Neshama Carlebach’s Learning to Believe Again is a poignant account of how she deals with knowing her father, Shlomo, was a sexual abuser. It got me thinking about the many times anti-abuse activists are told, “But, what about his family; they don’t deserve to suffer because of him.”
From FRUM FOLLIES, here.
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In recent years, the public has gradually discovered that there is a crisis in science. But what is the problem? And how bad is it, really? Today on The Corbett Report we shine a spotlight on the series of interrelated crises that are exposing the way institutional science is practiced today, and what it means for an increasingly science-dependent society.
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TRANSCRIPT
In 2015 a study from the Institute of Diet and Health with some surprising results launched a slew of click bait articles with explosive headlines:
“Chocolate accelerates weight loss” insisted one such headline.
“Scientists say eating chocolate can help you lose weight” declared another.
“Lose 10% More Weight By Eating A Chocolate Bar Every Day…No Joke!” promised yet another.
There was just one problem: This was a joke.
The head researcher of the study, “Johannes Bohannon,” took to io9 in May of that year to reveal that his name was actually John Bohannon, the “Institute of Diet and Health” was in fact nothing more than a website, and the study showing the magical weight loss effects of chocolate consumption was bogus. The hoax was the brainchild of a German television reporter who wanted to “demonstrate just how easy it is to turn bad science into the big headlines behind diet fads.”
Given how widely the study’s surprising conclusion was publicized—from the pages of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper to the TV sets of viewers in Texas and Australia—that demonstration was remarkably successful. But although it’s tempting to write this story off as a demonstration about gullible journalists and the scientific illiteracy of the press, the hoax serves as a window into a much larger, much more troubling story.
That story is The Crisis of Science.
This is The Corbett Report.
What makes the chocolate weight loss study so revealing isn’t that it was completely fake; it’s that in an important sense it wasn’t fake. Bohannes really did conduct a weight loss study and the data really does support the conclusion that subjects who ate chocolate on a low-carb diet lose weight faster than those on a non-chocolate diet. In fact, the chocolate dieters even had better cholesterol readings. The trick was all in how the data was interpreted and reported.
As Bohannes explained in his post-hoax confession:
“Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a ‘statistically significant’ result. Our study included 18 different measurements—weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.—from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.”
You see, finding a “statistically significant result” sounds impressive and helps scientists to get their paper published in high-impact journals, but “statistical significance” is in fact easy to fake. If, like Bohannes, you use a small sample size and measure for 18 different variables, it’s almost impossible not to find some “statistically significant” result. Scientists know this, and the process of sifting through data to find “statistically significant” (but ultimately meaningless) results is so common that it has its own name: “p-hacking” or “data dredging.”
But p-hacking only scrapes the surface of the problem. From confounding factors to normalcy bias to publication pressures to outright fraud, the once-pristine image of science and scientists as an impartial font of knowledge about the world has been seriously undermined over the past decade.
Although these types of problems are by no means new, they came into vogue when , a physician, researcher and writer at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, rocked the scientific community with his landmark paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” The 2005 paper addresses head on the concern that “most current published research findings are false,” asserting that “for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” The paper has achieved iconic status, becoming the most downloaded paper in the Public Library of Science and launching a conversation about false results, fake data, bias, manipulation and fraud in science that continues to this day.
JOHN IOANNIDIS: This is a paper that is practically presenting a mathematical modeling of what are the chances that a research finding that is published in the literature would be true. And it uses different parameters, different aspects, in terms of: What we know before; how likely it is for something to be true in a field; how much bias are maybe in the field; what kind of results we get; and what are the statistics that are presented for the specific result.
I have been humbled that this work has drawn so much attention and people from very different scientific fields—ranging not just bio-medicine, but also psychological science, social science, even astrophysics and the other more remote disciplines—have been attracted to what that paper was trying to do.
SOURCE: John Ioannidis on Moving Toward Truth in Scientific Research
Since Ioannidis’ paper took off, the “crisis of science” has become a mainstream concern, generating headlines in the mainstream press like The Washington Post, The Economist and The Times Higher Education Supplement. It has even been picked up by mainstream science publications like Scientific American, Nature and phys.org.
So what is the problem? And how bad is it, really? And what does it mean for an increasingly tech-dependent society that something is rotten in the state of science?
To get a handle on the scope of this dilemma, we have to realize that the “crisis” of science isn’t a crisis at all, but a series of interrelated crises that get to the heart of the way institutional science is practiced today.
First, there is the Replication Crisis.
This is the canary in the coalmine of the scientific crisis in general because it tells us that a surprising percentage of scientific studies, even ones published in top-tier academic journals that are often thought of as the gold standard for experimental research, cannot be reliably reproduced. This is a symptom of a larger crisis because reproducibility is considered to be a bedrock of the scientific process.
In a nutshell, an experiment is reproducible if independent researchers can run the same experiment and get the same results at a later date. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why this is important. If an experiment is truly revealing some fundamental truth about the world then that experiment should yield the same results under the same conditions anywhere and at any time (all other things being equal).
Well, not all things are equal.
In the opening years of this decade, the Center for Open Science led a team of 240 volunteer researchers in a quest to reproduce the results of 100 psychological experiments. These experiments had all been published in three of the most prestigious psychology journals. The results of this attempt to replicate these experiments, published in 2015 in a paper on “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science,” were abysmal. Only 39 of the experimental results could be reproduced.
Worse yet for those who would defend institutional science from its critics, these results are not confined to the realm of psychology. In 2011, Nature published a paper showing that researchers were only able to reproduce between 20 and 25 per cent of 67 published preclinical drug studies. They published another paper the next year with an even worse result: researchers could only reproduce six of a total of 53 “landmark” cancer studies. That’s a reproducibility rate of 11%.
These studies alone are persuasive, but the cherry on top came in May 2016 when Nature published the results of a survey of over 1,500 scientists finding fully 70% of them had tried and failed to reproduce published experimental results at some point. The poll covered researchers from a range of disciplines, from physicists and chemists to earth and environmental scientists to medical researchers and assorted others.
So why is there such a widespread inability to reproduce experimental results? There are a number of reasons, each of which give us another window into the greater crisis of science.
The simplest answer is the one that most fundamentally shakes the widespread belief that scientists are disinterested truthseekers who would never dream of publishing a false result or deliberately mislead others.
JAMES EVAN PILATO: Survey sheds light on the ‘crisis’ rocking research.
More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature’s survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research.
The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproducibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant ‘crisis’ of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature.
Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak. The best-known analyses, from psychology1 and cancer biology2, found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively.
So the headline of this article, James, that we grabbed from our buddy Doug at BlackListed News: “40 percent of scientists admit that fraud is always or often a factor that contributes to irreproducible research.”
SOURCE: Scientists Say Fraud Causing Crisis of Science – #NewWorldNextWeek
In fact, the data shows that the Crisis of Fraud in scientific circles is even worse than scientists will admit. A study published in 2012 found that fraud or suspected fraud was responsible for 43% of scientific paper retractions, by far the single leading cause of retraction. The study demonstrated a 1000% increase in (reported) scientific fraud since 1975. Together with “duplicate publication” and “plagiarism,” misconduct of one form or another accounted for two-thirds of all retractions.
So much for scientists as disinterested truth-tellers.
Indeed, instances of scientific fraud are cropping up more and more in the headlines these days.
Last year, Kohei Yamamizu of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application was found to have completely fabricated the data for his 2017 paper in the journal Stem Cell Reports, and earlier this year it was found that Yamamizu’s data fabrication was more extensive than previously thought, with a paper from 2012 also being retracted due to doubtful data.
Another Japanese researcher, Haruko Obokata, was found to have manipulated images to get her landmark study on stem cell creation published in Nature. The study was retracted and one of Obokata’s co-authors committed suicide when the fraud was discovered.
Similar stories of fraud behind retracted stem cell papers, molecular-scale transistor breakthroughs, psychological studies and a host of other research calls into question the very foundations of the modern system of peer-reviewed, reproducible science, which is supposed to mitigate fraudulent activity by carefully checking and, where appropriate, repeating important research.
There are a number of reasons why fraud and misconduct is on the rise, and these relate to more structural problems that unveil yet more crises in science.
Like the Crisis of Publication.
We’ve all heard of “publish or perish” by now. It means that only researchers who have a steady flow of published papers to their name are considered for the plush positions in modern-day academia.
This pressure isn’t some abstract or unstated force; it is direct and explicit. Until recently the medical department at London’s Imperial College told researchers that their target was to “publish three papers per annum including one in a prestigious journal with an impact factor of at least five.” Similar guidelines and quotas are enacted in departments throughout academia.
And so, like any quota-based system, people will find a way to cheat their way to the goal. Some attach their names to work they have little to do with. Others publish in pay-to-play journals that will publish anything for a small fee. And others simply fudge their data until they get a result that will grab headlines and earn a spot in a high-profile journal.
It’s easy to see how fraudulent or irreproducible data results from this pressure. The pressure to publish in turn puts pressure on researchers to produce data that will be “new” and “unexpected.” A study finding that drinking 5 cups of coffee a day increases your chance of urinary tract cancer (or decreases your chance of stroke) is infinitely more interesting (and thus publishable) than a study finding mixed results, or no discernible effect. So studies finding a surprising result (or ones that can be manipulated into showing surprising results) will be published and those with negative results will not. This makes it much harder for future scientists to get an accurate assessment of the state of research in any given field, since untold numbers of experiments with negative results never get published, and thus never see the light of day.
But the pressure to publish in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals itself raises the specter of another crisis: The Crisis of Peer Review.
The peer review process is designed as a check against fraud, sloppy research and other problems that arise when journal editors are determining whether to publish a paper. In theory, the editor of the journal passes the paper to another researcher in the same field who can then check that the research is factual, relevant, novel and sufficient for publication.
In practice, the process is never quite so straightforward.
The peer review system is in fact rife with abuse, but few cases are as flagrant as that of Hyung-In Moon. Moon was a medicinal-plant researcher at Dongguk University in Gyeongju, South Korea, who aroused suspicions by the ease with which his papers were reviewed. Most researchers are too busy to review other papers at all, but the editor of The Journal of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry noticed that the reviewers for Moon’s papers were not only always available, but that they usually submitted their review notes within 24 hours. When confronted by the editor about this suspiciously quick work, Moon admitted that he had written most of the reviews himself. He had simply gamed the system, where most journals ask researchers to submit names of potential reviewers for their papers, by creating fake names and email addresses and then submitting “reviews” of his own work.
Beyond the incentivization of fraud and opportunities for gaming the system, however, the peer review process has other, more structural problems. In certain specialized fields there are only a handful of scientists qualified to review new research in the discipline, meaning that this clique effectively forms a team of gatekeepers over an entire branch of science. They often know each other personally, meaning any new research they conduct is certain to be reviewed by one of their close associates (or their direct rivals). This “pal review” system also helps to solidify dogma in echo chambers where the same few people who go to the same conferences and pursue research along the same lines can prevent outsiders with novel approaches from entering the field of study.
In the most egregious cases, as with researchers in the orbit of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, groups of scientists have been caught conspiring to oust an editorfrom a journal that published papers that challenged their own research and even conspiring to “redefine what the peer-review literature is” in order to stop rival researchers from being published at all.
So, in short: Yes, there is a Replication Crisis in science. And yes, it is caused by a Crisis of Fraud. And yes, the fraud is motivated by a Crisis of Publication. And yes, those crises are further compounded by a Crisis of Peer Review.
But what creates this environment in the first place? What is the driving factor that keeps this whole system going in the face of all these crises? The answer isn’t difficult to understand. It’s the same thing that puts pressure on every other aspect of the economy: funding.
Modern laboratories investigating cutting edge questions involve expensive technology and large teams of researchers. The types of labs producing truly breakthrough results in today’s environment are the ones that are well funded. And there are only two ways for scientists to get big grants in our current system: big business or big government. So it should be no surprise that “scientific” results, so susceptible to the biases, frauds and manipulations that constitute the crises of science, are up for sale by scientists who are willing to provide dodgy data for dirty dollars to large corporations and politically-motivated government agencies.
From The Corbett Report, here.
Can one go to court when faced with a corrupt Toen or Beis Din? Should we allow Toanim in Beis Din? Is the system in Eretz Yisroel the correct model?
with Rabbi Dovid Cohen Shlit”a – Rov of Gvul Yaavetz, Leading Poseik in America – 16:00
with Rabbi Yudel Shain – Bais Din consultant – 24:30
with Rabbi Simcha Roth – Renowned Toen – 47:30
with Rabbi Tuvya Stern, Esq. – Attorney & Toen in Eretz Yisroel – 1:46:00
with Rabbi Ephraim Goldfein, Esq – Senior Partner, Goldfein and Joseph – 2:17:00
with Rabbi Yaakov Rappaport, Esq – Partner, Yuspeh Rappaport Law – 2:36:00
From Headlines in Halacha, here.
BS”D
9/12/2012
How the Chareidi Community Walked Right into the Trap Set For It, and How Well-Meaning People Enabled That to Happen
Or
How In Two Short Weeks We Went From A Few Kooks** to “The Torah Disrespects Women –It Is Wrong To Have Separate Gym Hours” to ‘How Come There Aren’t Women Models In The Windows Of the New Kenyon Ramot ‘ to an MK Pulling His Bill To Have Chillul Shabbos – Free Electricity
* 1) A suckerpunch primarily involves a closed fist contacting the soft underbelly of a person (beneath the rib cage) at a high velocity, causing the ensuing force to press upward on the victim’s diaphragm, leading to a sudden expulsion of air from the victim’s mouth and lungs. This opening blow leaves the victim open to various other attacks because of the defenseless nature of the victim.
2) A punch that takes someone by surprise, a punch coming from out of the blue.
3) When someone punches you and you didn’t even know you were fighting.
(Urban Dictionary)
**A person regarded as strange, eccentric, foolish, or insane.
(dictionary.com)
NOTE:
This essay was written for members of BTYA. Its purpose is not to convince anyone that what I am writing is correct, nor is it meant to change anyone’s mind. In fact, Chazal warn us
כשם שמצוה לאמר דבר הנשמע, כך מצוה שלא לאמר דבר שאינו נשמע (יבמות סה ע”ב)
and there is no greater dovor she’aino nishma than an opinion in the present raging controversy which differs from yours. Certainly, it is a dovor she’aino nishma to those who are not truth-seekers, whose purpose is to sow controversy and fan the flames and make sure that Israeli society is anything but united*
*See Caroline Glick’s ‘Is Israeli Society Unraveling?’ in the Jerusalem Post, posted Jan. 2,2012, and Moshe Feiglin’s על מה נריב בשבוע הבא in Maariv online posted 6 Teves,5772(go to mflikud.co.il and search for it)
This essay is merely my answer to members of my shul who have asked me my opinion. This is the answer. This is my opinion. That is all it purports to be, nothing more. My opinion, written for the members of BTYA who have asked me for it.
I – The Methodology
II – Clarifying Points
III – Antidote
IV – Answers To ‘But………
I – The Methodology
When the media in Medinas Yisrael and its cohorts have a target, whether the target is targeted due to ideological reasons (left vs. right…. peaceniks vs. settlers) or for religious ones (secular vs. dati…. dati vs. chareidi), even if it is not necessarily an enemy per se, just some group that the media and its cohorts have decided to ‘go after’, maybe it’s a slow news season, maybe there is an election in two years and the present ruling party is decidedly Chareidi, the modus operandi in attacking that entity takes on a well – defined behavioral pattern:
*E.g. A woman well-known in leftist secular circles gets on a bus designated for ultra-chareidim [who desire to travel with hafrada between the sexes], one which travels from chareidi neighborhood to chareidi neighborhood, one set up at the behest of Egged which wants the ultra-chareidi business and does not want that the ultra-Chareidim set up their own private bus lines; this woman had to disregard the regular bus lines which were available to her and closer to her home in order to get onto the Mehadrin bus – leading one to suspect that perhaps there was more than a little bit of intentional provocation on that bus).
The victim now seems defenseless (see front cover about the suckerpunch): if he does not follow along,” ‘Gotcha! ’, you agree with what they are doing!! “And if he publicly and loudly does condemn them as a member of the targeted group, he helps perpetrate the fiction that he and those like him are part of that group (the perpetrators), since whoever is NOT part of that group of malefactors is not asked to condemn them (and for obvious reasons — why should anyone not associated with the group have to condemn the deranged behavior of a few kooks? *) — thus, suckerpunched!!!
*) And if at any point in time this does happen, which it is bound to, it will already be weeks and months after the original demands which were specifically made on the targeted group, weeks and months after all sorts of implications have been drawn [as will be shown, and as have already occurred], and so it is clearly simply a case of trying to tidy up after the damage has already been done — locking the barn door after the horse is gone, or in this case, after you’ve stolen the horse.
And the ‘spokesmen’ say: Well, you see, there are “good” members of the targeted group, and “bad” members (e.g. good chareidim and bad chareidim; to the Arabs we might say–good Jews (Tel Avivians) and bad Jews (settlers); for the British at the time of the Mandate we say—there are good educated sophisticated Jews (from Western Europe) and uncouth disheveled simple-minded ones (from Eastern Europe)…
And the actions were perpetrated by the “bad” members, but we, the ‘spokesmen’, represent the “good” members.
This foolishly accepts the idea that the aberrant behavior somehow stems from the core values of the entire group—suckerpunched!
THIS IS PRECISELY WHAT HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR THE LAST FEW WEEKS ALL OVER MEDINAS ISRAEL.
And from there, of course, we move on to open season, usually in blogs:
“Why do you (the Chareidim) beat your children? Why do you not care about sexual abuse of children? Why do you maltreat women, terrorize children, and embezzle tzedaka money, live parasitic lives, and price-gouge through unnecessary hechsherim?? Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Have you stopped beating your husband yet?” A line is drawn connecting the original stupid, illegal, unethical, etc. behavior to beating children, and all sorts of abuse, and then to all sorts of weird, deviant behavior.
SUCKERPUNCHED!
And as surely as Lucy will jerk away that football and Charlie Brown will once again summersault backwards and fall on his back staring at the sky and wondering what happened , the more we “explain”, the worse it gets. As the father of a good friend of mine liked to describe, in explanation of this kind of behavior, “I can’t understand it. I cut this rope twice and it’s still too short!!”
II—Clarifying Points (in no particular order)
III – The Solution
(First of all, lose the urge, the need, to be loved. Work on it. Learn Sha’ar Yichud Hamaaseh! As for chillul HaShem, see Part IV).
When asked to comment, the answer should be “You are only asking me what I think because you have, or want to promote, a premise about Chareidim. I reject the very premise, and thus I have nothing to say. I will treat your request for comment as any proud Jew would treat a request to comment about Bernard Madoff, as any proud Italian would treat a request to comment about a Mafia murder. The minute I respond to your request, I’ve bought into your narrative, and have allowed myself to be suckerpunched! Sorry, I am not playing the game! Come to live in RBSA or RBSB for 3 days, and you will see that you are under a terribly wrong misconception, due to sensationalist reporting. I will not perpetuate that by treating it as anything more than what it is — a few kooks, who, instead of visiting Iran to deny the Holocaust, and to plan the dissolution of the State of Israel, have found something else to do. And whoever does not realize this is fooling himself, and therefore has a responsibility to clarify an obvious truth.”
I would add — “Please arrest any perpetrators committing a crime, make a 200-meter, 300, whatever it takes, “order-of-protection”, do whatever you, the police, know what and how to do to maintain the public order and civility (and they know how to do plenty when they want to).”
(As an example of what one should not do, very well-meaning people went to a ‘non-violence rally’ which turned out to be an anti-Torah rally led by the new Shinui party and funded by New Israel Fund.)
(By the way, when I was asked by people if they should go davka “as chareidim”, I said they should go davka not as Chareidim!)
IV – But…..
Sadly, this is a problem, a big one. But step one is to realize that it is not a problem we have created, and so the onus of a solution is not necessarily our responsibility (though it certainly behooves us to implement a solution were we to have one). Let me give a moshol: When a person is forced to go to secular court to pursue his monetary claims because the defendant refuses to go to a Bais Din — all the horrible terrible things it says in Shulchan Aruch about going to secular court, including the great chillul HaShem caused, is still true. Why then does one usually receive permission from the Bais Din to pursue such a course of action in such a case? The answer is that then, the onus of the chillul HaShem caused is not on the person who is going to the courts, though it seemingly should It is on the real cause of the chillul HaShem, on the person who refused to go to a Bais Din! In our case, the onus is on the actions of the kooks (thugs) and also, and perhaps more so , on those who publicized it out of proportion to its significance, and made it into a Chareidi issue! Not on the victims of the suckerpunch!
Now, certainly, if there is something I can do to undermine and to uproot a chillul HaShem, I should do it. That is elementary. But when my opinion has very little chance of reaching the people who think the worst of us (thanks to the media and its cohorts); when it will appear in a venue which is read by like-minded people, making it basically ‘preaching to the choir’ (whoops, wrong religion!); when it will be drowned out in a sea of competing noise; when there is a cacophony of babble out there — and most of all, when there is at least the very real risk of inviting the consequences of which I have spoken, it would be wise to heed the words of Chazal in Berachos 63A: “If you are living in a generation where the words of Torah ( i.e. words of truth) are not cherished, gather them in (as opposed to spreading them out)” … and Rashi explains: “And do not allow the words of Torah (i.e. of truth) to be left out there, to be humiliated.” ודו”ק
If a Jew kills someone, and some non-Jews in North Carolina or Kentucky choose to believe that this act is representative of all Jews — and the media is in a full-court press perpetuating that myth, and no less than the heads of Murder Inc. and the Mafia [Talk to the wives of some of those people lecturing religious Jewry, ודי לחכימא ברמיזא] giving very impassioned speeches about the sordidness of Judaism — I submit to you that it is the height of foolishness to try to explain otherwise.
It is a bit of American naiveté to think “If we only explain to them the beauty of Torah….” Yeah, and if we only get out of Lebanon, if we only get out of Gaza, if we only give up all territories, then there will be peace. “Been there, done that.
The minute I respond to a request to address the issue, so that the ‘public’ can hear what a “moderate chareidi Rabbi” holds, I’ve bought into your narrative, and have allowed myself to be suckerpunched! Sorry, I am not playing the game.
In closing, we would all do well to emulate Howard Roark, hero of THE FOUNTAINHEAD:
“Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.”
“But I don’t think of you.”
— Ellsworth Toohey and Howard Roark, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
THE END
A very large literature has built up over the past several decades in the area of so-called “happiness research.” Such research is based on several very dubious assumptions: namely, that utility is cardinal and measurable after all; that interpersonal utility comparisons can therefore be made; and that the great unicorn of economic theory — the “social welfare function” — has finally been spotted. Armed with these assertions, socialists around the world believe they have finally discovered their holy grail. Now that governments supposedly know with “scientific certainty” what constitutes “happiness,” there can be no argument (or so they think) against virtually unlimited government intervention in the name of creating happiness.
Affluence is actually a disease that generates massive unhappiness, says the Australian author of a popular book in this field, entitled Affluenza. The government of Brazil is in the process of enshrining this notion into its constitution, and similar movements exist in Great Britain and other countries.
These assumptions rest on the proclamation that public-opinion surveys are sufficient measures of cardinal utility. The economists who make such assumptions studiously ignore all of the reasons why economists have disavowed such practices — especially the notion of demonstrated preference — for generations. As Murray Rothbard explained in his essay, “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,”
The concept of demonstrated preference is simply this: that actual choice reveals, or demonstrates, a man’s preferences; that is, that his preferences are deducible from what he has chosen in action. Thus, if a man chooses to spend an hour at a concert rather than a movie, we deduce that the former was preferred, or ranked higher on his value scale. … This concept of preference, rooted in real choices, forms the keystone of the logical structure of economic analysis, and particularly of utility and welfare analysis.
Rothbard continued to explain the folly of relying on public opinion surveys, as opposed to the actual demonstrated preferences of economic decision makers:
One of the most absurd procedures based on a constancy assumption [i.e., the false assumption that people never alter their preferences] has been the attempt to arrive at a consumer’s preference scale not through observed real action, but through quizzing him by questionnaires. In vacuo, a few consumers are questioned at length on which abstract bundle of commodities they would prefer to another abstract bundle, and so on. Not only does this suffer from the constancy error, no assurance can be attached to the mere questioning of people when they are not confronted with the choices in actual practice. Not only will a person’s valuation differ when talking about them from when he is actually choosing, but there is also no guarantee that he is telling the truth.
The one economist who is arguably the leader in the field of “happiness research” (at least among economists) is Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich. When I asked him at a conference in Prague several years ago about the age-old criticisms of replacing actual demonstrated preferences with questionnaires, his response was that his “data” were no worse than GDP data. As bad and as unreliable as GDP data are, “happiness research” questionnaire data are at least no worse, he said.
But in fact, much of the happiness-research data are much, much worse.
European socialists in fields outside of economics have gone even further with their research of “happiness.” A bestseller in Europe is The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The book is an excellent example of the misuse and abuse of statistics by these two British epidemiologists. It is an abuse of statistics because the entire book is a fishing expedition for simple correlations between the degree of material “inequality” in a country and myriad other variables. Wilkinson and Pickett don’t even attempt the use of multiple-regression analysis, as is typical in their own field, in economics, and elsewhere. Consequently, they arrive at contrived statistical conclusions that greater material equality in a country supposedly leads to improvements in community life, mental health, drug use, physical health, obesity rates, intelligence, teenage births, recycling, violence, imprisonment, social mobility, dysfunctionality, anxiety, and self esteem. (One critic of this research mocked its abuse of statistical methods by presenting a scatter diagram that purportedly showed a positive correlation between recycling and suicide, suggesting that the more one recycles, the more likely that one will commit suicide!)
According to these scientific-sounding conclusions (which have been lavishly praised by politicians, of course), the people of the former Soviet Union must have been the happiest people on earth, since the pursuit of equality was always the pronounced objective of socialism. As F.A. Hayek wrote in the 1976 edition of The Road to Serfdom, socialism was originally defined as government ownership of the means of production, and then changed to mean the redistribution of income and wealth through the auspices of the welfare state and progressive income taxation. In each case, “equality” was the ultimate end; only the means changed over time.
Happiness researchers make no mention at all of the long-recognized deleterious effects of welfare statism, including destruction of the work ethic, family breakup, the growth of dysfunctional citizens who are paid by the state to remove themselves from the work force, etc.
Bruno Frey is no socialist, but the area of research that he champions is being very enthusiastically embraced by interventionists, socialists, and would-be central planners within the economics profession. Frey himself explained this in his June 2002 survey article in the Journal of Economic Literature entitled “What Can Economists Learn from Happiness Research?” (with Alois Stutzer). Among the things economists can learn from this strange branch of psychology, Frey and Stutzer approvingly report, are the following:
“Happiness functions have sometimes been looked at as the best existing approximation to a social-welfare function. It seems that, at long last, the so far empirically empty social welfare maximization … is given a new lease on life.”
Interpersonal utility comparisons have also been resurrected, supposedly proving that “social happiness” can be created by the state’s theft of one person’s income and the redistribution of it to another (while keeping a tidy sum for “administrative expenses”).