank Miele and Arthur R. Jensen in the book Intelligence, Race, And Genetics: Conversations With Arthur R. Jensen, Jensen becomes impatient with all the questions about his politics and makes the following statement:
You keep harping on politics. Over the years, I have become increasingly disillusioned about politics and [...]