The economy, political events and even the sun’s course have converged to make these bleak and darkening days for many of the world’s developed nations, and certainly for America. What we need is expert and effective guidance on the impact of policies and programs. What we get is a cacophony of conflicting, often incoherent, ill-informed just-so stories backed by some combination of intuition, self-interest, resentment, herd thinking, natural and social scientific theory, and cherry-picked statistics. The modern social sciences in particular, which had as their mandate and their promise to guide us in times like these, have often become simply another part of the problem, providing dueling experts for hire with dubious track records. That is, when they are not busy generating results that are completely irrelevant to real life practical problems.
How has this happened? We can blame human nature or ideological corruption, but I think it’s time to come to terms with the fact that one of the central activities of social science is a fool’s errand, because a core assumption that underlies it is wrong. That central activity is to create mathematical models that explain social phenomena by identifying and measuring a limited set of contributing causes. This is done using statistical tests for significance, explanatory power, accuracy and reliability (the p-values, F-tests, confidence intervals, factor analyses and so on). With minor variations, this is what the “scientific” work of political science, sociology, educational theory and social psychology consists in. Doing this is what it takes to get published in major journals and achieve tenure at major universities. Even economics uses these and related statistical methods, when it stops being social metaphysics and decides to get dirty with evidence. A core assumption that underlies this work is that there are unchanging relationships between the variables that can be identified in causal models.
Despite millions of hours of effort, the inconvenient truth is that there is not a single non-controversial quantitative model in the social sciences. I don’t mean a qualitative model which reformulates a truism, or is logically derived from prior assumptions. Nor am I referring to a mere statistical snapshot with no claim to durability (though the vast numbers of these too are contested). I mean a robust causal model, with dependent and independent variables, with measured and fixed coefficients giving the relative influence of the independent variables on the result, and applicable beyond the test scenario to a wider range of cases which have been successfully applied with precision. The sort of thing that litters the natural sciences like bones on a particularly grisly battlefield, allowing experts to build hydroelectric dams, synthetic organisms and Xbox 360s by exploiting precise and unchanging mathematical relationships. If there is such a quantitative model (or, one hardly dare utter the word, “law”) in the social sciences, I have not seen it. I’m willing to bet that neither have you.