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Should Science Be King In Politics?
Layzej writes "According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts. He suggests that energy and climate policy warrants a conservative approach based on science and accountability, rather than a populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking. He also proposes an intriguing free market solution to our energy and climate challenges."
The world is run on emotion as much as logic. Anyone that thinks logic can be king either has never been married, or is rapidly headed towards a divorce...
The two solutions that are in line with both past experience and economic theory are:
(A) cap-and-trade, where the government sells a limited number of pollution permits, allows the buyers of those permits to trade them, and then sends inspectors (funded by the proceeds of the original sale) to ensure that nobody goes over the number of permits they have. This was successfully used to reduce SO2 emissions back in the 1980's and 1990's.
(B) A CO2 tax, where the more you pollute the more you're taxed. This gives companies a financial incentive to reduce their emissions, and means that those that do reduce their CO2 emissions aren't at a competitive disadvantage from those that don't. Again, inspectors are needed (funded by the tax) to ensure that nobody cheats.
Both of these basically rely on putting a price on pollution, and then making sure nobody cheats on paying that price. It's enforced by the government because nobody else can - nobody owns the country's air, and nobody reasonably could.
I am officially gone from
If only more conservatives felt the same way. But American conservatives (and Republicans in particular) are about as far as it gets from "dealing in facts" these days and are more anti-science than the far left.
"Dealing in facts" means recognising evolution. That's unacceptable in the US Right. So something even mildly controversial, like climate change, has no hope.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
The problem with democracy is that it assumes everyone's opinions on every subject are equal.
In the real world, they're not. With a sufficiently educated populace, or a sufficiently minor subset of the populace who gets involved in voting and politics, it can potentially work. But with a populace with shrinking levels of basic education and basic abilities to rationally evaluate the information they're receiving, the US is showing that democracy largely does not work.
The world was a far simpler place when the US system of government was put together.
Less 'learn science' than 'learn the scientific method' and its application to everyday life. Or just critical thinking in general.
Too many people stop learning at the end of high school/university. If they just memorize some state of the art science related facts at that time our situation will not likely improve as new facts are discovered.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Examples
Bad: There is plenty of evidence to support this (*goes on to show evidence)
Good: Nope that is wrong!
Bad: Here is the explanation for why this is a problem
Good: God wants it this way
Valid science's biggest weakness in politics, is a shortage of 5 second soundbites that work. (and before you say less then 1% of voters know what E=MC squared means.)
News flash: neither party can be counted on to deal in facts. I will also say with utter confidence that your party line (of which there are only two) will not determine how factual you are. There are goddamn liars among all the ranks of any party.
Sorry, but for the last ten year or so they haven't been comparable. Yes, neither party is perfect, but only one party has taken a conscious ideological (as opposed to strategic) hard tack away from the facts.
Only one party has made it a party platform to attack scientific facts based upon religious or ideological principles.
Our population is more educated today than ever before, though I can't comment on their ability to rationally evaluate much. We also have the ability to do what the Greeks considered essential to Democracy, which is allow every citizen to witness the debate over every subject.
Internet, TV, newspapers, these things should be improving democracy and making it work on a larger scale than ever. That we use them mostly for porno and formulaic television shows is unfortunate. You could maybe make watching a debate prerequisite for voting, but we have a hard time even making people identify themselves at the polls, much less prove their fitness for being there.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
I think it's important to understand why conservatives are rejecting certain scientific facts. People like me on the left often make fun of them as being ignorant or anti-intellectual, but the reality is that it's very difficult for anyone to accept a fact that conflicts with your worldview. For example, history has turned the lawyer William Jennings Bryan from the famous "Monkey Trial" into a caricature of ignorance of foolishness in the face of scientific fact, but that belittles his motivation for fighting against the teaching of evolution: the textbook in question was pro eugenics and used the theory of evolution to argue that society should breed people the way we breed dogs. The Theory of Evolution was a fact, but the public policies people were proposing from it were an anathema to our human values. The theory of evolution has never recovered from the damage the eugenics movement did to it in the early 1900s.
The same thing is happening now with Global Warming. Whether conservatives know it or not, they are not resisting the Theory of Global Warming, they are resisting the policies that many conclude from it. Publicly accepting the theory and taking a more nuanced position about what we should do about, if we should do anything about it at all, isn't as straightforward as simply running a campaign against the theory itself using the same tactics the Tobacco industry used as recently as 15 years ago to defend smoking against its link to cancer (Yes, 15 years ago. I recently listened to a 1996 Larry King interview with Presidential candidate Bob Dole where they argued about whether smoking was safe or not).
It's a natural human reaction to reject facts that conflict with our vision of the world. That's why I love the term "Inconvenient Truth" to describe an empirical fact that generates cognitive dissonance. Just today I was reminded of one such truth as the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the discovery that our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, a fact I resisted for a decade because it paints such an incredibly bleak picture of our Cosmos where the galaxies will eventually vanish from the night sky as they fly away from us and the Universe eventually freezes at absolute zero. But you have to accept the fact and adapt your worldview to it.
Liberals have their own anti-science views: resistance to GMO Foods goes pretty far into unscientific scaremongering ("Frankenfoods" and anti-corporatism), the idea that smaller classes sizes are the only way to improve student performance (teacher accountability does demonstrate equal results for less money), and anti-vaccination scares come mostly from the left (mostly). The science behind these issues are inconvenient to certain aspects of liberal ideology, so it's easier to go off the anti-science deep end rather than refine their positions. The problem is that we the media finds nuanced debate and finely articulated positions inconvenient to ratings.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
No, not quite; It would get very few things done... nearly all of them the RIGHT things. Government is meant only to be the collective tool belt, replete with powers of leverage and enforcement, wielded by the citizenry for the benefit of the citizenry. One isn't meant to play with tools, nor use them any more often than any give job calls for.
Frankly, Bob Inglis sounds like a true fiscal conservative.
I suspect people have forgotten what they are, ever since talk radio began turning "conservative" into "people we like" and "liberal" into "people we don't like", there seems to have been a coarsening of the public debate. Nixon officially ended the days of the Republican party being the party of fiscal conservatives, he alienated scientists and universities and began the descent of the Republican party into social conservatism.
Frankly, I suspect that the Republican party is on the verge of a huge collapse that will have them spending 20 years in the wilderness again, if they're lucky. They are deliberately or ignorantly leading their followers astray, and this will blow up in their faces unless they continue to lose to the Democrats. If they win in 2012 it just may destroy the party. It seems highly unlikely the current Republican fiscal policy will make the U.S. economy better. If it doesn't the party could implode like it has so many times before.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
We're not talking about "politics", we're talking about governing.
It's not just the political system that's broken, it's us. Precious few citizens of any country except maybe Finland and a handful of others actually understand how their society works.
Look at the currently popular notion in the US that to run government, we need someone with experience running a private corporation. As if running a business had anything in common with running a government except they are both organizations. If that were the true measure, then a general would make the best president and we've seen that's not usually the case. In fact, I'd say that "business experience" or "experience" in general (other than experience dealing with people) is highly overrated. Right now, there's going to be only one person running for president in 2012 that actually has on-the-job experience as president of the US. Does that make him automatically the best person for the job? Does the fact that a leading candidate on the other side ran a business that successfully cannibalized other businesses make him the best person for the job?
I think the notion (mentioned by someone else in these comments) that understanding "science" in the most basic sense of the word, as a system of understanding that things have explanations and effects have causes would be extremely important in government. Certainly more important than the current notion, that the guy who has the most money gets to rule. I would have thought we were disabused of that notion a few centuries ago.
You are welcome on my lawn.
> we have a hard time even making people identify themselves at the polls
Actually voter fraud is quite rare. There's been something like a couple dozen cases in the last decade or two, and most of those were just mistakes (eg: people voting in the wrong precinct). Election fraud, on the other hand, is a real reason for concern. With recent revelations on the weakness of electronic voting machines, that seems a far greater hazard.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
The scientist Ben Franklin (No, it wasn't Albert Einstein) said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
We had 8 years of a science-and-fact-loving conservative government, after which we had a doubled national debt, two wars, an economic crisis second only to the Great Depression, the demonizing of evolution, and oh yeah, a new attitude in the country that climate change was questionable and that it was probably the scientists that were to blame. Please excuse me if I remain skeptical that a single former representative is going to change much.
There is a reason why Mr. Inglis is a "former" Representative - his commie ideas about actually believing the scientists were clearly not well received by his former constituency.
And he also seems to forget that scientists will lean to where the money is (left or right, up or down).
If you want to deal in facts, then perhaps you should try showing us evidence for this assertion. The idea that we have been mislead on a massive scale by grant-loving scientists is entirely from the imagination of people who dislike the findings, or from crackpots who had their unscientific papers rejected.
Your post reminded me of a quote from Sagan's book "Demon Haunted World (Subtitled: Science as a candle in the dark)";
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United State is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
High-quality science [is] struggling to get out," Francesca Grifo, of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists, told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. A UCS survey found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years in a total of at least 435 incidents. "Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change', 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications," Grifo said.
Source, 2007.
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