The Social Sciences have always suffered from envy of the Hard Sciences. From their earliest days they have attempted to imitate the hard sciences in the rigor of their experimental designs (more often ersatz rigor) and in their attempts to reduce complex behaviors and relationships to easily measured metrics. There have been a great many successes along the way (though many of the most significant successes have been discounted because they failed to match the theoretical prejudices of the research community.)
(As just one example, "g", the measure of problem solving ability best measured by IQ has been shown to be a stable and predictive construct in repeated testing and re-testing of data over the course of almost 100 years. However, because IQ disparities have been consistently found between racial and ethnic groups, much more effort from the Academic research community has gone into discrediting the measure than maximizing its utility. This is a case where ideology trumps data.]
One of the greatest intellectual failings of our political and academic elites, a failing that has infected the elites across the board, has emerged from the misuse of reductionism in Social Science. In the Hard Sciences, reductionism has been one of our greatest tools. The ability to isolate specific and basic variables in order to discover and delineate their operation has been a major factor in building the science upon which our technology rests. In the Social Sciences such reductionism has an important place but when it is almost unconsciously assumed and elevated to an ideal and especially when our elites use such reductionism as the basis upon which to develop policy, it has potentially disastrous implications.
Consider the concept of "root causes" which has been a popular meme for the last 50 years. By finding various correlatives of social pathology, the fiction was created that "root causes" of social pathology could be adequately understood and acted upon. Since poverty was correlated with everything from unemployment, academic failure, drug and alcohol abuse, criminal behavior, etc, the War on Poverty could be instituted as a logical and appropriate response to a social pathology. A complex structure, poverty, was reduced to a mere absence of money. The failure to appreciate the complexity of the problem lead to a simplistic solution that aggravated many aspects of the problem. The War on Poverty, with all good intentions, led to the crumbling of the black family and the explosion in illegitimacy that is now culminated in an ever increasing impoverished cohort who lack the skills and character structure to fully enter into the functioning of a modern economy.
The Social Sciences have done a particularly poor job of incorporating some of the more recent understanding of complexity. Just as the Hard Sciences, (consider Biology), have begun to understand their subject in more complex, systemic terms, the social scientists and the elites who depend upon them, increasingly seem wedded to the reductionist point of view. This is nowhere more overt than in our political class. A cogent argument can be made that President Bush's failures emerged from his operational embrace of reductionism. Although there were a great many voices raised, and much writing devoted to, warning of the complexity of the Iraqi endeavor, our manifest response appears to have been to reduce the problem to a simple kinetic variable. Decapitate Iraq and Democracy would emerge. At the same time, Bush's ideological commitment to capitalism and free markets led him to avoid many of the worst problems of reductionism at home. The wisdom of capitalism is that it facilitates the integration of maximal amounts of input. This is not infallible and cannot prevent periodic failures but does produce a dynamic equilibrium that is much more stable than the alternatives.
Consider the misuse of reductionism in the economic sphere. A top down approach implies that those who are making decisions have understood the problems they are addressing well enough to distill the fundamental variables that are causing the system to stutter and can introduce appropriate contingencies to alter the outcomes in predictable ways. In complex systems multiple autonomous agents will always lead to better outcomes than a more limited number. They are simply closer to the information necessary for making decisions, quicker to respond to alterations in the data, able to operate on smaller data sets, and unencumbered by the need to filter vast quantities of data in order to produce the appearance of a distilled, simple paradigm. Those at the top of a command economy will always be behind the curve and cannot, even theoretically, metabolize the information as fast as an army of autonomous agents.
Barack Obama's greatest weakness thus far is that he appears to believe that he has sufficient data upon which to make major decisions. Perhaps he has thoroughly incorporated the Left-Liberal belief that they have a monopoly on nuance and understand complexity better then the retrograde Conservatives. What he "understands" is a faux complexity that is based on reductionism. In almost every area Obama simplifies and over-simplifies complex systems to enable him to act as if he understands complexity. His failure to grasp that his simple schema, even those that are described as complex, omit most of the salient data, means that his prescriptions will fail because of the multiplication of down stream effects that cannot be predicted by his theory. At some point he will need to address the question that all such misguided leaders have had to address:
Does he accept his own limitations and recognize that he cannot control or predict the effects of major perturbations of the system? This is the road to humility and wisdom. Or, does he hold tenaciously to his paradigm, fail to see its limitations, and respond by the classic externalization of the left, ie, that it is "those people" who have sabotaged his good intentions? That is the road to authoritarianism, a development poorly tolerated by our always semi-chaotic system.
[Update: Richard Fernandez notes some ways in which the Obama administration is filtering the data stream in ways which limit feedback which might help it avoid mistakes. This example concerns foreign relations but the paradigm is apparent.]
Recent Comments