How Popperian falsification enabled the rise of neoliberalism
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aeon.co
If you accept the author's internal logic that groups like e.g. the Clear Energy Alliance are fundamentally acting in bad faith, then it should be abundantly clear that that a group making that sort of denialist argument by definition does not actually care one iota about whatever philosophy is being invoked. Philosophers have a long, time-honored tradition of producing bodies of work with the intent of destabilizing "naive" epistemology. If it wasn't Popper, it'd be Kuhn or Feyeraband or Derrida or Lacan or, or, or, ad infinitum. (Honestly based on my deeply informal and decidedly non-academic use of social media over the past decade, I always found Kuhn's work to be the more popular plaything for people engaging in most forms of science denialism).
Fundamentally, consider any case where a person believes that a.) some proposition P about reality holds, like "cigarette smoke causes cancer" and b.) there is a preponderance of scientific evidence in favor of P, and c.) there exist well-funded entities intentionally producing bad-faith/dishonest/equivocal work that either implies the negation of P or that the evidence in favor of P is flawed. If a person accepts (a), (b), and (c), then it seems most reasonable to also accept that the denialists in (c) probably don't genuinely care about things like "intellectual rigor" or "identifying a useful epistemological model for science." The thin philosophical veneer is just a disposable bauble intended to give a sense of academic respectability to bad work.
The term is used pretty much solely by people who think it's bad. They cite basically all of the downsides to capitalism: shrinking safety nets, loss of jobs and job security from globalization, financial panics like 2007, increasing wealth concentration, etc.
Odd smells preceded this passage and I was unsure of their origin. This is where the article went fully off the rails in my reading. The author conflates the individual economic actions of parents with the collective coercion of a despot.
Next, she labels Hayek as neoliberal. It is hard to take an article seriously if it cannot distinguish between laissez-faire capitalism and neoliberalism. This is a surprisingly common inaccurate generalization. I cannot help but wonder if the author is sincere.
>Popper’s appointment to a fellowship at the Royal Society marked the demise of a powerful strand of socialist leadership in British science...
Having played her cards, one can expect to read the rest of the article as a lamentation of a lack of socialism. She delivers by pivoting immediately to climate change and identity politics.
>Many of the same scientists went on to work for fossil fuel lobbyists, casting doubt on the science of anthropogenic climate change. It doesn’t take much time on a search engine to find examples of Popperianism wielded by deniers.
Here we touch on one of my favorites. Yes, incentives matter. Are there no incentives for the climate change agenda? What is a carbon credit, if not monetized debt? Putting aside the veracity of the climate apocalypse, we should be able to agree that the climate agenda involves centralizing control over energy consumption. We are supposed to believe that incentives of petroleum companies exist, but those who would establish a new paradigm for international currency have no ulterior motives? Simply put, who exactly will be printing these carbon credits, what is their historical background and why should we trust them?
Pure nonsense. Academic socialist declares that the sciences are not yet socialist enough, while the mainstream narrative is dominated by green socialism. If critiques of lockdowns, mass vaccinations, climate apocalypse or other political goals utilize falsifiability, she concludes falsifiability is the problem. Her favored political agendas remain infallible.
I share the author’s concerns about the supposed ethical neutrality of the application of scientific discoveries, but that has to do with politics and ethics and not the methods scientists use to make those discoveries. It’s like blaming theoretical computer science for the developing the techniques later programmers use in missile guidance systems. The theory isn’t the problem, the application is.
"While all this was going on, three philosophers were pulling[0] the rug away beneath the Popperians’ feet. They argued[1] that[2], when an experiment fails to prove a hypothesis, any element of the physical or theoretical set-up could be to blame. Nor can any single disproof ever count against a theory, since we can always put in a good-faith auxiliary hypothesis to protect it: perhaps the lab mice weren’t sufficiently inbred to produce genetic consistency; perhaps the chemical reaction occurs only in the presence of a particular catalyst. Moreover, we have to protect some theories for the sake of getting on at all. Generally, we don’t conclude that we have disproved well-established laws of physics – rather, that our experiment was faulty."
The basic argument is that falsificationism isn't actually how science is carried out.
[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2181906?seq=1
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-1863-0_...
I agree with your analysis. This is article is a way to take falsifiability off the table as a useful tool, which of course paves the way for unfalsifiable claims to be argued for on the basis of their purity.
It’s quite disturbing, even before the place where you see it go off the rails, there were some red flags - the idea that you can always defend a hypothesis by casting doubt on any element of an experiment, for example, or by introducing a new good-faith explanation of how the origins hypothesis can still be true.
Of course you can - and by doing so you generate new hypotheses that can be tested. This is to be expected and has no bearing at all on whether falsifiability itself is a problem.
The author is a professor of ‘science humanities’, which is itself an Orwellian sounding title. This piece suggests that she doesn’t understand the philosophy r science at all.
Respectfully, I think you may be out of your depth here. You critique the author for associating a major player in the development of neoliberalism with... neoliberalism? Hayek was a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society (sometimes considered a symbolic birthplace of the ideology) and his contributions to the field of economics helped lay the foundation for neoliberalism's global ascendance. Neoliberalism's Wikipedia entry is littered with mentions of his name. It's difficult to think of someone more qualified to don the label.
In practice neoliberalism does not represent the free-market as presented by Hayek. Mises was also a founding member of the MPS, will you have me believe that he was a neoliberal? These are generalizations leveled by socialist critics and third positionists who would use appeals to the market as a fig leaf. The incentives for distortion are clear.
>Neoliberalism is distinct from liberalism insofar as it does not advocate laissez-faire economic policy but instead is highly constructivist and advocates a strong state to bring about market-like reforms in every aspect of society.
>the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, whose founding members included Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Karl Popper, George Stigler and Ludwig von Mises. Meeting annually, it would become a "kind of international 'who's who' of the classical liberal and neo-liberal intellectuals.
Take the example of neoliberal negotiated "free trade" agreements and contrast that to laissez-faire unilateral free trade. The inability to distinguish between the two paradigms or the deliberate conflation of terms is what I am addressing.
Moving on, I'll reiterate that Hayek is widely considered a (very significant) neoliberal. This isn't a controversial viewpoint - check out neoliberalism's entry in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism) or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/) for the mainstream perspective on his role in its development. The notion that Hayek is not a neoliberal, however, would seem quite controversial to most in this space.
> In practice neoliberalism does not represent the free-market as presented by Hayek.
Keep in mind that Hayek was a theoretician, so his ideas represent a starting point, not a conclusion, when it comes to enacted policy. What are some good examples of neoliberalism in practice that you find wholly incompatible with Hayek's views?
> Take the example of neoliberal negotiated "free trade" agreements and contrast that to laissez-faire unilateral free trade.
While I can appreciate the differences between unilateral free trade and "neoliberal negotiated 'free trade' agreements," I'm not sure how the existence of those differences removes Hayek's prominent role in the history of neoliberalism. I'll also point out that the (confusing) catch-all use of the word "neoliberal" to describe American center-left politics from Carter onward shouldn't be conflated with academic use of the term.
> Mises was also a founding member of the MPS, will you have me believe that he was a neoliberal?
While I probably wouldn't primarily characterize Mises as a neoliberal, he had a huge influence on Hayek and maintained many views that are compatible with neoliberalism.
> Neoliberalism is distinct from liberalism insofar as it does not advocate laissez-faire economic policy but instead is highly constructivist and advocates a strong state to bring about market-like reforms in every aspect of society.
This is from economic historian/philosopher Philip Mirowski, I believe, and should be viewed in that context. He's describing an existing neoliberal political and economic system in toto, as opposed to the theoretical principles that Hayek or Friedman would have discussed. While one might discuss policies intended to increase economic freedom as if they could be overseen by a small, limited government, and would result in universally-increased freedom, actually implementing them could require a powerful and oppressive dictatorship like Augusto Pinochet's in Chile.
If we are going to play the mainstream reference game, we should allow the caveat that socialists dominate the establishment academic landscape. Hayek himself argued this even in 1949. Please see: "The Intellectuals and Socialism", F.A Hayek. While the domination of mainstream discourse may not be as complete and overwhelming as some socialists would prefer, it is palatable.
In spite of the above, even Wikipedia describes Hayek as a classical liberal.
>Hayek was also a major social theorist and political philosopher of the 20th century and as the co-founder of Mont Pelerin Society he contributed to the revival of classical liberalism in the post-war era
>The most interesting among the courageous dissenters of the 1980s were the classical liberals, disciples of F.A. Hayek, from whom they had learned about the crucial importance of economic freedom and about the often-ignored conceptual difference between liberalism and democracy
Where Wikipedia is able to directly describe Hayek as a neoliberal, it is in the words of a georgist.
I'll allow that Hayek's classical liberalism influenced neoliberalism, but the distinction is there. I'll go one step further and claim that the classical liberal influence wasn't strong enough. Going back to the earlier Mises link, you can see how there were disputes within the MPS. Attributing the end product of neoliberalism to Hayek or Mises is an inaccurate generalization.
>At the London School of Economics, Popper was close to the neoliberal theorist Friedrich Hayek.
Hayek, Mises and the classical liberal tradition are better represented today by the Austrians, which is widely held to be heterodox. It comes as no surprise. Neither were friends to the socialist cause. Socialist dominated institutions would naturally have that incentive. Furthermore, if you'll allow the digression, individualists by definition would need less approval and validation from the collective.
The distinction between having an influence on and being a proponent of something is wide. The chasm grows when the influence was insufficient.
At the top of the page on your provided Princeton link, sentence one:
>Though not all scholars agree on the meaning of the term, “neoliberalism”...
Neoliberalism as it is used in general parlance, especially by critics of the market, has come to mean half-hearted market based solutions which both the socialists and the classical liberals would regard as failures. Take the highly regulated 'private' healthcare system in the US as an example. Market advocates might claim, "at least it isn't socialism" at best. The size of the political economy eclipses the possibility of genuine free-market solutions here. Yet, the socialists would increase the size and scope of the state while blaming the market for failing.
Neoliberalism is a pejorative in the mouths of socialists. It is wielded indiscriminately. Classical liberals would attribute the failures of neoliberalism to the size and scope of government interference, a lack of genuine free-market reform.
>While one might discuss policies intended to increase economic freedom as if they could be overseen by a small, limited government, and would result in universally-increased freedom, actually implementing them could require a powerful and oppressive dictatorship like Augusto Pinochet's in Chile.
Yes, the old, "You can't have a small government without a big government" argument. I've most often seen this deployed against minarchists, so it is interesting to see it here. Maybe you can rephrase that one?
>What are some good examples of neoliberalism in practice that you find wholly incompatible with Hayek's views?
I'll let you take your pick, but google has some real gems here.
https://www.google.com/search?q=neoliberalism+pinochet
https://mises.org/wire/no-hayek-didnt-support-pinochet-regim...
>Hayek: "I have certainly never contended that generally authoritarian governments are more likely to secure individual liberty than democratic ones, but rather the contrary."
In more general terms, I think you'd find it difficult to square the CIA, military industrial complex backed Pinochet regime with the classical liberalism Hayek is known for. Similarly, the national-socialist influences and fugitives from justice at Colonia Dignidad are out of bounds. Maybe the third-positionists can claim these elements, but you can't stretch that onto classical liberals.
The distinction matters and from my side the generalization reads as dishonest. However having this discussion has shed some light on the topic and I'm not convinced that all those who would distort this issue do so with malice.