zilya18: переводы

→It is no doubt true that economists who, for moral or political reasons, endorse larger government spending, will tend to subscribe to the Keynesian arguments about the causes of the Great Depression. It is also true that opponents of “Big Government” will tend to be attracted to economic doctrines that stress the benefits of low taxation and slim government budgets. But it is the inability to perform controlled experiments that allows the persistence of such diametrically opposed economic theories, with both camps firmly convinced that they are right and their opponents are either dishonest or sloppy These passions are on a much tighter leash in the hard natural sciences, because in those disciplines the facts “speak for themselves” to a much greater degree than in the social sciences.

→At this early stage of the book, we have not yet mastered the concepts to proceed further with this actual dispute. (In subsequent lessons, you will learn the tools you need to better appreciate the two sides of the argument.) For now, the point is that the dispute remains unresolved, even though professional economists have been arguing about the causes of the Great Depression for more than seventy years. The controversy won’t die, because the exact conditions of the world economy in the late 1920s were unique. Economists can’t test the Keynesian theory by, say, holding everything else constant except doubling the U.S. federal budget deficit in 1932, in order to observe the effect on the unemployment rate.

→Things are not nearly as straightforward when two groups of economists argue over rival theories. For example, one group of economists— the Keynesians—believe that the Great Depression was caused by a collapse in “aggregate demand,” and that President Herbert Hoover and then Franklin D. Roosevelt should have pushed through massive government deficits—spending borrowed money—to counteract the slump. A different group of economists—the Austrians—disagree strongly, and instead think that the initial crash in 1929 was caused by a preceding “boom” engineered by the Federal Reserve, which is the U.S. central bank established by the government. According to the Austrians, Hoover and Roosevelt made the Depression drag on for more than a decade with their misguided interventionist policies. The Austrians dispute the Keynesian deficit theory, pointing out that Hoover and FDR ran what were at the time record high (peacetime) budget deficits during their administrations, which coincided with the slowest and most agonizing recovery in U.S. economic history. The Keynesians counter that, large as the deficits were, the government “obviously” didn’t borrow and spend enough, as proved by the lingering unemployment.

→To illustrate this important difference between the natural sciences and economics, first suppose two groups of physicists are arguing about the strength of the electric charge on a certain particle. After conducting an experiment using a clever new technique, one group in Australia announces that the previous estimate needs to be revised. However, the rival group of physicists argues that the Australian experiment is flawed, because the laboratory’s proximity to the South Pole distorted the measurements. They settle the dispute by conducting the same experiment at several different latitudes, to see if the measured results move closer to the previous estimate as the laboratory gets closer to the equator. The crucial assumptions behind all of this research are that the underlying laws governing the particles are the same, and that the experimenters can hold every other (relevant) factor constant while isolating the effects of the magnetic charge emanating from the earth’s poles. The story we just told gives an idea of why physics seems to “work” so well; there really is good reason to suppose that over the years, the physicists will develop theories with greater and greater accuracy in predicting how the physical world works.

→Most professionals in the social sciences think that the same method—the “scientific method”—should be used in their fields as well. However, the problem is that, quite literally, the objects of their study have minds of their own. It has proved fiendishly difficult to come up with a set of concise laws that accurately predict the behavior of people in various circumstances. In the social sciences, especially economics, things are so much more complicated that in many cases it is simply impossible to perform a truly controlled experiment.

→Since subatomic particles don’t (as far as we know) have minds, in order to understand their behavior—in order to “explain” subatomic particles—a theory in physics can’t be asked to do anything more than to predict, with greater and greater precision and accuracy, what these particles will do in various circumstances. Now we should point out that in actual practice, things are not so simple in day-to-day physics. One theory may yield better predictions in a few experiments, while another theory may be simpler and more elegant. Some physicists may “believe in” the more elegant theory, and search for possible flaws in the experiments that cast doubts on their preferred theory. Even so, in the long run a theory in the hard sciences that systematically and unambiguously yields better predictions will eventually displace its rivals.

→One important reason for this gulf between the success and prestige of the natural sciences on the one hand, versus the mediocre results and hostility to the social sciences on the other, is that the objects of study in the natural sciences are fairly simple, and their behavior seems to be governed by a concise set of rules. Consequently, the hard sciences can (typically) rely on controlled experiments to evaluate their theories. This is why it’s much less likely that physics will go down a cul-de-sac the way many people think Freudian psychology or Keynesian economics did. Physical theories make predictions about objects in the material world. It would be very difficult for a newfangled yet ultimately inferior theory to sweep the profession in a hard science (such as physics), because its inferiority would be demonstrated repeatedly in experiments. Einstein famously resisted some of the philosophical implications of quantum theory but no physicist (including him) could argue with the accuracy of the theory’s predictions about experimental measurements made on subatomic particles.

→For some reason, it seems that even the most accomplished geniuses in the social sciences can lead their disciplines down dead-ends, where more and more of the experts in the field (as well as the general public) begin to suspect that the “state of the art” is a waste of time. Many people would agree that “psychiatry was doing all right... until Sigmund Freud,” or that, “Economics took a major wrong turn when John Maynard Keynes came on the scene.” Yet almost nobody would say, “Isaac Newton did a lot of great work in physics, until that nutjob Einstein came along and ruined it.”

→We suggest the reason is that the physics and chemistry behind powerful weapons are right. The physicists said to the military, “If you drop this object from an airplane, it will induce a fission reaction that will release an incredible amount of heat.” And the physicists were perfectly accurate in their predictions. In sharp contrast, the psychiatrists told the courts, “Give us authority to imprison people we think are mentally ill, and allow us to inject them with drugs and perform other experiments on them. This will make them well, and yield a society with adjusted people who do not exhibit aberrant, anti-social behavior.” Many of the supposedly top-notch economists too told governments during the 20th and 21st centuries: “Give us control of the printing press, and we will spare the world any more ravaging depressions and rampant price inflation.” Obviously, the track record of the psychiatrists and most influential economists is not nearly as laudable as that of the natural scientists.

→One possible answer is that the social sciences have justified some pretty awful things, such as electroshock therapy for people incarcerated against their will, and the government-sponsored slaughter of millions of pigs during the Great Depression while Americans starved. So maybe these types of episodes are the reason many people distrust psychiatrists and economists. But again, why don’t people also tend to blame physicists for Hiroshima, or the chemists for gunpowder?

→What is going on here? If we hadn’t known the answer already, we might have expected things to be the reverse, where public opinion revered the scientists who studied people and not mindless particles.

→There is a sharp difference between sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology on the one hand, versus sciences such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology on the other. People refer to the former as “hard” and the latter as “soft,” and—especially among the hard scientists!—there is a general feeling that the so-called hard sciences are more rigorous and indeed “scientific” than the so-called soft sciences. Generally speaking, the smartest and most celebrated scientists in the world are found in the hard sciences; besides the obvious icon of Einstein, the physicists Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking have also captured the popular imagination. In contrast, it is not nearly as prestigious to win awards in psychology, and few people could even name the top sociologists of the last century. While some people might condemn the particular physicists who helped create atomic weapons, even so the overwhelming majority support physics itself. Yet in another sharp contrast, many people are skeptical and even hostile to some of the social sciences, particularly economics and psychiatry.

→The Success of the Natural Sciences versus the Social Sciences

→As the example of Sally hitting Joe with her car illustrates, even the “raw facts” of the social sciences are tinged with our understanding of other people’s minds. In contrast, typically in the natural sciences neither the raw facts, nor the theories developed to explain them, rely on an appreciation of the intentions of other thinking beings. The natural scientist can look out upon the physical world and try to come up with explanations of its “mindless” behavior.

→For example, if Sally runs her car over Joe and he dies, this may or may not count as a homicide. If Sally had a heart attack five seconds before the crash, it was probably not a crime, but rather just an accident. On the other hand, if the cops arrive at the scene to hear Sally yelling, “That’s the last time you’ll cheat on me!” then it’s time to read Sally her rights. Notice that ultimately it is Sally’s mind that makes the difference; the sociologist needs to make guesses about what Sally consciously intended in order to know if a crime occurred. No amount of physical description per se can decide the matter, except insofar as the description sheds light on what Sally was thinking when the car struck Joe. Her mental will has the power to transform a regular car into a murder weapon. To stress the point one last time: Nothing physical changes in the composition of the car during this transformation; the physicist and chemist wouldn’t notice anything happening to the molecules forming the car. On the contrary, when we say that Sally “turned the vehicle into a murder weapon,” we are rendering a judgment concerning the intangible, directly unobservable state of Sally’s mind. The physical movements of Sally’s hands and feet as she controlled the car are not the crucial issue; it is her conscious intentions that determine whether we need to add one more homicide to the running total.

→—Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 59–60

→Take such things as tools, food, medicine, weapons, words, sentences, communications, and acts of production.... I believe these to be fair samples of the kind of objects of human activity which constantly occur in the social sciences. It is easily seen that all these concepts... refer not to some objective properties possessed by the things, or which the observer can find out about them, but to views which some other person holds about the things. These objects cannot even be defined in physical terms, because there is no single physical property which any one member of a class must possess.... [T]hey can be defined only by indicating relations between three terms: a purpose, somebody who holds that purpose, and an object which that person thinks to be a suitable means for that purpose.

→Even the “Facts” of the Social Sciences Are Related to the Mind

→This awareness of other minds, and the fact that other thinking humans have their individual motivations, pervades the social sciences. It’s not confined to the formation of theories to explain events, either: Even the raw “facts” of the social sciences are themselves mental things, and not purely natural or physical. For example, a sociologist might come up with a theory relating an increase in the crime rate with the increase in the rate of divorce. But in order for the sociologist to even collect data to test this theory, she needs to “get inside other people’s minds” in order to know which events should be classified as crimes and divorces in the first place; these are not mere brute facts of nature.

→Because of their different subject matter, the social sciences focus on purposeful action, as described in the preceding section, while the natural sciences focus on mindless behavior. Even though he might not even be aware that he is doing it, the social scientist’s explanations and theories at least implicitly rely on the hypothesis that there are other minds at work, influencing events. In sharp contrast, with the notable exception of biology, the natural scientist typically doesn’t refer to a conscious intelligence when explaining events in his field of expertise.