The Limits of Common Sense

Another thing that gets me frustrated is the endless tropes about "common sense" when it comes to governance.  It sounds good, which is why the phrase gets used so much.  But what it fails to acknowledge is that systems are complicated, big systems are even more complicated, and the US federal government is a really big system. 

So common sense that works around the kitchen table in your family just has no parallel in the federal government.  In fact it doesn't have that much parallel in lots of areas.

For example, when I go to the hospital for a medical operation, I don't want the doctor referring first and foremost to common sense when he starts cutting me up- I want him using the latest scientific research and drawing from his vast experience performing similar operations.  I don't care whether he has enough common sense to fix a lawnmower or carve a turkey.  I'm looking for a savant who knows about his specialty.

To take another example, when considering Global Climate Change, referring to common sense arguments has no meaning.  We had a snowy winter here in New England, so common sense tells me that the planet couldn't be getting warmer.  Except climatologists who are studying this stuff for a living overwhelmingly agree that the planet is indeed getting warmer, and that it's caused by humans.  I think I'm going with the geeks here.

And finally, comparing the US government budget to my own family budget is comparing apples to cow dung.  The goals are completely different- we should be paying attention to what professional economists and policy wonks say about deficits.  And we should look at history- not the history of my family's finances, because that's not relevant- the history of our macroeconomy when governments have run deficits, the history of tax rates and how growth is tied into taxes.  When I'm arguing with conservatives about this I start with this kind of stuff, and they inevitably reply with "common sense" arguments about how government deficits crowd out private borrowing and how the burden of debt repayment will be unmanageable- but they've got no data!  Because the data's all pretty clear when you look at history instead of analogies to your family budget.

I had an old boss who once said "common sense isn't so common".  True that.  But in political discourse we could use even less of it.

Climate Change and (in)action

It's tough for me to put out a wonky discussion of Climate Change, since it involves the hard sciences, which is a lot harder for laymen to understand than economics or other social sciences. It's easy enough for Climate Change deniers to dig up some wacko academic who disputes the common wisdom of the field and has a PhD, but I think one has to look at what the consensus is among scientists in that field, and it's pretty clear.
But I come back to this line of reasoning: there's a good possibility that Al Gore is right, and that Climate Change will keep accelerating, that we'll continue to see year after year set new records as hottest on record, that polar ice caps will melt putting Bangladesh under water, that deserts will grow and more of the planet will become uninhabitable, etc etc. If the worst of the predictions are correct, we're going to be REALLY sorry we didn't act, because every year we wait the problem gets harder to solve.

Now of course it's possible that the scientific consensus is wrong- after all, there was once agreement that the world was flat, and that diseases were caused by witchcraft. If that turns out to be the case, we'll have lowered carbon emissions for no good reason. Well, even that isn't right, because I think everyone agrees that carbon emissions leads to unhealthy air to breathe, smog, etc so there's some benefit even if Climate Change scientists are wrong.

So think about the relative downside of going the wrong way on either side: either we do nothing and confront a catastrophe, or we do too much unnecessarily and waste resources we could have used for other economic growth. Which one is worse? Seems pretty obvious to me. And to top it all off, the odds of Climate Change being real seem much better than the odds that it's not, seeing as nearly all climate scientists agree that it's real.