BrianGarst.com

Friedrich von Hayek offered many great insights to the field of economics. An important one came in his 1974 lecture titled, “The Pretense of Knowledge,” in which he criticized the profession of economics for adopting a “scientistic” attitude. That is, economists pretended they could achieve the same sort of precision measuring human affairs as could the physical sciences. Specifically, for economics, “the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.”

Hayek contrasts economics with the physical sciences, where “it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable.” The pretense of definitive scientific knowledge regarding cause and effect of complicated human endeavors led to decades of bad policy and, were he alive today, Hayek would no doubt point to the same issue as plaguing contemporary policymaking (just consider all the hoopla in recent years over spending “multipliers”).

The physical sciences to which Hayek contrasts economics are not without their own pretenses. The natural world, it turns out, is every bit as complicated as human affairs. While we can quantify, observe and test in the physical sciences in ways we cannot quite match for in economics (which by no means suggests there is no value in quantitative analysis), total – or even sufficient – understanding of the complex interactions of just our climate continues to elude us, and the “scientistic” pretensions that we can so adequately command the natural world as to call for a drastic reorder of human society to alter it threatens the same sort of “mess of things” as Hayek sought to clean up in his own profession.

Consider the record of climate models that have, thus far, driven the hysteria over global warming. As it turns out, they have been failing to predict the observed climate record for several decades. So why the blind faith in them? Partly it is the pretense that we can isolate a singular, overwhelming cause to changes in a system so complicated as the Earth’s climate. Partly too, I think, is a public belief in the power of the computer that approaches mysticism. In the  minds of many it seems to function like this: Data is collected and inputted into a computer -> something magic happens -> definitive answers arrive. But computer models are only as useful as the understanding of those who create them, and their understanding remains limited by the complexity of the system. Is it theoretically possible to perfectly model the Earth’s climate? I don’t see why not. But it’s not a simple matter of taking measurements and seeing how they interact. Sometimes we don’t even know what variables to measure.

When it comes to climate modeling, the computer is basically just a powerful calculator. What it produces should be taken with the same proper skepticism as any scientific assertion, but that has not happened to date. Despite persistently failing to accurately reflect the known climate, the IPCC and other groups continue to trumpet these climate models as definitive. They are not, but their perception as such explains why every year seems to bring a story like the current 35-year record high in Antarctic sea ice, which has “baffled” scientists.

None of this is to say that we know nothing about the climate, or that science can’t provide meaningful answers or predictions. Rather, it means that we lack even the flimsiest of certainty regarding what we know about the totality of the system to justify the massive reordering of society, and the subsequent dip in human prosperity it requires, that our President and so many others are clamoring for.

Global Warming