Colossal errors

It's always fun when entire bodies of supposed expert knowledge, fundamentals that are accepted by nearly everyone, are revealed to be wrong and/or unfounded.  My attention has been drawn to three strong examples of this phenomenon:

• Low-fat diet
• Shoes
• Economics

Once you internalize the fact that even mighty establishments, possessing the finest acronymed professional societies and mahogany-and-brass lobbies, all of whose members get plenty of respect at their local country clubs, can be totally full of shit, it is both liberating and, in a way, paralyzing.   I posted yesterday about how the Internet is having both of these effects in the medical arena.  And there are plenty of comical examples to be found of how this has been true in the past, with even the most highly and widely respected "experts" (doctors, scientists, philosophers, economists, etc).  Yet it's a lot harder when you are ensconced in *today's* discourses and claims of expertise and received wisdom.  It's like being trapped in amber -- it's a lot harder to assess the quality of the piece than when you're on the outside.

The shattering of received wisdom is liberating because it teaches you to question what other "common sense" might be way off track, and to grasp the contingency of our world -- just how broad the scope of possibilities are.  It could be true that our current understanding of economics is pretty good -- it could also be true that it's totally bogus, and we'd be better off with all kinds of radical changes (I strongly suspect the latter).  It frees you up to be practical and pragmatic, since you are no longer wedded to various notions of Truth, you can just more directly seek practical solutions for what's good policy.

On the other hand, the busting open of possibilities can be paralyzing. The more things in life that are open to question, the harder it can be to know what to do. 

Let's look a little closer at my three examples.

Low-fat diet

For a few decades it has been accepted medical wisdom that a high-fat diet is bad for you.  But the whole low-carb movement started by Atkins has challenged that wisdom, and pointed out that in fact, there really isn't actually any solid evidence that that is true.  They point out that shortly after you eat a bowl full of pasta, your body turns it into what is more or less the equivalent of a Snickers bar.  Even whole grains go through the same process, just a little more slowly.  And if you're not getting your calories from carbs (sugar, more or less), you basically gotta get them from fat.  As I mentioned in a recent post, it may be that it is not true that a calorie is a calorie, because fat calories make you feel fuller, while sugar calories do wacky things to your insulin system and can actually make you feel more hungry.  I notice this myself -- it is after a big pasta meal that I crave dessert the most.

To get a better explanation of this, and a fuller sense for just how wrong the conventional wisdom seems to be, read this excellent summation that ran a few years ago in the New York Times Magazine.

I was intellectually persuaded of the merit of these arguments by this and other pieces.  But (as the author of the piece himself alludes to) it is still hard to eat a high-fat diet without feeling that you are hurting yourself, while you don't feel that way at all eating pasta still.  This shows the power that these kinds of social understandings have over us and our tastes.

Shoes

It's all a big lie, man.  Just like gloves, safety goggles, and helmets, shoes are a useful piece of protective gear in some circumstances -- snow drifts, steel mills, and the like.  But overall, they just aren't that necessary, as a few brave pioneers willing to flout social convention have discovered, and I have confirmed for myself.  If I can run 15 miles on asphalt roads with my soles intact, then just when is it exactly that I need shoes?  As I have gone into, they are more of an irrational cultural holdover from  medievalistic, tribal, hierarchical, aristocratic, status-obsessed European historical cultures than a necessity of life.

Yet our society is pretty twisted when it comes to bare feet.  As barefooters.org points out,

consider a business near a beach. This business has barefooted customers all day long. Not only has nobody ever contracted any sort of illness from somebody else's bare feet, but nobody thinks anything of bare feet because it's "OK" to be barefoot near a beach. Now, transport this same business a few miles inland. Suddenly, without any change to the inside of the business, bare feet are an alleged health risk. Does this make sense?

(By the way, no state has any law prohibiting bare feet in any restaurant or other establishment. Or while driving.)  As the site points out, people don't usually mind flip-flops and sandals where the top of the foot is entirely visible -- it's the fact that someone lacks material on the bottom of their foot that bothers people. Again, what sense does that make?

It would be one thing if this was just a social custom that flouted hard evidence -- hardly an unknown.  But even the experts, as represented by foot doctors quoted in most articles about barefooting, appears to recoil at the idea of going barefoot.  I never see them address the substantial body of evidence that barefooting is far better for your feet.  Granted, it would be a hard sell for most doctors to instruct their patients to go barefoot full time, and a lot of patients would demand other remedies, and go to another doctor if they could not get them from their first.  But the best doctors think like scientists, in the full, rich sense of that term -- rational and evidence-guided, but also imaginative, intuitive, and brave enough to follow that evidence where it may lead.  They're not supposed to be petty-bourgeois shopkeepers, concerned about their customers and their market and their competition.  And they're not supposed to swallow holdover Elizabethan cultural biases and just pass them down to each new generation of doctors.  Even if patients resist the evidence, doctors could advise them to at least go barefoot as much as possible, and some do, but the profession does not seem to do this in general; instead they are actively steering people away from barefooting and toward baroque (if profitable) foot inserts and the like.  I wonder how many doctors have even investigated all the literature that is out there, and weighed it scientifically.

A pretty good article just came out in New York Magazine that also does a decent job of summarizing what's wrong with our conventional wisdom regarding shoes:  "You Walk Wrong: It took 4 million years of evolution to perfect the human foot.  But we're wrecking it with every step we take"

Economics

Oh man, I really hate economics.  I could write a post a day for a year on this subject, if I only had the time.  I will leave most of this subject for future posts, but suffice it to say here that while the field produces many useful and interesting intellectual tools, they never add up to a coherent body of knowledge; the very notion of homo economicus on which the field is based is a total myth; the very idea that a social science can be based upon physics as a role model is a giant anti-historicist error; the history of the field shows little evidence that economics is getting closer to the truth; and the field has an inborn conservative political bias and cultural effect even when practiced by liberals.

As markets implode, venerable companies fall to their knees, vast neighborhoods are reduced to ghost towns, and the national (world?) economy teeters, this is increasingly not a difficult case to make.  Over and again throughout history, economists and the conventional wisdom they impart have been proven to be colossally in error.  Examples include:

• The mercantilists, who viewed the economic arena as a zero-sum battle for power among nation states, and wealth as more important than production
• The Physiocrats, who in the 18th century regarded agriculture as the only basis of wealth.  The industrial revolution kinda showed otherwise
• The Classical Economists, who advocated the hands-off approach that led to and was discredited by the Great Depression
• The Keynesians, who thought they'd figured everything out, until they were discredited by the (supposedly theoretically impossible) combination of high inflation, slow growth and high unemployment ("stagflation") in the early 1970s
• The post-Reagan free marketeers, the cock-sure ideologues of our own era, having explained away the Great Depression and much else, seek to move back towards pure Classical Economics (which never really existed).  While the intellectual descendants of the Keynesians have become more humble epistemologically, the Free Marketeers think they have the Answers, and their viewpoint dominates our culture.  We may be witnessing the wheels come off this latest economic blind alley at this very moment.

Who will be next? 

What these error-ridden subject areas have in common is that:

• They are irredeemably complex -- there are just too many variables to be susceptible to reductionist analysis
• They are heavily burdened by thick cultural baggage
• They result from stunning failures of epistemological humility. I remember asking proponents of Bush's Iraq War before he started it, "where are the nukes?" If Saddam has them, let's see them before we invade -- by which I meant, let's be sure they exist.   Why don't dietitians ask themselves, "where's the evidence a high-fat diet is bad?  Why don't foot doctors recognize just how little we know about sports medicine?  Why don't economists recognize the historical nature of their discipline?

Comments

[Ed]

Regarding epistemology in economics: I highly recommend the first few chapters of Ludvig von Mises "Human Action".

Whether or not you end up agreeing with Mises, you'll discover that not all economists have done such a poor job of understanding epistemology.

Modern mainstream economists don't take Mises and his intellectual descendants ("The Austrian School") seriously, precisely because the Austrians have a radically different epistemology. They agree with you that it is pointless to try to treat economics like physics.

You can read the book for free here:

http://mises.org/resources/3250

(found this via your signature in a message on the running barefoot yahoo group)