Guardian columnist
David Robert Grimes singles out advocates of property rights and
free markets as a special menace to society largely because their
supposedly greed blinds them to the scientific truths about climate
change, gun control, and pharmaceutical research and development so
evident to objective and fair-minded leftwingers. Of course, Grimes
inconveniently overlooks is the copious research that finds that
leftwingers resort to motivated cognition too when it comes to
evaluating distasteful scientific data. GMOs? Nuclear power?
Fracking?
Consider the findings of Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his
research colleagues at the Yale Cultural Cognition
Project. The group uses a theory of cultural commitments
devised by University of California, Berkeley, political scientist
Aaron Wildavsky that “holds that individuals can be expected to
form perceptions of risk that reflect and reinforce values that
they share with others.” The Wildavskyan schema situates Americans’
cultural values on two scales, one that ranges from Individualist
to Communitarian and another that goes from Hierarchy to
Egalitarian. In general, Hierarchical folks prefer a social order
where people have clearly defined roles and lines of authority.
Egalitarians want to reduce racial, gender, and income
inequalities. Individualists expect people to succeed or fail on
their own, while Communitarians believe that society is obligated
to take care of everyone.
The researchers report that people whose values are located in
Individualist/Hierarchy spaces “can be expected to be skeptical of
claims of environmental and technological risks. Such people,
according to the theory, intuitively perceive that widespread
acceptance of such claims would license restrictions on commerce
and industry, forms of behavior that Hierarchical/Individualists
value.” On the other hand Egalitarian/Communitarians “tend to be
morally suspicious of commerce and industry, which they see as the
source of unjust disparities in wealth and power. They therefore
find it congenial, the theory posits, to see those forms of
behavior as dangerous and thus worthy of restriction.” On this
view, then, Egalitarian/Communitarians would be more worried about
climate change risks than would be Hierarchical/Individualists.
On climate change Grimes asserts “if one accepts human-mediated
climate change, then supporting mitigating action should follow.”
The fact that scientific research identifies a problem does not
specify what policies should be adopted to address it. Mitigating
global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions is certainly
one possible policy, but so, too, is favoring increased economic
growth and technological progress as a way to enable people to
adapt to future climate challenges. What about buidling nuclear
power plants as a way to cut carbon dioxide emissions? Which is
better? Science does not say. It is not at all surprising that
Individualists are highly suspicious when carbon rationing
proposals just happen to fit the cultural values and policy
preferences of Egalitarian/Communitarians.
For what it’s worth, I am a libertarian who has
concluded that man-made global warming likely poses significant
problems.
Next, Grimes evidently thinks that science somehow shows that
trusting private companies to innovate health care is “misguided.”
Nevertheless, health economist James Henderson points out in
Health Economics and Policy:
U.S. supremacy in the development of new drugs is clear….In
2010, there were almost 3,000 compounds in development in the
United States-three times the number in the entire European Union
and six times the number in Japan. Europe’s once-thriving
pharmaceutical industry is migrating to the United States. Since
1995, Pharmacia (Sweden), Novartis, (Switzerland), Avantis
(France/Germany), GlaxoSmithKline (United Kingdom) have moved some
aspect of their operations to the United States.
Grimes also dismisses the claim that FDA regulation is
excessive. Yet, a 2010
study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that
FDA regulations on clinical trials of new cancer medications saved
16 life-years over the course of drug development. On the other
hand, the authors conservatively estimate that increased regulatory
delays in drug approvals results in the loss of nearly 300,000
life-years in the U.S. Even Grimes might agree that such regulation
might be a tad “excessive.”
Finally, Grimes argues that scientific findings trump the
libertarian notion that “people have a right to arm themselves to
make themselves safer.” Never mind that the U.S. Constitution
guarantees Americans the right to bear arms. In any case, Grimes
cites some studies that find that gun owners are more likely to be
shot than non-gun owners and that accidental deaths from gunshots
are more likely in gun-owning households. Let’s just say that
research in this area is not as settled as Grimes supposes.
Consider the issue of concealed carry. A 2004 National Academy of
Sciences report on Firearms and Violence found
that…
…despite a large body of research, the committee found no
credible evidence that the passage of right-to-carry laws decreases
or increases violent crime ….
In a
2013 study published in Applied Economics Letters, the
Quinnipiac University economist Mark Gius sought to determine the
effects of state-level assault weapons bans and concealed carry
laws on gun-related murder rates between 1980 and 2009. He found
that murder rates were 10 percent higher in states with more
restrictive concealed carry laws. In addition, assault weapon bans
did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level. Gius
concluded that his results suggest that “limiting the ability to
carry concealed weapons may cause murder rates to increase.”
My article, “Study
Shows Smart Liberals, Conservatives, and Libertarians Are Easiest
to Fool,” in which I analyzed the findings of the 2012 Yale
Cultural Cognition study, “Ideology,
Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection: An Experimental
Study” reported that liberals, conservatives, and, yes,
libertarians are equally adept at ignoring data that threatens
their worldviews, while warmly embracing that which confirms their
biases. I concluded:
The new Yale study finds that when it comes to thinking about
policy-relevant scientific information that challenges their
ideological views liberals, conservatives, and, yes, libertarians,
are inclined to violate physicist Richard Feynman’s famous “first
principle.” As the irreverent genius put it, “You must not fool
yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”And the smarter you are, the easier it is to fool yourself.
That means Grimes too.
For more background, see my article, “Why
Do People Believe Scientifically Untrue Things?” See also my
“The
Evolution of Liberty” item at Cato Unbound in which I
point out that modern science only became possible once liberal
institutions like private property, the rule of law, and free
markets came into existence.
Hat tip Ken Constantino.
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