Deirdre McCloskey is no fan of the experimental methods of the latest winners of the Nobel Prize.
a good deal of the work of the Nobelists, is as startlingly unethical, and stupid, as the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment run from 1931 to as late as 1971. African-American men were randomly assigned to not get the penicillin that the medical scientists from the U.S. Department of Health already knew cured the disease.
Pointer from Don Boudreaux.
More broadly, she attacks the mindset of mainstream economists that their purpose in life is to come up with policies for government to impose on the public. She argues against interventionist policies both in principle and in terms of consequences. She argues that adults are entitled to make their own decisions unaffected by government policy; moreover, when they do enjoy liberty, the results are greater prosperity.
My thoughts:
1. If we take it as given that government is going to undertake policy, then it might be better informed by controlled experiments. For example, in education, over 99 percent of experiments are not controlled. The bureaucrats implement a new curriculum without testing whether it achieves desired objectives (assuming that those objectives are clearly articulated).
2. What should economists say about policy? I think that McCloskey would argue that our over-arching observations, about the effectiveness of markets and the public-choice problems inherent in government intervention, overpower the fantasy-despot analyses of market failure. We know that market processes better implement experimentation, evaluation, and evolution. She would say that experiments cannot teach us anything that takes us beyond that insight or that refutes it.
McCloskey says:
McCloskey might be right about the “dubious, fiddly, bossy little policies” but I’m not convinced her assessment isn’t rife with the same kind of fuzzy headed thinking that went into the design/reporting of the field experiments.
First, the adjective in her phrase “adult liberty” is important. Children are an important exception. One of the reasons is that economic decisions made by parents on their children’s behalf may not be optimal. Whether it makes sense to complicate the system with the introduction of another stakeholder in the form of coercive government is a more interesting and complex question that is unsettled. Even with adults, there are some domains where the multi-stakeholder problem does not present an obvious answer without aggregate data, such as the cost/benefit of seatbelt and motorcycle helmet laws. I’m all for governments collecting and publishing data/statistics in some domains.
Children, public safety, public health, and some multi-stakeholder systems are domains where collection action “may” have a positive impact. The discussion yesterday about “An American Healthcare Scam” is the result of a complex multi-stakeholder system, in my opinion, rather than an obvious scam. The Glewwe et al “Eyeglasses and academic performance in rural primary schools in China” paper has the following from the abstract:
This study is not as “startlingly unethical, and stupid, as the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment” as McCloskey claims. I have not read beyond the abstract but the experiment seems to combine a set of interventions into a single recommendation. I’m interested in the results of unbundling each step in the process: public eye tests for rural children, information sharing with parents, the promotion of public health/safety information, and finally we might get to a cost/benefit analysis of subsidized eyeglasses. Perhaps these steps are only conflated in the Abstract which may be appropriate.
I’m all for literacy programs but that does not mean such programs have not historically resulted in horrifying situations with Australian Aborigines and Canadian First Nations people. Lets not confuse tragic tactical mistakes with misguided strategy and lets not condemn all field experiments because some are poorly done.
adults are entitled to make their own decisions unaffected by government policy
Great theory, miserable in actuality. I think kids ought to be vaccinated against a batch of diseases; that makes me one of McCloskey’s villains. I think drivers ought to have some insurance against accidents. I even think people who have drunk too much to function shouldn’t be legally driving on the highways. And maybe there ought to be some communitarian fix-up for mentally ill people who live under bridges and overpasses — sure, they’ve made the choices that brought them to such a setting from their own free will, but the bodies start to smell after they die of neglect and injury. Is there some profit making corporation that cleans up the corpses? or do we have to resort to tax-payer supported sanitation workers? Ever meet a con man? or a psychopath? And rejoiced in their perfect liberty?
And — I’m really reaching here — it shouldn’t be an individual’s free and open choice about whether he wanders into a schoolyard and starts shooting down kids. What’s the approved libertarian way of handling this? Convince me the free market, untroubled by bureaucrats and other petty despots, has a cure for this.
Libertarianism is a great theory for a society filled with rational, highly intelligent, well socialized and empathetic adults. It’s about as applicable to the world we live in as Aristotle’s ideas about “natural” slaves and free men.
McCloskey’s critique is weak by her usual high standards. Besides the knee-jerk reaction to paternalism (which is not unreasonable given the past failures of policymakers and social scientists), her point is that the policy interventions of Randomistas are small and inconsequential. Lant Pritchett earlier made a related point that Governments do not take the Randomistas seriously. True enough, but I think this work is analogous to Doctors Without Borders. For a country at war, the real answer is obvious: peace. But in the meantime, DWB can help reduce suffering. Likewise with RCT policies.