Boy, do liberals love to claim that their side is “pro-science,” while conservatives are “anti-science.” This is sort of their new thing. There are occasional bits of evidence they can point to, but this is mostly self-serving hogwash.
The irony is that, in making these claims, liberals often betray a complete ignorance of what science is. The latest example comes from The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn.
Cohn asserts:
And then he wraps up by lamenting, “In an ideal world, these findings would matter,” but those neanderthal Republicans are too impervious to evidence.
Cohn thinks he’s being all empiricist while Republicans are just opposing stimulus for political reasons or ideology. But here’s the thing: there’s not much empirical about those CBO “findings.”
Reason’s Peter Suderman explained this a few months back:
The reports aren’t based on a detailed measurement of real-world output. Instead, they’re based on measuring the input (how much money was spent), and then using models to project how big the multiplier effect has been. Measuring spending and modeling output means that you can believe the CBO when it says that the stimulus turned out to be more costly than expected, but you should remain wary about any claims made using the “real-world effects” side.
Here’s how the CBO puts it:
There’s nothing wrong with using economic models in many circumstances, but you can’t claim that a piece of legislation worked because a model, based on assumptions that it would work, says it worked. You certainly can’t accuse the legislation’s critics of ignoring “findings.”
If I had concluded that “More guns equal less crime,” and then ran a model that embraced assumption, I could show pretty handily that places with more guns had less crime. Citing the CBO as proof of the stimulus’s effects is only less ridiculous because the models are more complex.
The bottom line is that if the stimulus bill did not do what it was originally forecast to do, then that would not have been detected by the subsequent analysis. I say that because CBO director Doug Elmendorf said, “if the stimulus bill did not do what it was originally forecast to do, then that would not have been detected by the subsequent analysis.”
The irony, of course, is that Cohn thinks he’s relying on results while opponents rely on presumptions, but his “results” are not based in “findings,” but in carrying out a syllogism from his own presumptions.
