Latest news with #SeeingtheInvisible
Time of India
07-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Why economics should abjure ethics
The blog is named after Seeing the Invisible, the title of a book on economics for children that Sanjeev wrote in 2018. Economics involves the study of incentives, motivations and information flows which are invisible. Likewise, self-seeking ministers and bureaucrats often work invisibly (and insidiously) against the public interest - more so in socialist countries like India where governments take on many unnecessary functions. On the other hand, self-interested businesses – through their competition for our custom – end up fostering the public interest. This blog straddles a range of autobiographical, governance and policy topics, including the experience working in the IAS, letting go of the Indian bureaucracy and learning new things in different countries, and attempting to build a liberal party for India. LESS ... MORE In 2023, I suggested why public health ethics is useless at best, harmful at worst. In 2024 I explained why, in my view, ethics must be expunged from public health. In doing so I also cited broader problems with the concept of ethics which make it unsuitable to inform public policy. A recent paper by Jim Dorn argued that the best argument for free trade is its morality. The economist Donald Boudreaux supported this: 'Jim Dorn is correct: The ultimate justification for free trade is that protectionism is unethical. What right do producers A, B, and C have to the income that you earn that you wish to spend purchasing imports? The answer is none.' I believe that Don Boudreaux is one of the finest economists of our time but I disagree with such rhetoric. Morality operates in an irrational world and carries the risk of being used to drive entirely opposing arguments. I will attempt to show in this piece that not just public health, economics must also abjure ethics. Ethics provides no tools to assess public policy Ethical analysis is fully justified for individual-level medical interventions. That's why we have the Hippocratic oath. Individual-level ethics also tells us why enslaving someone is bad or why trading in children is bad. But ethics doesn't make sense for society-wide policy such as property rights (private or public), lockdowns, or vaccine mandates. That's because ethics has no methodology to assess and then aggregate harms and benefits across millions of people. Instead, it forces us to look within, to use the guidance of our 'soul', thus switching off the rational circuits of our brain. The Nobel laureate George Stigler wrote in 1980 that an economist 'needs no ethical system to criticize error: he is simply a well-trained political arithmetician'. For society-wide policy, only empirical, rational methods, such as a cost-benefit analysis, are justified. There is a good reason why there is no economics textbook on theology and ethics but many textbooks on how to identify costs and benefits of policy. Economists can readily demonstrate that free trade provides a net benefit to society while socialism, which confiscates property and destroys trade, causes more harm than good. Once the net benefits of capitalism and free trade are proven, readers can draw their own conclusion. We don't need to embellish our already powerful arguments with ethics. Ethics is often the first resort of the scoundrel There's an aphorism in India: 'Munh mein Ram, bagal mein churi'. It cautions us against those who proclaim loudly to be ethical (chanting the name of God at every step), for such people are capable of plunging a knife into our back when we are not watching. In 2024, I elaborated how 'ethics is a devious concept that has often been deployed since antiquity by elites to justify their misdemeanours'. In 2023 I showed how : 'Every soldier's God is on his side. Ethics is the most malleable instrument of human imagination. It is always misused by zealots.' Socialists and fascists lay claim to their superior ethics. In a chapter on 'Hitler's Ethics' in his 2004 book, From Darwin to Hitler, Richard Weikart explained that: '[I]t is clear from Hitler's writings and speeches that he was not amoral at all. On the contrary, he was highly moralistic and consistently applied his vision of morality to policy decisions'. Even when he was losing the war, in January 1945, Hitler said: 'The insight into the moral value of our conviction and the resulting objectives of our struggle for life give us and, above all, give me the strength to continue to wage this fight in the most difficult hours with the strongest faith'. In describing Marx's ethical goals, Frederick Engels wrote in his 1877 book, Anti-Duhring, about how communism would achieve '[a] really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any remembrance of them'. Who could object to such warm and fuzzy goals? But we know what communism actually does. Likewise, the founding Fabian socialist, Dr Havelock Ellis wrote in 1922 that 'The inspiring appeal of Socialism to ardent minds is no doubt ethical.' R. H. Tawney, a British Christian socialist, is reported to have believed that 'socialism…involves a moral transformation, not just an economic one'. In his 1949 essay advocating socialism, Albert Einstein plied the ethical argument: 'socialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. ….there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy'. In his 2012 book, How China became Capitalist, Ronald Coase noted that socialism was considered by China's leadership as the moral way 'to stamp out economic inequality, the perceived root of all social evils'. Socialism brings an abrupt end to private property rights, markets and free trade because doing so is said to be ethical. John Rawls's social justice arguments for confiscation of private property are likewise based on ethics. But Jim Dorn claims that it is free trade, instead, that is ethical! So, who is right? None of them. Because ethics can't give us a unique, objective answer. It is unfit for purpose. Socialists need to resort to the subterfuge of morality to persuade others because of overwhelming empirical evidence against socialism. Let them do so. We can easily refute them with objectively measurable rational facts. Conflating private ethics with society-wide policy When people ask me what drives me, I cite 'nishkama karma', i.e. doing the right thing with no regard to the consequences. I'm not religious by the remotest stretch of imagination but this phrase from the Gita works for me. Everyone, however, differ on their understandings of 'right action'. We might think highly of our personal moral standards but that doesn't give us the authority to tell others how the world should be run. Instead, we should first rationally confirm that our beliefs do actually provide a net benefit to society, and then share these proofs with others. Objective, empirical proofs have a higher chance of persuading others than appeals to morality. Nobel prize winning economist cautioned economists from using arguments other than purely rational ones. In his 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty, he noted that 'noble sentiments' have often been 'mobilized in the service of greatly perverted aims'. He explained that using such (moral) sentiments is 'neither a safe guide nor a certain protection against error'. Let's stick with empirical, rational arguments and not divert economics into the capricious and often deadly swamp of morality. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Time of India
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Why public health must always be led by economists
The blog is named after Seeing the Invisible, the title of a book on economics for children that Sanjeev wrote in 2018. Economics involves the study of incentives, motivations and information flows which are invisible. Likewise, self-seeking ministers and bureaucrats often work invisibly (and insidiously) against the public interest - more so in socialist countries like India where governments take on many unnecessary functions. On the other hand, self-interested businesses – through their competition for our custom – end up fostering the public interest. This blog straddles a range of autobiographical, governance and policy topics, including the experience working in the IAS, letting go of the Indian bureaucracy and learning new things in different countries, and attempting to build a liberal party for India. LESS ... MORE Dr Anthony Fauci was obsessed with covid. On 13 May 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that Fauci is 'not … making the case that continuing to restrict activities will make Americans healthier overall, but only that it will, in his opinion, reduce Covid-19 deaths'. This blinkered focus, in which overall health does not matter, informed Fauci's testimony to the US Senate. He displayed no interest in 'the need to get the country back open again', stating that 'I don't give advice about economic things'. This episode summarises everything that's wrong with public health today. Excluding Sweden, most public health officials, globally, ignored society-wide health during covid, leading to hundreds of thousands of lives directly or indirectly lost from lockdowns, reduction in the life expectancy of hundreds of millions, and $15 trillion in wealth destroyed. All for a pandemic which is invisible in the aggregate mortality statistics of Sweden – the only country that didn't lock down. But Fauci was not to blame. He was simply following public health textbooks. The problem is that public health textbooks are wrong about almost everything. For instance, textbooks cherry-pick a few instances when quarantine seemingly worked without assessing the harms caused, and never evaluate the enormous cumulative harms of the myriads of historical quarantine episodes. The absence of a whole-of-society methodology in public health underpins its support for totalitarian interventions. This was not always so. At the commencement of modern public health, it was standard practice to use cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to assess quarantine and sanitation. But the golden age of public health, when rational thought and empiricism prevailed, lasted only for a few decades before medical doctors took public health back to the Dark Ages. started modern public health After centuries of quarantine quackery (led by medical doctors) the economist Jeremy Bentham proposed a systematic approach to public health in his Constitutional Code (1822-32). His disciples, the lawyer Edwin Chadwick (who was also a competent economist), and Dr Southwood Smith, used the CBA method to show that quarantine causes great harm while sanitation creates vast societal benefits. This led to the Public Health Act of 1848. Chadwick was clear: medical doctors must not lead public health In his 1842 report into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, Chadwick was happy to have doctors involved in the delivery of public health, recommending that the 2,300 doctors who provided Poor law medical relief should also undertake sanitary inspections when they visit someone's house. But he ruled out medical doctors becoming leaders of public health: 'the physician … has done his work when he has pointed out the disease that results from the neglect of proper administrative measures, and has alleviated the sufferings of the victims'. He advocated for 'the science of the civil engineer' as public health leaders. In his 1885 book he explained that sanitary engineers can vastly reduce mortality rates. At all times, he wanted the preventive and curative functions to be separate. He explained in 1885: '[t]he curative service, acts by the diagnosis of the individual. The preventive service acts by diagnoses, as it were, of the condition of a town' (i.e. the whole of society). But the medical fraternity hijacked public health The medical community was enraged that an economist-lawyer was leading the General Board of Health. The medical journal, The Lancet, attacked him bitterly, claiming that Chadwick's 1849 report against quarantine was 'especially malignant' … 'towards the medical profession'. His medical enemies managed to push him out and take charge of the role of chief medical officer. Very soon, all economic content and thinking was expunged from public health. In a 1913 article, Dr Charles Chapin claimed that 'losses by disease and gain through sanitation produce little impression … [It is] dangerous to rely upon a balance sheet of life and death'. Core competencies for public health require economics, not medicine Chadwick was right to firmly resist the encroachment of medical doctors into public health which needs minimal medical knowledge, no more than high school biology. Public health is also aware that medical doctors are not needed. In a 2003 book, 'Public Health in Practice', Andrew Watterson et al listed ten competencies for public health, none of which had any medical content. In a book chapter, Dr John Middleton wrote: 'Does the Director of Public Health need to be a doctor? Not necessarily. All of the ten … competencies for public health practice can be encompassed in individuals who are not doctors'. Instead, public health leaders need deep knowledge of society-wide health and well-being, which is the specialisation of economics. But not all economists! Many economists wrongly advocated lockdowns during covid based on 'negative externalities' and 'public goods'. Likewise, health economics textbooks wrongly promote vaccine mandates. As Harold Desmetz showed conclusively, these concepts have no empirical content and can't guide public policy. We need empirically minded scientist-economists. Public health leaders should know about the drivers of life expectancy, about opportunity costs and human factors, about CBA including the measurement of mental health through WELLBYs, and be able to empirically unpack historical experience. They should understand panics and function rationally when the public goes into hysteria. Only a small group of economists who specialise in happiness and wellbeing, fit the bill, but they will need additional training. Some doctors are finally realising the problem. In 2022, the Hillsdale College's Academy for Science and Freedom wrote that 'public health advice should consider the impact on overall health' (Chadwick had said that over 150 years ago!). But medical doctors know nothing about such analysis. Till today, no public health textbook incorporates a CBA of any form of quarantine, let alone of covid lockdowns. Instead, textbooks resort to subjective, speculative tools such as mathematical epidemiological models and ethics, which neither have anything to do with medicine, nor can they ever lead to robust policy. Can this competency gap be filled by training medical doctors in economics? No. To develop Treasury-style economists skilled in society-wide assessment takes at least a decade. It is far easier to identify good economists and teach them elementary biology. Conclusion Exactly as Chadwick had anticipated, medical doctors have badly botched up public health. We need economists to lead public health, with inputs from appropriate medical doctors and engineers. In particular, I recommend that a post of Chief Public Health Officer – always to be held by an economist – be created in each jurisdiction. Academic schools of public health should be transferred to economics departments. Medical doctors worldwide should be limited to what they know best: the curative function (Chief Medical Officer). Given the hegemony of medical doctors in public health, however, we will need a transitional strategy. First, let's create a Centre for Scientific Public Health headed by an economist, tasked with publishing textbooks to educate the world on the right way of doing public health. Second, more economists should write in established public health journals, demonstrating the value they bring. Third, a new branch called 'public health economics' should be created in economics to analyse the knowledge and incentive problems in public health, and irrationality during pandemic panics. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
