Age of the Empirical

By John O. McGinnis
John O. McGinnis is a professor of law at Northwestern University.

Pundits and politicians alike complain that virulent partisanship and the excessive power of special interests distort modern democracy. As result, it is difficult to elicit the consensus for policies that will promote the public interest. These are not new problems. In the early 1800s, for instance, Federalists and Democratic Republicans clashed sharply and vituperatively, disagreeing on such fundamental issues as whether creating a Bank of the United States was wise. Consensus periods of politics in American history have been few and far between.

But our future politics is more likely to forge consensus than that of the past, because we are on the cusp of a golden age of social science empiricism that will help bring a greater measure of agreement on the consequences of public policy. The richer stream of information generated by empirical discoveries will provide an anchor for good public policy against partisan storms and special-interest disturbances, making it harder for the political process to be manipulated by narrow interests.

Many great social scientists have understood that people are ultimately persuaded more by facts than by abstract theories. That is the reason that Adam Smith filled The Wealth of Nations with a wealth of factual observations to demonstrate the power of his ideas. It remains the case that if supporters of a policy can demonstrate that it leads to greater prosperity, the political battle is often half-won. It is true that facts alone cannot generate values, and thus no empirical evidence by itself can logically mandate support for a specific social policy. Smith’s contemporary, the philosopher David Hume, himself made this clear with his famous “is-ought distinction.” But politically, most people within modern industrial society adhere to a rather narrow range of values, at least in the economic realm. They favor more prosperity, better education and health care, and other such goods that make for a flourishing life. As to these issues, what is debated is which political program will in fact broadly deliver these goods.

Empiricism has particular power in the United States, where a spirit of pragmatism limits the plausible boundaries of political debate. Republicans try to show that tax cuts will stimulate economic growth, while Democrats argue that the resulting deficits will impede it. Republicans argue that, in the long run, such tax cuts will raise the incomes of all. Democrats tend to disagree. Such consequential arguments are key to persuading the vast middle of American politics. For instance, if the facts show that school choice improves test scores overall, it is unlikely that vague moral claims, like unfairness to teachers, will stop advocates of school choice from making substantial political gains.

Fortunately, we are at the dawn of the greatest age of empiricism the world has ever known. The driving force in the rise of empiricism is the accelerating power of information technology, often referred to as Moore’s law. Moore’s law — originated by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel — is the now well-established rule that the number of transistors packed onto an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months. As a result, computer speed and memory have been doubling at approximately the same rates. Such exponential growth will persist for at least another 15 years. Many observers believe that new paradigms will continue the acceleration of computer power in the decades after silicon chip technology is exhausted.

The fruits of Moore’s law will be not only ever fancier gadgets, but also an ever more informed policy calculus. The accelerating power of computers addresses what has always been the Achilles’ heel of empiricism — its need for enormous amounts of data and huge calculating capacity. Pythagoras famously said “the world is built on the power of numbers.” That is the slogan of empiricists as well, but processing these numbers requires huge computer power. First, the social world must be broken down into numbers that can be calculated, and to deal with matters of any social complexity, that means a lot of numbers. To draw any conclusions, these numbers must then be sliced and diced to test hypotheses about particular social claims, such as the assertion that school choice improves test scores.

But now computers allow more and more facts to be collected and recorded in systematic form, making possible more precise measurements of worldly events. In fact, we can imagine that soon electronic agents will sweep the web to collect data for researchers to use. Greater computer power also permits the construction and implementation of ever more complex equations by which investigators try to exclude the confounding factors always present in the messy social world and thus to reveal the true causes of social phenomena. It also permits methods, like repeated sampling, to produce better error estimates, giving researchers greater confidence in their results. One University of Chicago social scientist is said to have taken the entire summer to run a regression on a mainframe computer 40 years ago. Now researchers can run scores of regressions on their laptops in a few hours. As a result, more empirical papers about social science are written every year, and that trend appears to be accelerating as well.

The resulting rich vein of data and stream of studies analyzing those data will, over time, transform our politics. No matter what the machinations in Washington in a particular week, a new empirical study will likely offer the fruits of some investigation, calculating the effects of a flat tax on economic growth, for example, or of extra school spending on school achievement. The profusion of such work can make a very substantial political difference by changing the information mix in which politics plays out.

Political discussions all have a policy landscape that is shaped by our common knowledge, and it is this common knowledge that empiricists are changing through their discoveries. The effects of any one empirical discovery, to be sure, will be incremental, but the long-run effects of diffusing cumulative empirical knowledge will be enormous. As in science, there will often be good-faith disagreements among different researchers, but, as with other sciences, in the long run empiricists will develop a consensus about the effects of a policy, and that consensus will influence the political world. Greater common knowledge no less than technological innovation is a source of long-term prosperity.

Of course, new facts inimical to their causes will not induce interest groups — from teachers unions to the automobile trade associations — to abandon programs that serve their interests at the expense of the public. Nor will the new information change the fact that the public has little incentive to understand the complexities of public policy. Nevertheless, the new information will shift the debate in many areas, little by little, as the results become diffused through elites and the many sources of the modern media. Cumulatively, the information will often force interest groups to give ground.

Two other factors — themselves a product of our ongoing technological revolutions — will amplify the power of empiricism. One is the rise of blogs. Blogs help police and expose false studies with which interest groups and partisans may attempt to counter the empirical work that undermines the factual bases of their positions. Academic experts regularly write for blogs and, unlike reporters, are well suited to subject empirical work to searching scrutiny. Recently, for instance, a group of prominent legal scholars has begun a blog wholly devoted to law and empiricism. Such developments will also force empiricists to be more careful and transparent about the discretionary decisions they make, such as their choices of time periods to include in their investigations, because their colleagues will be able to call them to account for misjudgment or bias more easily.

The second development reinforcing empiricism is the rise of information markets. Information markets are sophisticated betting pools that modern information technology has created by making it much easier to gather bets and keep running tallies of the odds that the bets generate. Already, information markets are getting a lot of attention because of their ability to predict current events. For instance, on the eve of the presidential election of 2004, the information market Tradesports predicted the winner of every state correctly. Companies now routinely use them to anticipate which product line will be successful. In the future, individuals may bet on what the growth rate or tax revenue will be, conditional either on the implementation of a specific tax cut or on its absence. Thus, empirical claims about the effects of tax rates will also be tested by those willing to bet on the predictions that flow from them. As the economist Robin Hanson notes, these markets will provide a more democratic check on the empirical claims of experts, making it harder for expert peer review to insulate claims from contestation.

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