Academia
The destruction of Argentina’s higher education and science system
Scientific research, academic knowledge production, and higher education are under an obscene and direct attack today in Argentina. Milei’s attack is not an isolated case. To a certain extent, it is part of a global phenomenon, i.e. the rampant anti-intellectualism of the “new” right-wing movements and governments, which has certainly accelerated its spread with the last pandemic. Regarding this, I have written about the relationship between anti-intellectualism and the elitist conditions of knowledge production, focusing on our real practices and material conditions as workers of science and higher education here (in Spanish). In this entry I want to stress a different aspect of today’s anti-intellectualism, its consequences vis-à-vis neoliberalism’s own goals.
By attacking higher education and public scientific research, any openly capitalist government is shooting itself on the foot. The purpose of Milei’s government can only be pushing Argentina into an even more subaltern position regarding the global knowledge production. But I think that knowledge production is, like nature, politics, and social reproduction, an area of the “non-economic” sphere of reality without which capitalism cannot survive for (too) long in a given place and time and (in the long run) in general, globally, so this latter aim is also a suicidal decision wherever it is carried out.
Like any ruthless attack, the assault on the science system is based on unjustified lies and prejudices. I want to dispel some of the most common ones in the attacks on the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), the institution that brings together a large part of public research in Argentina. The question that guides me is the logic behind the attack on Argentine science, but what interests me most about this attack is the defence that we are proposing and the one that we should propose so that in this struggle we do not end up losing our agenda and our critical orientation in the hands of right-wing projects.
Milei’s government began with an immediate and aggressive budget cut. As with the rest of the public administration, for the National Universities and the science and technology system in general, the budget for 2023 was frozen for 2024, leaving the system without funding before the middle of the year in an uncontrollable inflationary context. The defunding of the science and technology system violates laws 25,467, 27,614, and 27,738. Law 27,614 provides for a “progressive and sustained increase in resources destined to strengthen the System of Science, Technology, and Innovation.” Of course, respect for law is not this government’s cup of tea, so we can do little by insisting that they are violating the law: they just answer, like automats, “There is no money.” But this is an impertinent response because Argentine science has always been very cheap.
Today, the Argentine R&D system does not imply any budgetary burden that would jeopardize fiscal balances. In fact, CONICET stands out in global science rankings not merely for its positioning in the first quartile (see the SCImago ranking). ), but mainly because it is there even though it has a much smaller budget than any of the other institutions in the top fifty places of the ranking. Argentine science, with all its budgetary problems and all the challenges of doing science in the “Global South,” is actually too cheap for the levels of performance and excellence its researchers achieve.
Néstor Kirchner’s government (2003-2007) proposed many policies to increase the number of science and technology researchers and personnel, something that happily occurred. If we look at the number of R&D personnel per million inhabitants compared to other countries, we will see that we are quite well for the region with 1,284 research workers, but well below countries like Spain, Canada, Ireland, China, Czech Republic, Hungary, Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Japan, Russia, Singapore, Denmark, Slovenia, Croatia, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Portugal, or the United States. We also need to increase the number of people with completed doctorates to approach the figures of these countries.
The percentages that so-called “developed” countries allocate to research and development are much higher than those stipulated by our Law 27,614, as can be seen in this map made with data from the UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics.
Additionally, their GDPs are much larger than our GDP, so they receive much more funding than what we receive for research in Argentina. If we wanted to be a “developed country,” we would have to start by doing as they do, not the opposite of what they do. For those of us who do not have a developmentalist (capitalist) view of science, this is not a tenable argument, but it is a very valid argument if the premise is accepted, which much of the progressive political spectrum in Argentine science do and the Milei-Macri supporters claim to do.
What is often argued in response to these odious comparisons is that Argentina cannot afford to invest in research and development. It is precisely the opposite. It is not the case that “developed” countries can allocate more money to R&D because they have extra cash to expend. Development is also a function of centuries of sovereign production of knowledge. Capitalism, for instance, is not only the product of processes of land appropriation and capitalist accumulation but also of scientific progress. Neither agricultural nor industrial capitalist modes of production would exist without scientific knowledge produced by academies around the world in the modern era. For example, in the 17th century, the role of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in driving scientific and technological advancement for the development of capitalism was fundamental. But this does not mean that scientific laboratories and the ideologues’ libraries can submit their own mode of knowledge production to the logic of capital. Even if they are to be instrumental to capitalism, they have to maintain the “non-economic” functioning of their own practice, in the same way that the modern state is not reduced to economic logic but fulfils its functions following its own political logic, even when it serves capital.
As recently argued by my colleague Federico Penelas, “the slogan ‘There is no money’ should not be read as descriptive but as normative: it does not matter if the state has money or not, what matters is that it should not have it, because assuming that duty would imply, according to the Mileist ideology, perpetuating the robbery that any tax burden entails. The foundation of the program is, therefore, moral.”
I think that this exclusively ideological foundation of the austerity program could be the cause of the implosion of the program itself because it accelerates a contradiction that capitalist “developed” countries take great care not to accelerate at home: the contradiction between capitalism and its “non-economic” conditions of possibility. In this case, the condition of possibility I am referring to is the production of knowledge. Defunding science not only harms the private sector (a euphemism that does not refer to any worker, no matter how “private” their educational and professional trajectory may be, but only to capital), it also contradicts the conditions of possibility of capitalism.
Established beyond all doubt that Bernardo Houssay’s phrase “Science is not expensive; ignorance is” has much truth to it, I am more interested in the question of what logic lies behind it.
Nancy Fraser argues that capitalism has three conditions of possibility whose rationalities and normativities are “non-economic.” Without these three spheres, there would be no capitalism (or any other system of production, we could add): the reproduction of life (care, health, education, sanitation conditions), nature (from which any mode of production extracts food, shelter, and energy), and political power (the democratic state, in our case). Of course, capitalism needs these three spheres, but it also forms a symbiosis with them, producing reality in each of them, shaping them to serve its own aim. The interesting point Fraser makes is that many capitalist crises arise when the logics of these spheres contradict the capitalist logic of value and viceversa. By their own internal logics, these conditions of possibility of capital cannot be absolutely subsumed under the logic of capitalist economic profit without provoking the collapse not only of social ties, the environment, and life itself, but also, and this is what the over-ideologized Milei’s government ignores, capitalism itself.
I believe that knowledge production within academic frameworks is a “non-economic” sphere of this kind: it is a condition of possibility, at this point in history, for any regime of production and any type of society and therefore cannot be subjected to an extrinsic logic. At the same time, knowledge production has an impact (that word so cherished by the neoliberal vision of academia) on all dimensions of social relations, not only in economic activity and capitalist value production. It has an impact both in the political sphere and in the social relations specific to reproduction and care, and in the metabolism between humanity and nature. Regarding this “impact,” it is impossible to establish a hierarchy between sciences and disciplines and it is much more impossible to do so with an economic normativity as the sole criterion of analysis.
To understand what it means to produce scientific knowledge it is essential to understand that academic knowledge production, by its own logic and normative principles, is not governed by the logic of value or the market, even when it serves capitalism. The same applies to the tasks of reproduction of human life: even when they serve capitalism, the encroachment of this terrain by the logic of capital ultimately harms capitalist accumulation itself –if the contradiction between accumulation by exploitation and the commodification of health, education, and care does not provoke the eruption of a huge crisis first. I am not a developmentalist and I believe that science should not, as it often is, be at the service of capital. The point is that those developmentalist arguments that most of the Argentine political spectrum likes so much advocate, all of them, for an increased public funding for research and higher education.
Milei’s government despises the social sciences and humanities more than any other area of knowledge production. Officials in Milei’s government and its supporters propose two arguments against public funding for these disciplines. One of them is that only the so-called “hard science” can be useful to society and meet its needs. The other one states that all the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, the so-called “soft science”, are ideological or, better, that they have been invaded by ideology. In a way, the objection against soft science is twofold: it would be incapable of responding to society’s needs and, even if it were, it is currently so ideologised that it could not do so without a process of ideological reorganization o neutralization directed by the government. Note that the whole issue is based on an (ideological) distinction between hard science and soft science that is not seriously defendable from any informed perspective on scientific work and that denies the reality of transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. Besides, this differentiation has a historically dated metaphysical and ontological debt that is very difficult to discharge when it is assumed: the stark dichotomy between an immutably objective nature and a human freedom that is essentially the spiritual realm of the subjective.
Regarding the first argument: who and how determines what a given society needs? If we were to say “that same society”, that would answer very little. To know what a society needs, we need all the tools of many different “soft” disciplines. Questions about what a society is, what its needs are, how to organize those needs, how to know them in the first place, how to know if we are perceiving the needs of a society rather than those of a particular sector of it, how to know if we can access that kind of knowledge to begin with, are philosophical questions. Physics and mathematics do not answer any of them nor are test tubes the suitable tools to address them.
Neoliberalism differs from democratic visions of the world in that neoliberals are dogmatically convinced that they have the truth regarding each of these questions, no matter how many books contradict them. As a doctrine, neoliberalism is against freedom of research in the social sciences and humanities because it does not accept any questioning or dissent against its conservative view of the world. This does not imply that it does not have its own soft scientists both from public universities and think tanks. The difference between the former and the latter is that in the latter, unquestioned unanimity is guaranteed, and in the former pluralism, diversity, and freedom in research and teaching were achieved after centuries of students’ and scholars’ struggles. Neoliberals call this freedom of research “ideology” following the same rule by which they call “censorship” any assertion that contradicts them. To neoliberals, “Western values” such as academic freedom, debate, and criticism do not seem as Western as the hetero-cisnormative and Christian values they profess, to give a clear example.
Regarding the second point, it is simply false that there is ideological excess today in the soft science disciplines in Argentina that would distinguish them from the hard science ones. On the one hand, formal and natural sciences are not immune to ideology. Bu I want to insist in the implausibility of the supposed prevalence of ideology in soft science.
A real and robust development of plurality in the social sciences and humanities is a good tool against the proliferation of absurd theories. Frontal attacks by right-wing governments on CONICET are not new. We knew them in the 1990s when the research science system also experienced a scandalous defunding. Back then, Minister Domingo Cavallo (whose policies directly caused the 2001 Argentine crisis) famously told sociologist Susana Torrado to go “wash the dishes” (an expression that means, in a nutshell, “f*ck off”, but is specially demeaning when directed against women). Torrado had publicly shown the results of her research warning about the impact Cavallo’s convertibility policy had on unemployment. She was, of course, completely right. It is not difficult to realize that Cavallo’s anti-scientific animosity was directed against soft science’s capacity (in this case, Sociology and Demography) to expose the disastrous consequences of this policy, which was the flagship of Menem’s economic plan.
Like Milei’s current policies, the convertibility policy carried out in the 1990s derives from an abstract and idealizing theory, disconnected not only from the Argentine reality but from the reality of any real economic functioning. After decades of popular, student, and higher education worker struggles today in Argentina there is a high level of research freedom that includes neoliberal theorists and Professors in Public Universities and in CONICET. And nobody persecutes or censors them: they feel persecuted and censored when someone contradicts them because, as I said, it is part of neoliberal doctrine not to tolerate dissent. What bothers these liberal heirs of the Mont Pelerin Society (which was mostly composed of “soft” scientists!) is that well-done research has the virtue of showing the inapplicability of their economic and social theory, its own ideological character and its disconnection from reality. Neoliberalism is an absurd doctrine in several senses, but above all one: it is an unreal vision of social relations, the human person, and history. Serious research in social and human sciences exposes the fact that it is a deeply flawed vision of the world.
Along with the need to protect the absurd nature of their own theories from criticism, the right-wing government has another motivation for destroying Argentine knowledge production: creating a strong epistemic subjugation. Ultimately, it is not so much about the economic return of public investment in R&D as it is about annihilating any local production of knowledge so that transnational capital can relocate Argentina as a space for the reproduction of technologies from the Global North. The suffocation of genuine Argentine innovation is a necessary strategy to pave the way for a deepening of extractive practices. For capitalism in its current phase, Argentina remains a peripheral sector whose natural function should be to provide natural resources (such as lithium) at the lowest possible cost and cheap wage labour. Technological leadership is denied to us because producing knowledge is not the role that planetary capital wants us to fulfil today and historically.
A crucial aspect of the contemporary right-wing’s anti-scientific trend, which relates to both epistemic subjugation and the critical potential of scientific research, is the relationship between research topics, the state, and capital. This is where hard science shows its ideological biases.
Recurring questions: What is “Argentinian” science? What topics are of scientific interest to Argentina? What do we perceive as critical issues and problems to investigate? In order to research “things that are useful to society,” we must first know what those problems are. The real problem is, then, that we do not always perceive society’s “real” problems. We tend, instead, to perceive as problematic only what affects us personally. Not all collectives have the same problems. What is more important, the problems of one collective may be the privileges of another collective. This is one of the main teachings one can learn from black Marxist feminism with Angela Davis at the forefront. Our first task as knowledge producers is, then, to fight against our own ignorance, our own biases, and our own elitization.
I choose to believe that no scholar thinks that science has a guaranteed access to objective truth. No one with an academic background who has spent time reflecting on their own practices of knowledge production can believe that scientific knowledge is neutral, impartial, universal, and objective. We know that these are impossible criteria that hide parochial and economic interests. What we try to do as knowledge producers in academia is not finding The Truth of Reality. What we do is collaborate in the creation of a body of knowledge that helps us to understand the conditions in which we live and, consequently, to be able to transform them when they generate unnecessary suffering. Of course, we also disagree about what is that needs transformation, but unanimity is not our goal either. However, this is nothing like post-truth politics. It is about scientific communities relating to truth in a humble and anti-dogmatic way. At least, that is our aspiration, because the opposite is dogmatic thinking such as in neoliberalism and conspiracy theories.
The existence of a transdisciplinary and robust scientific community guarantees a counterbalance to the tendency of modern science to serve capitalist projects contrary to society’s interests and the ecological health of the territory. The greater the freedom of research, the more possible it is for research lines on neglected but necessary topics to proliferate. The more funding there is for basic research in all disciplines, the greater the likelihood that research will have positive impact on the needs and well-being of the people and the territory and not the interests of capital. Because they know this, right-wing governments need to weaken and reduce the scope of the R&D system. If there is one thing I know from my trajectory in CONICET, it is that in times when CONICET was underfunded, admissions depended less on merit than on factors of conservative political bias. CONICET’s elitization in other times did not guarantee the “quality” of the research; on the contrary, excellence was never the criterion by which someone was given a position there.
Against the absurd dogmatism of the neoliberal and conservative governments proliferating globally, the research community opposes its own polemical and critical character. This counter-pressure will more likely come from below than from the scientific elite, from the more proletarian strata of the scientific system sooner than from the established colleagues who always receive the lion’s share of funding and who always occupy decision-making spaces in universities and scientific institutions.
Useful, impactful, and non-ideological science can only be achieved by policies granting more science to more children, promoting scientific vocations, encouraging informed critique by rigorous researchers who listen to society’s problems as they are formulated by their actual communities. On our part, this calls for a greater commitment to the critical self-awareness of our role and our condition as science workers.
Happy International Workers’ Day for you all!
Going Meta on Culture Wars
Culture wars have two main functions. First, to split an existing, dominant social or political coalition apart by the clever use of wedge-issues. (Not all wedge-issues are a part of a culture war.) So, a culture war reveals a latent or induces real divergence in a pre-existing coalition. So, for example, how to think about trans-issues has split contemporary feminism apart (especially in the U.K, which is itself an interesting phenomenon). Second, and this mirrors the first function, to induce or solidify unity within a potentially heterogeneous coalition (think of the role of women’s ‘right to choose’ in America’s Democratic party). So, the issue must have salience to what we may call ‘tribe formation.’ (If you don’t like my examples offer your own!)
Now, the term ‘culture war’ is a literalist translation of the German ‘Kulturkampf.’ This nineteenth century conflict involved a major political conflict between Bismarck and the Catholic Church over control of educational institutions (and the content taught) as well as ecclesiastical appointments. In it national/ethnic stereotypes (about the Polish) were used to shift balance of allegiance. One reason I mention this origin of the term because in it we already see many of the later features of culture wars: the significance of education, especially the education of social elites, the role of non-materialist values, including ethnicity/race, religion, and nationalism.
I don’t mean to suggest cultural wars only have these tribal functions. Obviously there are two others worth mentioning. First, culture wars may be oriented toward policy or legislative changes. But as Samantha Hancox-Li stressed, in an important recent essay, “How Movements win,” (Liberal Currents, April 9, 2024), issues that function well in solidifying coalitions need not do well in producing lasting legislation. (Her example is police abolitionism in the wake of BLM.)
Second, culture wars tend to be in the interest of particular individual members of what was once known as the clerisy (or intelligentsia, or blogosphere) who make some issue or some particular strategy part of their signature or persona and hope to cash in on them in some way. Sometimes this can be extraordinarily successful: Boris Johnson went from Back-Bencher to Foreign-Secretary to Prime-Minister in record time on the back of his support for Leave/Brexit.
Now, anything can become a culture war topic. That’s because anything can become of symbolic importance and become instrumental in solidifying affective and instrumental ties among people. Don’t believe me? Go re-read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels!
However, there is a class of topics that are especially likely to be effective in perpetuating culture wars. These are topics that are at the (i) intersection of campus politics (recall elite education) and, also, (ii) involve considerable abstraction. Now, what’s important about campus politics (especially at highly selective schools) is it is far removed from ordinary people’s lives despite the high seeming stakes involved (getting in is perceived to generate enormous windfalls). There is little direct acquaintance with them, and even people that have gone to a selective institution in the past spend their adult lives away from them. In addition, on campus there is an extreme intellectual division of labor among (and even within) disciplines such that the vocabulary of one discipline can become highly unintelligible and esoteric to members of another. The jargon of one discipline can easily become gibberish to the next, and this jargon is utterly unsuitable for public debate, where it will quickly seem mystery or bullshit.
So, the specialized jargon of a discipline or a field can also put other academics on par with members of the wider public: in the position of being unsure what is insight and what is bullshit. Culture war entrepreneurs take advantage of this fact in combination with the social and lived distance of campus life. Fashion, sports, entertainment, and art also can become culture war topics for very analogous reasons.
The previous two paragraphs hint at topics related to the political and theoretical significance of hyperspecialization that animate Plato’s Republic and Bacon’s New Atlantis. They have been put on the map anew by Elijah Millgram in his (2015) The Great Endarkenment; and are also of interest to me in my work on synthetic philosophy (see here for my restatement).
So, much for set up.
But there is another important feature that I need to mention. Some readers may well find the above too dispassionate about what’s at stake. They may feel that I lack a certain warmth toward truth. They would be right, but not because I am a sociopath about truth. Rather, when it comes to truth in public life, I am (recall) a Platonic skeptic: in democratic public life opinion will predominate and truth will, by and large, not rule. (See also Cyril Hédoin’s response here.) This may be elitist and undesirable, but some of us can’t afford to trade in fantasies.
Now, one might think that because nothing as abstract as (say) the semantic theory of truth could become a source of dispute in political and social life. This misunderstands politics. In political and social life anything can become politicized. And if one looks over the history of European politics incredibly abstruse often highly metaphysical topics have become the source of political and social strife. I don’t just have now distant condemnations of 1277 in mind, or the theological conflicts that led to the actual wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In my own life-time the purported perjury of a philandering president was debated in terms of the semantics of ‘is.’ Rather, as I noted abstruse topics lend themselves quite well to culture wars because people’s stance on them is not shaped by informed deliberation even understanding, but by social cues, loyalty, and aspirational tribal affiliation.
Bright (a LSE philosopher) himself comes very close to arguing this himself in his error theory:
So far so good. But then he concludes his piece with the following thought:
People care about how they interact with others, they care about how their history is understood and appreciated. There are particular claims about conventions we should or should not adopt around race or gender that they find very controversial indeed. And I think by sheer coincidence (ultimately related to the prestige economy of academia rewarding high-level discussion of abstract concepts combined with the habit of humanities scholars to want to pose as radical) we often get discussions about such cultural hot topics appearing next to discussions of the nature of truth and objectivity. And by Lockean association of ideas people come to pair the vexation they feel at the former with the nuances of the latter.
But politics is about how we live together, who is to command and who is to obey and when these roles should be reversed or abandoned, what our shared resources should be spent upon and when they should be saved, what burdens are to be borne and by whom. Theory of truth and ideals of objectivity are not irrelevant to all this, but their role remains fairly indirect. Keep your eyes on the prize.+
There are two disagreements that I want to highlight because my own views are not far removed from Bright’s. First, his claim that it is ‘sheer coincidence’ that cultural hot topics appear so close to the ‘nature of truth and objectivity.’ My disagreement may be surprising given my Platonic skepticism about truth in public life; for one might expect that I tend to treat social and political life as intrinsically random and, therefore, not truth conducive. But that’s not how I see it. Rather, there are strategic agents that promote given associations for the kinds of reasons outlined above; they even promote the character of the epistemic environment (whether it is trustworthy or not, etc.). Some such actors expect to gain from a public life where there is mistrust in established authorities and media. I don’t mean to suggest any determined strategic agent will always succeed. (So I am not claiming that social life is without causal opacity.) But political agents are constantly trying to generate new associations and antipathies within and among us.
Second, while Bright is surely right that “politics is about how we live together, who is to command and who is to obey and when these roles should be reversed or abandoned, what our shared resources should be spent upon and when they should be saved, what burdens are to be borne and by who;” this does not exclude or keep at a distance (or indirectness), a “theory of truth and ideals of objectivity.” And that’s because of their role in generating any ‘we.’
Even the most nominalist metaphysician has to acknowledge that in political life, people’s beliefs about abstracta (including rejecting their existence) may be an affective glue in some social unity. In fact, for the nominalist this helps explain the mechanism of how the otherwise distinct come to understand themselves as constituting a possible ‘we.’’
Now, one may well think I have missed Bright’s point. After all, his low-key satire is designed to make us laugh at our tendency to fall for the hucksters who try to set us apart by appealing to our mistakes over how to apply a Tarski-bi-conditional or how to interpret a model theory; or those that try to convince us that accepting ‘2+2=4’ is key to civilizational survival. The hucksters prevent, say, “rendering material circumstances more akin to what one might expect given a racially egalitarian ideology.”
Fair enough.
The problem is that in culture wars ridicule and mockery don’t unmask the powerful and bring us back to our senses. Rather, they reinforce the affective ties of the tribe or coalition. And so earnestly (or mockingly) one, thereby, keeps the culture war going rather than (ahh) changing the topic.
- This post first appeared in a slightly modified form at digressionsnimpressions.
Foucault on criticism monsters and the laws of vain reviews
“There is criticism to which one responds, other criticism to which one replies. Wrongly perhaps. Why not lend an equally attentive ear to incomprehension triviality, ignorance, or bad faith? Why reject these as so many incidents, regrettable for family honor? Is one correct in believing them inessential to the activity of criticism? I wonder if […]
Expertise and naval power
Robert Farley has replied to my recent post on the obsolescence of naval power. Unlike our previous exchange, a pile-on where I was (as he points out) in a minority of one, Robert’s tone is mostly civil this time, and I intend to reciprocate. Our disagreements have narrowed a fair way. On many points, it’s a matter of whether the glass is half-full or half-empty.
For example, Farley observes that despite Houthi attacks, 2 million tonnes of shipping per day is passing through the Suez canal. I’d turn that around and point out that 4 million tonnes of shipping per day has been diverted to more roundabout routes. However, since we agree that naval authorities overstate the macro importance of threats to shipping lanes, we can put that point to one side.
A more relevant case is that of China’s capacity (or lack thereof) to mount a seaborne invasion of Taiwan. I said that China has only a handful of modern landing craft and that their announced plan relies on civilian ferries. Farley points out that China has constructed 16 large, modern amphibious assault vessels in the past 18 years, with more on the way. That’s more than might normally be implied by the word “handful”, but not in a way that meaningfully challenges my argument.
According to Robert’s link, the ships in question can carry 800 troops, or about 10 000 if all of them were used. That’s enough to do a re-enactment of the Dieppe raid, but not to play a major role in an invasion of a country with a standing army at least ten times as large. And the implied rate of construction (one per year) suggests this isn’t going to change any time soon. This leisurely approach is consistent with the CCPs need to maintain a public position that it is willing and able to reunite with Taiwan by force, along with a private recognition that this isn’t possible and wouldn’t be wise if it were.
Now I come to the question of expertise. Robert is miffed that as an economist, I declaim on subjects on which I have no expertise, and also by my use of the term “naval fans”. The latter was a snarky response to our previous interaction and I withdraw it.
But as Robert himself admits, naval authorities routinely make claims about the economic role of naval power on which they have no expertise (some of which have been proved thoroughly wrong by the current partial closure of the Suez Canal, as well as by lengthy closures in the 20th century). The same authorities routinely point to the vast amount of of shipping passing through the South China Sea as evidence of the need to protect this waterway against China, where most of this shipping originates or ends. This clip from Australian satirical show Utopia makes the point.
The bigger problem with claims about expertise arises when it’s applied to events that are too rare, and too unlike each other, to provide a real evidence base. That’s true of global economic crises, for example. Economists mostly failed to predict the Global Financial crisis, and disagreed about both its likely course and the appropriate policy response.
It’s true in spades about naval warfare. As Robert says “all naval wars are incredibly rare and we have to analyze the hell out of the empirical evidence we can get our hands on.” Until 2022, the only significant instance in my, or Farley’s lifetime, was the Falklands War, which can be read either as a demonstration of the continuing relevance of navies or as an illustration of their vulnerability even to weak opponents like the Argentine Air Force. But that was forty years ago, when anti-ship missiles were much less well-developed.
In the absence of significant empirical evidence, naval experts have had to rely on the outcomes of exercises and simulations to make predictions. Unsurprisingly, these have tended to reaffirm the importance and power of navies (compare the many economists who extolled the financial sector before the GFC).
In particular, most naval experts saw Russia’s Black Sea Fleet as a powerful force that would play a decisive role in a war with Ukraine. Farley points out some partial successes in obstructing Ukrainian exports, but this is nothing like the total dominance most experts predicted.
As regards Taiwan, it’s interesting to contrast the steady drumbeat of warnings from US generals and admires that an invasion is imminent with this assessment by (non-military) experts that an invasion is not likely and (on the majority view) not feasible.
I’m not sure where naval experts fall on this spectrum. But, as with economic crises, this is an issue on which you can pick your expert.
Wenar on why you shouldn’t try to help poor people
In all the discussion of Leif Wenar’s critique of Effective Altruism , I haven’t seen much mention of the central premise: that development aid is generally counterproductive (unless, perhaps, it’s delivered by wealthy surfers in their spare time). Wenar is quite clear that his argument applies just as much to official development aid and to the long-standing efforts of NGOs as to projects supported by EA. He quotes burned-out aid workers “hoping their projects were doing more good than harm.”
Wenar provides some examples of unintended consequences. For example, bednets provided to fight are sometimes diverted for use as fishing nets. And catching more fish might be bad because it could lead to overfishing (there is no actual evidence of this happening, AFAICT). This seems trivial in comparison to the lives saved by anti-malarial programs
Update Wenar’s claim about bednets, as presented by Marc Andreessen, was thoroughly refuted by Dylan Matthews in Vox earlier this year. (footnote 1 applies) End update
It’s worth pointing out that, on Wenar’s telling, a project that gave poor people proper fishing nets (exactly the kind of thing that might appeal to the coastal villagers befriended by his surfer friend) might be even worse for overfishing than the occasional diversion of bednets.
Wenar applies his critique to international aid programs. But exactly the same kind of arguments could be, and are made, against similar programs at the national level or subnational level. It’s not hard to find burned-out social workers, teachers and for that matter, university professors, who will say, after some particularly dispiriting experience, that their efforts have been worse than useless. And the political right is always eager to point out the unintended consequences of helping people. But we have plenty of evidence, most notably from the last decade of austerity, to show that not helping people is much worse.
Reading Wenar, I was particularly struck by this casual dismissal of the lifesaving effects of programs like the WHO campaign against malaria and the PEPFARs aid initiative, which I initially found quoted with approval by Brian Leiter [1]
“The claim that there is “not much to show for [aid]” is simply false. Even among the “bottom billion”—the population of countries that have experienced the weakest economic growth over the last few decades—quality of life has increased dramatically. In 1950, life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa was just 36.7 years. Now it’s 56 years, a gain of almost 50% … In reality, a tiny amount of aid has been spent, and there have been dramatic increases in the welfare of the world’s poorest people.”
Now this is pure hooey. Even aid’s biggest boosters would cringe at the implication that aid had caused a 50 percent increase in sub-Saharan life expectancies. And what follows this astonishing statement is a tangle of qualifications and irrelevancies trailing off into the footnotes. To anyone who knows even a little about aid, it’s like MacAskill has tattooed “Not Serious” on his forehead.
I’m not an expert on classical logic [2] but I can count at least three fallacies here: guilt by assocation, an argument from incredulity and a false dichotomy. First, the fact the claim being attacked is supported by someone silly like McAskill says nothing about its truth value. Second, apart from anecdotes about disgruntled aid workers, Wenar offers nothing more in rebuttal than ‘I don’t believe it’.
Third, and most importantly, even if it’s not true that all of the increase in life expectancy is due to aid, that doesn’t prove that there was no contribution. Suppose that all the aid provided since the end of colonial rule (approaching one trillion $US) had only increased African life expectancy by one year, and had achieved nothing else. That’s still at least a billion years of extra life. To achieve that same gain with medical interventions in the rich countries of the world, it would be necessary to spend at least $US50 trillion (at the margin, interventions have typically already been adopted unless they cost more than $50-100 000 per life year gained)
Why, apart from the unpopularity of people like McAskill and SBF, has this shoddy stuff been taken seriously? Attacks on aid programs have a clear appeal on the ideological extremes of right and left, and a more diffuse appeal based on sloppy reasoning. The rightwing view is that aid (whether foreign aid or domestic social welfare programs) promotes dependency among recipients, when what is needed is trade and free markets. The far-left mirror image is that aid is designed to pacify the recipients who would otherwise mobilise as a revolutionary force. The sloppy middle view, typically associated with terms like ‘band-aid’, starts from the correct premise that, in a better world, aid would not be necessary, and goes on to to the non sequitur that giving aid is inconsistent with hopes for that better world.
Finally coming to the capitalized version of Effective Altruism, it’s true that it provides a way for predatory rich people to salve their consciences. But rich predatory people have always sought such salves. It’s better to use the guilt money to give effective help to poor people than to endow elite colleges and opera companies for other rich people (see, most recently, the Sacklers). If you don’t like this conclusion, the right response is to change the system that rewards destructive behavior with massive piles of wealth, while leaving billions of people in poverty. [3]. Until that effort succeeds, aid is the least bad option (and there is no reason not to do both).
[1] I’m aware that Leiter is something of a polarising figure. So bringing him in might be seen as an ad hominem on my part. If so, turnabout is fair play, I say.
[2] Modal logic is much more useful in the theoretical work I do.
[3] Ingrid’s work on limitarianism is having some impact here.
The Free Speech Union’s Key Role in Developing Government Legislation
Toby Young resigned from the board of higher education regulator the Office for Students (OfS) in 2018 after controversy over a string of offensive tweets directed at women as well as comments about working-class students and eugenics.
In 2020, Young launched the Free Speech Union (FSU), and in 2023 Professor Arif Ahmed, a former Advisory Council member of the FSU was appointed to be the OfS’s new “free speech czar” tasked with protecting academics and students who make controversial comments due to legislation the FSU lobbied for, advised on, and amended.
From being forced to resign, Young now leads an organisation which is involved in developing Government legislation such as the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act and has begun working with councils to “to enshrine free speech in its policies, procedures, code of conduct and constitution.”
Miriam Cates MP speaking at the Northern Research Group conference in Doncaster in 2023.
Photo: Danny Lawson/PA Images/Alamy
When Miriam Cates MP was contacted by Byline Times to offer a right of reply for another article, the response came not from her office but from the account of Samuel Armstrong.
Armstrong’s role as a freelance political consultant for individual MPs, groups of MPs and political campaigns, demonstrates how the FSU works closely with elements of the Conservative Party to shape legislation.
His current anchor clients are the FSU, where he is Legislative Affairs Director, and the New Conservatives grouping of MPs, for which Cates is a director, and which received a £50,000 donation in December from the Dubai-based Legatum Institute Foundation, the investment fund behind GB News.
Armstrong's role for the FSU entails working with the FSU’s Legal Advisory Council to draft and propose amendments to bills that are frequently either taken up or proposed in a different format by the government.
His LinkedIn profile says “Unlike all too many, we really get into the nitty-gritty of the legislative process and use all the levers of Parliamentary procedure to win.”
Major recent campaigns have included the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, changes to the Online Safety Bill, the Workers Protection Bill being dropped, and Payment Services Regulations.
Think Tanking Academia
FSU member Professor Abhishek Saha explained the organisation's role in producing the Higher Education Bill in an article for the US-based Heterodox Academy in February 2024, providing insight into how legislation is being created through the input of think tanks and the FSU.
In February 2021, the UK Government issued a policy paper setting out proposals to strengthen protections for free speech in response to reports published by the think tanks Cieo, Policy Exchange, and Civitas. All three reports faced criticism.
As reported by openDemocracy, Civitas’ report was produced by compiling often misleading media reports and looking at university websites, marking down universities if they had anti-racism training or procedures to anonymously report harassment, concluding that “universities have adopted, wholesale, a mutation and splicing of past radicalisms that include Marxism, postmodernism, feminism, Freudianism, and Maoism”. Research by the BBC’s Reality Check team contradicted this.
Initially lobbying for the bill when the Government was weighing up its merits, the FSU then advised the Government on what to include in the legislation and worked on its amendments.
On 7 December 2022, the House of Lords voted to remove the Bill’s statutory tort clause completely. The tort mechanism allows civil claims to be brought in the County Court against higher education providers and student unions if they breach their new free speech obligations.
Saha explains in the Heterodox Academy article that he then met with Claire Coutinho MP in February 2023, and says the FSU convinced the Government to amend Clause Four, not to address concerns, but to further expand the tort mechanism so that financial losses from legal action included subtler forms of loss, for example, humiliation, loss of reputation, or restriction of access to research data.
Another amendment added in the Commons was an expansion of the bill’s academic freedom protections to beyond an individual’s “field of expertise”.
The Commons voted 283 to 161 to reinstate the tort in full and it was passed in the Lords on 10 May 2023 after it was agreed that a complainant would need to have exhausted the free speech complaints scheme before going to court unless bringing civil proceedings for an injunction only.
Setting the Boundaries of Debate
The legislation’s complaints system will be overseen by the OfS’s new Director for Free Speech and Academic Freedom, Professor Arif Ahmed. Appointed to the position in August 2023, he left the post of Commissioner to the Equality and Human Rights Commission which he’d been appointed to in late 2022 by Kemi Badenoch MP.
Ahmed was previously a member of the FSU’s Advisory Council and was part of the group of academics focused around Cambridge University that developed into the FSU.
Despite its stance against cancel culture, the FSU website “celebrated” the “critical role” played by Ahmed after his campaign at Cambridge forced plans to allow anonymous reporting of microaggressions to be dropped, and resulted in the resignation of Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the University in 2021.
Details of the new complaints system have yet to be released, however on 25 March, when Ahmed was interviewed on the Today Programme regarding what would be considered a breach of free speech, he was unable to provide examples, stating that each case would be judged on individual merit.
Subsequently, the OfS announced a consultation period, lasting until 24 May, on proposed new guidance for higher education providers and students’ unions on fulfilling “new free speech duties which are expected to be from August this year”.
Ahmed will have considerable influence in setting the boundaries of debate in higher education. Critics have raised concerns that the threat of large financial sanctions could create a climate of fear where individuals feel unable to challenge abusive or derogatory comments.
This March, Bromley Council in London has passed a proposal to “enshrine free speech” above “HR-style inquisition and political snitching” after councillors worked for many months with the FSU to write the policy. The policy will protect strongly held beliefs and allow councillors to “challenge, without repercussions.” The FSU is hoping other councils will follow Bromley.
