Is Economics a Science?

Maybe it's just because I am getting older, but everything these days seems to be changing faster and getting ever more complicated. Look at light bulbs. When most bulbs were incandescent, replacing a burned out bulb was not too complicated. Mainly one needed just to check for a suitable wattage and the job was done. Chandeliers might have a smaller socket, so a little extra check for that is still a good idea. But the arrival of compact florescent bulbs has made the lighting aisle a much more daunting place. It might make sense to pay ten times as much for such a fancy bulb, if it will really last ten times as long, and especially if it provides the same light while using less electric power. Is the bulb really likely to last as long as the manufacturer claims on the package?

Nowadays with a smart phone one can do product research right in the hardware store. A quick search of the internet will provide an endless list of product reviews. Interpreting these is a bit challenging, though. The manufacturer may well have planted positive reviews with a convincing but unfounded aura of objectivity. On the other hand, various grouches and trolls delight in trashing whatever they encounter, highlighting every imperfection but still leaving one no wiser about which bulb to choose. It's a big help if one can find a review at a site one knows, from a source one knows well enough to be able to trust. Having found a few such informative reviews on candidate light bulbs, one can then search too to see if there are better prices close by.

That might already sound a bit overwhelming, but buying light bulbs isn't actually even that simple. It's not just that LED bulbs have entered the arena, with yet higher prices, longer lives, and higher efficiencies. What makes the lighting aisle especially bewildering these days is how quickly the prices on LED bulbs are dropping. If I know that the prices for these top-notch bulbs will drop 30% in six months, my smart strategy might be to buy a cheap incandescent to get me by in the mean time, and then come back shopping again after the price reduction. Smart choices aren't just a matter of how the market looks today, but depend too prices in the future.

Shopping for lighting fixtures is much more future-oriented than shopping for bulbs. A single fixture might last through dozens of bulbs. The fixture is also much bigger investment than a bulb, often including a significant cost for installation. If a fixture uses any sort of less common type of socket or requires any special shape of bulb, then buying the fixture becomes a gamble that the bulbs it requires will remain available for long enough in the future to get one's money's worth out of the fixture. In the best of worlds, the required bulbs will even be available at good prices!

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a smart phone app or a website that could give accurate forecasts about product availability and pricing? Of course such a tool's usefulness would go far beyond light bulbs and lighting fixtures. It could have averted the entire housing and financial crisis! Too often people took out mortgages on houses than they couldn't afford, expecting to be able to resell the houses at higher prices before they got too far behind on their mortgage payments. If they had known that housing prices were going to stop climbing, they wouldn't have bought the houses in the first place and the foreclosures would have been averted.

Given than we can't even forecast the weather more than a few days ahead with any degree of accuracy, it seems unlikely that reliable forecasts of housing prices are likely to become available. On the other hand, as computer models of changing atmospheric pressure and temperature get ever more sophisticated, and as more weather stations are deployed across the land and sea and in orbit, weather forecasting does indeed get more accurate, even if only incrementally. Are housing markets somehow inherently more difficult to forecast than the weather?

When planning a big project, it is often advantageous not to tip one's hand. A large electrical manufacturer might want to introduce a new line of lighting fixtures that will require a new type of bulb which that manufacturer also plans to supply. Perhaps the main appeal is the fixture or perhaps it’s the bulbs, but either way if the manufacturer is the sole supplier of each then the sales of one will drive its sales of the other. But if word leaks out about the new type of bulb, then competing manufacturers will be able to enter the market at the same time or even ahead of the one that initiated the move.

Suppose that an accurate market forecasting tool were available. Surely it ought make the job easier for those competing manufacturers. The forecasting tool would tell them in advance about the new type of bulb that would be appearing soon. But such a tool could also be used by the manufacture that plans to initiate such a move. If they see that the tool has prematurely revealed their plans and spoiled the early mover advantage they would have gained, they could just change their plans to something a bit different from what the tool was forecasting, regaining their market advantage.

It's hard to believe that there's something behind the weather that delights in raining on our picnics, harder still that something would read the weather forecast to infer our picnicking plans, the better to steer the rain our way. But in the marketplace there is much to be gained by spoiling the plans of others, and utter certainty that any available forecast will be used to that end. For every player who tries to use a forecast to gain an advantage, there will be a player who acts to steer things against the forecast to tilt the advantage in their own direction. Forecasting markets is a much nastier kettle of fish than forecasting the weather!

Communities of Learning

Today's tragic slaughter of schoolchildren in Connecticut is almost impossible to think about in its utter senselessness, but we have to think about it all the same. One natural response is to tighten the restrictions on the sorts of weapons used in such slaughtering, and clearly that is a good idea, but superficial. Anyone who could commit such an atrocity must be severely disturbed. Somehow people who are that broken need to be identified and treated appropriately, for their own benefit as well as that of society. This approach goes a bit deeper, but, in dividing the world up into the normal, the pathological, and the institutional authorities who are to enforce such distinctions, I fear it cannot be very effective either. Of course the world has always been subject to incidents of senseless cruelty. But there are surely differences of degree. The only sane way to live is to take as crucial and urgent the responsibility to cultivate compassionate and meaningful lives, as individuals, families, and communities. What makes lives meaningful is relationships. When our lives manifest as the cherishing of each other, the likelihood is vastly reduced of anyone becoming so disconnected as to commit random murders. If somehow a person becomes so deranged as to be capable of such senseless violence, in a community where relationships of cherished, the pathology will be recognized and at least taken on as a struggle. Remote and abstract institutions may have a role, but the primary focus of response can be the community, which can work to keep any sort of weapons out of the hands of such a disturbed individual.

In our time and place, community is a rather ethereal concept. Our modern technologies of communication and transportation seem to have been the primary agents of the dissolution of community. We have ready access to a few hundred million other people, those of us living on the grid, on the network, on the web - pulverizing our relationships to bits, to broken fragments. Such a broken system cannot sustain itself, and indeed the signs of collapse are everywhere. How far we have to fall before we rebuild enough integrity to revitalize our relationships and make richly meaningful lives again normal, that is our crucial and urgent challenge.

Archdruid John Greer proposes that "devising a framework for adult education outside the grip of the current American education industry is one of the most pressing needs of the decade or two right ahead of us." Perhaps it is not going too far to extend this proposal, to see learning as the binding fabric of human community. Learning is life. This points to the real pathology of our science today, which has far too much the smell of death, of an escape from the grappling and tangling with the ambiguities and paradoxes of raw experience, an escape into the pure clean clear realms of the ideal, of mathematics and theory and abstraction.

We need widespread local venues where learning can be shared, learning that promotes engagement with the realities of experience, of daily life. Some of these might be workshops oriented to somewhat specialized crafts. But the general foundation needs to be the cultivation of how to live a sane life. The basic skills of living need to be taught, rooted in our world today and reaching to the world we envision for tomorrow.

Gardening, nutrition, physical exercise, the skills of reading and writing, household finance, home repair, bicycle and automobile repair, computer skills, crafts such as sewing and woodworking, arts like painting, sculpture and music, how to manage interpersonal conflicts, the basics of working with government agencies and other large scale institutions such as insurance companies… these sorts of down to earth basic skills whose sharing can provide not only the raw material for revitalized community but also the context for critical thinking. It is through vital engagement with the substance of experience that the sublime arises, not by chasing after abstractions. Theory and abstraction properly work when they enhance our engagement with experience. They are means, not properly ends.

Let us learn together, to reconnect through the world, to each other.

Thriving Science

When out driving long enough distances, I've been listening to Malcolm Eckel's lectures on Buddhism that he recorded with The Learning Company. In his talk on The Sangha, he brought up the great monastic institutions of India, whose destruction effectively brought an end to Buddhism in India. Eckel compared those institutions to our modern universities.

This comparison got me thinking. To a large extent the practice of science is highly concentrated in elite institutions: our great research universities, along with a few government and industrial research labs. Perhaps it is also the election cycle that is coming to a close over the next few hours that has also reminded me, for example with the reports of bizarre beliefs about the human reproductive system, that the scientific outlook is not so very widespread.

On the one hand the challenge is real enough of how to steer science toward the actualization of its greatest potential for benefiting humanity and the planetary biosphere. This challenge takes for granted the continuing vitality of our scientific institutions. But a very real challenge to that vitality may well be sitting on the other hand.

I've been reading Linda Lear's biography of Beatrix Potter. Potter was evidently a fine amateur naturalist. Her illustrations for her children's books grew out of her botanical drawings, from which also grew her interest in the biology, in particular of mushrooms and lichen. She was a real pioneer of lichen biology, perceiving their symbiotic nature far ahead of almost anyone else. Lear tells us that it was just around the time of Potter's insights on lichen, around 1900, that botany was becoming professionalized, so that the insights of an amateur were discounted. Of course the fact that Potter was a woman didn't help matters either.

If science is to survive then it seems that somehow it must become more localized and to recover the appreciation it once held for the amateur. This is quite distinct from any sort of indulging of incompetence. To some extent the current professionalized approach to science can actually provide more support for incompetence, since the competition for professional status and position can overshadow the quest for truth. The competence we need to cultivate has to do with willingness to break through confused thinking despite the cost, rather than the exploitation of confusion for profit.

The increasing financial, political, and natural stresses on our scientific institutions, from fiscal cliffs to surging seas, will shake them profoundly. This shaking can provide an opportunity for a new more vital vision, for a science that inspires and thrives as a pervasive element of society.

Liminality

Our world consists of many objects of various types. There are physical objects like automobiles and cell phones, illusory objects like rainbows and reflections, imaginary objects like hobbits and unicorns, institutional objects like corporations and nations, philosophical objects like truth and beauty, and many others. Both the objects and their types have ill-defined boundaries. One fundamental boundary is temporal, the birth of a thing and the death. A particular automobile comes into existence at some point in time, and goes out of existence at some later point. Beyond particular automobiles, there is the general class Automobile to which these belong. The notion of a birth and death of such a general class is harder to pin down. Was the invention of the Automobile a discovery of an eternal class or the creation of a new class? Whatever heaven might house such eternal classes, it must be a very crowded place to contain every possible invention. A more useful way to think of such classes is as patterns of human thought and communication, which would then have invention a creation of a new such pattern.

When Charles Darwin was studying barnacles, he realized that the division of particular barnacles into species, and into higher taxonomic classes, was to some extent arbitrary. When does the variation within a species cross into variation across species? There are some general rules to be applied, but just how the rules should be applied to particular cases can get thorny enough to become a taxonomer's judgment call, in the last case an arbitrary decision. And it is just this interpenetration of intra- and inter-specific variation that makes evolution possible. If there were an uncrossable chasm between species, evolution would be impossible.

Science is another general category whose ultimately undefinable frontiers enables evolution. What sorts of propositions and activities should properly count as scientific? Evolution of such a category is not likely to happen through wholesale redefinition, but instead through incremental shifts at the frontiers. One notion of the frontier of science is where new scientific propositions are created or where their truth value is in an active process of determination. This frontier corresponds roughly to the regular introduction of new models of automobiles. This is an evolution of the various things that we class in the category of Automobile, but it is not a change in our very notion of what makes a thing an Automobile or not. The rise of electric bicycles is a bit more interesting, as it puts in question the boundary between bicycles and motorcycles. The evolution of the category Science is pushed where there are propositions or activities that we're not quite sure should properly called scientific.

A collection of phenomena becomes recognizable as a pattern, can be seen as an object, when it repeats itself often enough across a long enough time, which then requires some regularity or stability in its environment, the associated phenomena that are causally intertwined with the object. As conditions shift, the object responds, evolves. Science is an evolving category in just this way. For example, the use of automated experimental observation and mathematical calculation and deduction have raised the question of whether scientific activity is properly limited to human activity and the acceptable degree of indirection.

Rather than gambling on any particular forecast of future conditions, a wise strategy is to look at a family of most likely futures and to position oneself to be able to respond effectively to any of them. A major fork in the road ahead for the world is whether energy production can continue growing or whether instead we are facing declines as precipitous as the advances of the past century. Given the fundamental role that energy consumption plays across the full range of our patterns of living, a significant decline would have a huge impact on all of our institutions, including science. Already with impeded progress in experimental particle physics and space exploration one can see some of the early effects of resource limitations.

What kinds of science will we need in an era of declining resources, and what kinds will we be able to afford?

The Challenge

Ran Prieur posted part of a letter he received from one of his readers:

It seems me that the space and time for critical thought is increasingly shrinking in our world... a result of people being increasingly integrated into and identifying with systems and not an issue with particular systems. Having been out of West Point for three years and now in medical school, I can say confidently that the field of medicine is far more hierarchical, self congratulatory, malicious towards "the other", and dogmatic than I find even the American military to be.

Of course there are many soldiers, physicians, scientists and engineers who are exemplary opposites of malice and dogmatism. But how can we change the character of these subcultures themselves?

A good starting point is to begin to dismantle the mechanisms that currently encourage malice and dogmatism. One approach could be to broaden the distribution of support. If there were a way to break through to the ultimate nature of reality by concentrating enough talent and resources on the right project, then perhaps that ultimate achievement could justify the neglect of projects less likely to strike such gold. But if the rainbow is better enjoyed by viewing it from many perspectives rather than by a concentrated push to reach the pot of gold at its end, the wiser approach could be to cultivate as many open eyes as possible.

Teamwork

A Buddhist practice of science is not fundamentally different from a Buddhist approach to any other mundane discipline. David McCarthy in his essay The Six-Fold Economics of Compassion uses the six perfections (generosity, ethical discipline, tolerance, diligence, focus, wisdom) to elaborate what an economics of compassion could be. My project here is to sketch out what compassionate science would look like. In large part, though, compassionate science is just compassionate action and no extraordinary analysis is required. Just be a compassionate person who happens to be a scientist, or who happens to be involved in some sort of scientific activity.

But perhaps, after all, scientific activity does have some special features that create challenges and opportunities worth examining. Of course, what it is exactly that distinguishes scientific from non-scientific activity: that is a curious philosophical puzzle. Perhaps science is distinctively objective, or quantitative, or mathematical. Science is devoted to publication and preoccupied with priority. Science is the fruit of the interplay of theory and experiment, each driving the refinement and enhancing the range of the other.

One of the cornerstones of science is its collective nature. Science is a group activity. Many of its features are consequences of this basic property. Quantitative measurements using institutionally maintained standards and the public recording of results in journals and conference proceedings: these are the means by which a scientific community's exploration can be kept coherent. Objective phenomena are essentially those which can be observed consistently by all the members of the group.

If there is a kind of group mind whose investigation of the world we call "science", then what is special about compassionate science is that it also must be a group activity, a refinement and transformation of this group mind.

Being sensitive to the moral consequences of actions, Buddhist practice in general puts special emphasis on the intent behind actions and the contribution of this intent to the formation of habitual patterns. If I try to help someone, it is certainly best if my actions actually benefit that person. But even if my effort fails, I am reinforcing a tendency to act helpfully, a tendency that can bring positive results again and again in the future.

In these modern times, it is hardly just the mutual refinement of theory and experiment that is dominated by large organizations. How can an organization cultivate a calm clarity, come to see the illusory nature of its own identity, and dedicate itself to the welfare of others? How can an organization cultivate kindness?

Another perspective from which to approach this challenge is to ask: what prevents an organization from behaving kindly?

Most organizations already have regular reviews of policies that have been put in place to prevent abusive behaviors of various types. One classic principle of Buddhist practice is the constant return of attention to the here and now. Somehow the attention to kindness needs to be an integral part of the regular work of the organization, rather than an annoying interruption. Making the transformation of the organization a top priority, no less than its immediate effectiveness, ought to create space for such attention.

Wealth and Theology

Somehow Buddhism and Science both address the ultimate nature of reality, both dig beneath appearances to discover the underlying truth. Somehow the truths they discover must be related. In any case, a Buddhist living in modern industrial society has good reason to relate them. We live in a world constructed by science, a world that at every turn advertises the power of the truth discovered by science. For most of us, the discovery of the truth of Buddhism is much more a work in progress. Buddhism does not build airplanes and cell phones, Buddhism builds, transforms, people. This transformation is principally a matter of the notoriously elusive mind. However inescapably intimate our experience of mind is, it is the hardest thing to subject to quantitative, objective, scientific scrutiny. Relating the truths of Science and Buddhism turns out to be problematic.

One approach to solving this problem is to bring the remarkably powerful apparatus of scientific investigation to bear more directly on the mind. If we can land probes on distant planets, surely we can probe something so much closer to home, something that is practically the very essence of home. On the other hand, a bit of caution is called for. Descartes, one of the founders of the modern scientific project, put mind in a category totally separate from the locatable objects that science can grasp. Indeed, the ungraspable nature of mind is a fundamental truth discovered by Buddhism.

Graspable phenomena are never ultimate. This perspective provides another way to relate the truths of Buddhism and Science. Science always confronts a receding horizon in its quest for the ultimate nature of reality. Is this just an accidental feature of our time, a sign of the imperfection of our understanding, an imperfection that can be and will be repaired as the scientific project is brought to completion? If the project is inherently impossible to complete, if the quest for the ultimate truth is like racing for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, if the scientific project is inherently futile… but how can that be, given its overwhelming success?

What kind of success have we achieved through science? We have learned an extraordinary amount about the world, given ourselves powerful tools for changing the world, and indeed changed the world in many profound ways. If all these are mere by-products of a futile quest for the ultimate, perhaps it is a worthy quest despite its futility.

Of course, all these marvelous accomplishments are not entirely attributable to the modern scientific project. Many significant discoveries are stumbled upon in quests for much more mundane ends, some noble and some less so. To what extent our remarkable technological progress can be credited to the modern scientific project and to what extent it is more a matter of a less coherently thought-out series of developments across many dimensions spanning the full planetary ecological system. Our wealth is not good proof of our theology!

I am not arguing that wealth and theology are totally disconnected: I am merely arguing that they are not totally connected, either. Should we choose that theology that maximizes our wealth? There are intractable challenges in any sort of experimental check. For example, if word were to leak out of preliminary findings, the latest get-rich-quick theology, the competitive landscape would instantly shift, invalidating later trials. But the difficulties are far more profound. Our theology supplies our framework for evaluating our wealth. This is akin to the challenge involved in measuring inflation, Should we apply a theology-relative hedonic correction for each trial? Does a miser's accumulation constitute true wealth?

What if we let go of the scientific quest to get to the bottom of things, recognizing its futility, and instead return our attention to the here and now, redirecting our work to understand and change the world. If Science is collectively refined relative truth, the appropriate compass by which to steer it is moral. We must collectively refine our sensitivity to the help and harm brought by our work.

And what are the truly profound challenges of science in our time? Of course there are vastly diverse technical challenges across the entire frontier of science. But when is our technology something that helps people and the planet, and when does it become harmful? There is no sense in weighing the help or harm of technology as a whole. This project is a matter of details, of each here and each now. Resigning from attentive work is just as delusively apathetic as diligent work that refuses attention to moral consequences.

Engaging in the Buddhist path is a matter of self transformation. The truths of Buddhism don't relate so much to the bright shining side of science, its spectacular achievements. The first steps on the Buddhist path are usually rather uncomfortable, as we start to see how deeply caught we are in the cycle of delusion, grasping, and suffering. This is the work that is needed now in science, to see how we have been caught up in greed, violence, and delusion. But to see, too, the unbounded positive potential opened up by the path of self transformation.