Lately I've been wondering why it is that certain theses that seem to have been fairly well empirically established are still treated as if they were somehow still up for debate.
Isn't it obvious already that "trickle-down" economics is a factual misnomer, with supposedly activity- and jobs-generating tax breaks rather going directly into the already deep pockets of CEOs or other head honchos, and most of the remainder going to any shareholders there might be? Why were further tax cuts to business any part of the discussion of how to resuscitate the economy?
Isn't it completely clear that single-payer (with, if you must, room for privateers to accommodate the overly wealthy, impatient, or wedded to life) is the best health care system, with "best" tracking almost every dimension except "with respect to guaranteeing massive profits for head honchos and shareholders associated with certain corporations"?
Don't we know by now that torture doesn't work? And that military invasions and occupations are the most destructive and counter-productive forms of foreign policy?
Why, then, are there continuing "policy" discussions over the right way to go over these issues, and worse, why do these discussions typically proceed by first taking the best (see afore-mentioned understanding of 'best') options off the table?
One straightfoward answer is, of course: money. Money often talks louder than facts. Hence those in charge of setting policy all too often pocket the dough and look the other way. (See Larry Summers, AIPEC, and Max Baucus.)
But that can't be the whole story. Plausibly, no amount of campaign-contributed money will inspire a U.S. senator or representative to encourage policy that would make it OK for Christian Scientist parents to fail to take their ailing children to a doctor or hospital. What's the difference, then, between the latter kind of "no go" policy and those we face concerning economic, foreign, and health-care policies, which seem weirdly disconnected from the facts?
It's useful to consider the increasingly defunct "debates" over whether there is climate change, whether such change is problematic, and whether such change has various human activities as a significant contributing cause. Again, we've seen a lot of wrangling from rightwingers over whether there is sufficient evidence for affirmative answers to these questions, but slowly but surely the noise is dying down... after awhile denial just starts to seem too irrational, given the empirical evidence.
This suggests that the main tool whereby policy-makers and lobbyists and journalists get away with treating certain theses as "subject to debate" is by treating the disciplines associated with the theses as somehow less than fully scientific.
One could digress here into the interesting question of whether there
are any criteria demarcating science from other disciplines (which may
be either better and worse "confirmed", in some sense of the word).
More to the point, one could observe that policy-makers and others seem to have certain paradigms of "real science" in mind. That would be quantitative physics, of course.
Sadly for us, most of the disciplines treating of phenomena of most importance to our day-to-day lives are such as to fail to "measure up" to such standards of precision.
Hence it is that it may turn out that vindicating the special sciences as tracking robust causal joints in reality may be of more than mere theoretical interest. Onward, non-reductionists!
