I recently had the opportunity of visiting the emergency room at a big university hospital close to where I live (as a “customer,” unfortunately). It is safe to say that I was positively surprised by this experience. Of course, being from Sweden I expected something similar to the emergency rooms back home; Sweden is a socialist country, but it is not a backward, third world kind of place – the quality of health care is generally the same as in the US.

Since I have experience from visiting a big university emergency room in Sweden as well, this is the perfect opportunity to tell the world of my experience in a comparative case study. Both visits are from college towns, which should mean that a lion’s share of the population is very young and, one would presume, healthy. (For the sake of clarity: neither of the case studies involve ambulance but only walk-in emergency care. And in neither of the cases was for very serious medical problems, so don’t worry – I’m fine.)

The university hospital I visited here in the US is part of a very big, public university, so the comparison is not one of purely private vs. public. But it is safe to say that the differences between the two cases is primarily due to institutional differences: health care in the US is to a large extent paid for via [private] health insurance whereas all emergency care in Sweden is legally a public monopoly. There may be differences due to regional factors, traditions, culture, etc too – but since I have experience of both systems and it is easily shown that the quality of care in Sweden and the US is basically the same, I would say one can be fairly certain that the general differences shown in this case study are typical.

Let me first briefly tell you about my experience here in the US. After entering there were two desks with friendly ladies immediately greeting the care-seeker and asking what’s wrong. To the right, there was a small waiting room with probably 15-20 nice chairs for relatives and others who wait for their loved ones. One man was there playing with his child, probably waiting for the child’s mother (or sibling), despite it being around lunch-time.

After asking a few short questions and getting insurance information, a nurse appeared from the door three feet away with a wheel chair and I was immediately taken into a room with three nurses hooking up whatever machines they believed they needed, taking tests, etc. I also had to put my signature on two papers, the purpose of which was explained clearly by one of the nurses.

A physician came in and asked several more questions and took some more tests while looking at one of the flat screen monitors showing heart rate, blood pressure and numerous other things. Ten minutes later a nurse came by to take an X-ray, and some more tests were taken. And then, as seems to always be the case no matter what country one is in, I was left on my bed waiting for test results. There were frequently nurses checking in on me to see that I was alright.

Two hours later I was released with a prescription and advice on how to get well and with printouts of instructions what to do if there are further symptoms, when and where to make appointments for follow-ups etc. What is striking about this visit is that they asked for my ID (and insurance card), but nobody asked for payment or even discussed coverage etc.

The Swedish case is quite different. Instead of entering into a foyer with nurses greeting you, you step right into a waiting room with numerous people in it (Swedish emergency rooms are for some reason always packed with people). The first thing you do is take a ticket from the machine with your number on it, and then you go to the desk in the far end to register with the receptionist. Note that the purpose of a receptionist in this “free” public health care system is to receive payment for the visit or get your personal information for billing (the out-of-pocket cost would be approximately $45, but depending on what regional political unit you are in) and make sure you await your turn.

Next to the receptionist’s desk there is a closed, wheel chair approved (extra-wide) door next to a window covered with drapes on the inside. Behind that door is the screening room with a nurse seeing one person at a time trying to make a preliminary diagnosis in order to establish priority. You may speak to the nurse when it is your turn (that’s the number on your ticket!), but until then you will have to sit down if there are available chairs or otherwise stand waiting.

My experience is that most people in the waiting room are not seriously ill. In fact, I’ve seen retired people munching on cookies and drinking coffee from thermoses while talking to their friends. (You would not often find vending machines in these kinds of places in Sweden – I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.) It has seemed to me that they are in the ER to socialize with their friends rather than seek care; my guess is that they are feeling lonely or that they may have a headache or something that a Tylenol would take care of (old people’s common headaches is a real problem for ambulance emergency care!).

If you are in serious pain you will need to call an ambulance, even if it is not life-threatening or even urgent. Why? Because the wait in the emergency room could take hours – several hours. Without revealing too much about my own or my loved ones’ medical conditions, let me assure you that I’ve been in the emergency room at this Swedish university hospital where the the person seeking care has been in tremendous pain – but we have still been directed to sit down and await our turn (the receptionist makes the call, it seems).

When it is finally your turn, you may enter the room with the screening nurse. If it is serious, as it was in the case I’m describing, he or she will pretty soon realize that urgent care is necessary and then immediately notify a physician and the patient to a room (the rooms, I’ve noticed, are the same in Sweden and the US: they are basically rooms with three walls with the fourth wall being a curtain or glass door). The care is basically the same, even though you would likely experience more wait time in Sweden and you would not see as many people checking in on you.

The physician and nurses will take tests, check your heart rate and blood pressure etc. It is unlikely that you will be hooked up to a digital screen showing all this, but if you are (perhaps if your condition requires continuous control of values) it will not likely be a flat screen but one of those old green-and-black computer screens mounted to the wall or the ceiling.

One obvious difference is that comfort is not a priority in Swedish care; whereas nurses will frequently ask you if you are okay and adjust your seat or bed or whatever in the US, you will most likely be left alone on a rather uncomfortable bunk in Sweden. Also, you will notice that physicians and nurses in Sweden wear their own clothes with a white robe on top (some nurses do wear the white pajamas-like health care suits seen in the US), while in the US everybody seems to wear the pajamas-looking suits in different colors (green, blue, etc).

As I said earlier, the quality of care is about the same. It is a myth that public systems necessarily have lower quality care; they don’t always, and the reason for this is probably that poor quality is easily seen and will be “fixed” by politicians seeking reelection (through legal guarantees or whatever). But anyone with a little economics understanding knows that if quality is the same while out-of-pocket costs basically approach zero, it will shift (increase) demand. Supply, on the other hand, will not increase and is even likely, due to the empirically established law of sky-rocketing costs in public bureaucracies, to decrease.

The result is, of course, excess demand or shortage; in other words, health care is of good quality but is generally less accessible. In this case study,the inaccessibility of health care through the ER is due to the long waits in the waiting room (and also why you won’t see that many people checking up on you while admitted) – and the reason for this is characterized by the elderly having an ER picnic (which is, I must emphasize, something I have experienced myself).

So what do we learn from this case study? Well, first we need to stress that neither system is private – they are both shades of public. Furthermore, health care culture is not very different in terms of how and and what quality of care is given. The major difference is that there is less public bureaucracy in the US case (and, consequently, more of private market) due to private insurance financing. Therefore, the differences between the cases are due to these institutional differences: the level of reliance on political vs market solutions.

The funny thing in this is that one cannot conclude that emergency care in the US is better because it costs more. This is not true; Swedish health care is among the most expensive in the world, as is US health care. Any differences are marginal and the differences are not seen across the board: Swedish health care is more expensive in certain kinds of care whereas American ditto is more expensive in other kinds. No conclusions can be drawn due to costs or availability of capital (even though, of course, insurance companies try to keep costs down in the US while this role is taken on by the political system in Sweden).

It is also interesting that the obvious differences so easily can be explained by economic reasoning. Taking a principles course in micro economics gives us all the tools necessary to explain and understand the differences between American and Swedish health care – and economics perfectly predicts the outcomes of the systematic difference.

What we should learn from this is not, however, to always ask economists for advice. It is true that economics provides the tools to identify and assess pros and cons, but there is a lot of bullshittery going on by economists. One has to be open-minded and realize that institutions and context matter – and need to be considered in an economic analysis. Krugman-type economists would consciously overlook certain obvious problems/costs of public bureaucratic organization while they would over-emphasize semi-relevant benefits. So when asking economists, one must know what to expect.

What we can learn is what is strikingly obvious: artificial incentives created by a public system with no access to [internal and/or external] prices and not subject to competition cause problems due to the inability (indeed, impossibility) to calculate the best use of resources. The effect is higher cost and lower output, hence the inaccessibility of Swedish health care.

In my program, in contrast to most PhD programs, there has not been a formal and required exam as part of the program. Recently, however, this has changed. The reason for this is that the department has received poor scores in peer reviews and that the dissertations produced by students have not always been of the best quality. Fair enough, poor results should lead to change in order to effectuate improvement.

The reaction by the department is to increase the number of tests students have to take, and this is – as far as I understand – imposed retroactively also on students in the “old” program. Not only will there be a qualifying exam after the student has finished the program’s core course, but there is a paper to be submitted after the second year and a comprehensive exam as part of the dissertation proposal.

This is where I get confused. I fully understand the attempt to “control” that students have indeed understood the materials in the courses before they get to move on and start working on their research. But then, when they have reached the point where they are to defend their dissertation proposal to their committee, does it make sense to have another written test?

I think not.

It is easy to see how the faculty obviously panicked and felt the need to “do something.” Another test is however the wrong way to go. To understand this, let’s have a look at the process leading up to the dissertation defense. This process means the student works alone and/or together with his/her advisor to produce a text introducing the problem, the literature, what value is to be produced, the methods to do so and the expected problems and results.

When one’s advisor finds that the student is ready to defend the proposal and the committee has had a chance to review and comment on the proposal, then the student is invited to orally defend the proposal. The committee will ask questions and make sure the student knows what he’s/she’s doing. That’s fine; after all, the student is supposed to learn how to do research.

But at this point, what does a written test based on the material in the proposal add to the process? This is difficult to understand. It is especially troublesome since the comprehensive exam is a written test with limited time and closed books. How many researchers would you guess study the literature to the point of memorization before they write grant applications and research project plans? Of course they don’t – why would they? It is a waste of time to memorize details of others’ research that may not be relevant. And even to the point it is relevant, the articles and books are always available and need to be reread a thousand times in order to produce a fair analysis.

So “real” researchers don’t do that – but students should?

But maybe there is a reason to test the students – for sake of quality. Sure, this could be the case. Let’s have a look at this argument: students are to write a closed-book, memorization-testing exam on the material on which they are to do research in order for the department/faculty to make sure that the dissertation will be of good quality. Of course, for this to be even close to a real solution we need to assume that memorization of material makes one’s own research better and that the test as constructed by the committee does just this. Also, we need to assume the committee consists of experts in the exact area chosen by the student for research.

But remember the process as discussed briefly above. No student gets to defend his/her dissertation proposal without the consent and approval of the advisor. So if the department has experienced low-quality dissertations the problem is really that advisors don’t take their job seriously and let students defend their dissertation proposals prematurely. (We here ignore the troublesome fact that committees seem to consistently have chosen to approve proposals and dissertations of poor quality.)

So it must be concluded that the comprehensive test, as it is designed in my department, can only be seen as a test of whether the advisor has done his/her job properly. If the student is allowed to defend the dissertation proposal he or she must have already been deemed “ready” to do so by the advisor (and committee). So the student needs to take a comprehensive exam on the basis for his/her own research because the department cannot trust the advisor to do his/her job?

I guess this is where the pseudo-arguments “but everybody else does this” and “this is how it has always been done” are added. After all, without these pseudo-arguments there would be nothing left. The students are forced to literally waste weeks of their lives memorizing details of research they already know in order for the department to know the advisor and committee have done what they are supposed to.

If the problem is that some advisors (I doubt it is even a majority) allow their students to defend their proposals (and dissertations?) prematurely, then it is reasonable to assume the faculty already know who they are. But they are obviously afraid to bring this out in the open, possibly because they are likely to make enemies with people they have to work with for the rest of their lives. After all, academia spells t-e-n-u-r-e and this means life-long service in the same department. So it is a lot easier to have students jump through another hoop for the sake of appearing to assure quality and thereby saving face and avoid making enemies.

So what does this mean? It means, of course, that I will have to spend a lot of time memorizing things I believe my committee members believe is important in the material relevant for my research. It also means a break from my line of thinking and this, in turn, means I will have to start over with the research project – thereby losing even more time. Then I can finally do the research that I am in the department to do in the first place.

For the record, I sincerely doubt my advisor would allow me to defend an unfinished proposal. Instead, he would be frank with me and tell me that my proposal simply doesn’t cut it. After all, I am working with him to produce a document that will be approved by the committee (the advisor usually has the last word) – and if not, then the advisor has obviously not done his job. So this means I am not really affected by the new rules, except for the hoop-jumping part: I will most likely have to take the test. In order for the department to know “for sure” (if there is  such a thing) that my advisor has done his job.

It also means I will have to memorize a bunch of stuff that I am likely to challenge in my own research. I fail to understand how memorizing [at least some] conclusions that I am sure are wrong, or at least drawn on faulty bases, would help me, unless it is the case that I have misunderstood the articles and that another read will help me understand this mistake (both conditions are, of course, necessary for this to not be a complete waste of time).

Does this help my research? I sincerely doubt it. Does it potentially improve the quality of my future dissertation? Not a chance. The reason for this is that what is important in a PhD student’s research is not whether articles have been memorized, but whether (1) he or she can think (which is undoubtedly a scarce quality in academia…) and (2) if he or she has received proper guidance from his/her advisor.

The former is not dependent on a formal test such as the now offered comprehensive exam. In fact, if the student can think intellectually a dumb memorization-based test is likely to either bore the student (hopefully not to such a degree that he/she decides there are more worthwhile activities to spend lifetime on) or dull his/her mind.

The latter is also independent on any formal test of the student, since guidance is rarely testable and what is important is finding and understanding the literature. Both should be easy to identify in a proposal and oral defense, whereas they are both quite impossible to test in a formal written exam.

So why enforce a comprehensive exam, especially if in addition to a qualifying exam and a required two-year research paper? I have, I believe, suggested the true reasons above. But it must be concluded that since there is no logical reason to test whether a student has memorized the existing literature, especially since what is of importance is the judgment of primarily the advisor and secondarily the committee, there is no real reason to have such a test.

Sometimes the world isn’t very rational. Or, perhaps, in a tug-o-war world where one’s turf is everything one has, the only thing one can do is jump through the right hoops and hope for the best.

But please do prove that this disillusioned student is but a little confused.

Some people are truly narrow-minded jerks, and quite a few of them seem to have taken refuge to academic departments at publicly financed universities. Most of them, it seems, are simply not interested in creating knowledge, finding the truth, and all the other things most of us would probably expect from researchers and professors.

Whereas I could write this blog post on all the little things that I have discovered and that have annoyed me, I will only discuss something that I find particularly annoying and unworthy anyone working with science: conscious and purposeful smearing for the sake of … smearing.

The art of undermining somebody’s authority and reputation through spreading rumors and attacking them behind their backs is practiced in most trades, and so too in academia. One should not assume that scientists, supposedly fact-oriented and logically stringent seekers of The Truth, do not play dirty tricks on each other and spend enormous amounts of time and energy waging and fighting petty faction wars in departments or even within offices. Politics seems to be a “natural” part of most organized  bodies of people in which they do not naturally and solely share a specific aim.

In any case, academia is just like any other such body but perhaps more puerile. The hierarchy is very fixed while often informal and it is a highly held custom to kick on anyone who’s on a lower level. Also, if there is something you do not like – do not hesitate to attack their person rather than their research, and do whatever you can to make straw-man arguments with as sarcastic tone as possible.

There are plenty of examples of such behavior, but perhaps Brad DeLong’s treatment of Austrian Economics is the best recent example. Not only do comments correcting Dr. DeLong’s assertions mysteriously disappear from his blog or are as mysteriously shortened, but he does not give people disagreeing with him a chance. He is simply not interested in other views. Scholarly? Not very.

Steve Horwitz comments on DeLong (all the necessary links to comments back and forth are provided by Horwitz; Mellon was President Hoover’s Treasury Secretary):

First, DeLong cuts off the part of Murphy’s post where he provides the evidence that Hoover rejected that view and that it did not dominate his administration.  Brutally dishonest.  Bob replies in the comments, and I follow up.  DeLong then truncates the part of MY comment where I point to Larry White’s JMCB paper that demonstrated that even MELLON was not a “liquidationist” and neither were the Austrians.

This is not a very unusual or extreme behavior and Brad DeLong is hardly an extremist (extremely ignorant and puerile, maybe – but not an extremist). Rather, this is quite common behavior in the land of academia, where everybody’s constantly guarding their turf and aren’t interested in any arguments or facts unless they strengthen their own view.

The fact is that most academics are hardly sholars; they are mostly people who are too smart for politics but too lazy to do the work necessary to be successful in any other trade. And many professors have never even tried any other line of work. In fact, some even look down upon people with experience outside of academia as if that would be something despicable.

Academia and science simply doesn’t work the way it theoretically should, i.e. the way John Stuart Mill defended free speech: only through allowing everybody to speak their opinion can we have sufficient ground to weed out the obviously bad and false. If academia would work this way, it would be eagerly receptive to new ideas and not only accept but even long for new perspectives and challenging ways of explaining real phenomena. Embracing the ideas of the one who challenges you and what you believe in is the way towards scientific progress.

The fact is that academia works in a way that is quite the opposite. New ideas are not embraced; rather, they are fought, silenced, and ridiculed – and editors of scientific journals even refuse to publish papers that are too “controversial.” To be published, new scientific results need to be “scientifically correct” rather than true to the facts.

I guess the question that pops up in your mind now, dear reader, is why the heck I so badly want to be part of this? My answer is that there are a number of exceptions to this rule and that working with but one true scholar and a hundred nitwits is a privilege – it is very rewarding to be around and work with a true genious. Also, I love doing what professors do: I love research and I love teaching – I could even spend ours on committees without necessarily being bored to death.

What scares me, however, is that there are so many “great” self-proclaimed scholars out there that do not know what the word means. And that they fall to such low levels in ways of fighting their petty turf wars. I am scared about this fact, but I am not afraid of them nor what they do. My background in politics have prepared me for the worst, and the fact is that I too can play this game – and I have formal training through 15 years in politics, which most academics do not. They will not know what hit them.

So I say: let me do what I do best and do your worst in honest critiquing of my work. And if you cannot, but prefer to fight dirty, bring it on. It is not a threat, it is a promise.

The previous post discussed the problems of measurement and the very problematic assumption that “people are like rocks,” i.e. that individuals share a fixed and observable nature in the same way that rocks have common simple properties. I also stretched the discussion to cover the ever present tension between the Weberian concepts of erklären and verstehen.

The former kind of science strictly emphasizes explaining facts and establishing simple causal relationships that can be derived from the observable properties of the entity. The latter stresses the subjective understanding of what is going on, and finding a way of rationally establishing a way to “see” how things work and are related. Weber explicitly states that erklären is the purpose and method unique for the natural sciences whereas the social sciences need to have a verstehen-based perspective. Predictions, hence, are possible only in sciences based on the erklären methodology and this is the conflict in economics: a fundamentally social science attempting to make use of primarily (only?) the methods and methodology of the natural sciences.

But predictions are problematic in and of themselves even if we ignore the tension arising from using erklären methodology studying verstehen phenomena. The very nature of predictions imply the usage of historic data to say something about the future. As we know, and have known at least since the days of the Ancient Greeks, it does not follow from the fact that the sun has risen every morning for centuries that it will continue to do so. History and future are not the same and may even be very different. What makes the future so troublesome is that it is fundamentally uncertain and we cannot use the certain facts of history to create knowledge about it.

As was stressed in the previous post, extrapolating doesn’t necessarily make sense. Doing the same maneuver for predictions about the future from data about historical events makes even less sense. Tomorrow will not be exactly like yesterday, which is a fact everybody knows and should know. This fact is true for details as well. That a rock falls to the ground if dropped today does not mean it will do so tomorrow.

However, we can conclude that a rock will fall to the ground if dropped tomorrow if we can show what makes it drop and we can rely on the properties of these causes being the same tomorrow. A rock has a fixed nature with certain properties and these do not change. We have been able to establish that a rock is dead matter that responds to exogenous forces in a very reliable and predictable way – we know that a rock is a rock is a rock and that this means something in terms of its nature.

It may be the case that tomorrow does not have gravity or that all rocks have turned into lollipops, but that doesn’t change the fact that rocks, according to our defintion, are rocks and that they respond to different forces in certain ways. We cannot with complete certainty say that everything will be the same tomorrow, but we can make general statements that will hold true for the things, forces, and properties we have specified (if we have done a good job specifying them). 

Now try the same thing with a human being. An individual is an individual is an individual. If this is true in the same sense as a rock is a rock, then we should be able to establish if one and every individual likes ice cream, responds the same way to stimuli like heat and cold, reacts to a certain situation the same way with a high level of certainty. 

Try the latter and compare a rock with an individual. Expose the rock to exogenous forces and observe its “behavior” and what happens to it. Then expose an individual to some stimuli and observe the behavior. Repeat it and observe the behavior – is it exactly the same? You will find that different individuals react in different ways to stimuli – and that one individual’s reactions will change over time as he or she learns. The rock never learns.

So even if the way a rock is affected by certain experiments is not purely certain for the future, it is very much predictable. The way John Doe reacts to, e.g., a speeding car about to hit him is different every time – and may not [ever] be the same as how Jane Doe reacts. It is not predictable; we cannot know what will happen (i.e. how the individual will react). 

So how will people react to lower prices in a certain good? We can attempt to predict that tomorrow, if the price for widgets is 10% lower, people will purchase 500,000 more widgets. But that doesn’t make sense. If the price is indeed lower it does not follow that the people who bought a widget yesterday at the higher price are more likely to buy a widget again. It also doesn’t follow that people in general value the widget in the same way. 

The only thing we can say is that ceteris paribus people will tend to purchase more of the cheaper good, at least for as long as they subjectively expect to be better off through purchasing one [more]. People want to be better off (which follows from the definition of better) and therefore make choices to improve their situation – to the best of their ability. But their preferences change and their ranking of those preferences change – as do their needs, perspectives, experience, knowledge, etc. An individual is not an individual is not an individual, at least not the same way a rock is a rock is a rock.

The problem of induction is problematic in natural science where dead matter is studied, even though the deathness of matter makes its properties reliable and effects predictable. Add life to the equation and the problem of induction becomes insurmountable and obviously so. 

Some things do seem to be repeated over time and the saying that “history repeats itself” may be thought to disprove the point I am making. But it doesn’t. It may be true that history tends to repeat itself if we do not learn from it, but the problem is that there is no “we” in the sense that there is a “rocks.” Individuals are different from each other and they change over time; humankind may not learn from the lessons of history, but it is equally true that situations do not repeat themselves – only man-made abstractions of them do. It is rational to learn from the essence of a situation not to repeat it or its negative consequences, but it is equally rational to say that things have changed and therefore the outcomes may do so too.

The lesson to be learned is that collectivism doesn’t work when we speak of human behavior simply because human behavior is not as tightly bound to the properties of “human” as the effects on a rock are to its properties. The reason is that human consciousness is not necessarily the same as the human body – one could possibly predict the effects of stimuli in medicine, but not in economics. Medicine works with the properties of the human body, i.e. its constitution and chemical and biological relationships (however complex); economics studies human behavior, where one individual’s choice to act is not based on the same facts as another’s, and a specific individual tends to learn – and change – from experience.

In an opinion piece in the National Post the obvious question is asked: Why Do We Have Economists? The question had to be asked, especially since there has been no real “blame game,” no real and public debate on why all predictions turned out wrong, and no consequences for the economics profession. After all, economists often stress the fact that action is taken under rational assumptions of consequences and that all actions have consequences of some form. The army predicting economists is obviously an exception to that rule.

As some sociology professors frequently joking: say what you will about economists, but you will always get a straight and precise answer – and you always know that it is wrong. So the question asked by the editor of the National Post should be well taken; it is an important one. Why do we have economists?

But there is a question that is more important, especially for the professional economists who make all these “always wrong” predictions, and that is what makes the predictions always turn out wrong? The answer to this question lies in the error of Milton Friedman in his now famous (should-be infamous) article “The Methodology of Positive Economics” and the people who followed him (and still do).

Economics prides itself of being a deductive science, i.e. that new knowledge is deduced directly and logically from true premises or assumptions. Friedman argued that it doesn’t matter if the assumptions are wrong as long as one can extract general rules from which one can make predictions that are somewhat reliable and come close to the truth. What he spelled out was a theory of economics aiming to be a natural science, where exactness is both important and possible. In economics, however, we should learn that exactness is neither important nor possible.

In order to provide a positive, rigorous science that can produce exact predictions, one has to through out all understanding (in the Weberian verstehen-sense) and rely solely on cold data. One cannot make predictions unless that which is studied is perfectly observable and with clear boundaries. But what if we apply this line of thinking on human action, which is the core of what is studied in economics. Are the causes, nature, and consequences of human action perfectly observable and have clear boundaries? How do we measure the causes of an individual’s actions? His choice of action? The action itself? Its consequences?

The latter comes closer than the former, but it is still not even close to having the properties of the objects studied in the natural sciences. Mixing x grams of A with y grams of B may always create the substance C, and exposing D to E or F may always show exactly z – but doing m to one individual does not necessarily create the same effect as doing m to another. People are not simply responding perfectly and blindly to exogenous influences, there is a whole lot of other things going on that are at least as important as certain influences. Some call it “free will,” but you don’t have to go as far into metaphysical or religious pondering to realize that people are neither rocks nor [simpler] animals.

The problem of economic prediction is just that underlying assumption that we can “easily” predict the outcome of numerous people through meddling with some of the variables that affect people’s choices. It is simply not the case that different individuals choose to act the same way when exposed to (or influenced by) the same stimuli. Our bodies may – may – react in the same way, but our minds do not. 

To this some might retort: thanks to the law of large numbers we can generalize our conclusions despite individuals not being alike. When the law of large numbers is applicable, we can simply assume that if we just have a sample large enough all potentially skewed or unrepresentative data will even out and we will find The Truth about human beings. But this does not change the problem at hand – we are still generalizing in the same way, but only with more data and more individuals. 

Even if we accept the law of large numbers as a sufficient reason to use statistics to understand people, we will have to face the problem with their not being the same. That people, being boundedly rational, would always choose more over less (which necessarily follows from the definition of choice) does not mean they will choose a particular outcome over another in every situation. Each individual will make a subjective assessment of his preferences and rank them, then make a choice based on what he knows of his ranked preferences (this is the decision process, whether it is carried out consciously and reflectingly or not). But the ranking may change depending on circumstances as well as what the individual has learned.

Making perfect predictions the way Friedman proposed means we must take the quality of being human out of every individual, or at least “even it out” in order to calculate precise predictions. What do we learn by knowing that people without personalities and without “inner depth” (some call it soul) would necessarily act according to our the predictions? Probably not much.

Furthermore, the predictions are based on extrapolating well beyond what is reasonable. Establishing one person’ s assessment of everyday risk and the costs he accepts to take care to avoid this risk, and translating it into dollar amounts, does not necessarily give us monotonous knowledge of this individuals preferred choices. It does not follow that he would accept a high risk to lose his life if he was paid some muliple of the cost he was willing to take on for smaller risks.

Predictions simply do not cut it. So why do we have economists?

The answer to this question is that we do not need most economists, but we do, at the same time, need economists more than ever. The reason for this is that the economists working on predicting the exact outcome of hundreds or thousands (or millions or billions) of individuals’ simultaneous choices are worthless, their methodology is fundamentally flawed and they are nothing but frauds. And they should be treated accordingly.

While we think of what to do with the predicting economists we need to find the real economists, the people who understand the market and can tell us how it functions and what is required for it to function well. Very few economists understand what the market is about and how the emergent order arises, subsists, and what it effectuates. These economists were able to say a long time ago that we were heading towards a meltdown, and they did. They even published these warnings, but nobody listened or wanted to hear about it. “Nobody” here denotes the prediconomists and the political elite that [usually] hire them. 

Economists need to do what businesses did a long time ago: go back to basics. There is no need for armies of economists trying to predict the exact results of public policy, of interest rate changes, or monetary policy, etc. The use of prediconomists is not to learn about the future or politics, but as “useful idiots” disguising blind, naive, and ignorant attempts to regulate people’s choices through granting the commandeering of society an air of scientificity. And they serve well as scapegoats when their predictions turn out to be wrong and the people in charge can hide behind their “good intentions.”

What there is a need for is real economists who do not engage in futile attempts to “scientifically” make exact predictions of people’s future choices. We need people to tell us how the market works so that we can reap the full fruits of our hard work and profit from the risks we take.

The courts in Sweden are highly politicized. As is common in civil law countries (like most Western non-anglo-saxon countries), the Swedish court system is not based on principles such as the courts or judges discovering law (which is, originally, the case in common law countries) – they but enforce the law as decided by The Ruler, be he king or a faceless parliament – and trial by peers (the jury system).

The courts do, however, have a pseudo-jury system where a judge runs the show but a number of people are chosen to assist the judge in finding the defendant guilty or not guilty of crime. These people are appointed by the political parties with representation in the parliament. In other words, there is a kind of political jury system where the political elite gets to appoint who will make sure justice is upheld. That the same elite enacts the law that is tried in the courts is not a problem to most Swedes, it seems.

In this particular trial, a high-profile trial with international coverage, the politicization of the Swedish courts is extra troublesome. The road to the trial has been paved with scandals, where the entertainment industry’s organization Antipiratbyrån not only has done the police’s job at raides against private web hosting firms, but they have worked closelly with the police investigators and even hired or paid a number of them. Furthermore, the U.S. government has pressured the Swedish government into taking a number of actions that are not necessarily allowed in the Swedish system of “justice” – sometimes even outright prohibited. 

This has not stopped the investigation, however, which is still partly based on what was found or interpretations made based on the illegal investigations. The propaganda war is also an important part of the story, where the public obviously supports and engages in file sharing (both the legal and the copyright-violating kinds) while the political elite is whole-heartedly on the side of the industry. In fact, the political elite has been enacting a number of laws significantly reducing the rights and privacy of Swedish citizens only to get to the small number of illegal file-sharers.

It is in this context that a trial with a judge and politically appointed judge assistants (nämndemän) is highly problematic. But, as I have already mentioned, this seems to not be a big problem in the Swedish public debate. The special interest owns the political elite, and the political elite both enacts and enforces the law.

Furthermore, the trial has been tragicomic. The defendants’ lawyers have very frequently objected to the prosecutor’s use of evidence not previously shown to the court. There are transcripts from the courts showing how one of the defendant’s lawyer objects saying the prosecutor is “doing it again” and that he “did it yesterday” and “will you never learn?” The court never disallowed the evidence even though the defendants had to react without any preparation whatsoever.

Also, the court has consistently misunderstood what the technology does. The prosecutor has repeatedly made statements about the “copyrighted files on the Pirate Bay server,” whereas anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the bit torrent technology knows that there should be no such files. The Pirate Bay had only a torrent library – a type of links that any search engine also has (but torrent/file links, not web links).

These problems set aside, what has caused a debate after the conviction is that new information about the judge has surfaced. Not only is he ignorant of this particular technology and allowed the prosecutor’s consistent use of procedurally prohibited conduct. He is also a member of the Swedish Organization for Copyright. In other words, he is a member of the organization that promotes copyrights and has done so since 1954.

Does this mean the trial is dismissed and needs to be done all over again? Not necessarily – the court could decide that his membership further his knowledge of the issue rather than makes him biased. And it is likely that the request for appeal from the defendants will generate exactly this assessment. 

How, then, would the appeals court assess the fact that this same judge asked (asked, not ordered) one of the politically appointed assistants to step down and leave the court due to probable bias because he was a musician and member of the same organization? It would probably think this is a separate issue and that it was the correct call by the judge…

The fact is that this is a minor issue considering what has been going on for a long time during the investigations. Police investigators have been contracted by the Antipiratbyrån and then, when/if fired from the police, hired by them. The Antipiratbyrån folks have been assisting the police during raides even though it is strictly illegal to do so – yet the politicized system of “justice” has not reacted. The Swedish government has broken its own laws to please the U.S. government and a U.S.-based industry that is way off track and unwilling to change its business strategies despite the technological advances. And the entertainment industry has received legal privileges to take actions that not even the police has the right to take.

There are simply so many strange things going on that undermine the court system, the government legal system, the legitimacy of enactment and enforcement of laws for the sake of protecting a relic of intellectual property, that this doubtlessly will be known to future generations as something to be truly ashamed about. That is, if you are a statist. If you are not, then this was expected; what was not expected is that this has been going on without even trying to cover it up.

The general leftist might not find this question troubling, since the “obvious” answer is that economists work with money and capital and therefore have a natural and benefiting relationship with capital owners in our capitalist economy. This may be an answer that explains some individuals’ actions and convictions, but it is hardly the reason economists in general – theoretically or in reality – tend to have free market ideals. But it may be an easy way of avoiding over-simplifying and over-politicizing the issue.

Some may argue the other side of the simplified leftist coin: that there is a “selection bias” and therefore that people who like money and capital(ism) are more likely to choose to work with and study money and capital. This too may explain why some of the individuals in economics feel they belong on the right. But it doesn’t explain why virtually a whole discipline identify with the “right” side of the political spectrum.

The real answer should be based in simple economic theory: the theory of incentives, or, rather, the assumption that people do what they have an incentive to do. This is a core understanding in economics of the true nature of human action. People do what they have an incentive to do, and understanding this may lead the individual economist researcher to the solution to many a problem. Understanding that people do what they have an incentive to do explains virtually any social standards or institutions.

What this means here is that economists think this way and therefore necessarily think this way also with respect to politics and the organization of government. Seeing that individuals in government are acting on their incentives means seeing all the possible problems with government. For instance, take any democratically elected parliament taking the proposed budget to a vote. If the members of parliament would pay whatever is spent themselves they would have a great incentive of minimize the budget, make sure that it is spent and distributed efficiently, that only projects with great chances of success and with real benefits would see the light of day. But this is not the case; politicians choose what to spend other people’s money on.

Imagine what this screwed up set of incentives would mean in another setting, e.g. a common grocery store. We know that the owner or manager of the store makes sure to hire those he can trust to sell (and not steal) the groceries and he will only buy those groceries he knows people will buy. Why? Because his ass is on the line – if he spends most of the budget on groceries nobody wants he will lose customers and therefore his own money…and perhaps the whole store. 

Now imagine the same situation but where the owner or manager can decide how much money he gets to spend through simply taking other people’s money. Whoever lives in the area has to pay whatever percentage of his income to the owner of the grocery store so that the grocerer can buy goods to offer his customers. Now what are the incentives for him to buy only good products, only products people will like, and hire people he can trust? It makes more sense to buy the cheapest groceries, no matter if people like them, and hire the people he likes or people he feels sorry for or people he wants to do a favor. 

It is not necessary to ask which grocery store will be of greater utility for the customer, even if some of the groceries in the “political” grocery store are for free. 

This is how any political parliament works: politicians claim they are limited by their budgets, but they get to decide the size of the budget (and take the money necessary) and even if they should stay within the budget. It is often the case that they spend way more than they take from people, thereby not only spending people’s earned incomes but also the money they will earn in the future. So any political organization is, in terms of incentives, totaly screwed up. Or, to translate it into economic lingo, the incentives between the principal (voter) and agents (politicians) are misaligned.

So it makes sense for economists to identify with whatever politician that seems to understand more (read: seems to be less ignorant) about these things. And these people, at least rhetorically, are often found in the political right. I say rhetorically, since it is pretty obvious to whoever understands politics that in the choice between Bush and Obama neither one understands the first thing about economics. But Bush was able to make it sound like he had a fraction of a clue. 

The interesting point is not really that economists identify with the political right, but rather why they do not follow their theoretical understanding all the way through and demolish the State – at least in their thinking. Some of them clearly do (I am one), but not very many. 

So what we have here is really a whole academic discipline that understands, or supposedly understands, economics and therefore can identify the lack of aligned incentives in political organization – but don’t do so all the way. Economists either do not fully believe economic theory or they do not believe government is what it is (and claims to be). Which is it?

Some clearly do not understand and do not wish to understand economic theory nor apply it on other things than their precious formulas and functions. Such economists will never find any truth and will not produce anything of value to anyone. But what about the rest? It is clear that many economists live in symbiosis with the State and therefore do not wish to think about it in less positive terms. After all, the government employs a lot of economists and economists find it very prestigeous to work for the people with political power. So they simply neglect to apply their economic understanding on the organization they wish to serve.

So how about the rest, i.e. economists who do understand economic theory and wo do not find it necessary to lie to themselves in what regards the State? The answer to this question is what is very sad. It should be the case that economists who end up identifying with the political “right” while supporting government simply do so because they are as brainwashed as most people. Despite being scholars in economics they have learned throughout their lifetimes that there is no way to survive without government.

Economists (many of them) may not like government, but they accept it and even support it. And they use their sound theories to make government more efficient and effective – simply because they have been taught that there is no other way. To a free-thinking individual with economic understanding this is of course the same as saying that a certain industry “must” function like the “statist” grocery store mentioned above – but that we need to make its wasteful operations as efficient and effective as possible not to get “too much waste.”

Anyone understanding the competitive market understands that waste is not acceptable, that waste is minimized automatically through the profit motive and the pressure from competition. The problem here is not only that government is a monopoly and that the profit motive is nonexistent. The problem is also that it is an organization that can “legitimately” force its customers (and non-customers) to pay for its costs while it can supply whatever it wishes at whatever cost it finds most appropriate. 

Government, in other words, is an organization that is much much worse than any monopoly mentioned in economic theory – it is a monopoly cubed, judging from the weird incentives it creates and the effect it has on the market. There is therefore no way of understanding economists’ support for government other than that they have given up in the sense not applying what they know to it. Brainwashing works, even on those who have dedicated your whole professional lives to learning the truth – and when the truth speaks out clearly against government.

It is true that agorists in general do not fancy “organization, hierarchy, leaders and followers, etc.”, which is a common preference among anarchists of all varieties. Rothbard (and Klein) is right in that there is not necessarily anything wrong with voluntary organization or voluntary “membership” in hierarchical structures where one is subjected to the rule of majority vote or the whims of a ruler. But as good economists both Rothbard and Klein seem to assume too much: there is nothing wrong with making an informed decision to take a low-level position in a hierarchy ceteris paribus.

Ceteris paribus should here be understood as choosing in a situation where the only thing that distinguishes the hierarchical position from the non-hierarchical is hierarchy. But this is hardly ever the case in State society. Rather, individuals have to choose (if at all) from a very limited set of alternatives, where hierarchy and submission is part of all or most of the alternatives. Vietnamese children working in a Nike sweatshop are better off than as child prostitutes, ceteris paribus. But one cannot take the choices as exogenous to the political situation in the area, the region, the country, or the world. A political theory such as agorism needs to take into account the effect of political rule in the choices people make.

Agorists do just that: they realize that the limited options for a child, i.e. working in a sweat shop or becoming a prostitute, are not the result of the market but of political institutions. The choice in itself may be easy, but the context certainly isn’t. The person making the choice is subjected to political oppression through the unavailability of choices due to political regulation, rule, and coercive institutions.

This is not the same as making choices “subject to” alternatives made available in a free(d) market. The market measures costs to benefits and awards individuals with alternatives to the extent economically feasible. Political rule, however, causes imbalances in the marketplace which forcefully (directly or indirectly) removes alternatives that should have existed were it not for political oppressive rule. The choice between a sweat shop and prostitution is a choice only because of politics; it is not a “real” choice set, since it is forcefully limited.

The same is true with any choices we make today, and agorists, compared to other anarcho-capitalists, tend to put more weight on the choices that have been forcefully taken away from us. While many libertarians would compare a choice to status quo, an agorist would compare the choice situation with that which should obviously have been real in a free market. It is not an economic analysis, it is a political analysis based on a radical passion for justice.

This is relevant to the debate on organization, since agorists have a slightly different perspective than anarcho-capitalists, especially economist anarcho-capitalists. There is of course nothing supporting any counter-factual view on what would have been the case under different circumstances. But it is reasonable to draw some conclusions: the child would have more alternatives in a free market than sweat shop work and prostitution, of which some would likely have been better than both.

Only the better alternatives are important to our analysis, but it is safe to say that we can remain fairly confident that such better alternatives (subjectively identified and valued) would exist. State oppression has therefore deprived the child (in this case) from the choice he or she would have made were it not for State oppression. An economic analysis, at least using the tools commonly taught in academia, is too limited: it does not take into account the fundamental and far-reaching effect of the State on institutions and individual as well as collective behavior.

From this perspective, it is not necessarily the case that people in a freed setting would organize the way the presently choose to. It could be the case that people organize in large corporations, but it is unlikely. Why? Because people in general tend to dislike being “bossed around” by others, and they tend to very often dislike management because it is management or because they believe management’s decisions are incorrect or improper. Ask yourself: in a free(d) market, would more or fewer people choose to work in large structures where their actions are subjected to the decisions/management by others?

The answer isn’t necessarily obvious, but considering the multitude of organizational solutions that would be available were it not for the State, as well as the cost of e.g. corporation-like limited liability if fully internalized by the individual actor/organization, the answer becomes clearer. Agorists don’t despise or dislike organization per se, but I believe it is reasonable to say their analysis takes more facts into account. In quantitative economics lingo, agorists tend to control for many more variables.

So how does this relate to Klein’s post and the Rothbard quote? It provides the reason agorists, on average, are more skeptical than other libertarians to contemporary organizational structures. Agorist theory does not dismiss organization, but agorist class theory identifies, comparatively speaking, a great many more State-caused and State-inflicted problems with severe effects on the very bases on which choices are made. This makes agorists more skeptical towards organizational choices in contemporary State society.

If it were indeed the case that agorists were opposed to organization in and of itself, they would abstain from organize themselves. But this is not the case: agorists organize their efforts in the Molinari Institute as well as the Center for a Stateless Society and the Agorist Action Alliance.

Furthermore, agorists are strong proponents of voluntary organizing of free markets to create individual wealth while withdrawing support for the state to the greatest degree possible and providing real and viable free alternatives to State-controlled institutions. Agorism provides a theory for how to set the world free through liberating yourself and thereby fully take advantage of the economic incentives naturally provided in a free society. So-called counter-economics is a cornerstone in agorist theory and practice, and arranging or joining a counter-economy is voluntary in a sense no choice made in the State sanctioned market ever is. This is perhaps what distinguishes agorists from anarcho-capitalists the most: that they define “voluntary” in a much more absolutist sense.

Cross posted as a comment to Klein’s blog post. For more information, see my articles Saving the World through Saving Yourself, A Strategy for Forcing the State Back, and my previous blog post The Savior Complex.

What I am referring to is the scientific world view. This is not the scientific drive, i.e. the motivation to find the truth and to learn about the world, but the overly scientific anti-identification of that which is studied. It is as prevalent in the social sciences as it is in politics and buesiness management. There are no people around anymore, there’s only statistics and faceless aggregates.

In economics this is very obvious – the study of human action is almost completely reduced to discussions on how to mitigate biases and avoid multicollinearity in econometric functions. Now, in what sense would you gain understanding of why people act in certain ways through tweaking regression models? The obvious answer – and it is so obvious most economists simply don’t see it – is that you don’t. You don’t gain any knowledge whatsoever of why people acted a certain way through running tests of heteroskedasticity and deciding whether or not to use “White’s estimator.”

Economics is the most obvious victim of what I would like to call scientism, the belief that anything that uses aggregates and that is seemingly universal – through (at any price) avoiding to acknowledge the identity or personality of the individuals studied – is more valuable as a science. Actually, the common view is that as long as you can hide the fact that there are individuals in “the data” any conclusions you might draw are generally applicable.

In a recent discussion with a fellow student, I claimed that the empirical study of people is totally worthless unless your aim is to understand why exactly those individuals acted in that exact way in that exact situation. My point was that if the “experiment” would be repeated with the same people (as “data”) the outcome would be completely different because people learn. And if it would be repeated, and the situation could be set up exactly the same way, but the “data” (the people) would be different individuals the outcome would still be different – simply because they are different people and therefore react differently in a number of ways.

And on top of it all, these examples are still ridiculous – it simply isn’t possible to create the exact same situation again and expose people to it. Even if the setting (or framework) would be the same, the people would have different subjective experiences (no matter if they are “the same” or “others”), which would affect the results.

One could argue that this is why we have confidence intervals and standard deviations. But that implies that people act in such a way that the outcome of everybody’s actions are nicely distributed in a bell-shaped curve. How often would you say that happens? That would depend on what kind of people you happen to have in your sample, wouldn’t it? The point is that one cannot study people the way one studies dead matter, simply because people are people, i.e. thinking creatures that learn from experience and that aren’t reducible to a “nature” the same way a rock would be.

This “scientism” is not only prevalent in the [social] sciences – it is a cornerstone of modern politics as well as business management. In politics there is no such thing as an individual; it simply doesn’t happen that politicians discuss a certain individual. And if they happen to use the word “individual” they use it as a stereotypical “nature” of the items in the population they rule. In my ten years in party politics, I haven’t heard one politician discuss how decisions or policies affect individuals – the best I’ve heard is the use of stereotypical examples of “the average family” or “the single mom.” But never did anyone care to add flesh and blood to their dead skeletons.

There is a reason for this, even though politicians are usually too stupid to understand it. It simply isn’t possible to propose or support policies that affect people’s lives unless you make sure to forget that they are real people. Even cold-hearted, ignorant, and self-centered politicians wouldn’t have the guts nor morality to put hundreds or thousands of people in misery through pushing a button. Most people simply don’t have it in them to coldly calculate plusses and minuses while radically and forcefully change the lives of a great number of people with the stroke of a pen.

The lesson to learn is this: would there really be wars if those waging wars would see each and every person they would have to send to their deaths? It is unlikely, even though there are some really, really disturbed people out there.

The same is the case in large corporations, where the CEO or president usually has no clue about the people working for him (or her). Of course, the nature of a corporation is distinctly different from that of a state – the corporation gives, and any punishment from a corporation is to “not give”; a state takes, and any punishment is to “take more” or “kill” whereas every “reward” consists of “taking less” away from that person. Corporations can no doubt be horrible, but they are not a state.

The problem we have here is the “scientific” way of approaching one’s work: scientists who have no idea that the statistics they’re using are really people, won’t mind drawing horrible conclusions; politicians not understanding there are individuals and individual suffering as a result of every decision they make, don’t have a problem with “redistributing” from some to some or killing off some for the benefit of others; and business managers can take irresponsible risks when they can “simply”, if something goes wrong, cut the corporation’s employment with “10%” rather than, which is equally true, throw hundreds of families into unemployment and misery.

Scientism is the problem, and it arises as an effect of centralization. Centralization calls for stereotypes and grouping, for one-policy-fits-all kind of decisions, and cold-hearted leadership for some unidentified aim. What this world so desperately needs is radical decentralization. The problem with our society is not only that there is a huge parasitic cancer tumor feeding off our lives and liberties (i.e., the State), but that it is too large-scale and too centralized. Not only must the State go, but we need to get back to seeing people as people.

Seeing people as people is what so many individuals in our world have forgotten. Be they scientists, politicians or corporate managers – they all share the same fallacy in thinking that scale is a good thing, that personal ties are “in the way” and a problem for efficiency or whatever.

I am a person and I intend to continue being one. You better start seeing me as one.

But it is not these problems, however important, that I want to discuss in this post. Instead, I want to discuss the structure of the education I’m getting and what it seems to focus. Herein lies an important lesson to be learned about education in general and especially how students are treated. It is obvious that many professors seem to struggle with understanding how to treat graduate students, which means they sometimes fall into the “undergrad trap” and talk to us like were we at the very beginning of our studies on a higher level.

An even more obvious fact is that professors seem to lack an understanding for the greater issues. Someone has told me that students tend to focus on theory and theoretical reasoning because “it is easier” than “real” empirical research. I strongly disagree with this view; I find it ignorant and, frankly, stupid. It is not easier to develop a good theory than, as is supposedly “more difficult,” to grab a data set, run [standardized] regressions and then claim to have found The Truth. Such a statement makes me lose whatever respect I had for the person making it; they deserve no respect – rather, they deserve to be despised.

Even though most professors do not share (or at least not state) this view, misunderstanding or non-understanding is common. Often the problems I identify with premises for published papers that we’re reading are ignored, probably because they require a philosophical mindset. I’m not saying I’m a prodigy or hyper-intelligent and that “all professors” are stupid; on the contrary, my experience in both the Swedish master programs and the American PhD program is that the professors are usually highly intelligent people. However, they are not scholars and therefore cannot grasp the essence of discussions on a purely conceptual or theoretical level. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but they are not many.

Professors have chosen to (in some cases been forced to) focus on details for so long that they have more or less forgotten what they’re doing is all about. They no longer have an interest in finding Knoledge or Truth (if this ever was the case), but are more interested in specific “cool” details of theoretical-empirical papers that have, for some reason, become famous. It is no doubt the case that details can be interesting – and even very interesting – but a detail or sub-reasoning can only be interesting if the overall theoretical framework is a reasonable construct upon a basis of sound premises. This is, I’m afraid, not often the case. Papers are very often empirical or try to develop a theory from a semi-inductive approach to knowledging, and as such it seems the authors have not spent much time thinking through the foundation of the theory developed.

It is a sad truth that even academic researchers doing theoretical work have been so “empiricized” by the pressure of mainstream that have lost touch with the real world as well as interest in and understanding for the importance of premises and assumptions.

This brain washing (to use my adviser’s words) begins early in people’s academic careers. Graduate school is supposed to create a basis of knowledge while teaching the student how to think critically, but the real nature of the programs is that they aim for the streamlining of thought rather than encouragement for individual, unique, pioneering thought. It is true that all programs pay lip service to the dogma that students must learn critical thinking and that they must engage in research on their own even if they are taking a heavy course load. But the truth is that as little time as possible is left for the student to actually engage in such activities.

My own experience is that advanced studies are not very difficult; there are of course problems of notation, language and concepts one has never encountered before, but the level of difficulty is not unsurmountable. It appears to be difficult simply because there is so much work involved with learning what is taught in the course, but the work is not primarily time and effort spent tryting to wrestle complex concepts or advanced reasoning. Most courses cover fairly intuitive concepts.

I realize that I sound like someone who believes he is a Nietzschean übermensch, but that is not at all what I try to say. I have struggled quite a bit with the courses I’ve taken; it is only after finishing the course work that I have realized that the level of difficulty was not as high as I thought. And it has nothing to do with my “understanding what I [now] know.” The problem i have with the structure of the courses is that they seem to focus so much on details and technicalities that students cannot grasp what the professor is trying to say.

Take, for instance, a course I took in advanced micro economic theory. The theory itself, and especially the concepts behind it, is relatively simple – if you know anything about economics you should understand what make actors demand or supply goods and services on the market. But that is not what the course is about. Instead, the course barges into a jungle of calculus where the student struggles with finding first and second order conditions of abstract functions supposedly symbolizing a person’s “utility function” or a firm’s “production function.”

Of course, in the real world there is no such thing as a production function – a firm has assets and produces output using the resources and assets at hand in the best way possible. They are not making a generic function of their business processes and then taking derivatives to find the “optimal point.” And there is even less of a utility function (a somewhat humorous concept, I might add).

The details and technicalities are what is important and the understanding for what is really going on – or why the discipline ended up with these functions and conditions in the first place – is not only left out, it is ignored, dismissed, and considered “unimportant.”

As an analogy, imagine an automobile manufacturer where the engineers are hired to focus on making components as efficiently as possible without thinking of their use in the whole. If no one thinks of what the automobile is supposed to do – or how to put it together – there will be no automobile. Just like experts in economics (which is my field) can talk of “properties” of functions for ages without ever mentioning or even considering what the functions are for, where they come from, or what they try to explain.

What is the importance of the generic, differentiable, mathematical function to how people act in a market?

Academia is so consumed by discussing the details that nobody has time for or ever considers the so-called “whole picture.” Even in “softer” courses it is the case that students need to read as many articles as possible on certain details and technical matters that there simply is no time for reflection. After reading a couple of dozen articles – in a short time period – that all discuss the same technicality, how many students would you think are able to take a step back and reflect on the importance of the technicality qua technicality? Not very many.

It is therefore the case that academic education of today bears no resemblance whatsoever with the classical education of Ancient Athens (such as Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum) or even the education in the modern era. For instance, when German philosopher Immanuel Kant taught courses he discussed problems of morality and let the students consider his own theory and comment on it. I am not saying that the education of that time was unstructured or that it was some kind of dopey discourse post-modern style, but that there was a fundamental interest in ideas.

It may be unfair to compare the modern “hard” science of economics with the soft philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. But the thing is that Aristotle, for example, spent a lot of time on explaining natural phenomena and did so systematically and in an as structured and scientific way possible in that time and age. Yet his aim was not to dissect a detail of a small part of that which he found – he strived to understand and explain the world around him.

A criticism to my comparison of modern economics and the natural science research of Aristotle is that today’s society – as well as our knowledge – is way too advanced to use Aristotles methods. This may be true to some degree, but do not kid yourself – we are not as advanced compared to previous times as you would like to think. In terms of knowledge, we’re to a large extent in the process of rediscovering what scientists hundreds of years before us discovered, described, explained, and understood.

As a matter of fact, we have forgotten the reason for doing scientific work and research. We have to rediscover the purpose of what we are doing, but so far we are so focused on the details and technicalities that we haven’t even started acknowledging that we’re missing the whole picture and even parts of it through staring at one stroke of the pen.

Science is literally worthless if we cannot allow us to reflect on it and make it useful on a higher level of  abstraction; we are so busy doing scientific research that we have forgotten what the research is for.

So it is not surprising that that the [few] questions I [find it worthwhile to] ask aren’t understood. I am no Cicero, so perhaps my questions could be much more clearly articulated. But I doubt that the problem is primarily my inability to phrase the questions clearly enough – the problem, I maintain, is that they are of another nature than what science is thought to be all about. I cannot help finding similarities between theories, conflicts in implicit underlying assumptions, and problems in the questions being asked (rather in how they are answered). I am not interested in the technicalities or detailed answers; I am interested in the questions.

Perhaps you say that it is sad that I was not born a few hundred years ago, in a time where people still thought the way I think and were interested in the kind of things I am interested in. That is, in a time before the sciences were divided into separate disciplines and before the quantification of knowledge-seeking. And you may be right – I was born too late.

But on the other hand, science has lost its way and is maundering without compass or aim. I am certain that we will soon discover that we are not asking the right questions – and that we aren’t really asking questions at all. The recent interest for so-called “interdisciplinary research” is definitely a step in the right direction, even though it is a very small step. Science, I believe, will once again find a way back to the path of knowledge discovery; it is a matter of when not if.

From this perspective, I’d like to think that I was not born a few hundred years too late. Rather, I was born too soon. Or perhaps I can help science find its way back to its roots and purpose; that is, find the way home.