Diatribes of Jay: Elizabeth Warren, Defender of Science

To jump to the table of candidates’ educational backgrounds, click here. For comment on the value of Elizabeth Warren’s intelligence, click here. For an essay on her qualifications for the presidency, click here. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Erratum: For some reason known only to the god of geezers, an earlier version of this post had Andrew Yang’s surname as Wang. I apologize to him and regret the error, which confirms my belief that people my age (74) and older should not run for president.

It’s nice to have your own analysis confirmed by a Nobel Prize winner.

Thursday Paul Krugman published a column on the comprehensiveness and power of Elizabeth Warren’s plans to renew our country. Not only that. He confirmed that her plans have deep roots in the science of economics, including current data and analysis.

As a Nobel laureate and a career academic economist, Krugman ought to know. Yet his column was wistful, as if he had discovered a fascinating and important fact but didn’t quite know what to make of it. He wrote repeatedly that his discovery doesn’t necessarily make Warren the best candidate, let alone the best one to beat Trump.

On those last two points, I beg to differ. Warren is the best candidate. We had all better do everything we can to help her win. This essay explains yet one more reason why.

Our species’ roughly five thousand years of recorded history is largely a story of tribes. It’s a tale of the ceaseless flow of wealth, power and vitality among peoples and nations, with emphasis on their leaders and their wars. It’s like an endless family feud.

It’s hard to find a theme in this blood, struggle and strife. In the West, we focus on the rise and fall of the ancient democracies, Greece and Rome, and the insights of their philosophers, leaders and historians. After those cultures fell, the next near-millennium we once called the “Dark Ages.” Interestingly, that was when ancient China reached its earlier apex, culminating in its discovery of most of the world, including the Americas, as described by Gavin Menzies in his illuminating book 1421.

Up to that point, human history resembled Shakespeare’s famous metaphor, “a tale told by an idiot, fully of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But then things changed, at least in the West. In relatively quick succession came three big developments: the Renaissance, the invention of science, and the Enlightenment. Together, they took about five centuries out of a recorded history roughly ten times that long, but they changed our species’ social evolution.

During the 1400s and 1500s, the Renaissance brought a revival in the arts and literature and the rise of European city-states like Venice and Florence, which often ran democratically. The 1600s gave us modern observational science, with Galileo’s discovery of the heliocentric solar system in 1632. Then Newton published his mathematical theories of astronomy and physics in Principia Mathematica, which took its final title in 1686. The 1700s and 1800s brought us the Enlightenment: Adam Smith invented economics (coincidentally with our nation’s birth) in 1776, and John Stuart Mill conceived utilitarianism as “the greatest good for the greatest number” in 1861.

These last two developments were vital, and not just for the progress of democracy. With the advent of observational and mathematical science came the proposal of theories of humanity expressed in terms of concrete and quantifiable goals and achievements—cause and effect.

No longer was history just a random series of wars and conquests, a bloody family chronicle. It could have a rationale, a plan. We could evaluate the plan and its implementation rationally, even mathematically, using the nascent science of economics.

That’s what the Enlightenment really meant: a rational, quantitative method for evaluating the progress of humanity and setting its goals and objectives. Things like longevity, infant mortality, average levels of education, gross domestic product, economic equality, the percentage of people in prison, the concentration of pollutants in our air, water and food, and our mean and median incomes began to matter. We can observe and measure them, just like the paths of the planets in their orbits. Then we can use them as gauges of human progress, even justice. And we can build societal goals around improving them. As a species, we can set concrete, quantitative benchmarks. We can plan.

In his day, the great economist John Maynard Keynes called economics “a dismal science.” But it’s much less dismal today. Generations of quantitative researchers have made it far more rigorous and mathematical than in Keynes’ day. The Digital Age has let us accumulate and analyze vast masses of economic data. You might say the digital computer and its mass-storage peripherals did for economics what the telescope did for astronomy.

Against this background, we can see why Donald Trump’s reign has been so disastrous. In two years, we Americans have slip-slid backwards through the Enlightenment and the discovery of science as if they had never happened. Our supreme leader is self-consciously working for the benefit of himself and his own social class—even seeking aid from foreign oligarchs. What might do the greatest good for the greatest number never enters his mind. And he doesn’t believe in science at all—not just climate change, but economics, too. He thinks tariffs are things foreign exporters pay, and he won’t listen to the experts.

In this context, a future leader’s education makes a big difference. Was he weaned on English, with various “tales of sound and fury”? Did he study history, chronicling the struggles among tribes? Did she immerse herself in “political science,” which is less observational science than a history of tribes with names like “liberal,” “conservative,” “socialist,” “Communist,” and “populist,” with a little polling thrown in? Or did he or she receive education in real science, with more math than arithmetic, some study of cause and effect, the formation of specific hypotheses about external reality, and their testing by observation or experiment?

Here are the major fields of study, in college or university and beyond, of several leading Democratic candidates for president: Fields of Education of Selected Democratic Candidates for President in 2020

Candidate	College/University Major	Graduate or Other Education and Science-related Employment
Warren	Speech Pathology	Law, Special Education Teacher
Biden	History and Political Science	Law
Sanders	Political Science	None
Harris	Political Science and Economics	Law
Booker	Political Science	Law, Master of Sociology
Hickenlooper	English	Master of Geology, Petroleum Geologist
Buttigieg	History and Literature	Rhodes Scholarship in Philosophy, Politics and Economics
Yang	Economics	Law, Attorney in health-test industry

On reading this table with the hope of defending science and the Enlightenment in 2020, you could work up a good despond. All but Buttigieg, Hickenlooper and Sanders have law degrees. Now law is a strong intellectual discipline. I graduated from Harvard Law School and taught law in several other schools, and I believe law offers the most rigorous non-quantitative education. But law is not science.

Law differs from science because it doesn’t involve math. More fundamentally, it doesn’t test hypotheses against reality by observation or experiment. Instead, law applies human authority logically to human affairs. That’s precisely what modern science replaced in dethroning Aristotle and the other ancient authority figures who thought and wrote about the natural world without quantitative observation or experiment.

So if you want a defender of science and the Enlightenment, you have to look to Warren, with her degree in Speech Pathology, Booker with his master’s degree in Sociology, Hickenlooper with his master’s in Geology and related employment, Yang with his work as a lawyer in health-test firms, or Harris, Buttigieg or Yang with their training in economics. (Buttigieg’s economics education was part of his Rhodes scholarship. Yet it produced a bachelor’s degree from Oxford and appears to have been mathematically rigorous.)

If you’re looking for promoters and defenders of science, these pickings are pretty slim. Anyway, why focus on the youthful education of pols like Warren, who are already deep into non-scientific careers?

Science is a way of life. It’s the antithesis of religion, but we inculcate its values in our youth much as we do religious values, through instruction, repetition, and practice. Just so do we inculcate the Enlightenment values of reasoning concretely from cause and effect.

Once you reach adulthood, you either “get” these things or you don’t. Donald J. Trump, for example, has zero understanding of science and its value in our lives and recent history. Apparently he also has little or no ability to predict the effects and consequences of his various spasms of “policy.”

By far the most common way for anyone to “get” science, let alone in a non-scientific career, is through youthful education. The values of science and its strict, cause-and-effect reasoning “stick” most strongly in people who acquire them while young. So besides seeing practical demonstrations in policy, which few pols ever do, the best way to assess whether pols “get” science is to examine their educational backgrounds.

Warren’s particular field of science education—speech pathology—stands out as a branch of the science of medicine. That matters in two ways. First, medicine is the branch of science that, by far, has produced the most tangible and easily understood benefits to individuals. Second, unlike, say, physics or geology, which focus on abstract principles and on things, medicine focuses on people. It seeks to improve their lives and reduce their suffering.

So the goals of medicine are much the same as those of politics, or at least those politics should have. Medicine is therefore the discipline of science that most relates to people and the one to which most people best relate. (Here Kamala Harris may have a familial leg up: her mother was and may still be a doctoral-level cancer researcher, and her father is a doctoral Stanford economist.)

Economics is a science, too. Harris, Buttigieg, and Yang each have had some education in it. Yet none of them has had her or his plans endorsed, let alone by a Nobel laureate, as congruent with economic science.

Equally important, public understanding of economics is dubious and skeptical. Many voters see economic data or analysis as a charade and a fraud, along the lines of Mark Twain’s “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” In contrast, most ordinary voters understand the importance of medical science—and access to it!—in their guts. That’s one reason why the Dems won the 2018 midterms so decisively.

Anyway, medicine, including speech pathology, is an intrinsically altruistic science. Maybe that’s why Warren majored in it, decades before going into politics. It’s “relatable.” If a pol wanted a field to demonstrate the overarching human value of science, she could certainly pick a worse one.

Today our society is declining rapidly in many ways. Corruption is nothing new. It’s been increasing steadily at home since the height of the Cold War. Competence and reliance on experts have been declining sharply at least since Obama first ran for president. (See also this post.)

But with Donald Trump salting his know-nothing minions throughout our huge federal bureaucracy and disseminating his know-nothing ideas throughout cyberspace, we are now facing the end of the Enlightenment in America. We are also facing the end of the United States’ leadership in science, if not our abandonment of science as a basic societal value altogether. At the same time, our entire species is facing a global Luddite reaction against the values and understanding that have made the last seven centuries of human history quite different from, and far more hopeful than, all that came before.

Our nation can’t afford to lose those values or that understanding. Our species can’t afford to have us lose either. It’s hard to imagine any better way to avoid that sad fate than to elect a president who knows science from her youthful education, has applied it to children in teaching, and already has used it as a basis for planning how to improve our collective lives.

Footnote: I mention Yang’s work as a lawyer for health-testing companies only to be accurate and fair to him, who may have the most comprehensive policy plans on his campaign Website. But I happen to have a special perspective from which to compare legal work in science-related industries with education and work in science itself. After majoring in and earning a Ph.D. in physics and working for four years as a scientist, I switched careers to law and later, for four additional years, advised “high-tech” firms in Silicon Valley, including a few health-related firms. I can state unequivocally that all that legal work taught me less about the essence of science and the scientific method than any single month during my undergraduate or graduate education in science, or during my practice as a scientist.

In her work as a special-education teacher, I suspect that Warren had additional direct contact with science. For example, she probably did meticulous evaluations of teaching methods and their results and used quantitative trial and error to decide what works and what doesn’t work with particular students. That sort of testing more closely resembles the scientific method than almost anything a lawyer generally does. The only other candidate (among the eight discussed here) who really “did science” at any stage of his career is Hickenlooper, with his master’s degree in geology and several years of work in petroleum geology.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

For comment on the quality of Elizabeth Warren’s mind and its relevance to our current circumstances, click here.
For analysis of the disastrous effect of our leaders’ failure to take personal responsibility, click here.
For brief comment on China’s Tiananmen Square Massacre and its significance for our species, click here.
For reasons why the Democratic House should pass a big infrastructure bill ASAP, click here.
For an analysis why Nancy Pelosi is right on impeachment, click here.
For an explanation how demagoguing the issue of abortion has ruined our national politics and brought us our two worst presidents, and how we could recover, click here.
For analysis of the Huawei Tech Block and its necessity for maintaining our innovative infrastructure, click here.
For ten reasons, besides global warming, to dump oil as a fuel for ground transportation, click here.
For discussion why we must cooperate with China and how we can compete successfully with China, click here.
For reasons why Trump’s haphazard trade war will not win the competition with China, click here.
For a deeper discussion of how badly we Americans have failed to plan our future, click here.
For an essay on Elizabeth Warren’s qualifications for the presidency, click here.
For comment on how not doing our jobs has brought us Americans low, click here.
To see how modern politics has come to resemble the Game of Thrones, click here.
For a discussion of the waste of energy and fossil fuels caused by unneeded long-range batteries in electric cars, click here.
For a discussion why Democrats should embrace the long campaign season and make no premature moves, click here.
For a discussion how Trump and Brexit have put the tree world into free fall, click here.
For a review of how our own American acts help create our president’s claimed “invasion” of Central American migrants, click here.
For a review of basic facts that must inform any type of universal health insurance, click here.
For a discussion of how the West’s fall and China’s rise affect the chances of our species’ survival, click here.
For a discussion of what the Mueller Report is and how its release could affect American politics, click here.
For a note on the Mueller Report as the beginning of a process, click here.
For comment on the special candidacies of Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, click here.
For reasons why the twin 737 Max 8 disasters should inspire skepticism and caution with regard to potentially lethal uses of software and AI, click here.
For my message to Southwest Airlines on grounding the 737 Maxes, click here.
For an example of even the New York Times spewing propaganda, click here.
For means by which high-school teachers could help save American democracy, click here.
For a modern team of rivals that might comprise a dream Cabinet in 2021, click here.
For an analysis of the global decline of rules-based civilization, click here. For a brief note on avoiding health lobbying Armageddon, click here.
For analysis of how to save real news and America’s ability to see straight, click here.
For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here. For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here.
For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here.
For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here. For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here.
For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here.
For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here.
For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here.
For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here.
For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here.
For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here.
For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here.
For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here.
For additional reasons, click here.
For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here.
For Democrats’ core values, click here.
The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights?
For how our two parties lost their souls, click here.
For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here.
For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here.
For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here.

Diatribes of Jay

16 June 2019

Elizabeth Warren, Defender of Science

Fields of Education of Selected Democratic Candidates for President in 2020

Links to Popular Recent Posts

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

0 Comments:

About Me

Previous Posts