Luke Ford

Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan said: “…(ADHD) is an invention. Every child who’s not doing well in school is sent to see a pediatrician, and the pediatrician says: “It’s ADHD; here’s Ritalin.” In fact, 90 percent of these 5.4 million (ADHD-diagnosed) kids don’t have an abnormal dopamine metabolism. The problem is, if a drug is available to doctors, they’ll make the corresponding diagnosis.”

Stephen Turner writes a 2019 book review of the 2018 book Expert Failure by economist Roger Koppl:

* Education reform has been on the public agenda for more than a century. Educational research, as Ellen Condliffe Lagemann has shown, has been a succession of fads (Lagemann 2000). This gap never closed.

* Normal academic research, research not driven by a willing buyer with a policy agenda, is not exempt from these
problems. As Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, writes, “[M]uch of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” (2015, p. 1380)

Horton adds a comment about markets: “Can bad scientific practices be fixed?” Not without changing the market. “Part of the problem is that no one is incentivised to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivised to be productive and innovative” (2015, p. 1380).

One facilitator of this turn to darkness has been the abuse of statistics, acknowledged by the American Statistical Association (Wasserstein and Lazar 2016-and publicized in recent discussions of p-hacking and in connection with the reproducibility crisis. The issues are very basic. P values are conventionally used to certify a research finding as a fact. This convention, and its abuse, is a major source of the reproducibility crisis in psychology. A recent suggestion (Benjamin et al. 2018) to raise the level of significance from 0.05 to 0.005 would cause whole fields to come close to disappearing — and this would certainly include the fields of evidence-based policy. And the p-value issue just scratches the surface of the problems, which extend to virtually every area in which statistics are used, and in which the small manipulation of assumptions can produce radically different results.

One such problem is this: research subjects and goals are not randomly distributed. People are looking for and attempting to establish particular results. As John Iaonnidis has pointed out, the effect of this is to make the expert consensus little more than a measure of bias (2005). And obviously this bias is often politically motivated bias. The existence of this kind of bias, which often occurs when topics are intentionally under-researched, is admitted even by Brookings, whose reputation for impartiality is itself questionable.

“Psychologists, sociologists, and educational researchers have devoted far less attention to the black-white test score gap over the past quarter-century than they should have. Cowed by the hostile reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the status of the black family and to Arthur Jensen’s 1969 article arguing that racial differences in test performance were likely to be partly innate, most social scientists have chosen safer topics and hoped the problem would go away.” (Jencks and Phillips 1998)

There are many other topics that are no-go zones. And there is even a philosophical literature defending the practice of avoiding research on topics that lead in the wrong political direction (Kitcher, 2000, pp. 193-97). This kind of politically motivated self-censorship more or less assures that there will be massive error.

* “Error” is a problematic notion in this context, because judgments about error also rests, so to speak, on turtles that go all the way down. There is no perch outside of opinion on which we can rest our judgments. It is, as Michael Oakeshott would say, platforms, that go all the way down (1975, pp. 9, 27, 34). Our beliefs about the world rest on research that relies on experimental and statistical conventions. These in turn rest on other opinions, other consensuses. What we take to be true about the world depends on what someone decided to fund. The science, and the expertise we have, is the product of “the world,” but it is the world as disclosed by past decisions to disclose it and disclose it in a particular way. The “ways” are necessarily limited in ways that are unknown to us. The path we took could have been different. And had we taken a different path, we might have been in a position to see what the limitations of the path we took were. If we did not invest in that path, we might not ever be in that position. It is pleasing to think that the truth will out, eventually. But turtles can live a long time. And science is as entangled in problematic decision processes as the state.

Stephen Turner reviews this 2018 book:

* There is a well-established folk theory about elites, shared, more or less, by the elites and the non-elite. Here is a quotation of Larry Summers, a member of the elite by any criteria: “There are two kinds of politicians,” he said: “insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.”

Along with this folk theory comes a suspicion that the elite operates according to the ethic Alasdair Macintyre once described as “the morality of the public-school prefect. Its principal virtues are loyalty to the group and the cultivation of a corresponding feeling that there are really no limits to what you may do to outsiders.”

Given the ubiquity of this image of the political world, and the visibility and power of elites, one would think that elites would be a major focus of scholarship and debate as well as teaching, if only to debunk the folk theory. It has not been, and indeed one observes a kind of denial about elites in academic circles…

* Combining elite studies with economics is also now crucial, not merely because of the power of business leaders, but because of the relation between the goals of business and the ideological commitments to globalism and universalism that are shared with the rest of the elite, including, and perhaps especially, the academic elite.

* the problem that elites face in staying in control in the face of the fact that they are a tiny minority whose interests, especially interests in the distribution of wealth, are opposed to those of the rest of society. They continue in power because they can ally with other classes, typically the middle class, to create institutions that have the effect of redistributing wealth in ways that benefit the allied class.

* the old strategies of class alliance no longer work, together with the new fact of a novel and emerging kind of elite power held by corporations and bankers: the power to disinvest in whole countries, holding the nominal political leaders hostage. The two facts are connected. The power that economic actors can exert over states severs them from their former class alliances, and sets their former allies against them.

* The core problem is elite stability: the risks are elite stagnation through closure and elite factional conflict. These are endemic problems for elites. They are faced with a generic difficulty that is a constant threat to elite cohesion. Different elite factions, like different classes, benefit or are harmed differentially by the redistributive institutional arrangements that are set up to assure the alliance between the elite and a sufficiently large nonelite class to create stability. These alliances need to be maintained and are costly.

Maintaining the appropriate balances between elites and their non-elite allies is a difficult task which will also inevitably divide elites themselves. The historical winner among the possible arrangements has been, until recently at least, an alliance between the elite and the middle class, and especially the upper middle class. What’s in it for the middle classes? As SET put it, the elites “make society safe for profit” (209). Stable property rights, protection, and the freedom to do business in a predictable legal environment without onerous taxation is pretty much the formula, or has been. The elite also makes some room for members of this class to enter. The middle classes, in turn, deal with and mollify the lower classes, producing stability.

* The elite, however, can make this alliance with the lower classes as well, and has more to offer: the wealth of the middle class. There is always the possibility of what in the Obama era in the United States was called an “upstairs downstairs” alliance between the elite or factions of the elite and the lower classes against the interests of the middle classes. That fact helps keep the middle class in line. And this omnipresent possibility of new alliance with the elite produces an odd dynamic in relation to democracy. On the surface, there should be a conflict between elites and democracy. An oligarchy, after all, has to live in fear of being overthrown. But an elite, if it is functioning properly, benefits from democratization, precisely because it provides more alliance possibilities for the elite. It extends the number of people who benefit from the actions of the elite, and who will support it. And it reduces the reliance of the elite on a single class. Democratization enables playing groups off against one another, while retaining elite cohesion.

* So why are elites in trouble now? Why is there populism in advanced societies? Globalization, meaning the mobility of money and production together with relatively free trade and border-crossing financialization, are enormously beneficial to the elite, producing more inequality and “losers” in formerly closed or favorably situated national markets. It also gives new power to corporations over states.

* The only real threat to elite power is elite factional conflict. Given the sea of discontent, it is possible for an elite faction to ally with a discontented non-elite group. And, if there has been a period of stability in which the practice of managing these conflicts in the interest of the elite has fallen into disuse there are concerns, from the point of view of the elite, over the ability to manage intra-elite conflict. But there are no looming conflicts of this kind. The folk theory of the elite, in short, is true. But the new power elite, global and globalist, is an elite freed of its former bonds to the rest of society. The new bonds are elusive. A key finding of this book is that democracy, which was once a way of holding elites accountable, has become, in the new world of globalization, a means of keeping elites in power by dividing their domestic enemies.