How to Think About Social Issues: Intro and Tips 1-2

Introduction:

The following is a list of tips I have compiled to help you think more clearly and systematically about social issues. By social issues I mean any question relating to the functioning of human societies. These are commonly divided into economic issues, political issues, and social issues, but I see no need for such a, largely arbitrary, division, so I will use the all-encompassing ‘social’, designating ‘having to do with human societies’, instead. In practice, views on social issues tend to be related closely to views on government policy. Government policies are the decisions about how much and in what ways to use the coercive power of government, the organization of coercion considered legitimate in a geographically-bounded territory. The act of systematically thinking about and analyzing social issues is known as social science, and its practitioners, social scientists. The social sciences are often derided by natural scientists for being based on wishy-washy emotions and unsubstantiated opinions, and consequently not producing anything of value. While I would agree that this is true about a lot of the social science that is being done today, it need not be so. Social science can be just as rigorous as the natural sciences, provided that its epistemological differences are recognized and that rigorous analytical logic is not discarded in favour of relativistic opinions. Keeping the following tips in mind while thinking about social issues can help in this endeavour:

1. Mind your epistemology:

The social sciences and the natural sciences have different epistemological statuses. In the natural sciences, experiments are done by attempting to isolate one relevant variable, and then observing what effect changing that variable has on the result. This method is unavailable to the social scientist. History has sometimes been described as the laboratory experiment of the social sciences, but this is false. In history, variables cannot be fully isolated, a historical period must be compared with another wholesale, with all of their respective complicated variables of all kinds. For example, arguably the closest thing to a laboratory experiment in the social sciences were the fates of West and East Germany when the West adopted free-market institutions and the East was communist. Unsurprisingly for free-market economists, the West thrived economically while the East stagnated, and various people from the miserable East tried to escape to the relatively happy West. But, for the strict epistemologist, even this is not good enough to conclude empirically that capitalism is better than socialism. Perhaps the people in the East were less skilled at certain tasks or were less concerned with material improvement than those in the West? Perhaps natural resources were less favourably placed? Perhaps (and this probably was a big factor), the West got to associate and trade with more prosperous countries than the East, who could only associate with the Soviet bloc? The point is that historical situations have too many complex variables to serve as fully satisfactory laboratory experiments.

In that case though, how does the social scientist know anything about his subject matter? Luckily, the social scientist does enjoy an advantage over the natural scientist in one regard: he is what he is studying, that is, the social scientist is a human, and his subject matter is the study of human societies. Thus, the social scientist can learn truths about humans through introspection and logical deduction. For instance, the basic axiom behind most social science is the axiom that humans act in an attempt to substitute a less satisfactory state of affairs for a more satisfactory state of affairs, from their own subjective point of view. This statement cannot be refuted; doing so would mean an attempt to substitute a less satisfactory state of affairs (where the statement is not refuted) for a more satisfactory state of affairs (where the statement is refuted). Though impossible, the attempt was made nonetheless, and since action is not about achieving desired ends but attempting to achieve desired ends, the statement is confirmed in the very act of trying to refute it. From this simple axiom, complemented by well-known, broad empirical truths such as the greater productivity of the division of labour, the core of economic theory is logically deduced (such as the law of marginal utility, the price structure of the market, the incentive structure, etc…).

An example will help to illustrate this epistemological point. Sometimes, when analyzing a period of history, two thinkers agree on the facts, but differ on their interpretation and their relevance to social theory. A good example of this is the history of industrialism in the 19^th century and its effect on the wages of industrial workers. Every respectable historian agrees that real wages were going up over the course of the 19^th century, but, according to their views of economic theory, they disagree over the causal relation involved in this event. A socialist-leaning or labour union-sympathizing historian will tend to argue that it was the rise of the power of labour unions (a fact that is not denied by anyone) that led to the increase in the wages of industrial workers. Without this, according to the Marxist view of how wage rates are determined, the employers would have left the employees with the same real wage rates (enough so that they survive and procreate) and would have pocketed the surplus created by the growth of industry for themselves.

By contrast, historians sympathetic to the free-market will tend to argue that it was through the significant accumulation of capital and through technological improvements over this period (another fact that is not denied by anyone) that the real wages of industrial workers rose. This is because, according to free-market economic theory, wage rates are determined just like any other factor of production, and when one class of factors of production (capital goods) becomes more abundant, labour, a complementary factor of production to capital goods, without which capital goods are useless, becomes relatively scarcer and productive and hence more valuable, thus securing higher real wage rates for those willing to expend labour in this more productive structure of production. In cases such as these, calls to ‘let the facts speak for themselves’ are disingenuous, the facts say different things depending on what theory you interpret them with!   

Of course, not every social issue can be fully analyzed using deductive theory, but the knowledge provided by correct deductive theorizing is irrefutable, and every subsequent empirical examination of social issues must take it into account. For instance, the question of whether to have intellectual property laws is one such question. Economic theory tells us that there are some possible economic gains that will redound to the direct benefit of the inventor of a useful new technology, such as increased prestige and first-mover advantages, but that a lot of the benefits of this technology take the form of positive externalities, something that benefits other market participants without the producer of the externality being remunerated fully for these benefits. Thus, intellectual property laws are one way to help internalize this externality, by granting the innovator a temporary monopoly privilege over the marketing of his invention, which could conceivably result in more innovators being willing to innovate, as they will be able to expect remuneration more in line with the benefits that this technology would bring. On the other hand, economic theory also tells us that monopoly privileges result in harm to the consumers, as there is no competition in the provision of the monopolized good, allowing the monopolists to raise prices higher than otherwise. Also, intellectual property serves to stifle future innovations, as future innovators fear being sued by the holder of the patent for building off of the work done by the patent-holding innovator. Furthermore, any attempt to correctly guess at what people ‘would have’ paid for the use of the technology outside of their actual, concrete choices made on the market is fraught with difficulties. In this case, economic theory does not tell us which of these results will predominate, and empirical studies can prove useful (although never as conclusive as in the natural sciences) here. The empiricist social scientist who seeks to disprove deductive economic theory based off of empirical results alone, without any plausible, logical, theoretical argument as to why the previous theory was wrong, is guilty of a grave epistemological error though.

2. Remember that value is subjective:

A mistake frequently made by social scientists is to substitute their own value judgements for those of the people they are studying. For example, a social scientist, hypothetically, may say that while the economy may be freer in the United States, people are not as healthy in the US as they are in the UK, a country with less economic freedom and a socialized healthcare system, therefore the UK’s government is adopting ‘better’ policies than the US government. But, for the subjectivist, this conclusion does not necessarily follow. He recognises that according to some people’s value judgements, health may not be as important as other economic goods, such as eating greasy food. He would say that health is only a measure of economic efficiency when the people choose health over other goods, which they can only do in a free-market system, and that comparisons between the health levels of countries with free-market healthcare systems (not that the current US has that, but never mind that for now) and ones that force their citizens to pay for a certain amount of healthcare are really quite arbitrary from the point of view of the two countries’ economic efficiency. It would be just like if a social scientist in the past had ranked the countries according to the number of Bibles that were sold within their borders, and chastised countries with a low ranking.

Every individual has a different scale of value, and the only way that the social scientist can observe this scale of value is through the actions of individual people. For instance, the only way of knowing whether Bob prefers, at a given time, 2 pounds of apples costing him a dollar, 2 pounds of tomatoes costing him a dollar, or anything else that could be done with the dollar, is to observe his purchasing decisions in the grocery store. Surveys won’t do it, because the person might be lying, the person may not have really thought about the question, or the person’s value scales may have changed between the time he took the survey and the time he actually made his purchasing decisions. Thus, subjective judgements of value can only be demonstrated by individuals acting voluntarily, and cannot be known for sure by a statesman, social scientist, or anyone else before this action occurs.