Can We Trust ‘The Science’? A Conversation with Steven Hayward
The American Medical Association recommended that biological sex be removed from the public portion of birth certificates. The move demonstrates the power of gender ideology and the extent to which it has captured American institutions, even those nominally dedicated to science and human biology. It also raises an important political question: When so many of our political conversations revolve around “the science” and social-scientific research, what happens when the scientists themselves are no longer committed to the principles of their disciplines?
I reached out to Steven F. Hayward, author and senior resident scholar at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Government Studies, to discuss this and other questions related to progressivism in the academy. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
John Hirschauer: We place a lot of emphasis on expertise and evidence in our politics – we’re always talking about “the science,” what “studies show,” what “experts say,” that sort of thing. If we’re going to have those conversations, Americans have to be able to trust the institutions that create “the science,” perform the studies, and produce the experts. The peer-review process is often held up as a bulwark against the politicization of academic research. As an academic yourself, do you think Americans can trust the peer-review process to serve that purpose?
Steven F. Hayward: Well, that's a big subject. Let's do the subject of peer-reviewed academic literature first. I think increasingly you see a couple of things. One is, in social science generally, but even some of the sciences that are a little bit closer to what we used to call “hard science” like psychology or biology, you're finding that there is a replication crisis. In other words, an awful lot of peer-reviewed articles which have quantitative analysis can't be replicated by outside researchers, even when those researchers work on the same data.
This has been commented on a lot by a lot of people, but it doesn't seem to change things. That's because, point number two, an awful lot of peer-review these days is done by sending an article out to peers who are hand-selected by journal editors, who themselves are likely to be sympathetic to the article or author in question. Sometimes, the editors are even friends of the author in question. While the peer-review process is often done blindly, you still know that your article is being sent to people who have roughly the same frame of mind or viewpoint that you have.
So, you might get some modest criticisms from peers as to how to improve or change the article – that happens routinely. But my hunch is that it’s increasingly rare for peer review to be done by peers who would take a seriously critical view of something and send back a review that says, “I think this hypothesis or conclusion is completely wrong, and here's why.”
It's hard to know, because all the peer reviewing is done in a supposedly blind way – the editors always know who the reviewers are, but the authors usually don't. I think it’s a big problem that reasonable critics of a lot of research simply get ignored. That’s bad for science, because then it becomes an echo chamber. I think that's one of the biggest problems is you have an echo chamber in the academic world.
As you step the first circle out from the academic world to things like the American Medical Association, you see that many of the large professional associations have become wholly politicized. I think you really see that with the AMA saying, “Let's not include sex on birth certificates.” That shows you how fast and how far things move.
JH: The AMA thing was remarkable. It makes you wonder how many people in the academy and these professional organizations are totally beholden to ideology. How often, in your view, do academics work backward from ideological priors when conducting research?
SFH: A good example that has been quite controversial is some of the research done primarily by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman at Berkeley – where I'm an inmate, as always put it – on income inequality. The methodological arguments are serious and deep, but there are some pretty good counterarguments from people that Saez and Zucman have fiddled with the data to exaggerate the outcome they're looking for. If you correct the data or the treatment of it in different ways, you get very different outcomes. As you know, a lot of people on the left, including Saez and Zucman, are very much in favor of a wealth tax. They’re for a wealth tax and for the redistribution of wealth.
I think there is an absolutely fair question to ask whether they manipulated the data to back up their premise. Those methodological questions in econometrics and other fields – they get pretty serious and pretty deep right away for the lay person. It’s very hard to follow, but I think it's certainly a fair question.
JH: On the econometrics point, as you know, conservatives have historically had an uncomfortable relationship with social science. The idea that you can “scientifically” study of human behavior – especially in political and economic contexts – rests on a view of human nature that many conservatives reject. From your perspective as both an academic and a conservative, how do you feel about social science in general and the role it plays in our public discourse?
SFH: I think there are three or four points to be made about it. The traditional conservative critique of social science is that it was amoral – in other words, social scientists set aside moral questions or value judgments as being “unscientific” and therefore outside the purview of the study of social phenomena.
I think the second part of the critique is there's a selection bias – what the social scientists choose to study. These days, I think if you look at sociology, economics, a lot of political science, you'll find that there is huge attention given to racial issues. There’s a lot of attention on inequality of various kinds. So, you generate lots and lots of articles on those subjects. Some are valuable. A lot of them are politically biased and more lightweight.
You’re also limited by what data is available. I'll give you an example – there’s a lot of research these days on “unconscious racism.” A lot of that amounts to ingenious attempts to find out, by all kinds of subtle measures, whether somebody has some racism that they don't consciously acknowledge.
I think some of that can be valuable and interesting and suggestive and provoke conversation. On the other hand, think about another historic human emotion or human trait, like envy. It's one of the seven deadly sins. I've been looking around for social-science research on envy for quite a long time, and it’s very hard to find. There is very little work done on it. And it seems to me that a lot of our political arguments include an element of envy – hatred of the rich, for example, goes back as far as human civilization. It's not a new thing. To the extent that envy plays a part in our social sentiments, it's something that ought to be studied by social scientists. But almost none do it. That’s because of the selection bias of a generally liberal dominated field.
JH: So, I’m anxious to get your reaction to this. You might have seen it – there was a piece on Bari Weiss's Substack about a professor at a medical school who apologized for referring to “pregnant women” instead of “pregnant people.”
SFH: Right.
JH: One quote from the piece really stood out to me. A student said, “I'm not even sure what I'm not being taught, and unless my classmates are as skeptical as I am, they probably aren't aware, either.” This is a huge problem for the future of academia, obviously. The viability of the whole academic project depends on instructors giving students with the information they need to master their discipline, right? If that doesn’t happen, the whole thing falls apart.
This has effects beyond the academy, too. Isn’t there a risk that these ideological hang-ups will impede our ability to honestly assess social problems?
SFH: Oh, yeah. It’s already happening. Again, you take the example of racism and race questions. You can find some black scholars from years past who agreed that family structure was important for everyone, not just blacks. But blacks have the highest rate of out-of-wedlock births – something like 70 percent of black kids are born out of wedlock. Other groups have been trending up for years, too – the out-of-wedlock birth rate for whites is now as high as it was for blacks in 1965, when Pat Moynihan put out his famous report on the so-called “Negro family.” as it was called. It got him in so much trouble. It is now regarded as racist and illegitimate even to bring up the question of family structure in academic settings.
Even though liberals like Bill Galston who worked for Bill Clinton, who pointed out 20 or 30 years ago that if you grow up in an intact family with a mother and father, finish high school, and delay marriage until you've gotten a job, then your chances of being poor are less than five percent. On the other hand, if you grew up without a father – which is mostly what happens with children born out of wedlock – you don't finish high school, and you get married before you have a job, then your odds of being poor are more like 48 or 50 percent. Even liberals used to acknowledge these as serious questions, but if you bring them up now, you’re called a racist.
The whole question of family structure is being ruled out as a subject for serious discussion.
JH: We’ve focused a lot on academia and these various academic disputes, but there is more to our political debates, obviously, than disagreements about evidence and the findings of social scientists. A lot of our political disagreements have more to do with differences in value systems and moral judgments. What are the risks of focusing on “the science” to the exclusion of these other factors?
SFH: Well, I think here we should depart a bit from just the academic world and sort of elite conversations in the media and think about government regulation for a minute. One of the great pretenses of progressive administration a hundred years ago was that was the government needed to have “specialized expertise” to figure out how to solve difficult problems. By the way – no one is against expertise. We want highly trained expert doctors working on COVID or whatever else. The problem is the idea that there would be neutral experts with no skin in the game. It is delusional; I think we know that by now.
One of the things that political science teaches, particularly the public-choice school, is that bureaucracies tend to become single-minded about their mission. That’s understandable; at some point, if your job is to protect the environment, you're going to be zealous about it. If your job is to fight crime, you're going to be zealous about it.
The problem is, zealots don't make trade-offs very well. I think we really see this in the environmental area where, if you're a bureaucrat, you want to extend your mission. If the regulation is “X” you want it to be “X-plus-ten” – that's progress, we think. The biases and self-interests of bureaucratic organizations come into play. That’s what then distorts, I think, scientific investigation.
JH: Professor, thank you.
SFH: Thank you.
John Hirschauer is a staff writer for RealClearFoundation.
