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Strict constructionists argue that their analyses should confine themselves strictly to positive (that is, descriptive) analysis: identify who wins and who loses from a public policy, and how much, but leave judgments about the social merits of the policy to politicians.

a researcher’s political ideology or vested interest in a particular theory can still enter even ostensibly descriptive analysis by the data set chosen for the research; the mathematical transformations of raw data and the exclusion of so-called outlier data; the specific form of the mathematical equations posited for estimation; the estimation method used; the number of retrials in estimation to get what strikes the researcher as “plausible” results, and the manner in which final research findings are presented. This is so even among natural scientists discussing global warming. As the late medical journalist Victor Cohn once quoted a scientist, “I would not have seen it if I did not believe it.”

anyone who sincerely believes that seemingly scientific, positive research in the sciences — especially the social sciences — is invariably free of the researcher’s own predilections is a Panglossian optimist.

majority of economists have been unhappy for more than a century with the limits that the strict constructionist school would place upon their professional purview. They routinely do enter the forum in which public policy is debated

The problem with welfare analysis is not so much that ethical dimensions typically enter into it, but that economists pretend that is not so. They do so by justifying their normative dicta with appeal to the seemly scientific but actually value-laden concept of efficiency.

economics is not a science that only describes, measures, explains and predicts human interests, values and policies — it also evaluates, promotes, endorses or rejects them. The predicament of economics and all other social sciences consists in their failure to acknowledge honestly their value orientation in their pathetic and inauthentic pretension to emulate the natural sciences they presume to be value free.

By the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, a public policy is judged to enhance economic efficiency and overall social welfare — and therefore is to be recommended by economists to decision-makers — if those who gain from the policy could potentially bribe those who lose from it into accepting it and still be better off (Kaldor), or those who lose from it were unable to bribe the gainers into forgoing the policy (Hicks). That the bribe was not paid merely underscores the point.

In applications, the Kaldor-Hicks criterion and the efficiency criterion amount to the same thing. When Jack gains $10 and Jill loses $5, social gains increase by $5, so the policy is a good one. When Jack gains $10 and Jill loses $15, there is a deadweight loss of $5, so the policy is bad. Evidently, on the Kaldor-Hicks criterion one need not know who Jack and Jill are, nor anything about their economic circumstances. Furthermore, a truly stunning implication of the criterion is that if a public policy takes $X away from one citizen and gives it to another, and nothing else changes, then such a policy is welfare neutral. Would any non-economist buy that proposition?

Virtually all modern textbooks in economics base their treatment of efficiency on Kaldor-Hicks, usually without acknowledging the ethical dimensions of the concept. I use these texts in my economics courses as, I suppose, do most my colleagues around the world. But I explicitly alert my students to the ethical pitfalls in normative welfare economics, with commentaries such as “How Economists Bastardized Benthamite Utilitarianism” and “The Welfare Economics of Health Insurance,” or with assignments that force students to think about this issue. My advice to students and readers is: When you hear us economists wax eloquent on the virtue of greater efficiency — beware!

The “Asian Values” hypothesis is equally suspect. The UDHR recognises the universal applicability of human rights and any nation party to this treaty is not permitted to restrict rights purely on cultural, religious or political grounds.

“Asian governments are justified in restricting civil and political rights in some circumstances in favour of social stability and economic growth. Civil and political rights are immaterial when people are destitute and society is unstable.  Accordingly, as luxuries to be enjoyed once there is social order, civil and political liberties must be temporarily suspended so as to not inhibit the government’s delivery of economic and social necessities and so as to not threaten or destroy future development plans.” Whilst this argument may have been slightly more palatable if Singapore’s citizens were, in fact destitute, the reality is that Singapore is ranked as one of the world’s wealthiest countries and boasts a high life expectancy. Thus in Singapore’s case, arguments made in favour of a “liberty trade-off” are rendered completely untenable.

these cultural and religious justifications for violating rights are as unacceptable as Singapore’s purported assertion of an “Asian Values” conception of human rights. Even though the Singapore government’s language is more subtle, their arguments amount to same basic tenet: the purported justification of the denial of fundamental human rights, by reference to cultural, religious or political specific norms. Speaking recently in New York, the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon warned against such an interpretation of human rights:

“Yes, we recognize that social attitudes run deep.  Yes, social change often comes only with time.  Yet, let there be no confusion: where there is tension between cultural attitudes and universal human rights, universal human rights must carry the day. ” The universal and fundamental nature of human rights is the founding principle on which the United Nations was built: the right to freedom of expression must be guaranteed, “Asian Values” notwithstanding.

consistent with George's analysis, authorities last week relaxed past regulations that limited the use of the Internet and social media for election campaigning. Political parties and candidates will be allowed to use a broader range of new media platforms, including blogs, micro-blogs, online photo-sharing platforms, social networking sites and electronic media applications used on mobile phones, for election advertising. The loosening, however, only applies for political party-run websites, chat rooms and online discussion forums. Candidates must declare the new media content they intend to use within 12 hours after the start of the election campaign period. George warned in a recent blog entry that the new declaration requirements could open the way for PAP-led defamation suits against new media using opposition politicians. PAP leaders have historically relied on expensive litigation to suppress opposition and media criticism. "The PAP won't subject everyone's postings to legal scrutiny. But if it decides that a particular opposition politician needs to be utterly demolished, you can bet that no tweet of his would be too tiny, no Facebook update too fleeting ... in order a build the case against the individual," George warned in a journalism blog.

While opposition politicians will rely more on new than mainstream media to communicate with voters, they already recognize that the use of social media will not necessarily translate into votes. "[Online support] can give a too rosy a picture and false degree of comfort," said the RP's Jeyaretnam. "People who [interact with] us online are those who are already convinced with our messages anyway."

The Wall Street Journal's examination of scraping—a trade that involves personal information as well as many other types of data—is part of the newspaper's investigation into the business of tracking people's activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.

Some companies collect personal information for detailed background reports on individuals, such as email addresses, cell numbers, photographs and posts on social-network sites. Others offer what are known as listening services, which monitor in real time hundreds or thousands of news sources, blogs and websites to see what people are saying about specific products or topics.

One such service is offered by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal. Dow Jones collects data from the Web—which may include personal information contained in news articles and blog postings—that help corporate clients monitor how they are portrayed. It says it doesn't gather information from password-protected parts of sites.

The competition for data is fierce. PatientsLikeMe also sells data about its users. PatientsLikeMe says the data it sells is anonymized, no names attached.

Nielsen spokesman Matt Anchin says the company's reports to its clients include publicly available information gleaned from the Internet, "so if someone decides to share personally identifiable information, it could be included."

Internet users often have little recourse if personally identifiable data is scraped: There is no national law requiring data companies to let people remove or change information about themselves, though some firms let users remove their profiles under certain circumstances.

It’s a charge that John Jost, a social psychologist at New York University, flatly denies. Findings in political psychology bear upon deeply held personal beliefs and attitudes, he said, so they are bound to spark controversy. Research showing that conservatives score higher on measures of “intolerance of ambiguity” or the “need for cognitive closure” might bother some people, said Jost, but that does not make it biased.

“The job of the behavioral scientist is not to try to find something to say that couldn’t possibly be offensive,” said Jost. “Our job is to say what we think is true, and why.

Jost and his colleagues in 2003 compiled a meta-analysis of 88 studies from 12 different countries conducted over a 40-year period. They found strong evidence that conservatives tend to have higher needs to reduce uncertainty and threat. Conservatives also share psychological factors like fear, aggression, dogmatism, and the need for order, structure and closure. Political conservatism, they explained, could serve as a defense against anxieties and threats that arise out of everyday uncertainty, by justifying the status quo and preserving conditions that are comfortable and familiar.

The study triggered quite a public reaction, particularly within the conservative blogosphere. But the criticisms, according to Jost, were mistakenly focused on the researchers themselves; the findings were not disputed by the scientific community and have since been replicated. For example, a 2009 study followed college students over the span of their undergraduate experience and found that higher perceptions of threat did indeed predict political conservatism. Another 2009 study found that when confronted with a threat, liberals actually become more psychologically and politically conservative. Some studies even suggest that physiological traits like sensitivity to sudden noises or threatening images are associated with conservative political attitudes.

“The debate should always be about the data and its proper interpretation,” said Jost, “and never about the characteristics or motives of the researchers.” Phillip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees. However, Tetlock thinks that identifying the proper interpretation can be tricky, since personality measures can be described in many ways. “One observer’s ‘dogmatism’ can be another’s ‘principled,’ and one observer’s ‘open-mindedness’ can be another’s ‘flaccid and vacillating,’” Tetlock explained.

Richard Redding, a professor of law and psychology at Chapman University in Orange, California, points to a more general, indirect bias in political psychology. “It’s not the case that researchers are intentionally skewing the data,” which rarely happens, Redding said. Rather, the problem may lie in what sorts of questions are or are not asked.

For example, a conservative might be more inclined to undertake research on affirmative action in a way that would identify any negative outcomes, whereas a liberal probably wouldn’t, said Redding. Likewise, there may be aspects of personality that liberals simply haven’t considered. Redding is currently conducting a large-scale study on self-righteousness, which he suspects may be associated more highly with liberals than conservatives.

“The way you frame a problem is to some extent dictated by what you think the problem is,” said David Sears, a political psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. People’s strong feelings about issues like prejudice, sexism, authoritarianism, aggression, and nationalism — the bread and butter of political psychology — may influence how they design a study or present a problem.

The indirect bias that Sears and Redding identify is a far cry from the liberal groupthink others warn against. But given that psychology departments are predominantly left leaning, it’s important to seek out alternative viewpoints and explanations, said Jesse Graham, a social psychologist at the University of Southern California. A self-avowed liberal, Graham thinks it would be absurd to say he couldn’t do fair science because of his political preferences. “But,” he said, “it is something that I try to keep in mind.”

But the problem is deeper than simply intellectual inertia. It goes back, ultimately, to the unconsidered differentiations we make—at every moment when we distinguish among objects—between those in the foreground of our consciousness and the background places in which the objects happen to be situated. Moreover, this distinction creates a hierarchy of objects. We are conscious not only of the skin that encloses and defines the object, but of bits and pieces of that object, each of which must have its own “skin.” That is the problem of anatomization. A car has a motor and brakes and a transmission and an outer body that, at appropriate moments, become separate objects of our consciousness, objects that at least some knowledgeable person recognizes as coherent entities.

Evelyn Fox Keller sees “The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture” as a consequence of our false division of the world into living objects without sufficient consideration of the external milieu in which they are embedded, since organisms help create effective environments through their own life activities.

The central point of her analysis has been that gender itself (as opposed to sex) is socially constructed, and that construction has influenced the development of science:If there is a single point on which all feminist scholarship…has converged, it is the importance of recognizing the social construction of gender…. All of my work on gender and science proceeds from this basic recognition. My endeavor has been to call attention to the ways in which the social construction of a binary opposition between “masculine” and “feminine” has influenced the social construction of science.

major critical concern of Fox Keller’s present book is the widespread attempt to partition in some quantitative way the contribution made to human variation by differences in biological inheritance, that is, differences in genes, as opposed to differences in life experience. She wants to make clear a distinction between analyzing the relative strength of the causes of variation among individuals and groups, an analysis that is coherent in principle, and simply assigning the relative contributions of biological and environmental causes to the value of some character in an individual

It is, for example, all very well to say that genetic variation is responsible for 76 percent of the observed variation in adult height among American women while the remaining 24 percent is a consequence of differences in nutrition. The implication is that if all variation in nutrition were abolished then 24 percent of the observed height variation among individuals in the population in the next generation would disappear. To say, however, that 76 percent of Evelyn Fox Keller’s height was caused by her genes and 24 percent by her nutrition does not make sense. The nonsensical implication of trying to partition the causes of her individual height would be that if she never ate anything she would still be three quarters as tall as she is.

In fact, Keller is too optimistic about the assignment of causes of variation even when considering variation in a population. As she herself notes parenthetically, the assignment of relative proportions of population variation to different causes in a population depends on there being no specific interaction between the causes.

Keller’s rather casual treatment of the interaction between causal factors in the case of the drummers, despite her very great sophistication in analyzing the meaning of variation, is a symptom of a fault that is deeply embedded in the analytic training and thinking of both natural and social scientists. If there are several variable factors influencing some phenomenon, how are we to assign the relative importance to each in determining total variation? Let us take an extreme example. Suppose that we plant seeds of each of two different varieties of corn in two different locations with the following results measured in bushels of corn produced (see Table 1). There are differences between the varieties in their yield from location to location and there are differences between locations from variety to variety. So, both variety and location matter. But there is no average variation between locations when averaged over varieties or between varieties when averaged over locations. Just by knowing the variation in yield associated with location and variety separately does not tell us which factor is the more important source of variation; nor do the facts of location and variety exhaust the description of that variation.

Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite. These artificially constrained systems become prone to "Black Swans" -- that is, they become extremely vulnerable to large-scale events that lie far from the statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set of observers. Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, catching everyone off-guard and undoing years of stability or, in some cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems.

If a society provides a basic measure of health and economic security for its citizens, its citizens will be more tolerant of a little volatility/risk/ambition in its social and economic policy.

This gets at why I think its extremely difficult to reconcile modern-day conservatism and serious efforts to address climate change (and future resource shortages, and other various other sources of long-term risk). The U.S. conservative politic program is devoted to increasing economic and social insecurity for average people and decreasing it for wealthy business owners. That is roughly the opposite of the approach you'd want to take if you want to increase society's resilience to the dangers approaching.

is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

who is to do the planning. It is about this question that all the dispute about "economic planning" centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning—direction of the whole economic system according to one unified plan. Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons. The halfway house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the

Which of these systems is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge.

It may be admitted that, as far as scientific knowledge is concerned, a body of suitably chosen experts may be in the best position to command all the best knowledge available—though this is of course merely shifting the difficulty to the problem of selecting the experts.

Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active coöperation.

the relative importance of the different kinds of knowledge; those more likely to be at the disposal of particular individuals and those which we should with greater confidence expect to find in the possession of an authority made up of suitably chosen experts. If it is today so widely assumed that the latter will be in a better position, this is because one kind of knowledge, namely, scientific knowledge, occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind that is relevant.

It is a curious fact that this sort of knowledge should today be generally regarded with a kind of contempt and that anyone who by such knowledge gains an advantage over somebody better equipped with theoretical or technical knowledge is thought to have acted almost disreputably. To gain an advantage from better knowledge of facilities of communication or transport is sometimes regarded as almost dishonest, although it is quite as important that society make use of the best opportunities in this respect as in using the latest scientific discoveries.

The common idea now seems to be that all such knowledge should as a matter of course be readily at the command of everybody, and the reproach of irrationality leveled against the existing economic order is frequently based on the fact that it is not so available. This view disregards the fact that the method by which such knowledge can be made as widely available as possible is precisely the problem to which we have to find an answer.

One reason why economists are increasingly apt to forget about the constant small changes which make up the whole economic picture is probably their growing preoccupation with statistical aggregates, which show a very much greater stability than the movements of the detail. The comparative stability of the aggregates cannot, however, be accounted for—as the statisticians occasionally seem to be inclined to do—by the "law of large numbers" or the mutual compensation of random changes.

the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form. The statistics which such a central authority would have to use would have to be arrived at precisely by abstracting from minor differences between the things, by lumping together, as resources of one kind, items which differ as regards location, quality, and other particulars, in a way which may be very significant for the specific decision. It follows from this that central planning based on statistical information by its nature cannot take direct account of these circumstances of time and place and that the central planner will have to find some way or other in which the decisions depending on them can be left to the "man on the spot."

We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used. But the "man on the spot" cannot decide solely on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of the facts of his immediate surroundings. There still remains the problem of communicating to him such further information as he needs to fit his decisions into the whole pattern of changes of the larger economic system.

The problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and with most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science. As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection, "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." This is of profound significance in the social field. We make constant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess. We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up.

To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind in the same manner in which we assume it to be given to us as the explaining economists is to assume the problem away and to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world.

That an economist of Professor Schumpeter's standing should thus have fallen into a trap which the ambiguity of the term "datum" sets to the unwary can hardly be explained as a simple error. It suggests rather that there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach which habitually disregards an essential part of the phenomena with which we have to deal: the unavoidable imperfection of man's knowledge and the consequent need for a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired. Any approach, such as that of much of mathematical economics with its simultaneous equations, which in effect starts from the assumption that people's knowledge corresponds with the objective facts of the situation, systematically leaves out what is our main task to explain. I am far from denying that in our system equilibrium analysis has a useful function to perform. But when it comes to the point where it misleads some of our leading thinkers into believing that the situation which it describes has direct relevance to the solution of practical problems, it is high time that we remember that it does not deal with the social process at all and that it is no more than a useful preliminary to the study of the main problem.

as Durkeheim found when looking at Swiss data a century earlier, Catholics had the lowest suicide rate and Protestants higher. What's more, Egger found that the unaffiliated had the highest of all.

ne thing that jumped out was that the gap was much bigger for older people. At ages 35-44, there was essentially no difference. The gap grows gradually with age: in the oldest group (aged 85-94), Protestants are twice as likely as Catholics to commit suicide, and the unaffiliated four times as likely.

Strangely enough, the effect was particularly strong for death by poisoning. That's a perplexing result, until you remember that Switzerland is one of the few countries where assisted suicide is legal (so long as the motive is not selfish). There are several societies in Switzerland that provide assisted dying, with the usual method being an injection of barbiturates. On the death record, that's recorded as a death by poisoning.

That's not to say that Durkheim was wrong about religion. Social integration is important in reducing suicide, and that may well have contributed to the differences seen. Egger found that married people, and those living with others, also had lower suicide rates. But these data couldn't show that religion affected social integration.

what is surprising is that she found a third factor that was even more important that religion and social support. That factor was "Existential Well-Being", which relates to things such as feeling fulfilled and satisfied with life, and finding meaning and purpose in life.

Existential Well-Being remained important even after taking into account hopelessness, depression and social support. In other words, even if you feel hopeless, depressed, and alone, existential well-being (unlike religious well-being) can ease suicidal thoughts.

this does seem to fit in with other studies which have shown that spirituality does not reduce suicidal thoughts,and that feeling close to God is linked to a history of depression, whereas existential well being is linked to dramatically less depression.

Results from the present investigation indicate that many college students did not demonstrate high involvement in organized religion. Yet they reported high levels of spiritual well-being, especially existential well-being, and low levels of suicidal ideation. Furthermore, results highlighted existential well-being as an important factor associated with lower levels of suicidal ideation among college students. Overall, these findings suggest that a strategy for reducing distress and preventing suicide among college students may involve exploring mechanisms that nurture a sense of meaning in life in individuals for whom organized religion remains unimportant. Health professionals may have more success in improving young people’s sense of meaning and purpose by methods other than an increase in faith, participation in organized religion, or other indicators of religiosity.

that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success. As “network neutrality” gets bargained away—to add insult to injury, by an administration that was elected with the promise to defend it—the opportunities for the Zuckerbergs of tomorrow will shrink. And as they do, we will return more to the world where success depends upon permission. And privilege. And insiders. And where fewer turn their souls to inventing the next great idea.

Zuckerberg is a rightful hero of our time. I want my kids to admire him. To his credit, Sorkin gives him the only lines of true insight in the film: In response to the twins’ lawsuit, he asks, does “a guy who makes a really good chair owe money to anyone who ever made a chair?” And to his partner who signed away his ownership in Facebook: “You’re gonna blame me because you were the business head of the company and you made a bad business deal with your own company?” Friends who know Zuckerberg say such insight is common. No doubt his handlers are panicked that the film will tarnish the brand. He should listen less to these handlers. As I looked around at the packed theater of teens and twenty-somethings, there was no doubt who was in the right, however geeky and clumsy and sad. That generation will judge this new world. If, that is, we allow that new world to continue to flourish.

All other things being equal, we should act in accordance with the desires that we actually have, in this case the desire for sex. We may also desire to have children, but perhaps only one or two: in that case, we should act in such a way as to have as much sex as possible while also producing children in this small number.

Generally speaking, it is rational for us to act in ways that accord with our reflectively-endorsed desires or values, rather than in ways that maximise our reproductive chances or in whatever ways we tend to respond without thinking. If we value the benefits of social living, this may require that we support and conform to socially-developed norms of conduct that constrain individuals from acting in ruthless pursuit of self-interest.

Admittedly, our evolved nature may affect this, in the sense that any workable system of moral norms must be practical for the needs of beings like us, who are, it seems, naturally inclined to be neither angelically selfless nor utterly uncaring about others. Thus, our evolved psychology may impose limits on what real-world moral systems can realistically demand of human beings, perhaps defeating some of the more extreme ambitions of both conservatives and liberals. It may not be realistic to expect each other to be either as self-denying as moral conservatives seem to want or as altruistic as some liberals seem to want.

realistic moral systems will allow considerable scope for individuals to act in accordance with whatever they actually value. However, they will also impose constraints, since truly ruthless competition among individuals would lead to widespread insecurity, suffering, and disorder. Allowing it would be inconsistent with many values that most of us adhere to, on reflection, such as the values of loving and trusting relationships, social survival, and the amelioration of suffering in the world. If, however, we are social animals that already have an evolved sympathetic responsiveness to each other, the yoke of a realistic moral system may be relatively light for most of us most of the time.

Of course, ST reserves the right to edit my letter for clarity and length. When said statistics in question were directly taken from their original article, though, one has to wonder if there hasn’t been a breakdown in communication over there. I’m dreadfully sorry, forum editors, I should have double-checked my original source (your journalist Ms Rachel Chang) before sending my letter.

take a look at how my pride in our meritocratic system in my originally letter has been transfigured into awe at Dr Ng’s background, for example! Dear friends, when an editor takes the time and effort to not just paraphrase but completely and utterly transform your piece in both intent and meaning, then what can we say but bravo.

There are surely no lazy slackers over at the Straits Times; instead we have evidently men and women who dedicate time and effort to correct their misguided readers, and protect them from the shame of having their real opinions published.