Social "science"

Further to my last, the underpinning of the Progressive philosophy is the idea that social engineering can be achieved by policies that allegedly reflect a scientific appreciation of how society works. Jim Manzi's article "What social science does - and doesn't - know" in City Journal knocks that conceit firmly on the head. 

Manzi is the founder and head of an applied artificial intelligence software company and a senior fellow at the market-oriented Manhattan Institutethink-tank. He argues against doctrinaire social engineering for the same reason he has urged moderation in attributing global warming to man-made factors: there are too many variables to achieve the level of certainty required to commit to policies of certain harm but uncertain benefit.

We have no reliable way to measure counterfactuals - that is, to know what would have happened had we not executed some policy - because so many other factors influence the outcome. This seemingly narrow problem is central to our continuing inability to transform social sciences into actual sciences. Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, non-obvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study - that is, human social behavior, including the impact of proposed government programs.

Few programs can be shown to work in properly randomized and replicated trials. Despite complex and impressive-sounding empirical arguments by advocates and analysts, we should be very skeptical of claims for the effectiveness of new, counter-intuitive programs and policies, and we should be reluctant to trump the trial-and-error process of social evolution in matters of economics or social policy

At the moment, it is certain that we do not have anything remotely approaching a scientific understanding of human society. And the methods of experimental social science are not close to providing one within the foreseeable future. Science may someday allow us to predict human behavior comprehensively and reliably. Until then, we need to keep stumbling forward with trial-and-error learning as best we can.

Seemingly arguing against the trial-and-error approach is the evidence of the British benefits system, rightly described by Tom Clougherty on Adam Smith Institute as:

. . . a nightmare, complex, bureaucratic and riddled with perverse incentives that mean it often makes more sense for a person to be on welfare than in work. No one would ever has designed such a system intentionally - it is just the result of one political initiative being piled on top of another, until you're left with a Byzantine mess that makes no sense whatsoever.

But it does make sense: the consistent purpose in the creation of the "mess" has been to increase the government payroll and to create a vast political clientele. If your objective is instead the human development of those tangled in the welfare dependency web, it seems most unlikely that it is possible to do so through agencies that have developed to achieve the exact opposite.

The paradox that may well doom the Coalition government's determination to undo decades of evidently counter-productive social engineering initiatives is that the real purpose of those policies was always to create a status quo that suits far too many of those whose good will is essential to bring about any radical change.