Percy Bysshe Shelley … :
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.
Why Not Evidence-Based Politics?
Most of us understand that if we get sick, then evidence- based health care is more likely to heal us and keep us well than ideology- based modalities such as homeopathy or reiki.
Evidence-based health care means treatments or methods that have been repeatedly shown to work by double-blind tests, research studies and the collection of comprehensive data.
In contrast, belief in the effectiveness of non-evidence-based approaches such as homeopathy or reiki appear to be mostly based on a ‘confirmation bias’; that is, true believers will claim they have ‘evidence’, but what they really mean is that they remember the occasional cases when their ideology appeared to help (or at least coincided with a positive outcome), and ignore or forget the many more cases where it simply made no difference (or its effectiveness was statistically indistinguishable from a placebo effect).
However, whilst we by-and-large seem to accept that evidence-based medicine is the best way to look after our physical bodies, virtually all discussion of politics – how we look after our societies as a whole – seems to remain grounded in ideology.
From Plato (‘The Republic’) to Ayn Rand (‘Atlas Shrugged’), from communism to neo-liberal capitalism and anarchism, many of the most influential political ideals in history have been just that – ‘ideals’ based on philosophical convictions about what a desirable society should look like, with precious little hard practical evidence to show that they will actually produce societies that (to reveal my own ideal…) allow people to flourish and achieve their best potentials.
Part of the problem of course is that early political thinkers actually had very little hard evidence (from history or unbiased socio-economic data) to test their idealised politics against.
That is certainly no longer the case.
We now have a long history of a wide diversity of political experiments having been tried and having either failed outright (e.g., hard-line communism), or having gradually evolved into increasingly successful and stable systems (e.g., monarchy to parliamentary democracy).
Perhaps even more importantly, since the mid-Twentieth Century there has also been a virtual explosion of quantitative demographic and socio-economic data being collected in numerous societies. This is data which actually tells us which societies have been functioning better or worse on a range of objective well-being indicators (such as average incomes, employment rates, physical and mental health indicators, life expectancies, education rates, etc); and in the case of some western countries, how those indicators have changed over the century as political and economic conditions have changed.
This is immensely valuable information that was simply unavailable to virtually all of the most influential political and economic thinkers in history, including those whose ideas shaped much of modern Western political ideology such as Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx.
Learning the lessons of history
With all this information available to us, we can now do what earlier ideologues could not (and probably would not have wanted to anyway); namely we can actually look at all this evidence and see plainly which political ideologies work better or worse than others when measured against whatever criteria (ideals) we hold to characterise a better society.
To give what is to me perhaps the most obvious lesson of 20th Century history; we have learnt clearly that utopian political systems lead inevitably to repressive totalitarian states.
Since the charismatic leader in such cases always “knows” with god-like certainty what is best for the people, all dissent must be eliminated lest it hinder the building of the perfect society.
However that very repression leads to stagnation, dissatisfaction and corruption which ultimately makes the utopia unworkable. George Orwell (in ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’) understood the fatal flaws in Plato’s utopian ‘Republic’, because he had actually seen something like it tried in the Soviet Union.
We saw it again and again over the past century, in Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, and we are still seeing its (hopefully) last gasp in North Korea.
Utopian ideals put into practice lead to dystopian nightmares. Better societies evolve through the evolutionary process of historical experiments, experience and learning from mistakes; they are not created from the idealised and all-encompassing philosophical constructions of any one charismatic ‘genius’.
Nonetheless we still see little evidence that actual political systems in the 21st Century are responding to the lessons that are available to be learnt from history and socio-economic evidence.
It remains as true as ever that a true political ideologue will be convinced of the utter righteousness of their guiding ideological principles and dismiss any evidence to the contrary. Thus a hard left ideologue may be convinced that the highest guiding principle must be equal distribution of resources and opportunity across all members of society, and will go to great pains to explain away the historical evidence that, in practice, this can only be fully achieved under a very authoritarian and centralised system that in actual practice results in gross inefficiencies, repression of dissent, corruption as individuals try to increase their personal benefits anyway, and a dysfunctional stagnating society which will ultimately collapse (as it did in the USSR and must surely do in the current military kleptocracy of North Korea) unless it reforms to a less rigorously-left wing ideology (as it has in China and appears to be doing in Cuba).
Similarly – and more pertinently to present day USA and Australia – the hard Right ideologue will be convinced of the utter righteousness of elevating individual freedom to the highest good (albeit what they really mean is usually the freedom to consume resources and become richer without constraint or responsibility).
The fact that this inevitably results in an increasing concentration of wealth and privilege in a small elite sector of society is typically justified by the ideology of “trickle-down economics”: the notion that the increasing wealth of an increasingly smaller elite will trickle down to the remainder of society though creation of more jobs and more opportunities as the rich expand their business opportunities (‘a rising tide lifts all boats’).
The only problem with this notion is that there is now abundant socio-economic data which demonstrates that it just hasn’t worked (as described below), which is why the Australian economist John Quiggin1 has labelled trickle-down economics a “zombie” economic idea – one that should be long dead and buried, but which somehow manages to keep shambling on nonetheless.
Beyond ideological preference – the evidence of political success or failure
We don’t have to just believe (or not) in an ideology such as “If the rich get richer, the benefits will trickle down to the poor” because it does or doesn’t appeal to our philosophical or ethical preferences. We can actually look at the outcomes of such ideologies in practice, and see what effects they have had on the societies where they have been important factors.
An important recent study, ‘The Spirit Level’ by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett2 has done just this. They analysed a wealth of socio-economic data on Western (‘First World’) countries sourced from independent authoritative sources to demonstrate that in key Western societies such as the USA and the UK, the strong trend of increasing inequality in income distribution across these societies that has occurred since the 1970s3 has been closely followed by worsening social outcomes – including poorer health outcomes such as more obesity and shorter life expectancies, increasing homicide and imprisonment rates, poorer education outcomes and less upwards social mobility – that can traced to the increasing levels of anxiety, insecurity and mistrust that are created within those societies by increasing inequality.
The same trends are evident across the full range of Western societies, with the most unequal countries (USA, UK, Portugal) having the worst socio-economic outcomes, and the most equal societies (Japan, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands) having the best outcomes4 . Interestingly the same relationship also occurs amongst the differing states of the most unequal country – the USA – with the best socio-economic indicators occurring in the more equal states such as North Dakota, and the worst indicators in the most unequal states such as Mississippi.
Two other very important lessons also emerge from Wilkinson and Pickett’s study. The first is that whilst there is a strong correlation across Western countries between the income inequality within a society and its socio-economic quality of life indicators, there is little correlation between these and the per capita income of each society.
In Wilkinson and Pickett’s analysis, this means that it is not so much the overall wealth of a society as the equality or inequality of wealth distribution within each society that determines how good life may be in each society.
The other perhaps surprising outcome is that many of the worse socio-economic indicators that are found in more unequal societies apply not only to the poorer members of those societies, but also to their more well-off members. Wilkinson and Pickett attribute this to their finding that the underlying cause of worse socio-economic indicators in more unequal countries is the higher levels of mistrust, anxiety and insecurity within those societies, which are stresses that are felt by the well-off in such societies as well as by the poor.
As Wilkinson & Pickett note, steadily rising levels of income inequality have been a chronic ill accompanying a trend towards the increasing dominance of Right wing ideologies in Western countries such as the USA, UK and Australia from the 1970s onwards.
Thomas Piketty, in his important recent book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’5 , argues that these trends are driven by the basic nature of capital, which tends to drive increasing inequality because the returns on capital tend to exceed rates of economic growth in a society, thereby increasingly favouring wealthy investors over those with less investment capacity and more dependent on employment to provide their income.
Piketty argues that without political action to curb dangerously increasing inequality the result is an undermining of democratic values by an increasingly privileged few.
The increasing power and willingness of the Murdoch media to manipulate public debate over politics and issues such as climate change in both the USA and Australia in recent years is as blatant an example of this unhealthy trend as could be imagined.
Francis Fukuyama6 , following Mancur Olson’s argument in ‘The Rise and Decline of Nations’ (1982), has recently argued that in times of relative stability, democracies tend to accumulate ever-increasing numbers of self-interested groups and economic elites whose interest in maintaining and expanding their privileges under the status quo undermines the ability of the state to change in response to changing conditions and needs.
Thus inequality tends to increase resulting in an increasingly dysfunctional society until the point is reached where a major shock occurs which forces a fundamental re-adjustment to a more equal society.
In my opinion the French Revolution was one such shock, World War II was another, and climate change (with all its associated social chaos) will be the next. This trend towards more unequal societies with increasing social dysfunction has been most marked in the USA since the 1970s, and now we have the horror of an Australian government, supported and directed by powerful elites such as the fossil fuel industry and the Murdoch media, which seems to be deliberately trying to force us further down this path in Australia.
This is particularly frustrating given that the sort of hard Right-wing political ideology that the Abbott government is trying to implement is already refuted by actual socio-economic data.
The actual evidence says that if we want a better society, then we don’t want to be more like the USA; we should instead be looking with more interest at the European social democracies (Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, etc) to see if something like their political models could work for us.These political systems achieve better socio-economic outcomes because they have found a workable compromise between the freedom demanded by Right-wing ideology and the equality demanded by Left-wing ideology.
They allow scope for individual ambition and achievement – including greater wealth – but have adequate mechanisms to prevent income inequality from becoming so extreme as to be dysfunctional7.
As John Quiggin8 notes, the experience of the 20th Century showed that a mixed economy will outperform both central planning and laissez-faire systems; the real question for a serious politician is not which approach is better, but rather what is the optimum mix of services and responsibilities that the public (government) and private (market) sectors should provide.
Why not evidence-based politics?
So why not evidence -based politics? At least part of the reason seems to be that we persist in thinking that the “right” type of political organisation is one based on the “right” values.
The only trouble is, this is just ideology: we base our choice of the ‘right’ values on philosophical convictions (or, more commonly, on simple self-interest) and are not interested in any evidence as to which values actually produce better outcomes. That is to say, the answer is basically: “because we remain fundamentally irrational”.
Although we have discovered the precious secret of rationality, and have seen its value in the many technical achievements it has led to, we still remain emotionally wedded to irrational behaviour in many areas of our lives.
Still I do think we nonetheless have at least the potential to move beyond this irrationality, albeit we manifestly still have a long way to go.
But … with a wee crisis like global climate change to spur us on, maybe we have a chance to start to move in a better direction and start to take notice of the evidence that is already plain before our eyes as to which forms of social organisation (politics) actually produce better societies.
Refs …
1 John Quiggin, 2010: “Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us”; Princeton University Press, 238 pp.
2 Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, 2010: “The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone”; Penguin Books, 375 pp.
3 See also John Quiggin, 2010: “Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us”; Princeton University Press, Chapter 1 “The Great Moderation”.
4 Rather ironically, despite the USA’s claim the be a “Land of Opportunity”, the actual data on social mobility – the ability to improve one’s economic status – shows that the USA actually has the lowest upward mobility indicators of the eight western countries for which relevant data is available, and moreover that upward mobility in the USA has declined markedly since the 1980’s, in tandem with increasing income inequality (Wilkinson & Pickett 2010, p. 159-161).
5 Thomas Piketty, 2014: “Capital in the Twenty-First Century’; Harvard, USA, 685 pp.
6 Francis Fukuyama, 2014: “America in Decay: The sources of political dysfunction”; Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 2014, p. 5 – 26.
7 Wilkinson & Pickett (2010, p. 183-184) observed that, amongst the societies with greater socio-economic equality, this has been achieved by a variety of pathways. For example Sweden has focussed more on redistributive taxes and benefits and a large welfare state to provide more equal social security for its citizens, whereas Japan gets its high degree of equality from a greater equality of incomes before taxes and benefits.
8 John Quiggin, 2010: “Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us”; Princeton University Press, p.67, 77.
Chris Sharples is a University Associate at the University of Tasmania where he dabbles in geomorphology and the effects of sea-level rise on coasts. He is also interested in trying to spot elephants in rooms, and state the bleeding obvious about them.
