Oct 26 2009
Scientific Thinking to Guide Compassion
Science and compassion in the same sentence? How in the world do those two go together? Allow me to explain.
In some regards I could qualify as a bleeding-heart liberal. I often think, “Go ahead and tax the very well-off — and even me, of the less-well-off but still well class — to fund project X, which will help the less fortunate. We live in a society, after all. We’re all in this together.
But I do realize that simply throwing money at a problem can miss the mark. What the practice of throwing money at a problem accomplishes is the comforting thought that you are doing something, and sometimes little else. I want to help, but not if in the end it’s not helping.
Recent analysis of the factors influencing the severity of this country’s Great Depression led to this finding: Hoover’s pro-labor stance helped cause Great Depression, UCLA economist says.
In particular, the economist in question, Lee E. Ohanian, concluded -
The policies, which included both propping up wages and encouraging job-sharing, also accounted for more than two-thirds of the precipitous decline in hours worked in the manufacturing sector, which was much harder hit initially than the agricultural sector, according to Ohanian.
“By keeping industrial wages too high, Hoover sharply depressed employment beyond where it otherwise would have been, and that act drove down the overall gross national product,” Ohanian said. “His policy was the single most important event in precipitating the Great Depression.”
Hmm. Was that really the case? May have been. As far as I can tell –which isn’t very far because this area of research is relatively foreign to me — this is the conclusion of one man’s retrospective analysis. Something to be taken with a grain of salt.
Still, the point remains. Sometimes we can hurt society in the long run by rushing to help in the short. I wonder about the recent financial bail-outs of struggling companies, for one.
A substantial part of the problem, as I see it, is that the cost of helping is generally spread very thin. Because it doesn’t hurt the individual all that much, people are more willing to throw massive amounts of money at a problem. Yet funds are finite, and saying “just charge it” is irresponsible. So we should be smart with how we help. And scientific thinking is the best way to determine what actually works. Which is another reason to infuse more of it into politics.
