Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Posts

Why Are Experts So Often Wrong? Because They Can’t See Out Of Their Silos.

/in /by

Why we chose this article: We’ve learned a lot via the COVID-19 pandemic policy errors that were based on expert models, research, advice, and opinions. Why were they so wrong? There’s a general principle to be drawn. Experts are always going to be wrong when they employ a very narrow knowledge base and ignore the distribution of information that exists in society in decentralized form, rather than in siloed “expert” form.

When the coronavirus first began showing up in America in February 2020, both President Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, were arguing that the average citizen of the United States did not need to worry and that wearing masks wouldn’t do much to prevent one from getting or spreading the virus.

Shortly thereafter, the President invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950 to compel domestic companies to prioritize government Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) orders. FEMA and other federal agencies began seizing PPE stockpiles and redistributing them.

Taken independently, these actions seem contradictory; the federal government was simultaneously saying PPE wasn’t necessary for the virus and yet were taking steps to hoard the equipment.

Recently, both Trump and Fauci have attempted to address this seeming contradiction. They acknowledge that the virus was actually more deadly than they initially let on and the downplaying was done to prevent panic among the American people and ensure that necessary PPE could get to the hospitals rather than end up solely in private hands.

Let us take this explanation as correct: Trump and Fauci’s actions were motivated entirely by public concern. Let us assume there is no malice, self-interest, ignorance, or politics involved in their February actions. (As the reader will note, weakening these assumptions does not undermine the conclusions drawn in this article. If anything, it strengthens them.)

Trump and Fauci’s actions have failed to achieve their intended goals. Here we are, 7 months into the pandemic and 6 months into the federal government essentially taking control of PPE production in the US, and the equipment remains in short supply. Panic did indeed set in, with state and local governments acting in an unprecedented, destructive, and arbitrary manner. Second waves across Europe, spikes in schools, and fears of “super seeding” events continue to spread fears.

Why did the experts fail so badly, not just in the US but across the world?

Experts are just like us. They are experts in their specific fields, but not beyond them. The problem with a pandemic is that it is not simply a medical phenomenon. There are economic issues at play, political issues at play, mental health issues, educational issues, etc. Dr. Fauci may be a brilliant immunologist, but he is no economist.

Trump may be a civic-minded public servant, but he is no logistical expert. In other words, these experts fall into a problem that Roger Koppl calls “siloing.” These experts make decisions based upon their understanding, training, and knowledge. They do not necessarily know (or even know to consider) how their actions affect other elements of society.

From a political perspective, the February actions of Trump and Fauci may make sense. Containing panic may be wise during a pandemic, and the “noble lie” may be worthwhile. But, from an economic perspective, their behavior was foolish. Ultimately, the question of PPE production and distribution is an economic one. Economics is, partially, the study of the allocation of scarce resources to desired ends, according to early 20th century economist Lord Robbins. Economic theory gives us strong predictions about how the noble lie and subsequent seizure of PPE manufacturing would turn out: persistent shortages and hoarding by private citizens. Lo and behold, those predictions came true.

The expert failure of the Federal Government’s various agencies has a dynamic effect as well. Because they did not understand why they had failed, the experts began to rely on more and more regulatory solutions to the problems they faced. The noble lie that masks were not necessary was told in February.

By March, the fact that was a lie was quite obvious and people began stocking up on equipment and cleaning supplies. In order to make sure enough was available to hospitals, the federal government invoked the Defense Production Act, which capped prices and forced firms to prioritize federal contracts.

Firms, now facing rising costs and increasing demand for their products, could not raise prices to the federal government. They attempted to raise prices for private consumers. However, state and local governments began to impose anti-price gouging legislation to prevent price increases of PPE, toilet paper, paper towels, and other necessities.

Without rising prices to encourage conservation and search for alternative means to protect one’s self (e.g., cloth masks versus N95, staying at home, voluntary social distancing, etc), consumers continued to engage in risky behavior and search for PPE. As the shortages began to manifest, consumers started to panic (a panic which was fueled by media coverage of mass graves and overwhelmed hospitals).

This panic, in turn, led to various “shelter-at-home” orders, more price controls, and the disastrous lockdowns. But prices were still not able to rise (again, discouraging increased production and conservation) and the shortage persisted.

As the virus continued to spread, more and more draconian measures were imposed, both by the government and through intense (and Orwellian) social pressures. People were made to feel guilty about basic human desires for social contact. Feelings of claustrophobia from being cooped up in the house were dismissed as antisocial.

Predictably, however, the shortage persisted, leading to justification of more and more draconian measures. The experts continued to fail and they could not figure out why. As each day passed, more and more measures were imposed. The avalanche may have started small, with a single noble lie to contain panic, but the resulting destruction will be discussed and analyzed for years to come.

There is a tendency to analyze events as though they incur in a vacuum (this tendency is especially true in conversations among economists in regard to externalities, but that is a discussion for another time). But actions and events are not independent of one another; they are quite interlinked.

One of the advantages of liberalism (that is: the idea that people, except in rare cases, should generally be allowed to make their own decisions; that they should be protected from other people, including government, messing with their stuff) is that it prevents the cascading expert failure we’ve seen here in 2020.

When there is a multiplicity of plans, as opposed to a single, overarching plan, various failures can be canceled out and people can react to one another. As we have seen, when the feedback mechanism of personal interaction is overruled by a grand scheme, even if it is noble and (seemingly) virtuous, there can be strong negative results that cause the central planner to double, triple, or quadruple down on his failed scheme, resulting in even more problems.

Of course, if the experts are vicious, if Trump was actually trying to sow the seeds of panic and Fauci was truly ignorant of the nature of the virus, then the need to prevent their overarching control on our lives becomes all the greater.

Jon Murphy is an economics Ph.D. student at George Mason University. This article first appeared at aier.org.

How Bad Teaching Is Tearing America Apart.

/in /by
Why we chose this article: The education model in the US is exhibiting glaring weaknesses. It’s performing the task of a government propaganda mill designed to produce compliant citizens, more than that of a learning institution.  Bold commentators are willing to point this out.

If you have school-age children, the pandemic-induced move to online classes may give you an unusual window into their education. E.D. Hirsch expects you’ll be surprised by “how little whole-class instruction is going on,” how little knowledge is communicated, and how there is “no coherence” from day to day, let alone from year to year.

The current fashion is for teachers to be a “guide on the side, instead of a sage on the stage,” he says, quoting the latest pedagogical slogan, which means that teachers aren’t supposed to lecture students but to “facilitate” learning by nudging students to follow their own curiosity. Everything Mr. Hirsch knows about how children learn tells him that’s the wrong approach. “If you want equity in education, as well as excellence, you have to have whole-class instruction,” in which a teacher directly communicates information using a prescribed sequential curriculum.

Mr. Hirsch, 92, is best known for his 1987 book, “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.” It is an argument for teaching “specifics,” followed by a lengthy list of them—thousands of historical figures, events, concepts and literary works with which, in Mr. Hirsch’s view, educated Americans should be familiar. Heavily weighted toward Western history and civilization, the list provoked charges of elitism. Yet Mr. Hirsch is singularly focused on helping disadvantaged kids. They “are not exposed to this information at home,” he says, so they’ll starve intellectually unless the schools provide it.

He continues the argument in his new book, “How to Educate a Citizen,” in which he describes himself as a heretofore “rather polite scholar” who has become more “forthright and impatient because things are getting worse. Intellectual error has become a threat to the well-being of the nation. A truly massive tragedy is building.” Schools “are diminishing our national unity and our basic competence.”

Mr. Hirsch is nonetheless cheerful in a Zoom interview from a vacation home in Maine, his armchair perched next to a window with a water view. An emeritus professor at the University of Virginia, he normally resides in Charlottesville, where he continues his research and acts as the chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation.

He cites both history and neuroscience in explaining how education went wrong. It began in the 1940s, when “schools unbolted the desks and kids were no longer facing the teacher.” Instead children were divided into small groups and instructed to complete worksheets independently with occasional input from teachers. “That was also when our verbal test scores went down and the relative ranking of our elementary schools declined on a national level.” On the International Adult Literacy Survey, Americans went from being No. 1 for children who were educated in the 1950s to fifth for those in the ’70s and 14th in the ’90s. And things have only gotten worse. Between 2002 and 2015, American schoolchildren went from a ranking of 15th to 24th in reading on the Program for International Student Assessment.

The problem runs deeper than the style of instruction, Mr. Hirsch says. It’s the concept at its root—“child-centered classrooms,” the notion that “education is partly a matter of drawing out a child’s inborn nature.” Mr. Hirsch says emphatically that a child’s mind is “a blank slate.” On this point he agrees with John Locke and disagrees with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought children’s need to develop according to their nature. Both philosophers make the “Cultural Literacy” list, but “Locke has to make a comeback” among educators, Mr. Hirsch says. “The culture is up for grabs, and elementary schools are the culture makers.”

Mr. Hirsch is a man of the left—he has said he is “practically a socialist.” But he bristles at the idea that kids should read only books by people who look like them or live like them. He recalls how reading outside his own experience enabled him “to gain perspective.” Growing up in Memphis, Tenn., in the 1930s, he says, “there was no one I knew who wasn’t a racist.” In his teens, he picked up Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy” (1944), which “allowed me to escape.” The Swedish sociologist’s survey of American race relations “made a huge impact” on Mr. Hirsch. “I take it as an illustration of how important knowledge is and how important it is to not necessarily become a member of your culture.”

That’s no less true in 21st-century America. “The idea that identity and ethnicity are inborn and indelible from birth is a false view that leads to group hostility,” Mr. Hirsch says. “The idea that there can be an American culture that everyone joins seems to be anathema to some academic thinkers,” Mr. Hirsch says. “But I can’t believe it’s anathema to any normal person in the country who isn’t some social theorist.” It’s fine for children to embrace their particular heritage, he says, but also vital to create an “American ethnicity.” The purpose of elementary schools “is to make children into good citizens.”

That requires knowledge that is “shared nationally, if you’re going to read and write and communicate with one another.” He’s dismayed that people keep getting hung up on the particulars. “I’m fine with arguing about whether it shall be Toni Morrison or Herman Melville. Who cares?” He calls elementary school “a nonpartisan institution,” a view that may seem quaint in an era when schools are adopting ideological curricula like the “1619 Project” and teachers are displaying “Black Lives Matter” banners as their Zoom backgrounds.

Mr. Hirsch wants to correct some of these excesses. He dedicates “How to Educate a Citizen” to the late political scientist Richard Rorty, who died in 2007. Rorty “made a distinction between the political left and the cultural left,” says Mr. Hirsch, who considers himself a man of the former but not the latter. He commends to me a 1994 New York Times article, “The Unpatriotic Academy,” in which Rorty wrote: “In the name of ‘the politics of difference,’ [the left] refuses to rejoice in the country it inhabits. It repudiates the idea of a national identity, and the emotion of national pride.” Mr. Hirsch agrees and longs for the “willingness to sacrifice for the good of society that was very strong” during his early years. “Patriotism is important because we want to make our society work.”

Mr. Hirsch also takes issue with grade schools’ focus on “skills.” Whether it is imparting “critical thinking skills,” “communication skills” or “problem-solving skills,” he says such instruction is a waste of time in the absence of specific knowledge. He describes the findings of the National Academy of Sciences on the subject of the “domain specificity of human skills.” What this means, he explains in the new book, “is that being good at tennis does not make you good at golf or soccer. You may be a talented person with great hand-eye coordination—and indeed there are native general abilities that can be nurtured in different ways—but being a first-class swimmer will not make a person good at hockey.”

He cites the “baseball study,” conducted by researchers at Marquette University in the 1980s, which found that kids who knew more about how baseball was played performed better when answering questions about a text on baseball than those who didn’t understand the game—regardless of their reading level. The conventional response in education circles is that standardized tests are unfair because some kids are exposed to more specific knowledge than others. In Mr. Hirsch’s view that’s precisely why children should be exposed to more content: Educators “simply haven’t faced up to their duty to provide a coherent sequence of knowledge to children.”

There are now about 5,000 schools in the U.S. that use some form of the Core Knowledge curriculum, developed by Mr. Hirsch’s foundation. And research suggests Mr. Hirsch is right. A recent large-scale randomized study of public-school pupils in kindergarten through second grade found that use of the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum had statistically significant benefits for vocabulary, science knowledge, and social-studies knowledge.

Even in poor neighborhoods, kids at Core Knowledge schools perform well and are admitted to competitive high schools. From the South Bronx Classical Charter School to the public schools in Sullivan County, Tenn., Mr. Hirsch is clearly proud that his ideas have helped the least privileged kids in America.

He questions the idea that children who are exposed to more “experiences” are at an automatic advantage. “That’s what fiction is for,” he quips. And not only fiction. “The residue of experience is knowledge,” he says. “If you get your knowledge from the classroom, it’s just as good as if you got it from going to the opera. Poor kids can catch up.”

Asked about the effect of the pandemic and lockdown on children’s emotional well-being, Mr. Hirsch shrugs, then offers an anecdote from a principal at a Core Knowledge school. Before classes began one morning, a second-grade girl approached him and said: “I’m so excited for today.” When the principal asked why, she said, “Because today we are going to learn about the War of 1812.”

“Gee, I wonder what that’s about,” the principal said.

“I don’t know,” the girl replied. “But today I’m going to find out!”

For Mr. Hirsch, the lesson is clear. No matter the circumstances, “kids delight in learning things.”

Ms. Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.

Write for CFI