[Vision2020] The Ignorance Caucus

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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February 10, 2013
The Ignorance Caucus By PAUL
KRUGMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html>

Last week Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, gave what his office told
us would be a major policy speech. And we should be grateful for the
heads-up about the speech’s majorness. Otherwise, a read of the speech
might have suggested that he was offering nothing more than a meager,
warmed-over selection of stale ideas.

To be sure, Mr. Cantor tried to sound interested in serious policy
discussion. But he didn’t succeed — and that was no accident. For these
days his party dislikes the whole idea of applying critical thinking and
evidence to policy questions. And no, that’s not a caricature: Last year
the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking
skills,<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html>”
because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the
student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

And such is the influence of what we might call the ignorance caucus that
even when giving a speech intended to demonstrate his openness to new
ideas, Mr. Cantor felt obliged to give that caucus a shout-out, calling for
a complete end to federal funding of social science
research<http://www.aei.org/article/politics-and-public-opinion/legislative/house/remarks-by-majority-leader-eric-cantor-as-prepared-for-delivery/>.
Because it’s surely a waste of money seeking to understand the society
we’re trying to change.

Want other examples of the ignorance caucus at work? Start with health
care, an area in which Mr. Cantor tried not to sound anti-intellectual; he
lavished praise on medical research just before attacking federal support
for social science. (By the way, how much money are we talking about? Well,
the entire National Science Foundation budget for social and economic
sciences <http://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2013/pdf/10-SBE_fy2013.pdf>amounts
to a whopping 0.01 percent of the budget deficit.)

But Mr. Cantor’s support for medical research is curiously limited. He’s
all for developing new treatments, but he and his colleagues have adamantly
opposed “comparative effectiveness research,” which seeks to determine how
well such treatments work.

What they fear, of course, is that the people running Medicare and other
government programs might use the results of such research to determine
what they’re willing to pay for. Instead, they want to turn Medicare into a
voucher system and let individuals make decisions about treatment. But even
if you think that’s a good idea (it isn’t), how are individuals supposed to
make good medical choices if we ensure that they have no idea what health
benefits, if any, to expect from their choices?

Still, the desire to perpetuate ignorance on matters medical is nothing
compared with the desire to kill climate research, where Mr. Cantor’s
colleagues — particularly, as it happens, in his home state of Virginia —
have engaged in furious witch hunts against scientists who find evidence
they don’t like. True, the state has finally agreed to study the growing
risk of coastal flooding; Norfolk is among the American cities most
vulnerable to climate change. But Republicans in the State Legislature have
specifically prohibited the use of the words “sea-level
rise.<http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2012/06/12/et-tu-virginia-again-with-the-sea-level-rise/>”


And there are many other examples, like the way House Republicans
tried to suppress
a Congressional Research Service
report<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/business/questions-raised-on-withdrawal-of-congressional-research-services-report-on-tax-rates.html>casting
doubt on claims about the magical growth effects of tax cuts for
the wealthy.

Do actions like this have important effects? Well, consider the agonized
discussions of gun policy that followed the Newtown massacre. It would be
helpful to these discussions if we had a good grasp of the facts about
firearms and violence. But we don’t, because back in the 1990s conservative
politicians, acting on behalf of the National Rifle Association, bullied
federal agencies into ceasing just about all
research<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/26guns.html?_r=0>into
the issue. Willful ignorance matters.

O.K., at this point the conventions of punditry call for saying something
to demonstrate my evenhandedness, something along the lines of “Democrats
do it too.” But while Democrats, being human, often read evidence
selectively and choose to believe things that make them comfortable, there
really isn’t anything equivalent to Republicans’ active hostility to
collecting evidence in the first place.

The truth is that America’s partisan divide runs much deeper than even
pessimists are usually willing to admit; the parties aren’t just divided on
values and policy views, they’re divided over epistemology. One side
believes, at least in principle, in letting its policy views be shaped by
facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its
fixed beliefs.

In her parting shot on leaving the State Department, Hillary Clinton said
<http://news.yahoo.com/ap-interview-clinton-raps-benghazi-critics-084552064--politics.html>of
her Republican critics, “They just will not live in an evidence-based
world.” She was referring specifically to the Benghazi controversy, but her
point applies much more generally. And for all the talk of reforming and
reinventing the G.O.P., the ignorance caucus retains a firm grip on the
party’s heart and mind.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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