Tuesday, January 23, 2007
The roots of decline and fall?
Posted by Harold Henderson on 01.23.07 at 02:45 PM
Physicist Steven Weinberg is unwilling to respect all sincere faiths equally (Times Literary Supplement, via 3 Quarks Daily):
"My late friend, the distinguished Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, tried to convince the rulers of the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf to invest in scientific education and research, but he found that though they were enthusiastic about technology, they felt that pure science presented too great a challenge to faith. In 1981, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt called for an end to scientific education. In the areas of science I know best, though there are talented scientists of Muslim origin working productively in the West, for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading. This is despite the fact that in the ninth century, when science barely existed in Europe, the greatest centre of scientific research in the world was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
"Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries."
Think it couldn't happen here? John Quiggin of Crooked Timber pulls it together with valuable links:
"Jonathan Chait connects the dots between dishonest conservative claims about income inequality (coming in this case from Alan Reynolds) to similar arguments made about evolution and global warming. As he says, to construct an alternate reality in which income inequality is not increasing, global warming is not happening and the world is near the end of its 6000 years anyway, there’s no need to prove a case – just cast enough doubt on the facts and ideology or faith will do the rest. This is happening across the board. The Republican War on Science is so broad-based that there is now no academic discipline whose conclusions can be considered acceptable to orthodox Republicans."
Comments (8)
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Wow, that is some juxtapostion Harold. Claiming Muslim dumping of science is somehow equivalent to Republicanism, is outlandish. The NSF has had increased funding at or above the rate of inflation during the Bush Administration. I would guess the NIH also is in step with the NSF. How does the Federal Government sinking Billions into basic and applied research line up with the thought that there is a "republican war on science"? JBP
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Well, I recommend the book of that title, for starters, and the links provided by Quiggin -- they're coming after the economists now, for heaven's sake. Your point about money is confirmed at http://researchadmin.uchicago.edu/Trends-in-Science-Funding.pdf although science funding is declining as a % of GDP. But what's money when the president doesn't even know the basic facts about stem cells and parades his ignorance as fact? And has oil-industry hacks rewriting EPA reports? And closing EPA libraries? Promoting sex education that's been proven not to educate? This is not just a matter of budget dollars vs. bad policies. The right-wing media machine is deeply involved in constructing alternative realities in order to deny global warming, income inequality, and evolution. That system of illogic is what's "outlandish." If you can show that it's different from what reduced Islam from a great civilization to a shambles, I for one will be greatly relieved.
I have more bad news: Alan Reynolds' argument about income inequality not only aren't dishonest, they are logical, specific and stand unrefuted. Having read both the specific research that he attacks and his full detailed dissection of it, I posted on several economics blogs asking for specific logic or data contravening his points. All replies, I'm sorry to say, consisted of ad hominem attacks and sneers at me for being a naive stooge of the "free-market ideologues." I gather that Reynolds has in the past been guilty of dishonest twisting of data to suit his obvious political bias. However that's not the case on this subject, from my detailed read.
Harold, Hmm..does any sane economist believe in tariffs, high taxes, and price controls, three Democratic Economic Sacraments? If there is a war on Economic Science, it is certainly led from the Left. The NSF/NIH has embryonic stem cells as a 50 year + till productized. What little trust I have in scientists, it is certainly greater than my faith in Jan Schakowsky, Mark Kirk, and Rod Blago being able to prioritize research in health sciences. JBP
I don't want Blago prioritizing anything except maybe his in-cell reading list. Paul, your reading of Alan Reynolds is way ahead of me. Did Brad DeLong offer no substantive critique? I ask because he's someone I tend to rely on when I need to hear from a sane economist.
DeLong has offered some limited critique of Reynolds; DeLong's regular readers tend to go on at length to the effect that rising inequality is too obvious to be doubted. Reynolds has been personally replying on various blogs including DeLong's, but since most commenters are simply declining to believe him without engaging in specifics it's hard to form an opinion on the merits of his replies. Piketty and Saez have now begun posting their own replies to Reynolds including at DeLong's blog; I'm not finding their followups to be illuminating for good or ill. They still don't explain why entitlements shouldn't be counted as household income. Also I have learned from them that most analysts believe that the 1986 income tax reform's transferring a lot of high-end revenues newly into the income numbers (which had previously been reported as business incomes) was a short-term effect. This is a crucial point: Reynolds shows that without that purely-recordkeeping change, the relative rise in high-end incomes reported by Piketty Saez drops by around half. (Sort of like how for a while rape rates seemed to be going up simply because rapes were getting much more likely to be reported.) Piketty Saez say basically that "everybody agrees" that the 1986 law's impact was just short-term and washes out of the income numbers by 1990. I can't figure out or find a logic for that -- did all the high-end incomes which in 1987 move from the business column to the personal column somehow vanish by 1990? I dunno and nobody seems to be offering an explanation.
Since I still don't have time to do the work on this, I'll just point to Tyler Cowen's always good and (for an economist) unusually good-natured blog: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/01/alan_reynoldss_.html He also has links.
Yea I just read that post actually, and I like Cowen a lot. Alan Reynolds has posted a response to Cowen's comments, actually it's more of a general response to the blogger criticisms of him. Reynolds is a bit defensive but less so than I probably would be in his shoes, and I find his specific points in response to be quite strong. As Reynolds keeps pointing out, nothing he has written actually asserts that inequality hasn't risen at all. He does assert that the empirical case for such a rise has been wildly overstated, and that empiricism is better than arguing via anecdote (which I call "Reagan reasoning"), and that the overall facts of the issue _do_ matter, and that the bulk of the disagreement being directed at him is simply rhetoric. Reynolds has criticized Piketty-Saez by going through their data and logic point by point; progressives are criticizing Reynolds via ad hominem attacks and straw men. That makes the needle of my bullshit magnet twitch strongly in the direction opposite Reynolds, which is not at all to claim that I am sure he's right but if I have to bet...
