Most people make a distinction between what people believe to be true and what is actually true. I accept Richard Rorty‘s claim that this distinction is not useful. Because our view is in the minority, I’d like to reframe this discussion of truth in a way that is broadly accepted.
I’d like to consider propositions that are currently highly uncertain, but where scientific progress is likely to lead to a broad consensus in the future. Now Rortians like me and normal people can agree on a useful distinction. In this case it’s the distinction between things currently regarded as likely to be true with varying degrees of probability, and things that will be broadly accepted as true (or false) at some specified date in the future, as new information comes in.
For instance, let’s consider a question that was once uncertain but is now widely accepted. Consider what would have happened in 2008 if people were asked, “Will the Large Hadron Collider staff announce the discovery of a Higgs boson within 10 years. Please give us a probability value for the likelihood of this announcement.” (In fact, the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012; or at least it was announced, for you conspiracy buffs.)
I’d like you to consider how much faith we should have in answers provided by each of the following 4 groups, back in 2008.
1. Average individuals. (Individual truth)
2. The average probability provided by all individuals. (Democratic truth.)
3. The average probability provided by all PhD physicists (Expert truth)
4. The price of a Higgs boson futures contract that pays $1 if a Higgs boson is discovered within 10 years, and $0 otherwise. (Market truth)
I view these 4 types of truth as a reasonable summary of the options. In our society, various choices are delegated to various groups. Choices about what shoes to buy are made by individuals, the choice of President is made democratically, monetary policy is made by experts, whereas asset price values are determined by markets.
I suspect that most economists believe that Expert Truth is best when you are trying to figure out the probability of a Higgs boson discovery. I do not agree. I believe that market truth is almost always the most reliable method of identifying the truth.
Of course in any single case there’s lot of luck involved. If physicists said there was a 53% chance and markets implied a 48% chance, then the outcome of that single Higgs boson prediction experiment would tell us very little. But you can imagine hundreds of such experiments. Earlier questions might have included: “How many moons will Voyager discover around Saturn?” Or, “Will a mammal be cloned within 10 years?” Today we could ask, “What is the probability that sea levels will rise by at least 3 feet by 2100?” Or, “What is the probability of a 8.0 or greater earthquake in California within 20 years?” Etc., etc.
With hundreds of such questions, a “horse race” between markets and expert opinion would be quite interesting. I believe that markets would come out slightly ahead. Not because traders are smarter that scientists, rather because markets would incorporate all useful information, including the appropriate weight to put on each experts opinion, as well as any bias that might occur on politically charged questions.
Most economists do not agree with me. Although they teach the efficient markets hypothesis in class, they prefer that monetary policy be set by the FOMC, not an NGDP futures market. They also accept the criticism (from Queen Elizabeth) that our inability to predict the 2008 financial crisis was a black eye for the economics profession, whereas I noticed that the markets also failed to predict the crisis, and hence don’t believe that economists should accept any blame for not seeing the crisis coming.
Richard Rorty famously said, “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying.” Which I gather means that claims are regarded as true when they are broadly accepted by the public. But which public? Everyone? College professors who are Rorty’s peers?
For me, the most useful types of truth are the beliefs revealed in market prices. Markets are giant engines for generating true statements about the world—the most efficient truth engines ever discovered. Markets are especially useful in economics. It’s possible that nature will never reveal to philosophers the answer to basic questions about God, free will, consciousness, etc., but we economists are bombarded with interesting new data points almost every day. While the data measure the underlying reality with some imprecision, they are obviously useful enough to move asset prices. We’d really like to know the level of NGDP in the first quarter of 2021 as estimated by the BEA (with all its flaws), and an NGDP futures market is the best way to estimate that future BEA announcement.
What are we to make of the fact that there are currently no subsidized prediction markets for 2021 NGDP, or the 2050 sea level rise? I recall that Robin Hanson is as cynical as Jack Nicholson on that question:
I also believe that markets are the best way to answer moral questions. Thus the best way to figure out whether eating meat is immoral is not to read lots of books on moral philosophy (although that might have some value). Rather we need a prediction market on the probability that meat consumption in the US (taken from live animals) will be banned by 2100. Ditto for abortion. The same logic applies to aesthetics. Which films will be on the top 100 lists of film critics in 2100?
For paintings, the market already provides a sort of prediction, as explained by Tyler Cowen. Yes, one could argue that Tyler slightly overstates his case, as the “question” is not precisely specified. Paintings can have historical value that is separate from aesthetics—consider the recent Da Vinci that sold for $450 million. But I believe that Tyler is broadly correct.
Some people distinguish between scientific truth and moral “opinions”. I don’t. We can be more confident that murder will still be regarded as wrong in the year 2119 than we can be that current models of quantum mechanics and relativity will still be true 100 years from now.
PS. Each year the blogger Scott Alexander gives probabilities on a wide range of outcomes, and then a year later evaluates the results. As far as I recall, the outcomes do positively correlate with the probabilities that he assigns. I believe that the 538 website does something similar.
PPS. I would not rule out that some individual forecasters would usually beat the democratic forecast. For instance, Bryan Caplan almost always wins his bets. But the average individual forecast is probably inferior to the average forecast of all individuals.
PPPS. For those who never saw the movie, Jack says, “You can’t handle the truth!” But I knew that even though I never saw the film. I hope your knowledge of pop culture is not even worse than mine.
READER COMMENTS
Philo
May 1 2019 at 1:03pm
Not good. “Individual truth”, “democratic truth, “expert truth,” “market truth”? It simply darkens counsel to say “truth” when you mean “opinion”; these words are not synonyms.
You are right that markets should be relied on more extensively, but they are not useful for some questions—for example, in mathematics or in morals.
Mark Z
May 1 2019 at 6:31pm
“I believe that market truth is almost always the most reliable method of identifying the truth.”
Per your perspective, doesn’t the market determine the truth, not identify it?
With respect to market pricing though, I’m not sure I’d disagree that the market is either creating or generating a truth. For any good, there are as many prices as there are people willing to purchase that good at a finite price. My subjective valuation of the good isn’t proven ‘untrue’ by the market reaching a different price.
On moral questions, I think your position is is indistinguishable from (or rather, shares all the premises for, and no additional ones to justify a different conclusion) moral nihilism. The raw material of a market is the revealed subjective preferences of participants. Morality or immorality is either 1) decided beforehand, where preferences can be moral or immoral (e.g., the revealed preference to enslave one’s neighbor), or 2) a preference derives its morality from the frequency with which… people who happen to exist today share that preference, which I guess is your position? But this reasoning is circular: why would meat be banned by 2100? Because people came to believe it’s immoral. Why is it immoral? Because people believe it’s immoral. A closed loop. Nothing is demonstrated. You’d have to actually argue that there’s some moral reason why we should obey the majority, as opposed to a sacred text or one’s own intuition. That consensus opinion determines or is identical with what is moral is itself a moral supposition.
And I think your argument regarding aesthetics is pretty much absurd. I eat food that I enjoy. If I don’t enjoy a particular kind of food, but most people do, I don’t eat what the majority prefers. If I only bought food for its exchange value, maybe I’d care about what the market thinks, but for consumption, I’m just a subjectivist who heeds only his own preferences, as well I should be. After all, if everyone deferred to consensus irrespective of his own preferences, consensus would reflect no one’s subjective preferences, and therefore be useless.
Charlie
May 1 2019 at 7:02pm
“I also believe that markets are the best way to answer moral questions. Thus the best way to figure out whether eating meat is immoral is not to read lots of books on moral philosophy (although that might have some value).”
The market highlights preference, not morals. It’s an important distinction. Not every transaction is made considering its moral implications. Individuals may not even be aware of the moral implications of their actions. The market is an amalgamation of irrational individuals with asymmetric information.
David Henderson
May 1 2019 at 7:56pm
Scott,
You write:
That’s incorrect. All the prediction market will tell you is the probability that meat consumption will be banned. It can’t tell you what’s moral.
Nick D
May 3 2019 at 11:33am
you could interpret this as “what do the majority of people think is moral” on the premise that what most people think is moral often becomes law.
If i were required to bet on things being banned or not in 100 years, there are many things i would bet with >50% probability that are banned or still banned that i do not consider to be immoral.
Benjamin Cole
May 1 2019 at 10:02pm
I think I agree with this post, although I also think a Higgs boson is a new breed of American bison.
Yes, in the end markets determine morality—I think.
If slavery makes a comeback, and is successfully integrated into the American capitalist system (this is not far-fetched, it already happened before) then is slavery moral?
It would be, by people in future markets who think slavery is a moral and necessary adjunct to capitalism. They would control the bulk of the media, and contend as much.
Bedarz Iliachi
May 2 2019 at 1:44am
I wonder about the people likely to participate in the prediction markets.
Aren’t they more likely to be experts themselves?
Scott Sumner
May 2 2019 at 3:51am
Philo, You said:
“It simply darkens counsel to say “truth” when you mean “opinion”; these words are not synonyms.”
There is no meaningful distinction between saying “X is immoral” and saying “I regard X as immoral.”
I’ve never heard anyone, ever, say “X is immoral, but I don’t regard X as immoral.” What would that even mean?
When people say something is true, they mean they regard it as true. In that case, there are different senses in which people can regard something as true. As individuals, as a majority, as experts, and as a market outcome.
Mark, You said:
“Per your perspective, doesn’t the market determine the truth, not identify it?”
No, I’d say the market predicts things like future cash flows; it doesn’t determine those cash flows. Thus a prediction market on the presidential election doesn’t determine the election, it predicts it.
Charlie, I think you missed the point.
David, Of course it can’t tell us with certainty, but I believe it provides our “best guess” as to the truth.
Ben, When people say, “The public believes X, but ‘not X’ is actually true” they probably mean, “the public currently believes X, but in the long run people will realize that ‘not X’ is true.
Bedarz, Sometimes, but not always.
Weir
May 2 2019 at 7:51am
If you never see Endgame or Happy Days or even Godot you could probably still bluff your way through some chitchat about Beckett just with bits and pieces you picked up here and there.
“Nothing happens, twice.”
“Nothing happens, nobody goes, it’s awful.”
You could get away with it. And that’s important. You could keep the conversation going.
But Rorty goes further, and complicates things more than necessary. Call it the coincidence theory of truth.
Because, by some weird coincidence, the guy who can get away with saying this or that also just happens to be the guy who can point to the text of the actual plays.
The more you know about Beckett’s plays, the more you can get away with. In which case there really is something to know, isn’t there? The plays are out there and they either do or do not correspond to what people say about them. So what’s wrong with saying that these words correspond with that reality?
For example, you could talk about Beckett jumping the shark with Not I. And if you know the play fairly well you could make a convincing case in support. And if you know it really well, back to front, then you’d be more convincing still. Because there’s something to know.
Jonathan H Seed
May 2 2019 at 9:30am
Not to be nit-picky given we are on the same side here, but I think you should acknowledge the real role of predictive markets when taking into account risk. True, a market will best guide us as to how many beans are in the jar or the weight of a steer, but a forward contract on the S&P 500 or on corn tells us nothing about the markets prediction of either. Why? Forward market dont take into account risk. Markets only act as true indicators of probability in a risk-neutral world, no problem for beans in a jar where there is no risk on being wrong. Rules of no arbitrage assures it (to a degree).
If a NGDP market existed, the first thing I’d do, and likely many other, is short it to protect my stock market exposure this distorting it’s predictive powers. If it’s risk premium stayed constant, we could eventually factor that in, but there is very little evidence that risk premiums stay constant.
Still, a market would be better than nothing, so I applaud your effort, just am wary of overselling its power.
See https://alphaarchitect.com/2018/12/28/warren-buffett-is-wrong-about-options-except/ for a longer discussion.
J Mann
May 2 2019 at 10:08am
Two quick thoughts:
1) It’s a fairly obvious area of study to compare the results of expert prediction and market prediction in sports, where we have robust activity in each front. Are there any useful insights from that?
2) Maybe we’re getting caught up in the Rortian/normal person split, but I think the issue of market predictions on moral questions is a little different.
– I agree that the market is probably the best predictor of what moral opinions will be in 2100, or laws, or whatever specific question you’re pricing.
– I’m not sure that prediction is useful in answering most moral questions. If I’m trying to decide whether to be a vegetarian, the fact that it’s likely that most people will be vegetarian in 2100 is of only marginal interest to me.
— First, future people will exist in different circumstances. They will probably be richer, they will probably have access to better meat substitutes.
— Even if the question is whether those future people will find present meat eating me to be morally horrifying, so what? They don’t know me, they didn’t experience life in my circumstances., and that’s an argument from popularity anyway.
— And ultimately, the first thing in moral questions is to find out your framework and try to fit facts into it. It’s possible a given person will decide that their moral framework is “the majority moral opinion in the future is the correct basis for morality,” but it’s not necessary or even IMHO particularly likely.
Insaiyan
May 2 2019 at 11:11am
Truth, usefulness, and Rorty are an amusing topic for me. While I’ve never found any of Rorty’s argument’s persuasive, he was once extremely useful for me. When I was taking a class in logic, one of our running assignments would be discussions of classical logical fallacies. Affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent, kettle logic, begging questions, fallacy of division, fallacy of the illicit minor, etc. Every week there would be an assignment that described a series of logical fallacies and we’d have to find examples of them being used. In this, Rorty was extremely useful to me – often I could finished an entire assignment within a few minutes of opening any of his books. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth in particular was a treasure trove.
Bob Murphy
May 2 2019 at 11:22am
Scott,
I have to agree with David on this one. Right now you don’t think smoking pot is immoral (right?), even though it’s still illegal in many places.
I think you would say, “Right, and that’s why I predict that over time, it will become more and more legalized.” But there, I think that’s simply an implication of your underlying view–the *reason* you think it will be gradually legalized, is that you think more and more people will come to agree with your own view on its morality.
J Mann
May 2 2019 at 2:16pm
I think what Scott means by “moral” in this context is “will be considered immoral by Americans at a given point in the future.” The way he pairs it with aesthetics is IMHO instructive.
My concern is that I don’t see how “what are the Americans of 2100 likely to consider moral” a useful question. If I am deciding today whether I should eat meat or perform an abortion or impose a speech limitation , how does it help me to know what the Americans of 2100 are most likely to think about that action? Why should I privilege their moral opinion over that of the Americans of 3100 AD, or the Incas of 500 BC for that matter?
Scott clearly doesn’t conform his own moral opinions to the majority moral opinion of 2019, so I assume he’s not inclined to change his moral opinions upon learning what the majority opinion in 2100 is likely to be.
I guess on some Rortian level, we can say that the “answers to moral questions” just means whatever most people think it means, but then we need a new phrase for the framework by which we decide what goals we think we should base our own personal decisions around and possibly advocate others to base their decisions around. I’d further submit the meaning of that new phrase is what most people understand the existing phrase “the answers to moral questions” to mean.
Scott Sumner
May 2 2019 at 5:06pm
J Mann, Here it’s useful to distinguish between inside and outside views. If you believe in the wisdom of crowds, then you might believe that the outcome of an election is the best guess as to what is true. But elections only work if each voter independently forms an opinion on this, based on their own information. Thus my “inside view” of issues is often different from what a majority of Americans believes, and I vote to add my 2 cents worth to the process. I don’t just look at opinion polls, see what’s popular, and then vote that way.
But my outside view is that I’m not special and that the majority view is, on average, more correct than the individual opinion.
J Mann
May 3 2019 at 9:41am
Thanks, I appreciate the response! For what it’s worth, I agree that:
(1) if you subscribe to the wisdom of crowds on moral questions, it might make sense to try to live your life by majority moral opinion rather than your inside moral opinion, on the theory that the moral position most likely to be correct is the position chosen by the crowd, and
(2) if you believe that the wheel of progress generally moves forward, it might make sense to try to live your life by the predicted majority moral opinion of 2100 rather than the majority moral opinion of 2019.
but I have some quibbles:
(a) If you don’t try to resolve personal moral questions using majority moral opinion when it conflicts with your inside view, I question in what sense you are stating that the majority provides the answers to moral questions.
(b) I’m concerned that using predicted future moral opinions as a moral touchstone introduces some variance. I agree that a functional prediction market would be the best prediction of what the people in 2100 will think about eating meat, but there’s still a tremendous amount of variance. By contrast, I think we can get a much more accurate (but still obviously not perfect) view of current majority moral opinion.
I assume there’s a philosopher someplace doing the math, but do we think the majority moral opinion of 2100 is so much superior to the MMO of 2019 that the decreased confidence of our prediction is worth the increased accuracy of the moral opinion we are predicting? (And if so, there’s an interesting exercise in figuring out what date we should be predicting – presumably there is a specific date where the marginal increased difficulty of prediction outweighs the marginal increased wisdom of future moralists).
(c) There’s a recursion problem. Do most people think that the best way to determine morality is to accept the majority moral opinion on a future date? If not, doesn’t your heuristic indicate you are probably wrong on whether to use predicted future majority moral opinion to answer moral questions?
** My intuition is that most people use a combination of their rationalized self-interest, their inside moral view and the current majority view of their ingroup, but this may be complicated if they select their ingroup based on their inside moral view or something covariant with it. I don’t think people include outgroups in their majority moral view calculation, and while future views probably have some impact, I’m not sure it’s that significant.
Scott Sumner
May 3 2019 at 7:11pm
J Mann, Recall my comment on Bryan Caplan. To some extent the answer may depend on the expertise of the individual. The average individual is not smarter than the crowd, but the typical scientist may know more about something like evolution than the average opinion of all voters.
I’m not sure it make sense to talk about the democratic view on prediction markets, when less than 1% of people know what prediction markets are.
I don’t believe that I have any special expertise on eating meat, abortion, or many other issues. But I do have above average expertise on prediction markets.
J Mann
May 2 2019 at 2:17pm
When I said “will be considered immoral,” I meant “will be considered moral” – many apologies.
Bob Murphy
May 2 2019 at 11:26am
Another thing–and this is more of a quibble, I’m sure you could patch this up with some tweaking–but morality and legality are not the same thing, in just about anybody’s book. It’s legal to cheat on your spouse, even though most people think it’s immoral. There are tons of examples of things that most people would agree are immoral, even though most people would also say they shouldn’t be illegal. (E.g. heroin addiction for libertarians.)
Scott Sumner
May 2 2019 at 4:59pm
Weir, You said
“So what’s wrong with saying that these words correspond with that reality?”
Of course you are free to say your beliefs correspond with “reality”, but it doesn’t get you anywhere. Rorty has a critique of traditional epistemology—it’s simply not useful. There is no methodological recipe for showing what is “actually true”.
If I say “I am almost certain that Paris is the capital of France”, it adds absolute nothing of value if I add “And in fact Paris actually is the capital of France.” I’ve already described my beliefs, and the strength in which I hold them. What’s the value added in talking about “actual reality”. We are always talking about our beliefs (or society’s beliefs), held with varying degrees of confidence. There’s nothing more that can usefully be said.
Jonathan, You said:
“If a NGDP market existed, the first thing I’d do, and likely many other, is short it to protect my stock market exposure this distorting it’s predictive powers. If it’s risk premium stayed constant, we could eventually factor that in, but there is very little evidence that risk premiums stay constant.”
I don’t agree. If “many others” wanted to do this, an NGDP futures market would exist. It doesn’t exist because very few people have any interest in hedging against NGDP risk.
In an case, while a risk premium in an NGDP futures market might be of interest to finance professors, it would be far too small to be of macroeconomic significance. That’s doubly true for the time variation in any risk premium.
J Mann, You said:
“First, future people will exist in different circumstances. They will probably be richer, they will probably have access to better meat substitutes.
Even if the question is whether those future people will find present meat eating me to be morally horrifying, so what? They don’t know me, they didn’t experience life in my circumstances., and that’s an argument from popularity anyway.”
This is true of many moral questions. We tend to think war, slavery, torture, etc., are evil, but earlier societies might claim they are evil for us but not for them. Conditions were different a few hundred years ago. I have trouble seeing a justification of slavery under any conditions, but war could be justified in a Malthusian world of starvation, and torture might be justified where prisons were too expensive to maintain. My point here is not to try to justify any of these things, simply to point out that the point you raise is a problem for almost any moral position.
Thus you are correct that what is moral may change over time.
Nonetheless, I believe that when people say “society believes X, but Y is actually true” they usually in the back of their minds mean “society believes X, but I predict that society will eventually see that Y is true.” Although in fairness some may have a concept like “I believe that God views Y as actually true.” One way to think of reality is as the God’s eye view—something I tend to gloss over, not being religious.
Bob, You said:
“I think that’s simply an implication of your underlying view–the *reason* you think it will be gradually legalized, is that you think more and more people will come to agree with your own view on its morality.”
I’d put it slightly differently. I believe it will eventually be legalized because I believe that more and more people will come to correctly understand that it should be legalized. Just as I believe that more and more people will come to correctly understand that global warming is causing the ocean levels to rise.
I agree with your second comment; that is a valid distinction. Nonetheless, I still believe my meat eating example holds. But I’d need to do more work to justify the claim, as you correctly point out.
Mark Z
May 4 2019 at 2:16am
“Nonetheless, I believe that when people say “society believes X, but Y is actually true” they usually in the back of their minds mean “society believes X, but I predict that society will eventually see that Y is true.” ”
This is clearly false. Most people’s assessment of the morality of eradicating people for belonging to certain ethnicities would not, I expect, be affected if I managed to convince them that people in the future would believe it is moral. The would simply believe future generations were terribly immoral. Most people believe that morality is invariant to what consensus thinks (or will think) is moral. Most people aren’t closet Rortians.
You might argue that many people believe that what is moral will ‘win’ in the end, but that is not the same thing as what you’re arguing; it’s the opposite. You believe that what is moral is moral either because most people believe it’s moral today or will believe it’s moral at some point in the future (I’d ask when in the futureL in 100 years? 500 years? Is your goal to have the same beliefs as whoever happens to be around when the Sun explodes and extinguishes sentient life? Or do you think humanity is asymptotically approaching some set of beliefs after which they will cease to change?). Most people who have a progressive view of history, rather, believe that those with the correct moral beliefs succeed because their beliefs are correct. The morality of the belief is prior to, and causative of, its success. This is what ‘the arc of history bends toward justice’ means. Otherwise they’d say ‘the arc of justice bends toward history.’
Weir
May 2 2019 at 11:43pm
Traditional epistemology is tribal epistemology. Closed. Cut off. Cohesive. Coherent.
The tribal mindset on campus is as useful as it always has been in binding together its adherents. On campus they call themselves progressives, but earlier tribes mostly called themselves “the human beings” in their different dialects.
What all these tribes have in common is that, by closing themselves off from criticism and debate and from rational thought, they make progress impossible. They don’t want to go anywhere. They want to keep their rigid, stagnant system intact.
So they circle their wagons against outside agitators who say offensive things like, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” John Milton would never be allowed to give a commencement address in front of today’s illiberal, reactionary administrators and students and teachers.
Traditional epistemology is like traditional economics, meaning the economics of the small, stagnant village or the stagnant feudal hierarchy or the stagnant eurozone. No growth, no competition, no innovation. Just the one central power with its impenetrable, unquestionable ideology.
Rorty didn’t believe that his kind of socialism was a regressive throwback to something entirely familiar from history, and he didn’t believe that his kind of pragmatism was a similarly ancient and primitive and traditional superstition about how knowledge works. But his beliefs were false.
False but, at the same time, perfectly useful in giving its adherents a sense of meaning and collective purpose, enforcing conformity and blocking change, arresting progress by silencing dissent and silencing those doubts that dissenters inspire in others.
Bedarz Iliachi
May 3 2019 at 3:10am
Scott,
You write above at 4:59 pm that
What is correctly doing here? Are you not smuggling in absolute or God’eye morality?
Scott Sumner
May 3 2019 at 7:15pm
Nothing special. I just mean that this understanding will be correct, in my view. Sort of like me saying “I predict that someday a majority of Americans will come to correctly understand that Canada is bigger than America.” That’s all I meant. But you can delete that term if you wish.
Scott Young
May 3 2019 at 1:46pm
Scott,
Progress works for some things. Science advances, and so we (probably correctly) can say that our understanding of the world is superior than Newton’s or Aristotle’s. Similarly, for future events, those who live after the event have a much better say on whether an event was going to happen or not.
But what’s doing the work here is that we largely agree that some consensuses on truth (the future compared to the past) are “better.” But how do you say whether one group of people’s truths is better than any others? Either you have to resort to saying that some objective reality exists with which truth can be compared, or you fall back on saying that what society regards as the “better” perspective is just another one of those things people belief which we regard as true if there’s enough consensus to it.
Your post makes the assumption that art which is still regarded as great 100 years hence gives them greater aesthetic value. Or that practices, if outlawed in the future, says something about whether they were moral or immoral now. But both these views contain within them the view that the future necessarily judges things more correctly than the past. Perhaps that’s the case for science or history. It may even be the case for moral judgements if you buy some kind of Pinker-esque moral progress akin to scientific progress. But aesthetic judgements don’t seem to have any mechanism to ensure greater reliability further out. The works deemed best in the future may be because of what a future aesthetic says about them (indeed, aren’t we already seeing that in the case of formerly “great” works being viewed as problematic because of more modern sensibilities?).
The comparison between different truths (now and future, expert and market, individual and democratic) is itself a kind of truth statement. So doesn’t it recursively imply that if there is no objective benchmark for it to land onto, then we’re back where we started? If you say market truth is more reliable than expert truth, but most people disagree, what is supposed to adjudicate that debate other than some reference to objective benchmarks for which market truth actually performs better?
Doesn’t your entire argument, then, depend on us being able to actually tell whether different truths (or perhaps, more accurately, different mechanisms for arriving at truth) more closely match reality? If truth is just what people believe, and people believe experts more than markets, then your claim is false by definition? Or am I misunderstanding what you’ve written?
Scott Sumner
May 3 2019 at 7:20pm
Scott, You said:
“Either you have to resort to saying that some objective reality exists with which truth can be compared”
I don’t believe in “objective” reality for either science or morals. It’s all about beliefs, held with varying degrees of confidence. But certainly progress has been made in both fields.
You said:
“So doesn’t it recursively imply that if there is no objective benchmark for it to land onto”
Yes, it does.
On prediction markets, see my reply to J Mann (7:11pm)
Mark Z
May 4 2019 at 2:21am
“But certainly progress has been made in both fields.”
How do you know this? Changes have certainly been made, but on what basis do you describe said changes as progress? Why not regress?
Scott Sumner
May 4 2019 at 7:56pm
Mark, Progress in science allows us to do more with technology. Progress with morals allows us to have a more peaceful and happy world. That’s my evidence.
If you are asking whether I am 100% certain that we are making progress, then the answer is no.
Mark Z
May 4 2019 at 2:03am
Scott,
Your use of aesthetics as analogous to morality I think betrays an error in your attribution of significance to consensus (be it democratic or market consensus) to what is fundamentally a subjective matter.
I’d bring up my example of food: I don’t eat what most people enjoy, I eat what I subjectively prefer. I think you’re basically saying that I should generally assume the market is more likely to be right than I am, because it has more information than I do, but this is false when the question is one of subjective preference. The market only tells me about the subjective preferences of others. According to your worldview, society creates rather than discovers truths, including moral and aesthetic ones. But these created truths are merely the aggregation of subjective preferences. There’s no reason why one who has a rare preference should abandon it because the market ‘disagrees’ with it. In the case of morality, if I know something is wrong, but prediction markets show most society disagrees or will disagree, what does it even mean to say that society is right and I’m wrong? You reduce morality to subjective beliefs, right? But you seem to try to salvage the distinction between matters of taste (on which individual preferences are given and consensus is irrelevant) and other matters (such as moral ones) on which we, for some reason, are supposed to defer to social consensus.
But what’s the basis for this distinction? There doesn’t seem to be any. If we abandon the distinction between what’s true and what one believes to be true, then consensus is meaningless. It tells me nothing, because (concerning morality) it doesn’t tell me anything about what I subjectively perceive to be right or wrong.
Rortianism (is this the right noun?) seems to want to live in some middle ground between abject moral subjectivism and moral absolutism, but the contention that I ought to defer to society when it contradicts my subjective perception is as much a groundless moral absolute as any other. So to is the notion that history is progressive in nature, and that what is believed to be true in later times is superior to what is believed to be true in earlier times. There’s nothing superior about the Rortian teleological view of history relative to, say, the opposite view: that history is a story of moral degradation; or the view that there is no moral significance in the directionality of history at all, and that how views change with time is morally neutral. One trend is followed by another, sometimes old trends reemerge, but there’s no reason to care what trends future generations will follow, since what trends they follow will simply change endlessly anyway; we’re not asymptotically approaching some end point.
Scott Sumner
May 4 2019 at 7:53pm
Mark, You misunderstood me. I don’t believe the subjective/objective distinction is useful, at least regarding beliefs. If you want to argue that taste in food is subjective, I won’t disagree.
James
May 4 2019 at 4:44pm
If EMH is even approximately correct, no one should be satisfied with letting economists make the decision that NGDP should be the variable to target followed by a bunch of subsequent decisions as to what the target value of NGDP should be. It is far more consistent with the EMH to let the market make ALL the choices including what variables to target, what the target values should be, what reserve ratio banks should maintain, what currency to use, etc.
Scott Sumner
May 4 2019 at 7:51pm
James, The market is not able to decide what variable to target, as they don’t control monetary policy.
James
May 6 2019 at 10:37pm
Your comment is a non-sequitur; Markets can and do choose lots of targets without controlling monetary policy. Perhaps you commented in haste.
It is true the market does not control monetary policy today. It is also true the Fed does not use a GDP futures market to target NGDP today. Changing either would be a departure from the status quo.
If you are going to argue for a policy change based on the efficiency of markets, you should favor the policy change that would do the most to increase the use of markets.
The correct answer does not involve a group of economists picking a target value for some variable. Using a market make sure the economy is adhering to a central plan is still central planning.
E. Harding
May 5 2019 at 4:16pm
Interesting.
Lorenzo from Oz
May 5 2019 at 8:09pm
For a different perspective on factuality …
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/04/post-truth-and-the-virtues-of-reality-david-shteinman/
Lorenzo from Oz
May 5 2019 at 8:10pm
I would have thought one reason why economists use a lot of maths is that no about of differences of opinion can make 2 + 2 = 4 not true.
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