The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [27]
Well, as Yogi Berra once said, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” I soon discovered that Berra’s principle applies in spades to the economic sphere. We live in a world dramatically different from that envisioned by my visionary mentors, so I turned my attention to the writings of economists from the Austrian School and their protégés at the University of Chicago, who were decidedly becoming more mainstream in the 1980s as the country began a systematic shift toward the right. Through these writings I found a scientific foundation for my economic and political preferences. The founders of the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics—of which I consider myself a member even today—penned a number of books and essays whose ideas burned into my brain a clear understanding of right and wrong human action.
I read Friedrich A. von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty and The Road to Serfdom; I absorbed Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, an exceptional summary of free market economics; and I found Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose to be one of the clearest expositions of economic theory ever penned. His PBS documentary series by the same name—introduced by the most muscular libertarian in history, Arnold Schwarzenegger—was so powerful that I purchased the series on video and watched the episodes several times.12 In the giants of libertarian thought who most shaped my thinking, Ludwig von Mises was first among equals; he taught me that interventionism leads to more interventionism, and that if you can intervene to protect individuals from dangerous drugs, what about dangerous ideas?13
It is this link between freedom and ideas that brings together my passion for science and my love of liberty, and has led to the type of science that I practice today.
An Unauthorized Autobiography of Science
Over the past three decades I have noted two disturbing tendencies in both science and society: first, to rank the sciences from “hard” (physical sciences) to “medium” (biological sciences) to “soft” (social sciences); second, to divide science writing into two forms, technical and popular. As such rankings and divisions are wont to be, they include an assessment of worth, with the hard sciences and technical writing respected the most, and the soft sciences and popular writing esteemed the least. Both of these prejudices are so far off the mark that they are not even wrong.
I have always thought that if there must be a rank order (which there mustn’t), the current one is precisely reversed. The physical sciences are hard, in the sense that calculating differential equations is difficult, for example. The number of variables within the causal net of the subject matter, however, is comparatively simple to constrain and test when contrasted with, say, computing the actions of organisms in an ecosystem or predicting the consequences of global climate change. Even the difficulty of constructing comprehensive models in the biological sciences, however, pales in comparison to that of the workings of human brains and societies. By these measures, the social sciences are the hard disciplines, because the subject matter is orders of magnitude more complex and multifaceted with many more degrees of freedom to control and predict.
Between technical and popular science writing, there is what I call integrative science, a process that blends data, theory, and narrative. Without all three of these metaphorical legs, the seat upon which the enterprise of science rests will collapse. Attempts to determine which of the three legs has the greatest value is on a par with debating whether π or r2 is the most important factor in computing the area of a circle. I classify two types of narrative. Formal science writing—what I call the narrative of explanation—presents a neat and tidy step-by-step process of introduction-methods-results-discussion grounded in a nonexistent “scientific method” of observation-hypothesis-prediction-experiment