Biases in Social Science

 Madeline Kearns of National Review has written an excellent interview with Musa al-Gharbi of Heterodox Academy. It is frustrating to read about the biases in fields like sociology and social psychology.   My take is that there are three fallacies in the broad conversation, which includes most of what the academic reform movement has  been conversing about for the past 30 years:

First, social science is not science, and there will never be a scientific approach to hypothesis testing in subjects like sociology.  Economics is value free on the microeconomic level, but it will never be on the macroeconomic level.

The early days of social science were focused on problem solving,  and amateurs played the chief role until the late nineteenth century.  The establishment of professional social science coincided with the first research universities at places like Johns Hopkins and the Wharton School.  Social science struggled to become value free in the early twentieth century, but it never succeeded. In the late nineteenth century the Wharton School was founded to advocate for tariffs.  In the early days of professional sociology there were struggles between the advocates of a moralizing social work approach and a value free approach. The value free approach won, but never completely.  The half victory was largely overturned after the 1960s.   

 In the early days of the Harvard Business School, Edwin F. Gay advocated a case study approach to studying business. Until the 1950s the business schools did not tend to emphasize scientism.  The scientistic approach resulted from a push in the form of two major books, one by Gordon and Howell and the other by Pierson, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation.

Second, the academy is not reformable.  Colleges were chiefly Christian, with some engineering and practical, land grant institutions (which were also Christian), until the late 19th century. The establishment of Johns Hopkins led to an interest in adoption of the research university model, and Harvard soon followed.  The Carnegie Foundation and the General Education Board provided significant funding for colleges to professionalize along the lines of the research university model. In doing so, Abraham Flexner and his colleages at the foundations advocated and provided financial incentives for adoption of a principle of hierarchical emulation.  A few high-quality institutions would dominate, and other institutions would imitate. The principle of peer review precludes deviance, and that means political disagreement is foreclosed.  Departments and learned societies have evolved so that their cultures are rooted in political ideology. They view their political beliefs as moral.

Much of the conversation about university reform has assumed that universities can be changed as political candidates are changed. They cannot. They are rigid organizations that are difficult to change. Once the left-wing culture was instituted in the top-tier institutions, the cultures were set. The institutions will need to die rather than change.

It probably wasn't Flexner's or the foundations' intention to institute an ideologically left-wing university system, but from the 1920s, that was the effect, and the effect had to have been evident to the foundations. Burton Clark, in his classic The Distinctive College, notes that the colleges that were receiving support from the General Education Board had left-wing faculties, and the same institutions received the lion's share of media attention.  This was so even in the case of Reed, which was a brand new institution that received GEB funding and adopted a left-wing faculty from the inception.  The effect of de-Christianizing the colleges led to the hiring of mostly left-wing faculties.

Perpendicular control coupled with scientism fates university social science to be locked in a narrowly defined ideology.  It could have gone differently: The ideology could have been that of James Burnham or Ludwig von Mises, but it wasn't.  It is unclear  but probably not the case that the Carnegie Foundation and the GEB consciously preferred left-wing academics, but in aiming to de-Christinaize the colleges that was what they did.

Third, as result, incremental reform is unlikely.  The perpendicular structure of journal editorships and the cultures in most social science departments prohibit it.

University Scientism and American Totalitarianism

Is there a difference between (a) the American pragmatic political approach, a cornerstone of the claim of American exceptionalism, and (b) mere political caprice in the management of the economy and society such as characterized the fascist and national socialist economic policies? Academic research, especially in the fields of economics, sociology, and psychology, supposedly contributes to the public policy making process, differentiating the American third way from the fascist third way by making it rational.

But what if American pragmatism is based on a sham? What if social science is but scientism? Then, American economic and social policy is guided and influenced by the moral whimsies of social scientists whose moral sense has been addled in part by scientistic training, in part by careerist opportunism, and in part by political pandering. In that case, social science higher education can be viewed as any other propaganda device.  Perhaps American pragmatism and American exceptionalism are equivalent to any other authoritarian or totalitarian form.

All Science Is Politically Influenced; Social Science Is More So

Are the natural sciences as ideologically driven as the social sciences? No, but the extent that the natural sciences are politicized is understated by almost everyone, including many scientists.

Sociologists of science depict the natural sciences as heavily political. See, for instance, Bruno Latour, Science in Action, and Leviathan and the Air-Pump by Shapin and Schaffer.

However, the premise of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Karl Popper in the Logic of Scientific Discovery is fundamentally right: Natural science does engage in falsification, and their tests are relatively value free, although I do not doubt that the direction in which they go and the subjects that they study are ideologically and governmentally influenced.

The social sciences are primarily ideological. They are not science. Economists are especially narcissistic in this regard. Microeconomic theory is value free, but the rest of economics is to a large degree ideological, especially in the fields of macroeconomics, labor economics, and monetary economics.

The other social sciences are often if not mostly ideological. 

The tax exemption that universities enjoy for social science and humanities instruction should be eliminated unless the same tax exemptions are given to Republican advocacy organizations. That universities are primarily political organizations is seen in the adoption by the humanities, which should be involved in the transmission of our great Western culture, of politicized, social science approaches.

The hard sciences have better justification for public funding, but if government money is to be used for science, Republicans are advised to ensure that Democrats, who dominate universities, are not using the funds for politicized science.  One way to do this is to focus on chemistry, mathematics, molecular biology, medicine, and physics, and to limit (or at least carefully balance) funding for geology, environmental studies, and environmental biology.