In a short essay that beautifully encapsulates a few of the most relevant arguments in classical liberalism (Over-Legislation, 1853), Herbert Spencer observed: Did the State fulfill efficiently its unquestionable duties, there would be some excuse for this eagerness to assign it further duties. Were there no complaints of its faulty administration of justice… of its playing the tyrant where it should have been the protector… had we, in short, proved its efficiency as judge and defender… there would be some encouragement to hope for other benefits at its hands. It is disconcerting that such words, if pronounced today in any parliamentary assembly (not to mention economics departments), would earn the one who utters them the reputation of an extremist. Isn’t it simply prudent to make sure that the government does well what it endeavors to do, before adding on its duties? Isn’t it the sort of wisdom we practice with children, making sure they do their homework and do not fail at school, before allowing them to take on whatever extracurricular activity? Isn’t it perhaps something we should do concerning our own work, checking that we are not taking on too many commitments that eventually we will fail to honor properly? For the government, this basic wisdom seems not to apply, as it is by definition almighty. In a recent blog post, David Boaz, quoting research by Scott Lincicome, suggests that “Before we create new policies, it would behoove us to eliminate the policies that may have caused the very problem we’re trying to solve”. It is paradoxical that this form of common sense is dismissed as libertarian heterodoxy. In a saner world, it would be advocates of government intervention who would insist upon a proper and regular assessment of its works. You can believe that the government spends and decides better than individual people do, but then you should be the first to test this proposition regularly, if only to maintain public trust in government agencies. Instead people tend to believe that UNCHECKED government spends and decides better than people would. Perhaps the true political divide is not, like some of those who hold the aforementioned view tend to imply, between those who like government and those who hate it. It is between those who would give the government a blank check, and those who wouldn’t. (0 COMMENTS)

Last week, the Wall Street Journal editors wrote a stirring defense of the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to approve Biogen’s new drug Aduhelm. Aduhelm was approved to treat Alzheimer’s. Critics of the federal approval argue that there is no  direct evidence that Aduhelm will cure Alzheimer’s. Supporters agree. So what’s the issue? The Journal‘s editors put it well: Nobody has said Aduhelm is a cure, but it is the first treatment following hundreds of failures that has shown evidence in clinical trials of removing amyloid plaque—a hallmark of the disease—and slowing cognitive decline. Critics are right that it’s not clear that amyloid causes Alzheimer’s. But the leading research hypothesis is that a buildup of harmful amyloid plaque in the brain triggers a cascade of chemical changes that interfere with neuron communication and cause brain loss. Critics also note that some two dozen drugs aimed at removing amyloid have failed to meaningfully affect the course of the disease. The Journal continues: Yet many trials hadn’t properly screened patients to ensure they had Alzheimer’s. Some drugs were also tested on late-stage patients who had irreversible brain loss. And some failed to clear amyloid because they didn’t target the right molecules in the brain. Biogen learned from these failures, and the FDA noted that Aduhelm was the first drug to show “proof of concept” in an early stage trial that clearing amyloid could slow decline. This was supported by a Phase 3 trial in which patients receiving the highest dosage showed 25% to 28% less decline in memory and problem-solving compared to the placebo group after 78 weeks. In short, there’s a good case for allowing it. As more and more people use Aduhelm, we’ll get more information. In a few years, we’re likely to know much more. But there’s a wrinkle. If Medicare pays for this drug, whose positive effects in treating Alzheimer’s are somewhat speculative, we the taxpayers will be forced to pay. And the price is not low. The Journal quotes Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon): It’s unconscionable to ask seniors and taxpayers to pay $56,000 a year for a drug that has yet to be proven effective,” Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden tweeted after the Food and Drug Administration approved Aduhelm this month. Ask? I wish. Taxpayers don’t get “asked.” How does the Journal deal with Wyden’s point? By claiming that having Medicare negotiate a lower price is an imposition of a price control. It’s not. When a government negotiates a price, the other side is free to reject it. It’s not a price control. It would be a price control if the federal government said that no one–not an insurance company and not a patient–is allowed to pay more than $X for a drug. I don’t think that’s why Wyden is proposing; it’s certainly not the thinking of many of us want Medicare not to have an open-ended commitment to paying whatever a drug company charges. For many years now, the Journal‘s editors have argued that any restriction on how much Medicare will pay amounts to a price control and they’ve repeated the argument many times. But repetition doesn’t make the argument stronger. Here’s an earlier post where I criticized the editors on that point.   (0 COMMENTS)

Here’s a guest post by ASU’s Richard Hahn, reprinted with his permission.  I suspect he’d be happy to respond to comments! The problem with punchy slogans is that they are subject to (mis)interpretation. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has become common for folks to urge policy-makers to “follow the science”. But what exactly does this mean? There is a version of this slogan that I strongly support, but I worry that many of the people invoking it mean something different, and that this interpretation could actually undermine faith in science. In this longish essay I discuss the inherently approximate nature of science and explore how a scientific mindset can lead to near-sighted policy decisions. At the very least, readers may enjoy the linked articles, which represent a greatest-hits collection of writing that influenced my own thinking about public health policy over the past year. What even is science? All empirical knowledge is approximate. First of all, making sense of “follow the science” demands an understanding of what science is. It is important to remember that science is a process for learning about the world, not merely an established body of knowledge to be consulted. Some areas of science, like Newtonian physics, might give the impression of finality, but that is misleading. Even classical physics is just an approximation; over time we have been able to figure out tasks for which that approximation is adequate (aiming missiles) and those for which it isn’t (GPS, which requires more complex adjustments). For newer science, especially pertaining to complex subjects like human biochemistry, we often do not have a good sense of how our approximations might fail, nor do we have a more refined theory at the ready. Scientific inquiry is a process of continual revision and refinement and the knowledge we uncover by this process is always provisional (subject to revision) and contingent (subject to qualification). For example, we might think we know that a struck match will light, because we understand the basic chemistry of match heads. But if the match is in a chamber with no oxygen, then it won’t light. It also won’t light if it is in a strong magnetic field. The “scientific theory of matches” involves understanding the mechanisms of the match well enough that we can forecast novel scenarios in which the match will or will not light. Sometimes we will be wrong, but that is how we learn, how our approximations improve. Some scientifically acquired knowledge is more approximate than others. The scientific knowledge that underlies jet planes or heart surgery is quite a lot different from that underlying cell biology or genetics which is quite a lot different than that underlying epidemiology or climate science.  Scientific inquiry is an idealized method of establishing how the world works, but some phenomena are simply less well understood than others, despite being investigated using common scientific techniques (experiments, observation, data analysis, etc). A surgeon’s authority on surgery is qualitatively different from an climatologist’s authority on climate; they are both experts, but their domains of expertise are vastly different. One major difference between various areas of inquiry is whether or not they are amenable to repeatable experiments that are essentially similar; surgical procedures are, climatology (and paleontology and economics) are not. Mathematical/computer models incorporate many assumptions.   Computational models encapsulate many relationships at the same time. To continue with the match example, a quantitative model of match-lighting might include the size of the match, the proportion of potassium chlorate to sulfur, the force with which it is struck, the amount of oxygen in the environment and the strength of the magnetic field surrounding the match, etc. Accordingly, models reflect our knowledge of processes that have been observed, but also extend to situations that have not yet been observed. In this latter case — when a model produces a prediction for a situation where there is no data yet — the model’s prediction is not a demonstration of scientific fact, rather it is the starting point of a scientific experiment! Moreover, if the inputs to a model are wrong, then its predictions will be wrong, too, even if the model itself is correct. When models contain within them dozens or hundreds of potentially violable assumptions, that means there is lots of science left to do, rather than that there are clear conclusions to be drawn. Science alone cannot provide decisions. When the correct inputs to a model are unknown, or the model’s appropriateness in a novel setting is questionable, the scientific method itself doesn’t provide guidance for navigating these uncertainties. Science alone cannot solve practical decisions for two fundamental reasons. First, science provides a process for (eventually) resolving uncertainties by a process of experimentation, but often decisions must be made before that process can be undertaken. Pure science has the luxury of being agnostic until rigorous investigations are conducted, but insincere skepticism has no place when critical decisions must be made. Second, the scope of practical considerations is usually much broader than what sound scientific method usually allows. By its very nature, controlled experimentation involves narrowing the scope of a phenomena under consideration. The broader the domain of impact, the less science can provide clear answers — studying a single match is fundamentally different than studying the economic and human health ramifications of forest fires. Appeals to Science during Covid-19 In light of the above, what might “follow the science” mean in 2021? If it simply means that scientists and scientific studies should be consulted when evaluating policy decisions, that is all to the good. To do otherwise would be very foolish! However, if instead it means that scientists should be empowered to make policy decisions unilaterally or that only scientifically obtained knowledge should be considered, then I would argue that it is unwise. A wait-and-see approach to ambiguity in conjunction with a narrow purview can make scientists ineffective policy makers. This dynamic was apparent on many matters related to Covid-19. Lockdowns and mathematical epidemiology models. Standard models of infectious disease predict that early-stage epidemics will surge very much like compound interest makes credit card debt balloon: more infected people leads to more infected people, and so on. The steepness of the surge depends on various inputs to the model. One important input that dictates the human toll of an epidemic is the fatality rate. It is well known that fatality rates in the earliest stages of an epidemic are typically inflated — both because mild cases are not included in the denominator and because the numerator is apt to be calculated based on only the sickest patients — but influential models in March 2020 used these over-estimates anyway. Why? I suspect it has to do with the modelers’ narrowly construed objective: to limit deaths due to Covid-19. Based on this narrow mandate, policy recommendations would have been extreme according to any standard model of disease spread; selectively emphasizing the most dire forecast was essentially an act of persuasion. But plugging in worst-case values for key inputs had the effect of prioritizing Covid-19 deaths to the exclusion of the multitude of other factors affecting human welfare. Narrowness of focus is an asset in scientific investigation, but not in public policy. Plumes of virulent effluvia. A similar dynamic played out in the early weeks of the pandemic regarding outdoor exercise: could you catch the virus while jogging on the bike path? Prima facie, it should have been doubtful, based on our extensive experience with other viruses. The sheer volume of the outside atmosphere relative to that of human exhalations, in combination with the dispersing effects of wind, should have been reassuring. But then a widely-reported simulation came out — based on a fancy computer model — showing that human breath vapor can linger in the air and waft substantial distances. Based on this scientific report, many individuals began to wear masks while on their morning jog, if not skipping it altogether. Parks were closed. But here’s the thing: that simulation study didn’t reveal anything we didn’t know before. When someone walks by you wearing perfume, you can smell it, and we knew that before it was “scientized” with a colorful infographic. Meanwhile, the actually relevant question — what amount of virus must you be exposed to before it can be expected to lead to an infection and how does this compare to the amount of virus that would be in a typical jogger’s vapor wake — remained unanswered. Again, the narrowness of the scientific approach is a weakness here. By reporting on a necessary — but not sufficient — condition for contracting the disease, the study fell far short of providing actionable information. At the same time, the pretense that this computer simulation proved something new made it seem as if our knowledge that similar viruses were not readily transmissible via brief outdoor contact was inapplicable due to lack of rigor. Again, affected skepticism is an understandable position if the goal is to publish a science paper, but it has no place in public policy. During Covid-19, this pattern repeated itself over and over: efficacy of masks, contractability via surfaces, reinfection. In each case “probably” or “probably not” became “it’s possible, we have to await further studies to venture any opinion”. Coupled with a monofocus on Covid-19 case suppression, no mitigation measure was too extreme, including essentially cancelling elementary school indefinitely. Vaccine efficacy doubt. As a final example — and probably the most important one — consider the messaging about vaccine efficacy. The basic science underlying vaccines is more solid than the science underlying non-pharmaceutical interventions by many orders of magnitude because the fundamental mechanisms behind vaccines are narrow, well-studied, and universal in a way that behavioral level interventions are definitely not. Advice to keep wearing your mask post-vaccine — just to be safe! — while simultaneously keeping national parks closed, ignores gross qualitative differences among scientific fields and reveals the scientists’ asymmetric utility (mitigation is always costless). A scientific explanation should not change based on what an audience is likely to do with it, and when it does, that erodes faith in the scientific process itself. Protecting faith in science To summarize, when both uncertainty and stakes are high, principled agnosticism in the name of science is unethical; prior knowledge should not be discarded in a bid at scientific purity. Further, when uncertainty cannot be resolved, a worst-case analysis based on a too-narrow criterion (covid case counts only) can lead to bad policy — the collateral damage to other facets of welfare may overwhelm the improvements on the narrow metric: to entertain this possibility is not anti-science, it’s ethical policy-making. In context “follow the science” sometimes means that one should not even raise the question of policy trade-offs. But this is a mistake: just because something is easier to measure, making it more amenable to scientific modeling, does not mean it is more important. It is understandable that the scientists who study a particular phenomenon are inclined to focus narrowly on it, but we should not mistake their professional commitment with society’s broader needs. The core belief underlying the scientific enterprise is that the workings of our world are knowable in principle, even if that knowledge will always be imperfect in practice. This perspective has given us air travel and artificial hearts and life-saving vaccines. It is a perspective that is worth celebrating and protecting. But, when we fail to acknowledge qualitative differences between different areas of scientific inquiry, conflate science with (narrowly defined) risk aversion, and fail to distinguish between scientific advice and the personal priorities of the scientists providing that advice, we run the risk of undermining faith in all science, which would be a tragedy. We must not let rhetoric about science turn science into rhetoric. (0 COMMENTS)

What if you had the opportunity to discuss and review some of EconTalk host, Russ Roberts’ published books? Well now might be your chance!   Erik Rostad, host of the podcast Books of Titans, read all of Russ’s books; his experience is the subject of this podcast. Through the duration of the podcast, Rostad discusses The Invisible Heart, The Choice, The Price of Everything, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, and Gambling with Other People’s Money. At the end of the segment, Rostad summarizes the most important aspect he wants to remember from this set of books. Give Rostad’s podcast a listen and then answer the discussion questions below, and start a conversation with what you think about the podcast!     1-Rostad starts with a quote from Roberts’ book, The Invisible Heart. The quote is, “There is an invisible heart at the core of the market place, serving the customer and doing it joyously.” He goes on to discuss how this quote illustrates the often unconsidered side of free markets. A very common view of free markets and economic ideology today is that is they are “unkind and selfish.” Do you agree or disagree with this perspective? In what ways do you think that it is or isn’t? If you’ve read The Invisible Heart can you think of any specific examples from the book?   2- In his discussion on The Choice, Rostad reads a quote describing protectionism as a harmful strategy: “Can you imagine how poor America would be in 1960 or 2005 if America had made a decision back in 1900 to preserve the size of agriculture in the name of saving jobs?” This is often an aspect of economics that isn’t considered. Do you think the way that Roberts illustrates this point explains the dangers of protectionism? Can you think of other examples that would illustrate the same point?   3- How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life focuses on Adam Smith’s book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. A main topic of both these books is self-interest vs. selfishness and the line between the two. Do you see a difference between self-interest and selfishness? Do you think you can be self-interested without being selfish? Are there times that the two ideas overlap? Can you think of an example?   4- Rostad discusses the importance of small decisions. He summarizes Roberts’ view that the small decisions we make when no one else is around or when it seems like our choices don’t matter are the most important decisions we make, as they determine the direction our lives move in. This thought process highlights the importance of daily habits that support the small yet important decisions we make every day. In what ways is this relevant to your own life? Do you have any daily habits that you use to guide your decisions consciously or unconsciously?   5- Can you summarize the point that Rostad thinks is the most important out of Roberts’ five books? Given the other content of the podcast (or if you have read some or all of the books), do you think Rostad’s main takeaway is the most important one? Did any other points stick out to you as more important? Explain. (0 COMMENTS)

Many people would regard my approach to teaching monetary policy during my final years at Bentley to be hopelessly “out of date”. Marginal Revolution University has a new video out that discusses new ways of teaching Fed policy in light of changes made during and after the Great Recession.  Here I’d like to push back against this new view. Early in the video, Tyler suggests that the Fed traditionally relied mostly on open market operations, and then during the Great Recession it discovered that it needed new tools to achieve its goals. Tyler mentioned quantitative easing, interest on bank reserves, and repurchase agreements (as well as reverse repurchase agreements). But is there actually any evidence that the Fed needed new policy tools? Tyler mentions that the Fed traditionally purchased T-bills in its open market operations, and that quantitative easing allowed it to purchase much longer-term bonds. But is that correct? This data suggests that even before the Great Recession, T-bills were only a modest portion of the Fed’s balance sheet: In my view, “quantitative easing” is nothing more than big open market operations.  You might quibble that the purchase of MBSs was something new, but since these bonds had already been effectively guaranteed by the Treasury, they were very close substitutes for the long-term T-bonds that the Fed already held in its portfolio.  Instead of a brand new way of teaching money, we simply need to add a couple words on MBSs to the textbook definition of open market operations, which is the buying and selling of bonds with base money.  Repurchase agreements have the same sort of impact on the monetary base, but it’s a technical innovation that isn’t really important for undergraduates.  Rather you want them to focus on the essence of what monetary policy–exchanging money for bonds. There is one new policy tool that is both distinctive and important—interest on bank reserves.  While I’m no mind reader, I sensed that Tyler struggled with the question of how to explain this tool.  At the beginning of the video, Tyler suggested that these new tools were instituted by the Fed to address the special problems that arose during the Great Recession.  Then right before explaining interest on reserves, he noted that the Fed had trouble stimulating the economy during the long period of near zero interest rates after 2008. I hope you see the problem.  Interest on bank reserves is a contractionary policy, and does nothing to address the special problems associated with the sort of liquidity trap that was used to motivate the discussion.  Indeed the Fed was provisionally granted permission to use IOR back in 2006 (with a 5 year delay), when interest rates were fairly high. Just to be clear, Tyler doesn’t say anything about IOR that is incorrect.  After motivating the IOR discussion with some comments on the zero bound issue making open market operations much less effective, the actual example of interest on reserves that he cites is from 2015, when the Fed raised IOR to prevent the economy from overheating. In retrospect, the Fed clearly raised IOR too soon, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad example to use.  The 2015 example does illustrate how IOR works in a technical sense.  My bigger complaint is that the video gives the impression that the Great Recession created a need for new policy tools, and there isn’t really any evidence that this is the case.  Quantitative easing is not really a new tool, it’s an old tool used much more aggressively.  And IOR is a highly contractionary policy, and thus whatever its merits its not something you want to start doing 10 months into the worst recession since the 1930s.  But that’s exactly what the Fed did. I sympathize with instructors.  It must be confusing to teach the truth—that the Fed blundered in late 2008 (as even Ben Bernanke admitted in his memoir.)  It’s much easier for students if you teach these new tools as logical innovations to deal with specific new problems.  Unfortunately, the easy way to teach monetary policy doesn’t happen to be true. PS.  This critique is aimed at a new MRU video, but it’s equally applicable to many new economics textbooks, which treat the Fed as the hero of the story, not the villain. PPS.  If you want to teach about new expansionary policy tools for the zero bound, you should ignore the Fed and instead discuss the policy of negative IOR in Europe and Japan. (0 COMMENTS)

I was just on an NPR panel on Capitalism, squaring off against socialists Kristen Ghodsee and Vivek Chibber.  Enjoy the full show! (0 COMMENTS)

I rarely read a whole 300+ page novel in a day, but I did so on Saturday. It’s Campusland by Scott Johnston. Johnston, who worked at Salomon and opened some nightclubs in New York, also founded two tech start-ups. But those are not what the book’s about. It’s about Ephraim Russell, a young assistant professor of American literature who teaches at fictitious Devon University, a small elite private university with a multi-billion dollar endowment. Russell is up for tenure but, while trying to teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, gets caught in the buzzsaw of phony charges of racism. Later he gets charged with coming on sexually to a precocious 18-year old freshman (excuse me, I shouldn’t have said “man:” I mean “first-year.) There are so many things to like about the book. It took about 40 pages for me to get into it but once I was, I wanted to know what happens. Even though much of what transpires seems overdone, one can believe that this kind of thing can happen in a Title IX, “Dear Colleague” universe. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, look it up or, better yet, read the book. Johnston is quite good at examining the motives and incentives of the various players who try to get Professor Russell in hot water. Each motivation seems plausible. One passage in particular is worth reporting in an economics blog, the unintended, but believable, consequences of changes in laws, in particular the law on drinking. One of Ronald Reagan’s worst domestic policy mess-ups was his signing a federal law to raise the drinking age to 21. (It doesn’t compare with his ratcheting up of the war on drugs but it’s pretty bad.) The stick Reagan and Congress used for states that didn’t comply was a threat to withhold highway funds. Johnston doesn’t mention Reagan but he does lay out some unintended consequences of the law. Here are a few. Effect on Fraternities Despite determined efforts over many decades by Devon administrators, fraternities remained a part of the school ecosystem. There was a time, back in the 1970s, when the administrators had almost succeeded in purging them, but then the drinking age was raised to twenty-one and off-campus fraternities sprouted like invasive weeds. Effect on Size of Parties and Type of Alcohol Consumed But big, campus-wide parties? Those were now a thing of the past. Students slithered into the nook and crannies, mainly dorm rooms and fraternities, consuming what they wanted behind closed doors where they wouldn’t be caught by RAs and other mandated busybodies. Beer, the college beverage of choice since the first student was forced to read Proust, faded away. Too bulky. No way to sneak a keg into your dorm. Vodka was the new poison, its primary virtue lying in its efficiency–a mere ounce was equivalent to a whole beer, so it was easy to sneak around, and it mixed with about anything. Notice the solid economic reasoning above about the effect of illegalization on risk and therefore on relative prices. Effect on Mixing of Demographic Groups There were other, subtler consequences. Unintended ones. Social life became cliquey, balkanized. With the open-to-all, campus-wide parties gone, students now huddled in groups of six or ten or twelve. These groups had an irritating habit, from a progressive college administrators point of view, of self-selecting almost completely along demographic lines. HT2 Jonathan Meer, for recommending the book.         (0 COMMENTS)

Bryan’s Comments “BC” indicates Bryan’s comments; “MH” is me (from the book). 1. Argument from Design MH:     Even if you’d never seen a watch before, you would immediately know that this thing had to have been designed by someone. It’s too intricately ordered to have just happened. BC:      The reason why we infer a watch-maker from a watch is not that the watch is “intricately ordered,” but that we have independent reason to believe that watches are not naturally occurring. The “even if you’d never seen a watch before” is meant to exclude that. I.e., if you showed the watch to a person who had never seen (or heard of) a watch before, they’d still immediately know that it was an artefact. I assume that’s clear. That excludes the possibility that the conclusion is based on background knowledge about watches. Maybe Bryan thinks they actually wouldn’t know this? Or he thinks there is some other reason for believing that watches are not naturally occurring? But I have no idea what this would be (?). BC:      Consider this rock formation: [image of Bryce Canyon] Now compare it to this rock carving: [image of rock with heart carved in it] The former is far more “intricately ordered” than the latter. But the latter shows design, and the former does not. Why? Because we have independent knowledge that only intelligent beings create rocks with little hearts on them. Bryce Canyon is not really very ordered (though admittedly more ordered than just a big junk pile); you could move large parts of it around in lots of ways and not upset any salient pattern or activity. This is very unlike a watch: If you move parts of the watch around, for almost all ways of doing so, it stops working. The rock carving has a simple order. But I don’t understand how Bryan thinks we know that it was carved by a person. I don’t know what “independent knowledge” he’s referring to. Maybe it’s the knowledge that a lot of people like heart shapes? Maybe it consists of having seen people drawing such shapes in the past? Suppose it was a rock with a different shape on it, one that you had never seen before. Like this: I’ve never seen that shape before I found it on the internet just now. I bet a lot of readers haven’t either. I also have not looked up what that is, or whether it is natural or man-made. This one object is my entire sample of surfaces with that shape etched into them. Q: Can I tell whether that’s man made? Yes, I can. I have zero doubt. This doesn’t rest on background knowledge about instances of that shape. BC:      But would it not be even more implausible to think that God just appeared by chance? Theists standardly say that God either always existed or exists “outside time” (whatever that means), and often claim that God exists necessarily. They wouldn’t say that God appeared by chance. Btw, I didn’t address this in the book, but sometimes people say, “But isn’t God himself even more intricately ordered than living things?” No; I have no idea why people say that. Theists typically think that God is a single, simple entity. God is not supposed to have organs arranged in a body, etc., the way you do. 2. Fine Tuning MH:     [W]hy does the universe in fact have life-friendly parameters? The theist says: Because an intelligent, benevolent, and immensely powerful being set the parameters of the universe that way, in order to make life possible. BC:      I say this is an obviously terrible argument, and I don’t say such things lightly. Why? Because we have zero evidence that the anyone can “set the parameters of the universe”! I don’t know why Bryan thinks we have no evidence of that. The theist cited the evidence: the fact that the universe has life-friendly parameters. To say that we have no evidence of anyone being able to set the parameters of the universe, you have to assume that the evidence the theist just cited is not in fact evidence of what the theist says it is evidence of. That begs the question. I note that this type of evidence is common, and it is not in general controversial that it counts as evidence (at least when we’re talking about things other than God). I.e., the fact that a seemingly improbable phenomenon exists, and that some theory would explain that phenomenon, is standardly accepted as evidence for that theory. That is in general how we have evidence for unobserved, theoretical phenomena (atoms, magnetic fields, quarks, etc.) And you don’t have to have some other evidence for those phenomena, independent of the inference to the best explanation. I don’t know what view of evidence Bryan is assuming or why he claims that there’s no evidence in this case, so it’s hard for me to say more. MH:     [“Made by God” example] BC:      I’d say this is excellent evidence for intelligent English-speaking life on Mars, but zero evidence for God’s existence. Zero evidence? So the probability of God doesn’t go up at all? How can that be? God isn’t even a possible explanation of the evidence in the story? The prior probability of God existing is zero? I deliberately designed the example to be absurdly heavy-handed evidence pointing to God (theists can only dream of finding evidence so powerful and so obvious). I didn’t think anyone would have a problem with saying that ridiculous story would count as evidence for God if it happened. BC:      After all, everything on Earth labelled “made by God” is made by garden-variety intelligent English-speaking life, so why shouldn’t we make a parallel inference on Mars? I’ve never seen anything labelled “made by God”, so I’m not sure what things Bryan is referring to. Of course, if I saw an ordinary object, like a shirt, labelled “made by God”, I would think it was made by a human being. This, however, was not a plausible explanation in my example, because (i) there are no people on Mars before the astronauts go there, (ii) it was stipulated that the formations are consequences of the laws of nature. Human beings do not have the ability to design the laws of nature. If there is a being with the ability to design laws of nature, I would say that being has some fairly godlike powers. I suppose it could still be incredibly advanced aliens, but I don’t know why that theory would completely overwhelm the theistic theory. 3. The Anthropic Principle MH:     [Firing squad example] BC:      My reply: Entertaining such hypotheses only makes sense because we have independent reason to believe that people normally don’t survive fifty-man firing squads. Again, I don’t know what independent reason Bryan is talking about. Explain it to me like I’m a baby. I think it makes sense to entertain hypotheses for how you survived, because it is initially extremely improbable that you would survive the 50-man firing squad. Is that the independent reason Bryan is referring to? Or is that not enough, and you need some other reason? If so, I don’t know why Bryan thinks that you need some other reason. BC:      In contrast, it’s not weird for humans to exist on [a] planet hospitable to human life. And if you ask, “How did this happen?,” saying, “If the universe were very different, we wouldn’t be here [to] ask such questions” is illuminating. I don’t understand at all why Bryan says either of those things, so I can’t respond to this other than to repeat what I said in the book. It is weird for us to exist, once you know about the incredibly specific conditions required for us to exist. It’s weird because, well, it’s extremely improbable. Also, it’s true in the Firing Squad example that if the shooters hadn’t all missed, you wouldn’t be there to ask questions about it; yet that comment is not at all illuminating about why the shooters missed. Similarly, therefore, the statement “If the universe were very different, we wouldn’t be here to ask questions” is unilluminating about why the universe is the way it is. BC:      In any case, if you take fine tuning seriously, why can’t you just ask, “How did we happen to be in a universe where a divine being fine-tunes the laws of nature to allow our survival?” You can ask that, but there’s nothing at all odd on its face about a conscious being deciding to create a universe that would have intelligent life. This question strikes me as being no better motivated than the parallel question one could raise for any explanation. Someone posits X to explain evidence E. You can always say, “Why can’t you just ask, ‘How did it happen that X was the case?’” Well, sometimes you can ask that (perhaps always), but (a) this doesn’t mean that X doesn’t explain E, or that we should never make inferences to the best explanation, and (b) often X is less weird or more understandable on its face than E was. 4. Burden of Proof BC:      If X has a low prior probability of existing, and there’s no evidence of X’s existence, we should conclude that X has a very low posterior probability of existing. What gives X “a low prior probability of existing”? Many things, including (a) being very specific (e.g. X=”a guy with a feathered hat named Josephus who likes pickle-flavored ice cream and has exactly 19 hairs on his head”), and (b) being fantastical (e.g. X=Superman). I note that Bryan is not defending the burden of proof principle as it is usually formulated, because the standard burden-of-proof principle claims that there is a burden of proof for any assertion of existence; it’s not limited to things with specially low prior probabilities (or it claims that every hypothesized entity has a low prior probability). Anyway, I agree that the more specific the description of X is, the lower is the probability that X exists. But I’m not sure what counts as “fantastical”. In particular, I’m not sure whether the idea of a conscious being that can adjust the parameters of the universe is fantastical. If it is, then I’m not sure why we should think all “fantastical” things have a low prior probability. 5. Free Will BC:      My position, which I warrant Huemer would also accept: Libertarian free will and behavioral predictability are totally compatible. […] I’m going to continue taking care of my kids. Still, this doesn’t show that I can’t do otherwise, only that I won’t. Agreed. And that’s a good example. If you think that predictability (with high probability) rules out free will, then you’d have to say that when people do stuff that is obviously the only sensible thing to do, they’re not acting freely. Which is counter-intuitive. Another example: I find someone living in a penthouse in Denver worth $3 million. I offer that person 50 bucks for the condo. I can predict, with very high probability, that the owner is going to turn down my offer. Surely that doesn’t mean that the owner’s decision to reject my offer is not free. 6. Degrees of Freedom BC:      I say, for example, that alcoholics are fully free to stop drinking. They rarely do, but they absolutely can. Indeed, there is strong empirical evidence that I’m right, because changing incentives changes alcoholics behavior; and if changing incentives changes behavior, that is strong evidence that you were capable of changing your behavior all along. I would say that changing the incentives changes how difficult it is to stop drinking. The more difficult it is to stop, the less free the alcoholic is. The extreme of difficulty (the maximum level) is impossibility, and that is where the person is not free at all. Being “fully free”, or “maximally free” would be at the opposite extreme, where it is completely easy to stop drinking. I think that view coheres with the fact that changing incentives sometimes alters the alcoholic’s behavior. It also explains why we blame someone less for bad actions that were, as we say, “more difficult” to resist. BC:      We condemn a starving man for stealing bread much less than a well-fed man for doing the same. The reason, though, [is] not because the latter choice is “freer” than the other, but because the latter choice is less morally justified than the [former]. Indeed, the starving man’s action sounds like it’s not wrong at all! But not all cases are like that. You can imagine a pair of cases in which the action is equally justified objectively, but it was more psychologically difficult for one person to do the right thing than the other. E.g., maybe it was harder for A to do the right thing than B because A is a child and hasn’t yet developed good habits, or A was drunk, or A was very emotional at the time, or A didn’t have enough time to think about it, etc. Whereas B, faced with the same options with the same consequences, didn’t have any of those problems. Then we’d blame B more. By stipulation, the reason can’t be found in a difference in the actions or the external conditions. It has to be about degree of responsibility for the action. 7. “The Soul” Terminological note: Yes, you can basically write “mind” for “soul” if you prefer, and many people like that better. However, I take the term “soul” to be more specific. The term “mind” is neutral between physicalist and dualist (and idealist) views. The term “soul”, however, is not; it basically means “the mind on a Cartesian conception of it”. So most physicalists are happy to say that we have minds, but no physicalist would say that we have souls. 8. Hard Determinism BC:      In other words, determinism is a supremely unscientific theory that begins by throwing away ubiquitous conflicting evidence that each of us experiences in our every waking moment. Yep. Reader Comments There are a lot of these, so I’m going to be really brief. (a) why huemer thinks the standard multiverse argument doesn’t solve this I said that the multiverse is a viable explanation at the end of that chapter. (b) Sabine Hossenfelder argues that the fine tuning argument begs the question because it assumes a probability distribution that makes the constants of the universe unlikely… The “Made by God” example was designed to (and does) refute precisely this view. (c) How does one really disagree with the idea that all human behavior can be traced to physical causes? Partly by being a mind-body dualist! (d) The soul theory is subject to plenty of devastating reductio arguments as well. I don’t think there are any devastating arguments there at all. (e) To know what we seem to observe, wouldn’t we first have to know what the options would look like? If both theories predicts the same observation, we can’t tell if we seem to observe theory 1 or theory 2. I think this question conflates observation with inference or theory. You don’t observe a theory, and you don’t have to know anything about any theory to know what you seemingly observed. (f) …portrayals of Jesus in the Gospels aren’t implausibly specific. Agreed. But I don’t think many people (and surely not either Bryan or me) doubt that Jesus existed. The issue is whether there is an intelligent designer of the universe. (g) “God did it” is not an explanation at all; it’s a declaration that no explanation is possible. I don’t understand why the commenter said either of those things. Both are false on their face; “God did it” is an explanation, and it’s certainly not a declaration that no explanation is possible. (h) But the Wagerer must also make herself forget that she is going through the motions, instrumentally, in the hope of acquiring belief. She must act to forget-and-believe. I don’t see why she would have to do that. There seem to be many people who do the sort of things I described, and they don’t have to forget doing them. E.g., many people only watch “news” sources that support their ideology, they don’t forget that they’re doing this, and they have no trouble believing their ideology. (i) why does Philosophy accept the descriptions of Gods given by the worshippers? They are almost certainly inflated. […] If God is as great as the believers make him out to be, humans are probably an unimportant side-show. Fair points. If God made the universe, there are probably many other planets with life out there, so God would not be focused on Earth in particular. (j) If Determinism is established, then we will continue to do what we have (and will) be doing. This assumes that the establishment of determinism would not itself have any causal powers. But it would (just like all the other events in the world).   (0 COMMENTS)

Journalist and author Sebastian Junger talks about his book, Freedom, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. The book and conversation are based on a 400-mile walk Junger took with buddies along railroad rights-of-way, evading police, railroad security, and other wanderers. Junger discusses the ever-present tension between the human desire to be free and the desire to be interconnected and part of something. Along the way, Junger talks about the joy of walking, the limits of human endurance, war, and why the more powerful, better-equipped military isn’t always the winner. (0 COMMENTS)

Journalist and author Sebastian Junger talks about his book, Freedom, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. The book and conversation are based on a 400-mile walk Junger took with buddies along railroad rights-of-way, evading police, railroad security, and other wanderers. Junger discusses the ever-present tension between the human desire to be free and the desire to […] The post Sebastian Junger on Freedom appeared first on Econlib.