Results tagged “belief” from Eccentric Eclectica

I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of expertise. Alvin Goldman, a philosopher at Rutgers, has written some interesting papers on the interaction between novices and experts. Next week I’m going to be leading a discussion on the topic.

I restarted my research on this topic after participating in some other recent discussions about economics and the reactions to the recent recession. How can economists propose such dramatically different explanations and remedies to the current crisis? The result is Paul Krugman asking How did economists get it so wrong?

Chris Dillow posts some interesting thoughts on whether economics is more certain about it’s conclusions now than it was 80 years ago when John Maynard Keynes was writing his General Theory.

To answer the question Dillow looks at two recent papers by economists about the rationality of markets. In comparison to Keynes the contemporary papers are more advanced, referencing more empirical data and having greater theoretical clarity. But they reach opposite conclusions by studying the same data, one finding evidence of rationality and the other finding evidence of irrationality.

Keynes wrote without any reference to empirical data. So which case is better? Someone of prestigious economic intelligence writing without any empirical data or two contemporary economists analyzing the data but reaching different conclusions.

This suggests that, if it is firm beliefs you want, economics regresses. Reading Keynes, you’d infer clearly that markets were somehow not rational. Reading the later papers you wouldn’t know whether they were or not. 70 years of advances in economics has merely generated doubt.

This kind of situation puts the novice economic observer into a major pickle. The novice must rely on the experts to analyze the information and data because the novice lacks the knowledge to even begin the analysis. But after the experts finish the conclusions are contradictory. Is there a way for the novice to resolve this problem?

We tackled the topic of American cultural literacy last night at Socrate’s Cafe and, as always, the topic immediately turned to politics.

A gentleman quoted Patrick Fitzgerald (the attorney involved in the Blagovich scandal) saying that “there is a fine line between politics and criminality.” Extend this to gross generalizations about all politicians and you begin to see the tone of the discussion. He asked whether anyone looking at the American political system from outside would see anything other than criminality.

I replied that there is always a fine line between criminal and non-criminal behavior. One day, Bernard Madoff was running a profitable hedge-fund and the next he was the ringleader of a Ponzi scheme.

My point was twofold. First, I believe there is nothing in politics that makes it an inherently criminal activity. Second, criminality is an ex post facto label that we use to describe behavior that we have rejected as wrong, usually for societal reasons. Sadly I don’t think my argument made a lot of headway. I keep feeling as though I’m talking at orthogonal angles to all the people around me.

Far too many people believe or hope that “good leadership” will get us out of the mess that we are currently in, but an even more pernicious belief is assuming that all politicians are criminal. There are many things wrong with our political system but rampant criminality is not one of them. Just look into the problems faced by Africa over the last 50 years and I think you’ll see that America has a lot of problems to worry about but rampant political criminality is not one of them.