3 ms·

I suppose I didn't quite understand what you meant by false consciousness. It sounded a bit like "people want what they're told by others to want and that's bad

I suppose I didn't quite understand what you meant by false consciousness. It sounded a bit like "people want what they're told by others to want and that's bad" in the example of feminism, but isn't that just the process of opinion forming? If the governing classes have been told their whole life the EU is good, the future, peace, civilisation etc and then support Remain, are they labouring under false consciousness? Or what does it mean, precisely? I think there is economic knowledge we can know to be true. A lot of the basics is surely sound, but also quite obvious and simple (supply and demand, printing money creates inflation etc). The problem and question is to what extent things go off the rails after that? It's worth calibrating our expectations against other fields of science, for example: 1. Ioannadis argued in a very well known paper that about half of all published research findings are false. 2. I've heard repeatedly that Big Pharma/VC supports this, and biotech doesn't get more investment (vs say software firms) partly because about half of all academic microbiology doesn't replicate. 3. Psychology as a field has witnessed large areas collapse completely during the replication crisis: entire careers and phenomenons with hundreds of papers investigating them just turn out to be based on nonsense. A good example of the latter is this one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev... It's entirely reasonable to assume that most academic output is false, and that average is significantly biased upwards by hard sciences that are empirically testable. If you focus on subjects that produce explanations of observed data independent of large scale experiments (psychology, economics, history, sociology, yes also climatology etc) then it's fair to assume the vast majority of published output is wrong. This may seem radical or absurd, but I think this view will become more widespread in future. For instance even in psychology, where experiments are possible (unlike economics), many studies are statistically underpowered to a level that can't plausibly be fixed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816570/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816570/ It's certainly going to be the case that economics is more wrong than psychology; at least in psychology you can run experiments, even if they're too small. Thus, given the structural and financial setup of these fields, we can assume they will continue to produce spurious findings indefinitely. Now, you pose the following question: If all these expert economists with their models and their papers can't make a prediction why should you or I believe that you can? You and I have a major structural advantage over professional economists when it comes to making accurate predictions: our careers are not judged by our output. This gives us a huge edge because we can be as imprecise, simple or intuitive as we like and nobody will care. My Brexit economy prediction wasn't very precise, it was literally "We're being told there will be a huge recession caused by uncertainty and I think that's completely wrong". No recession, thus, my predictions were better than the economists! But mine also didn't have any numbers in it. This is the right level of precision for such a prediction given the state of economic knowledge, and for a non-professional that's fine. For a Treasury official, not so much. The underlying cause is social: academics and related professions (like government economists) are required by their peers to "publish or perish", preferably in reputable journals. Like speakers on the dinner circuit, they must speak even if they have nothing insightful to say right now. If they come up with something novel or clever sounding they will be promoted and become one of the judges themselves, where they apply the same criteria. I've been referring to the working classes because Brexit is so often positioned as the 'educated' vs the 'working class', and the article is about class distinctions. But that's actually kind of a gloss over what I really mean. My point is really about specific professions or classes vs everyone else. Your whole scenario was based on the idea that the EU coveted the UK's growth rate but when I linked to World Bank data showing that in 2018 the UK underperformed literally every member state but Italy (ok, level with Germany) you still say that we're doing very well compared to other member states. For UK vs France/Italy, remember the UK has a much lower unemployment rate: https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-unemployment-rate@3x.png?s=ukueilor&v=201911120938V20191105&url2=/france/unemployment-rate https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-... https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-unemployment-rate@3x.png?s=ukueilor&v=201911120938V20191105&url2=/italy/unemployment-rate https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-... You're right that my original point about "growth" was over-stated. I was thinking of some quarters where the UK had better GDP growth than Germany along with better employment stats than France, wage growth etc. There's been lots of positive economic news lately. But it doesn't actually matter - the overall point I was making remains even if the UK would have weaker growth at the moment. Namely, there are plausible scenarios in which leaving is good for growth and you don't have to be ignorant to believe them. We can see how the EU seems to be scared of the idea of the UK deregulating and becoming more competitive. For instance Angela Merkel stated outright that in future Germany may have to face the UK as a competitor alongside China and the USA (implication: today they don't). The French Secretary of State for European Affairs has said outright about the UK, "I don't want a tax haven on our doorstep". It seems like they take the scenario of a stronger British economy outside the EU seriously, and I guess that's enough to validate the scenario. Re: economics blogs. Unfortunately I don't read any economics blogs. The Telegraph has columnists who lay out some of the ideas and Leave campaigners (including Boris, to his credit) have in the past proposed various things the UK could do to increase competitiveness, like the free ports. Finally, falsifiability. Yes, I do think about this. One thing that makes it hard is my own predictions are a mix of short range which were proven true already, and long range, but those are only about a specific scenario that probably won't happen (Conservatives get more conservative and significantly liberalise the economy). But the advantage of not being an economist is I can happily say "I don't know what will happen next year" and nobody will care, which is why I can be more accurate than them :)

bambataa 7y ago
My understanding of false consciousness is that it's a false belief knowingly spread by others to achieve some aim. When someone justifies their political views as "just common sense" it's often an indicator because what's taken to be self-evidently true changes over time. In my view, what matters is not so much the belief itself but the way in which it's reached. Let's return to the hospital example and assume that your local hospital is overcrowded and underfunded. If you look at immigration levels in your area, read about the economic impact of migration and the levels of government funding to your area and decide that, on balance, hospital overcrowding is due to immigration then I would not consider that false consciousness. Possibly incorrect, but not false consciousness. If you just see a lot of Romanians on the street and read lots of anti-immigration stories in your newspaper and conclude that the overcrowding is due to immigration then I'd consider that false consciousness because you are relying on a notion of "basic common sense" and haven't even considered the possibility that the migrants are contributing more than they take or that the government funding has been inadequate. The whole questions of knowledge that we've been debating, though very important, is in a sense secondary to this because the person relying on common sense isn't actively dismissing the claims of economic truth, they're completely unaware of them. And in this particular example I think it's pretty clear that the government sought to deflect anger at austerity to immigrants. Assuming that Cameron and Osborne shared the kind of elite worldview we've been discussing, they would have known that the deflection couldn't be justified. They were deliberately spreading a view of the world that, in their minds at least, they would have known to be wrong. So that's why I think it's false consciousness - knowingly spreading a false belief. Where it gets complicated is when the elite come to believe the idea as well, and then it's just a received wisdom (and the original intent has completed succeeded). I think you're right to call out remainers' unquestioning belief that the EU is a good thing, though I disagree on how much we can rely on economic. You're right that we should be skeptical of that too, of course. One important thing that neither of us has mentioned that much is the role of the media in propagating beliefs and the extent to which the British public's view of the EU has been shaped by the likes of Boris Johnson printing knowingly false stories about the EU ("knowingly spreading a false belief"...). I'd argue that all of these [1] are examples of false consciousness. Either the official figures are all totally wrong and a person looking down their street can make a more accurate estimate than teams of statisticians measuring the entire country, or views are shaped by distorted reporting of these issues. And if the media aren't trying to present a factual account of reality, that raises the question of what are they trying to do instead...? [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/british-public-wrong-about-nearly-everything-survey-shows-8697821.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/british-publ... Edit to add: I used to read the Telegraph but then they went down a weird spiral of clickbait mixed with making everything interesting premium-only. A pity because it used to be very good.

bambataa 7y ago

My understanding of false consciousness is that it's a false belief knowingly spread by others to achieve some aim. When someone justifies their political views as "just common sense" it's often an indicator because what's taken to be self-evidently true changes over time. In my view, what matters is not so much the belief itself but the way in which it's reached. Let's return to the hospital example and assume that your local hospital is overcrowded and underfunded. If you look at immigration levels in your area, read about the economic impact of migration and the levels of government funding to your area and decide that, on balance, hospital overcrowding is due to immigration then I would not consider that false consciousness. Possibly incorrect, but not false consciousness. If you just see a lot of Romanians on the street and read lots of anti-immigration stories in your newspaper and conclude that the overcrowding is due to immigration then I'd consider that false consciousness because you are relying on a notion of "basic common sense" and haven't even considered the possibility that the migrants are contributing more than they take or that the government funding has been inadequate. The whole questions of knowledge that we've been debating, though very important, is in a sense secondary to this because the person relying on common sense isn't actively dismissing the claims of economic truth, they're completely unaware of them. And in this particular example I think it's pretty clear that the government sought to deflect anger at austerity to immigrants. Assuming that Cameron and Osborne shared the kind of elite worldview we've been discussing, they would have known that the deflection couldn't be justified. They were deliberately spreading a view of the world that, in their minds at least, they would have known to be wrong. So that's why I think it's false consciousness - knowingly spreading a false belief. Where it gets complicated is when the elite come to believe the idea as well, and then it's just a received wisdom (and the original intent has completed succeeded). I think you're right to call out remainers' unquestioning belief that the EU is a good thing, though I disagree on how much we can rely on economic. You're right that we should be skeptical of that too, of course. One important thing that neither of us has mentioned that much is the role of the media in propagating beliefs and the extent to which the British public's view of the EU has been shaped by the likes of Boris Johnson printing knowingly false stories about the EU ("knowingly spreading a false belief"...). I'd argue that all of these [1] are examples of false consciousness. Either the official figures are all totally wrong and a person looking down their street can make a more accurate estimate than teams of statisticians measuring the entire country, or views are shaped by distorted reporting of these issues. And if the media aren't trying to present a factual account of reality, that raises the question of what are they trying to do instead...? [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/british-public-wrong-about-nearly-everything-survey-shows-8697821.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/british-publ... Edit to add: I used to read the Telegraph but then they went down a weird spiral of clickbait mixed with making everything interesting premium-only. A pity because it used to be very good.