Who Gets to Say?

To introduce this opinion post, I long have been a fan of science, even before I became a regular reader in 1965 of Science, Scientific American, and The New York Times’ Tuesday science section, to name but a few science sources. Over my 41-year career with a private, nonprofit, and scientific economic research organization, I studied, spoke and wrote about the sciences of energy, demographics, economics, and government, as well as the science of science itself. That background and continuing interest has provided me with some ability to distinguish between science and non-science, a recent example of which is Jeffrey D. Sachs’s “Fixing the Broken Policy Process” (Scientific American, Jan. 2010) where he lobbies for government limits on – yes, lobbying.

Scientific American, once an American icon but now owned by a “German-based” publishing group, has changed over time to serve a larger popular science market. Whereas it once published mostly about innovative science, it recently showcased comment from U.S. government policy officials such as former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, and policy economists and industrialists such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Lester Thurow, Mitchell Kapor, Michael Dertouzos, and Nicholas Negroponte (see SA’s web page).

Professor Sachs is a highly trained economist, now the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, which, judging from its website, hopes also to have a large influence on government policy, especially under the recurring rant of sustainable development. As a prominent economist proposing interventionist policy solutions for many of the world’s ills, Sachs may fit the description of an intellectual, as recently discussed by Thomas Sowell in his Intellectuals and Society (2009), a book about prominent intellectuals and their failed policy prescriptions, and a book I recommend to all. But, for now, let’s stick to Professor Sachs’s fix for the broken policy process.

The Earth Institute states that:

Earth is at a critical crossroads. While revolutionary advances in science and technology have lifted humanity to new heights of prosperity and longevity in many parts of the world, hundreds of millions of people are vulnerable to the impacts of hazards and natural disasters, extreme poverty, infectious disease and a host of other challenges. At the same time, human activity, especially in the last 100 years, is threatening the health of the environment and potentially posing risks of unprecedented magnitude to our shared future.
Today, approximately one in six people on the planet subsist on less than $1 a day. The world’s population is expected to increase to nine billion people by 2050, further straining Earth’s resources and humanity’s ability to thrive. With a window of opportunity to head off the most severe impacts of these challenges, the Earth Institute, Columbia University, is working to help the world pave a path toward sustainability.

A noble sounding effort, but one hardly differing from similar and failed exhortations noted by sundry eminent historical persons such as Malthus. Here we are, disrespectfully living longer than our parents, who also should not have been able to escape long-predicted limits. Sachs shares an elitist and in my opinion flawed notion that expert advisers constitute independent and impartial council: “Herein lies the policy challenge of today. When we let the private sector enter into public decision making, we end up with [his list of contemporary, deplorable things] devoid of serious scientific content.” Rather than private persons having a say in public policy, Sachs recommends that government’s highest priorities should be given to his list of policy recommendations for sustainable development, a hobby horse of his Earth Institute. Without showing any evidence of past successes for such policy dictat, he pushes his intellectual prescription for policy process improvement, apparently unaware of his own special pleading as a columnist from the pages of a once-scientific journal.

Sachs is not alone; many highly trained people comfortable in academia, public life, and government circles offer citizens the benefit of their special but limited knowledge. In Sachs’s case, especially the case of an economist no doubt familiar with supply and demand, I see little sense in his failure to realize that government has fostered lobbying per se as means to political and economic ends. Think about it, one of the reasons that America’s Founders severely limited Federal powers was to increase the expense of lobbying the many states. When power concentrates in just one body politic and the rewards rise accordingly, the costs of lobbying go down, and lobbying increases.

Which invites this observer to ask if an independent review of the fundamental causes of the rampant growth of special pleading may prove more useful than yet another prescription for special pleading reform by those promoting their own horrific policy agendas at increasing public expense?

How can one sort sense from nonsense on such matters? Serious students of population and resource topics might start with two classics: Progress and Poverty (H. George, 1879) and The Ultimate Resource II (J. Simon, 1996). Little new in demographics or economics transpired between the two. To paraphrase George and to hint at Simon, both jay hawks and humans eat chicken, with the difference that the more humans, the more and various kinds of plump chickens.