‘Rational Expectations’ is a problematic theory in economics. Here I want to focus more away from economics; and more on the meanings of ‘rationality’ in decision-making, than on the problematic ambiguity of the word ‘expect’ (and its derivatives such as ‘expectations’). ‘Expectation’ here means what we believe ‘will’ happen, not ‘should’ happen; a rational expectation is a prediction, an unbiased average of possibilities, formed through a (usually implicit) calculation of possible benefits and costs – utilities and disutilities, to be technical – and their associated probabilities.

A rational decision is one that uses all freely available information in unbiased ways – plus some researched information, bearing in mind the cost of information gathering – to reach an optimal conclusion, or to decide on a course of action that can be ‘expected’ to lead to an optimal outcome to the decision-maker.

All living beings are rational to a point, in that they contain an automatic intelligence (AutoI) which exhibits programmed rationality. For most beings, AutoI is fully pre-programmed, so is not ‘intelligence’ as we would normally understand it; for others, that programming is subject to continuous reprogramming through a process of ‘learning’, true intelligence. In addition, beings of at least one species – humans – have a ‘manual override‘ intelligence (ManualI), which is our consciousness or awareness.

AutoI is an imperfect, though subversive, process of quasi-rational decision-making. Brains make calculations about optimal behaviour all the time; calculations of which we are not aware. (Richard Dawkins – eg in The Selfish Gene – would argue that these calculations serve the interest of the genotype rather than the individual phenotype.) For humans at least, full rationality means the capacity to use ManualI to override the amoral limitations of AutoI.

Rational decision-making, through learning, may be called ‘intelligence’. Though intelligence has another meaning: ‘information’, as in the ‘Central Intelligence Agency’ (CIA). It is perfectly possible to use unintelligent (stupid?) processes to gather and interpret intelligence!

Even when rational processes are used, many good decisions will, with hindsight, have inferior outcomes; or many good forecasts will prove partly or fully incorrect. It’s mostly bad luck, but also partly because intelligence is rarely completely unbiased, and partly because the cost of gaining extra information can be too high.

Expected Value, aka Expected Outcome

There is a simple rationality formula – familiar to students of statistics and of finance – which can yield a number called an ‘expected value’. In this expectations’ formula, a high positive number represents a good decision and a higher positive number represents a better decision. A negative number represents a bad (ie adverse) expected outcome, although sometimes all available expected outcomes are ‘bad’, meaning that the better course of action is the ‘lesser evil’. A positive number indicates an expected benefit, though not a necessary benefit. Negative possible outcomes represent ‘downside risk’, whereas positive possible outcomes represent ‘upside risk’.

(It is important to note that, in many contexts, a negative number does not denote something bad. A negative number may indicate ‘left’, as in the left-side of a Bell Curve; or ‘south’ or ‘west’ as in latitude and longitude. In accounting, a ‘deficit’ by no means indicates something bad, though President Trump and many others are confused on that point [see Could US tariffs cause lasting damage to the global economy? Al Jazeera 7 April 2025, where he says “to me a deficit is a loss”]; and we note that the substitution of the term ‘third world’ for ‘global south’ suggests an inferiority of southern latitudes. In double-entry bookkeeping, items must add to zero; one side of any balance sheet has negative values by necessity. A deficit, in some contexts, represents a ‘shortfall’ which is probably ‘bad’; but also a ‘longfall’ – or ‘surplus’ – is often bad, just think of the games of lawn bowls and pétanque.)

A simple example of rational decision-making is to decide between doing either something or nothing; for example, when contemplating asking someone out on a date. The expected outcome of doing nothing – not asking – has a value of zero. But, if you ask the person for the date, and you evaluate the chance of a ‘yes’ as 0.2, the utility of a ‘yes’ as +10, and the disutility of a ‘no’ as -1, then the expected value calculates to 1.2; so, the rational decision is to ask (the calculation is 10×0.2–1×0.8). This example is interesting, because the more probable outcome is a ‘no’, and a ‘no’ would make you less happy than if you had not asked the question; nevertheless, the rational decision here is to ‘take the risk’. (‘Risk averse’ persons might have rated the consequence of ‘rejection’ as a -4 rather than a -1; they would calculate an expected value of -1.2, so would choose to not ask for the date.)

Political Decision-Making when Catastrophic Outcomes are Possible

A rational calculation allocates values and probabilities to each identified possible outcome. A favourable outcome is represented by a positive number, a neutral outcome has a zero value, and an adverse outcome has a negative value.

A basic favourable outcome may be designated a value of one; an outcome twice-as-good has a value of two. An outcome an ‘order-of-magnitude’ better has a utility or happiness value of ten. The same applies to adverse outcomes; the equivalent disutility scores are minus-one, minus-two, and minus-ten.

An aeroplane crash might incur a score of minus fifty to society and minus ten million to an individual. The probability of dying in such a crash, for an individual, getting on a plane is probably about one in 100 million. If it was less than one-in-a-million, hardly anybody would get on a plane. (The chance of winning NZ Lotto first division is about one-in four-million.)

We should be thinking like this when we think about war. What kind of risk would we be willing to take? A problem is that the people who provoke wars do not themselves expect to be fatal victims.

A catastrophic outcome could range from minus 100 (say a small war) to minus infinity. An outcome which meant the total eradication of all life on Earth would come close to minus infinity. However, because of the mathematics of infinity (∞), any outcome of minus infinity with a non-zero probability yields an expectation of minus infinity. So for the following example, I will use minus one billion (-1b) as the disutility score for such a total catastrophe. A catastrophe that leads ‘only’ to human extinction might have a value of minus ten million (-10m). A holocaust the size of the 1943 RAF firebombing of Hamburg might have a catastrophe-value of minus one thousand (-1,000). A catastrophe the size of the 1932-1945 Bloodlands of Eastern Europe (which included 14,000 murders including the Holocaust, and much additional non-fatal suffering) might have an overall catastrophe-value of minus a hundred thousand (-100,000).

(Could we imagine an outcome of plus infinity: +∞? Maybe not, though certain evangelical Christians – extreme dispensationalists – pray for Armageddon; “dispensationalism views the progression of history in stages that begin in the Garden of Eden and ends in the paradise of the New Heavens and New Earth“. Thus, what might be minus infinity to most of us could be plus infinity for a few. There is an analogy of ‘wrap-around-mathematics’ in geospace; a longitude of +180° is the same as a longitude of -180°. And, in another example, some people believe that there is little difference between extreme-far-right politics and extreme-far-left politics. On this topic of extremes, the mainstream media should avoid the mindless repetition of hyperbole – as in a comment recently heard that President Trump’s tariffs may amount to an “economic nuclear winter“.)

My Example – the Ukraine War

In an example with some relevance to today, we might consider the NATO-backed ‘defence of Ukraine’. I could assign a modestly favourable outcome of +1 with a 50% probability, a very favourable outcome +10 with a 10% probability, and a catastrophic -1,000,000 with a 1% probability. (All other possibilities I will treat here as neutral, although my sense is that they are mostly adverse.) I calculate an expected value of minus 9,998.5; practically, minus 10,000; this is an average of all the identified possibilities, a catastrophic risk rather than a prediction of a major catastrophe.

This decision to persevere with the NATO-backed ‘defence of Ukraine’ is only rational if the only alternative decision – to abandon the NATO- backed ‘defence of Ukraine’ – comes up with an even lower expected value. (These two alternative decisions would be characterised by New Zealand’s former Ambassador to the United Kingdom – Phil Goff – as ‘standing up for Good in the face of Evil’ versus ‘appeasement of Putin’.) It seems to me that catastrophe becomes much less probable, in my example, with the ‘appeasement’ option than with the ‘defence’ option. (In the case that Goff was commenting on, his implication was that the 1938 ‘appeasement’ of Adolf Hitler by Neville Chamberlain led to either an increase in the probability of catastrophic war, or an increase in the size of catastrophe that might ensue.)

Morality Fallacy

One view of morality is the identification of some Other as Evil, and that any subsequent calling out of that (Evil) Other must therefore be Good. Further, in this view of morality, the claim is that, if and when hostilities break out between Good and Evil, then Good must fight to the ‘bitter end’ at ‘any cost’. (When we see Evil fighting to the bitter end – as per the examples of Germany and Japan in World War Two – we tend to think that’s stupid; but Good fighting to the bitter end is seen as righteous.)

Of course, this kind of morality is quite wrong. The idea that one must never surrender to Evil is a moral fallacy, based on the false (binary) idea that one side (generally ‘our side’) of a dispute or conflict has the entire ‘moral-high-ground’ and the other side has the entire ‘moral-low-ground’. Further, a victory to ‘Evil’ is surely less catastrophic than annihilation; a victory to Evil may be a lesser evil. Choosing annihilation can never be a Good choice.

Most conflict is nothing like Good versus Evil, though many participants on both (or all) sides believe that their side is Good. Most extended conflict is Bad versus Bad, Bad versus Stupid, or Stupid versus Stupid; although there are differing degrees of Bad and Stupid. Further, in the rare case when a conflict can objectively be described as Good versus Evil, it can never be good to disregard cost.

Morality in Practice

True morality requires a broadening of the concepts of ‘self’ and ‘self-interest’.

The important issues are benefits and costs to whom (or to what), and the matter of present benefits/costs versus future benefits/costs. In a sense, morality is a matter of ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘when’. Is it beneficial if something favourable happens ‘here’ but not ‘there’? ‘Now’, but not ‘then’? To ‘me’ or ‘us’, but not to ‘you’ or to ‘them’.

Human ManualI is very good at inclusive morality; AutoI is not.

It is natural, and not wrong, to prioritise one’s own group; and to prioritise the present over the future. The issue is the extent that we ‘discount’ benefits to those that are not ‘us’, and future benefits vis-à-vis present benefits. And costs, which we may regard as negative benefits. A very high level of discounting is near complete indifference towards others, or towards to future. An even higher level of discounting is to see harm to others as being beneficial to us; anti-altruism, being cruel to be cruel.

Then there is the ‘straw man’ morality much emphasised by classical liberals. ‘Libertarians’ claim that certain people with a collectivist mindset believe in an extreme form of altruism, where benefits to others take priority over benefits to self; such an ethos may be called a ‘culture of sacrifice’, benefitting by not-benefitting. While this does happen occasionally, what is more common is for people to emphasise public over private benefits; this is the sound moral principle that libertarians really disapprove of.

Thus, an important part of our ‘rational calculus’ is the private versus public balance; the extent to which we might recognise, and account for, ‘public benefits’ in addition to ‘private benefits’.

So, when we complete our matrix of probabilities and beneficial values, what weight do we give to the benefits that will be enjoyed by people other than ourselves, to other people in both their private and public capacities. Should we care if another group experiences genocide? Do we gloat? Should we empathise, or – more accurately – sympathise, and incorporate others into a more broadly-defined ‘community of self’?

If we have a war against a neighbouring country, should we care about how it affects other more distant countries through ‘collateral damage’? Should we care about a possible catastrophe if it can be postponed until the end of the life-expectancy of our generation? Should we care about the prosperity of life forms other than our own? Should we care about the well-being of our environments? Should we care more about our ‘natural resources’ – such as ‘land’ – than we care about other people who might be competing for the use of those same resources? If we have knowledge that will allow us to make improvements to the lives of others so that they catch up to our own living standards, should we make that knowledge public and useful? Should we account for the well-being of people who live under the rule of rulers who we have cast as ‘Evil’ (such as the burghers of Hamburg in 1943)?

One important morality concept is that of ‘reciprocation’. If we accept that others have the right to think of us in ways that compare with how we think of them, then we must value their lives much as we value our own lives. If I live in Auckland, should I value the life of a person who lives in New Delhi nearly as much as I value the life of someone who lives in Wellington? I should if I expect persons in Mumbai to value my life nearly as much as they value the lives of people in New Delhi.

Reciprocal morality can easily fail when someone belongs to a group which has apparent power over another group. We may cease to care whether the other group suffers our wrath, if we perceive that the ‘lesser’ group has no power to inflict their wrath onto our group. We may feel that we have immunity, and impunity. They should care about us, but we need not care about them.

It is through our ManualI – our manual override, our consciousness, our awareness – that we have the opportunity to make rational valuations which incorporate morality. Our AutoI, while rational in its own terms, is also amoral. We can behave in amoral self-interested ways – even immoral ways – without being aware of it. Our automatic benefit-cost analyses drive much of our behaviour, without our awareness; we cannot easily question what drives our Auto-Intelligence.

Our AutoI systems may – in evolutionary terms – select for degrees of ignorance, stupidity, blindness as ways of succeeding, of coping. AutoI protects us from having to face-up to the downsides of our actions and our beliefs; especially downsides experienced more by others than by ourselves. And they tell us that we are Good, and that some others are Bad.

Pavlovian Narratives

We come to believe in other people’s narratives through habit or conditioning. AutoI itself has a cost-cutting capacity that allows speedy decision-making; it adopts reasoning shortcuts, in the context that shortcuts save costs. We build careers – indeed our careers as experts in something – by largely accepting other people’s narratives as truths that should not be questioned and that should be passed on. We enjoy belonging to ‘belief communities’; and we are ‘pain-minimisers’ at least as much as we are ‘pleasure-maximisers’; it may be ‘painful’ to be excluded from a community. We too-easily appease unsound public-policy decisions without even knowing that we are appeasing. We turn-off the bad news rather than confronting it.

Our beliefs are subject to Pavlovian conditioning. And one of the most painful experiences any human being can suffer is to have beliefs cancelled as ‘stupid’. So we unknowingly – through AutoI – program our auto-intelligences to protect our beliefs from adverse exposure; and, if such protection fails, to denounce those who challenge our belief-narratives.

One form of cost-cutting-rationality is ‘follow-the-leader’. It’s a form of ‘conclusion free-riding’. We choose to believe things if we perceive that many others believe those things. An important form of ‘follow-the-leader’ is to simply take our cues from authority figures, saving ourselves the trouble of ‘manual’ self-reasoning.

With AI – Artificial Intelligence – we delegate even more of our decision-making away from our moral centres, our consciousnesses, our manual overrides. We allow automatic and artificial intelligence to perform ever more of our mental labour. It’s more a matter of people becoming robot-like than being replaced by robots.

Pavlovian rationalisation is heavily compromised by unconscious bias. Beliefs that arise from uncritical ‘follow-the-leader’ strategies are unsound. They lead us to make suboptimal decisions.

Why War?

Many people, including people in positions of influence, make decisions that are sub-rational, in the sense that they allow auto-biases to prevail over reflective ‘manual’ decision-making. There are biases in received information, and further biases in the way we interpret/process information.

Unhelpful, biased and simplistic narratives lead us into wars. And, because wars end in the future, we forever discount the problem of finishing wars.

When we go to war, how much do we think about third parties? In the old days when an attacker might lay-siege to a castle, it was very much ‘us’ versus ‘you’. But today is the time of nuclear weapons, other potential weapons of mass destruction, of civilian-targeting, and drone warfare. Proper consideration of third-parties – including non-human parties – becomes paramount. A Keir Starmer might feel cross towards a Vladimir Putin; but should that be allowed to have a significant adverse impact on the people of, say, Sri Lanka; let alone the people of Lancashire or Kazan?

Proper reflective and conscious consideration of the costs and benefits of our actions which impact on others should be undertaken. Smaller losses are better than bigger losses, and the world doesn’t end if the other guy believes he has ‘won’. Such considerations, which minimise bias, do allow for a degree of weighting in favour of the protagonists’ communities. But our group should never be indifferent to the wellbeing of other groups – including but not only the antagonist group(s) – and should forever understand that if we expect our opponents to not commit crimes, then we should not commit crimes either.

War escalates conflicts rather than resolves them. And it exacerbates other public ‘bads’ such as disease, famine, and climate change. War comes about because of lazy unchecked narratives, and unreasoned loyalty to those narratives.

Further Issues about Rational Expectations:

Poor People

It is widely believed by middle-class people that people in the precariat (lower-working-class) and the underclass should not gamble; as in buying lottery tickets and playing the ‘pokies’. But ‘lower-class people’ generally exhibit quite rational behaviour. In this case, rare but big wins make a real difference to people’s lives, whereas regular small losses make little difference to people already in poverty or in poverty-traps.

The expected return on gambling is usually negative, though the actual value of a big-win cannot simply be measured in dollar-terms. $100,000 means a much greater benefit to a poor person than to a rich person. Further, the expected value of non-gambling for someone stuck in a poverty-trap is also negative. It is rational to choose the least-negative option when all options are adverse.

Policy Credibility

Here I have commented about the rationality of decision-making, and how rational decisions are made in a reflective, conscious, moral, and humane way. However, there is also an issue around the meaning of ‘expectations’. While the more technically correct meaning of expectation is a person’s belief in what will happen, the word ‘expectation’ is also used to express a person’s belief in what should happen.

(An expectation can be either what someone will do, or should do. Consider: ‘Russia will keep fighting’ and ‘Russia should stop fighting’. To ‘keep fighting’ and to ‘stop fighting’ are both valid expectations; though only the first is a rational expectation from the viewpoint of, say, Keir Starmer; the second is an ‘exhortation’.)

The phrase ‘rational expectations’ is used most widely in the macroeconomics of interest rates and inflation. The job of Reserve Banks (‘central banks’) in the post-1989 world is to condition people (in a Pavlovian sense) into believing that an engineered increase in interest rates will lead to a fall in the inflation rate. This is called ‘credibility’. The idea is that if enough people believe a proposition to be true, then it will become true, and hence the conditioned belief becomes a rational belief. If people come to believe that the rate of inflation this year will be less than it was last year – however they came to that belief – then it should dowse their price-raising ardour; it becomes a contrived ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’.

War

The same reasoning may be applied to warfare. If, by one side (especially ‘our’ side) talking-tough (and waving an incendiary stick), people on both sides believe that the other side will dowse its asset-razing ardour (due to fear or ‘loss of morale’), then the belief that a war is more-likely-to-end may in itself lead to a cessation of hostilities. While unconvincing, because humans are averse to humiliation, it’s an appeal to ‘our’ AutoI (automatic intelligence) over our less credulous ManualI (manual override, our reflective intelligence). It’s the ‘credible’ ‘tough-man’ (or iron-lady) narrative. In this sense, Winston Churchill was a credible wartime leader.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Science, in the not-so-recent-past, has often had a bad press. It’s been personified, particularly by the political left, as Frankenstein, as agents of capitalism, classical liberalism, colonialism, sexism (yang over yin), eugenics, and god-like pretension. More recently though, in the zeitgeists of climate change awareness and covid, it’s had an unusually good press; although we retain this persistent worry that viruses such as SARS-Cov2 may be the unwitting or witting result of the work of careless or evil scientists.

Science is simply a method of acquiring knowledge; a method that complements other methods, such as direct observation, thematic storytelling (literature, humanities), and abstraction (eg mathematics, accounting and law). And applied science is the process of creating technologies and other interventions which make use of scientific knowledge. Almost no knowledge is absolute; knowledge, whether derived from science or otherwise, is contestable. The only kind of absolute knowledge is that of tautology, with the most important tautologies being those that make up the discipline of mathematics.

The mantra we hear much of these days is: ‘the science tells us …’. Actually, the science doesn’t tell us anything; rather scientists tell us things, and scientists are people with the same human foibles as other people. This idea of science (and therefore scientists) being the ‘arbiters of facts’ is what I call ‘scientism’. It is no different to the old medieval idea of popes, and archbishops, and ayatollahs as being the possessors of facts; the arbiters of truth. It seeds the idea of uncontested – indeed incontestable – truth. It is the idea that ‘facts’ represent truth, and that there cannot be ‘alternative facts’; it is the idea that if some statement (ie ‘claim’) conflicts with what the authorised science says, then that claim must be false.

This philosophy of science as absolute truth – ‘the facts’ – is practiced and supported by ‘scientistes’ (as I call them). Scientism is the religion of science; the ‘faith’ of science. Many people we call ‘scientists’ may also aptly be called ‘scientistes’; they practice their science as a faith as well as their approved method.

Scientific knowledge actually consists of ‘explanatory hypotheses’ which are ‘undisproven’. (This statement is an ‘abstract truth’ or tautology; it represents a ‘definition’ of science.) Thus science is a deductive method, where potential truths derive from theory, and are subject to testing. Scientific hypotheses may or may not be currently contested – in full or in part. But, to be scientific, the must be capable of being contested; and a resolution to such a contest should be conceptually possible, using the method of direct observation. The resolution need not be the discarding of one hypothesis in favour of another; it may be a synthesis of the contesting hypotheses. (Is ‘light’ made up of waves or particles? It turns out that the best current answer is ‘both’.) We use scientific knowledge – undisproven hypotheses – to make predictions; ‘making predictions’ may be to test hypotheses, or we may perform actions – or implement policies – on the basis that this knowledge is most likely true.

We might note that the concept of evolution in science is a tautology; it essentially says ‘what survives best survives best’. The disputes that involve evolution are around the initial origins of ‘things’ (such as the origins of life, or of matter); or around the mechanisms of evolutionary change, including whether those mechanisms involve intervention. (Charles Darwin prefaced ‘The Origins of the Species’ with a discussion about domestication, in which humans were the external agents for the evolution of domesticated species.)

A most useful metaphor for science is the ‘table’. Explanatory hypotheses that may be true – that are undisproven – sit on this table of potential knowledge. Scientific tension exists when there are two or more hypotheses on the table, both (or all) purporting to explain the same observations. A scientist welcomes alternative hypotheses, because science is all about testing and revising current knowledge. Scientistes, on the other hand, do whatever they can to prevent the emergence of alternative facts. Scientistes are invested in one set of facts, and – in line with human nature generally – are not happy to ‘write off’ past investment. Leading scientistes distil their wisdom into texts, which become ‘the truth’. In medical ‘science’, the truth for nearly two millenniums was revealed through the second century writings of Galen, arguably the greatest scientiste of all time. Ordinary scientistes, like priests, simply perpetrate or perpetuate the teachings of their antecedent mentors.

For practical convenience, science is divided into sciences, or scientific disciplines. The first division is into ‘natural science’ vis-à-vis ‘social science’; sometimes called ‘hard science’ versus ‘soft science’. The former includes physics, chemistry and biology. The latter includes economics, anthropology and psychology. By definition, these are empirical (subject to testing by observation) rather than cultural. However the practice of many people who are employed as ‘scientists’ may indeed include a cultural component; a component that reflects a belief system.

Belief systems can be regarded as forms of literary truths; truths which will typically conflict with other belief systems, and which by their very nature cannot be resolved as true or false. There are other kinds of literary truth: in particular those of ‘fiction’, such as the works of Shakespeare that uphold certain universal themes about human behaviour; and those of ‘non-fiction’, in particular history texts (historiography) which are highly contestable, and which often convey as much information about the zeitgeists and beliefs of the historians as they do about the times and mores that are being investigated.

Abstract truths may take the form of a tautology – true by definition or (as in algebra) by logical extension. Or they may arise from a belief system: for example, a set of laws such as the ‘Ten Commandments’ or ‘Sharia Law’; or an accounting methodology such as the ‘double-entry bookkeeping’ as practiced by the medieval Venetians, and attributed in particular to the renaissance texts of Luca Pacioli.

Belief systems can be overlayed, possibly in contradictory ways. It is perfectly possible to believe in both Christianity and primitive capitalism. It is also possible to believe in Christianity and be implacably imposed to primitive capitalism. (To avoid discursion, we may think of primitive capitalism as unevolved or unreimagined capitalism. See my Who’s The Thief? for a way out of unevolved capitalism.) While purely religious belief systems are not contestable, systems such as primitive capitalism – based on legal and accounting constructs around ‘property’ – are contestable but not in a strictly scientific sense. More in an ethical sense.

Who are Scientists?

Babies are scientists! Babies are unencumbered by previous investments, previously formed beliefs, so are free to learn about the world by forming hypotheses, testing them, and rejecting or modifying the hypotheses that don’t meet their evidential tests.

• Babies resemble tiny scientists more than you might think, PBS, 2 Apr 2015
• Every Child is a Scientist, Wired, 28 Sep 2011

In an important sense, a scientist is anybody who revises what they believe to be true in the light of changing evidence. Police detectives are – or at least ought to be – scientists; yet, as a group, they have had a reputation for tunnel vision, for pursuing a single line of investigation while downplaying information that questions that investigative line.

Yet we normally think of scientists as people who are employed with a role labelled ‘scientist’, and as specialist scholars or practitioners within a scientific discipline such as physics or economics. Many people with this moniker are people we do not trust, in large part because of who they are employed by, or who they might hold an allegiance towards.

Any ‘scientist’ who instinctively acts to keep ‘alternative facts’ off the ‘table of knowledge’ is a scientiste rather than a scientist, whatever their formal title might be. They may have been corrupted by their employers’ belief systems; or by their own. Indeed their own belief systems might attract them to employers with compatible belief systems. Scientistes are the knowledge gatekeepers of liberal polities.

Another problem with scientific truth is that of ‘narrow-vision’. One test of a scientifically-informed policy relating to Covid19 might be that it minimises the number of people who die of Covid19, while neither caring about the number of people who die from (ie, as a result of, directly or indirectly) Covid19, nor being interested in non-fatal consequences of Covid19. The informing scientists may be unbiassed with respect to a belief system, but unintentionally biassed through an overly narrow criterion of the success of an intervention they support.

The scientiste problem is not just about biassed science; it’s also about the cheerleaders for scientism, who may include politicians, public servants, and journalists. Cheerleaders, inclined towards popular belief-systems, may express ‘confirmation bias’ towards certain kinds of scientific ‘facts’ relative to alternative scientific facts. They may not ask questions that do not align with the favoured narratives.

An interesting article of the bad scientist good scientist genre is ‘Reality Check: Vax Vexation’ by Stephen Davis (NZ Listener, 4 Dec 2021, p.12) which focuses on the Public Health Policy Journal, which is edited and published by ‘discredited’ scientists. (I use quote marks as a sign of my neutrality on this matter.) My sense is that much of the ‘science’ in this journal might be regarded as non-science or nonsense by many scientists; but much science published in other journals also reflects an agenda.

Indeed some bad science is used to push one agenda that I’m supportive of; namely that of concern about anthropogenic climate change, a reality which it is difficult to argue against based on the evidence that I’m aware of. Nevertheless, as an economic historian, I was disappointed by the infamous ‘hockey stick’ chart, that entirely removes the Little Ice Age which peaked in the seventeenth century, and has been widely argued to be an instrumental factor in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, especially in Europe. (A very worthwhile book here is Nature’s Mutiny by Philipp Blom, Picador 2019, about “How the Little Ice Age transformed the West and shaped the present”. Some people have played down the Little Ice Age by suggesting that it was mainly a northern hemisphere phenomenon; the state of New Zealand’s glaciers at the time of James Cook’s first voyage – 1769 – would suggest otherwise)

Another example of bad science good science rhetoric was Al Jazeera’s The Campaign Against the Climate (17 Apr 2021) where ‘bad scientists’ upholding naked capitalist agendas with pseudo-scientific falsehoods were pitted against good publicly-spirited agenda-free scientists. If only it were that simple! Actually, the requirement to look after Planet Earth is a difficult-to-contest ethical truth; the climate science is useful, but by no means the only reason to induce better behaviour.

An interesting and accessible recent discussion about science was Steven Pinker’s RNZ (27 Nov 2021) interview with Kim Hill: Steven Pinker: why being rational is human and matters now. In a poignant moment at the end of the interview, Pinker acknowledged the important scientific career of the late Emeritus Professor Michael Corballis, who, apparently, “some senior academics say Corballis was the best chance Auckland University has ever had to snare a Nobel Prize“. Sadly, for this distinguished world scientist aged 85, half of the references in his Wikipedia page relate to events in the last few months (see the letter Corballis co-authored, In Defence of Science, which referred to Mātauranga Māori.

(Mātauranga Māori is largely a mix of generalised inference from direct observation [the inductivemethod], much of which complements and facilitates science, and thematic storytelling which conveys ethical truths and true human foibles. That is not to claim that Māori before colonisation never used the scientific [deductive] method; rather it is to acknowledge that valid knowledge – truth – is much more than explanatory science, and that oral traditions of knowledge cannot easily convey methodology.)

Questions in need of an Improved Knowledge Base

I will mention four.

First on human origins, very little of what I have read properly acknowledges that a very large proportion of humans in the past will have lived, as today, in low-altitude habitats. The anthropalaeontologists don’t deny that sea levels are up to 100 metres higher today than they were between 90,000 and 10,000 years ago; but they continue to favour inductive reasoning based on available evidence (very little of which was from low-altitude habitats for the essential reason that those habitats are now under water), while showing little interest in more speculative theory-informed possibilities about the coastal lives of early humans.

Second, when it comes to epidemiology, there still seems to be a scientific bias in favour of explanations for epidemics based on the unique characteristics of micro-pathogens rather than in favour of explanations that focus on the different vulnerabilities of host populations to the likes of viruses and bacteria. Thus, I have yet to see any stories trying to explain why, in 2020 before new Covid19 variants emerged, Eastern Europe suffered much worse than Western Europe in late 2020 despite the west suffering much more initially; and I have seen few attempts to explain why South America was so vulnerable.

Third, there are many matters in economics that could be better understood by better practice in economic science. The one I will mention here is about the causes of inflation; and the alleged role of low interest rates in causing inflation, and of the widespread conviction that intervening in the market to raise interest costs will somehow make inflation go away. The commonsense approach is to see inflation as analogous to physiological pain, knowing that pain can have many possible causes. The ‘one remedy’ answer for inflation is no more scientific than was Galen’s famous blood-letting remedy for many types of medical ailment. Further, we only have to look at the relationship between interest rates and inflation in New Zealand (and elsewhere) in the years before the 2008 global financial crisis; then, higher interest rates were raising both general inflation and especially house price inflation.

Finally, an accounting matter. How can we know how much income-tax is paid by any New Zealander, and by all New Zealanders? It’s a question with no scientific answer, because it depends on the legal and accounting systems adopted. And these systems, as noted, are derived culturally, not scientifically.

Philosophers of Science

I will finish this essay by noting three classic works on the philosophy of Science; all works I learned about in my higher education.

The first work remains the seminal text on the scientific method, and was published in Nazi Germany in 1934, and translated into English in 1959. It is of course Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery. We should note that Popper (born in Austria) was not a Nazi; he indeed also wrote a classic discourse on political liberalism – The Open Society and Its Enemies – while living as a political refugee in Christchurch, New Zealand. Popper will have been well aware of the Methodenstreit – the Battle of Methods – in economics in the 1880s, in which the deductive method promoted by the ‘Austrian school’ of economists was pitted against the inductive method favoured by the German ‘historical school’.

The second classic work on science was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(1962), which introduced the notion of ‘paradigm-shift’. Thus the reality is that most professional scientists work within paradigms all their careers, and that there is an innate conservatism within such scientific work. Scientists tend not to ask questions that might lead to uncomfortable answers; they build safer careers working within already well-researched territory.

Finally, Imre Lakatos introduced the idea of ‘Research Programmes’ which had a hard core, and a soft periphery. The hard core really represented a ‘scientific dogma’ (yes, it’s an oxymoron), a quasi-scientific belief system (doctrine) which was protected from the usual scientific methods of falsification. The Research Programme could, however, evolve in relatively incremental ways, through allowing changes to its soft outer veneer.

I have little doubt that Michael Corballis was familiar with the works of these three philosophers of knowledge. Of course, their works and his are subject to the principle of scientific contestability – subject to revision through argument and through counter-example – as are any works in the field of knowledge.

One of the ‘pseudo-sciences’ that Lakatos identified was ‘neoclassical economics’, which, at its core and as is practiced by its practitioners, is very much a doctrine – the doctrine of economic liberalism – rather than a science. Yet economics comes up with many useful hypotheses which are often tested, though not always rejected or modified when the scientific method suggests they should be. Take my example about inflation.

Indeed economics, which models itself on physics, contains truths that are more analogous to pure mathematical truths; truths that might be called advanced tautologies. An important such truth forms the basis for cost-benefit analysis: it says that if the benefit of doing more of something outweighs its ‘marginal’ cost, then more should be done. Otherwise more should not be done, and possibly too much of that something has already been done.

Coming back to the biggest scientific issue of 2020 and 2021, this core economic truth can help answer the question as to how long a nation facing a pandemic emergency should continue to stay in protective quarantine, or for how long people should continue to wear facemasks in confined public spaces. By definition, an emergency public health mandate has clear short-term benefits that outweigh its short-term costs. But, when it comes to the question of extending such an authority-led measure, calculations of diminishing benefits and increasing costs come into play.

Conclusion

There is much more to knowledge than science. Nevertheless, the scientific method has proved to be a major contributor to modern knowledge, both through the wonderful and otherwise unknowable insights into nature that it brings, and to the technologies and other human interventions which contestable knowledge makes possible. Science should neither be denounced nor deified. Scientism is not science. Scientific knowledge is contestable, by definition, and is tested and modified through observation and measurement.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Cartoon Strip 1

Imagine a two-panel cartoon strip. Each panel has an apple tree and two people. In the first panel, the tree has eight apples, all low-hanging. In the second panel, the apples have all been picked. One person (A) has one apple in their basket. The other person (B) has seven apples in theirs.

There are two simple and obvious interpretation scenarios. One scenario is that the tree is the private property of one of the two people; the other scenario is that the tree is in the public domain. The tree is a metaphor for ‘property’ (ie, for ‘capital’).

In scenario one, all eight apples belong to one of the people (B); ie the owner of the tree. In scenario two, the apples should be distributed evenly; four apples each.

The cartoon strip shows an outcome, however, that is neither of these. One person has more apples than they are entitled to. In scenario one, A is the thief. In scenario two, B is the thief.

There is no scientific principle that can lead us to say, factually, who is the thief. The fact we must determine – ie the answer to the question posed in the title – depends on the property rights a society subscribes to. Rights are a legal construct, a matter of principle; not a matter that can be resolved by science.

We can give names to these two scenarios. Scenario one may be called ‘primitive capitalism’. Scenario two may be called ‘primitive communism’.

Cartoon Strip 2

This is identical to strip 1, except that there are two trees of approximately equal size, and each tree has four apples. Once again, in the second panel, A has one apple and B has seven.

There are now four interpretation scenarios. In addition to the two previous scenarios – primitive capitalism and primitive communism – there is scenario three, which has each person owning a tree. This scenario could be called ‘private-property-owning democracy’. Person B would clearly be the thief, because each person should have four apples.

Scenario four follows by conflating the two interpretations from Cartoon Strip 1. One tree would be privately owned, and one would be in the public domain. Person B would be the thief. B should have six apples (not seven), with person A having two (not one).

Democratic Capitalism

Scenario four may be called ‘democratic capitalism’. And, if the legal system – and the accounting system – could be aligned this way, with a simple balance of private and public property rights, then the economic problems of our age (indeed of any age) can be resolved.

From this principled viewpoint, much of what we see in the world around us is indeed theft. We live under a presumption of primitive capitalism.

What is required is democratic capitalism, with due respect for democratic and capitalist property rights. Translated into the ‘real world’, all adults – ie minors excluded – hold, as a matter of legal principle, a democratic franchise. All franchisees (an alternative word to ‘citizens’) draw sustenance and enjoyment, as a right, from the public tree; while most also draw from their own private trees.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

In our age of unnuanced media reporting, cynicism, and political correctness, words and meanings are subject – perhaps increasingly – to an effective process of cancellation. It’s not a new process, in the past certain words might be replaced by others – eg ‘race’ replaced by ‘ethnicity’, ‘illegitimate’ replaced by ‘ex-nuptial’, ‘benefit’ replaced by ‘handout’. Such replacements are not necessarily problematic. In the first two examples given above, words whose popular meanings have become pejorative have been replaced by words with essentially the same meanings, but without the pejorative connotations.

In the third example, a word (‘benefit’) that is a very good word – indeed a word that literally means ‘something good’ – has suffered a pejorative meaning and has been largely replaced by a word that reinforces that pejorative meaning. The proper meaning of ‘benefit’ – as a noun, though not as a verb – has largely been lost to the language; and it’s a critically important meaning to the understanding of the available capitalist options for the future of human civilisation. (I cannot conceive of any non-capitalist options that are not dystopian; apologies for the quadruple negative!)

Three words that I am particularly lamenting are ‘disinterested’, ‘progressive’, and ‘literally’. Today the word ‘disinterested’ has been almost entirely conflated with the word ‘uninterested’. Yet the craft of an academic – of a scholar – is to be always disinterested and never uninterested. The loss of this distinction is one of the warning signs that the age of reason – always tentative, but critically important to facilitating a civilised way of life – is nearing its end.

The word ‘progressive’ has two main meanings – both somewhat nebulous. For the earlier meaning, we get the full flavour in James Belich’s book on New Zealand history, Making Peoples. It was exemplified in the settler dream of creating a ‘Greater Britain’ in these islands; progress was understood as growth on steroids. The politicians in New Zealand most associated with this meaning of progressive were Julius Vogel, Joseph Ward, and Robert Muldoon (in Muldoon’s case it was about stemming what would otherwise have been substantial negative growth). These were our financially heroic political leaders, prepared to make full use of the government’s privileged balance sheet to build a materially advanced and equitable future.

The alternative – and prevailing – meaning of ‘progressive’ was coined through the American progressive movement of the early 1900s. Indeed these left-wing American intellectuals looked to New Zealand – and particularly the initial ‘radical’ Liberal leadership of John Balance (who lost his head, decades ago, in Whanganui) and William Pember Reeves – as setting the pace to a bright new socially enlightened twentieth century. (Refer Progressivism and the World of Reform: New Zealand and the Origins of the American Welfare State, 1987, by Peter J. Coleman.)

There are ironies. In Canada in the twentieth century, the equivalent of New Zealand’s National Party was the ‘Progressive Conservatives’, with the word ‘progressive’ fully containing that Vogellian meaning mentioned above. Yet today, the term ‘progressive’ relates to the new white collar socio-economic elite – simultaneously left-wing and (like all elites) conservative, inclined to shut down debates about practical solutions to the actual problems of our age, pursuing ideological agendas formed yesterday, and inclined to interpret the contemporary world as a contest between intelligentsia (defined as themselves) and an emerging conspiracy-theorising stupidia.

The word ‘literally’ is a wonderful word, the antonym of ‘figuratively’. To literally walk in someone else’s shoes means to actually wear the shoes of that other person. Recently I heard someone say, after a good result in the Olympic Games, that they were ‘literally over the moon’. Yeah right! Not even Jeff Bezos can do that. Not yet. ‘Literally’ is now becoming a synonym of ‘figuratively’; and, more generally, its just becoming another meaningless expression of hyperbole.

Sex, Gender and Certification

Language in this area is becoming a (figurative) minefield. And, in reflection of these sensitivities, this week the New Zealand Parliament is proceeding with a bill that will enable people to modify their birth certificates. This retrospective tinkering with historical documents – like other retrospective procedures in law – makes me very uneasy. Retrospectivity was one of the important themes of George Orwell’s classic dystopia, 1984. People would be cancelled, would become unpersons who legally never existed, even though they are or were alive, literally.

I will quote Yuval Noah Harari – from p.170 of his very (and deservedly) popular book Sapiens. Harari has impeccable credentials as a ‘progressive’ intellectual, in the full twentyfirst century meaning of that word.

Scholars usually distinguish between ‘sex’, which is a biological category, and ‘gender’, a cultural category. Sex is divided between males and females, and the qualities of this division are objective and have remained constant throughout history. Gender is divided between men and women (and some cultures recognise other categories). … To get to be a member of the male sex is the simplest thing in the world. You just need to be born with an X and a Y chromosome. To get to be a female is equally simple. A pair of X chromosomes will do it.

The word ‘sex’ has become a bit like the word ‘race’, and as a result many people have come to use the word ‘gender’, incorrectly, as a euphemism for ‘sex’. Some people accentuate the biological concept of ‘sex’, while substituting the word ‘gender’. Take ‘gender-reveal parties’ as an example. Further, some feminists refer to ‘gender’ as a biological attribute, while others use it as a cultural attribute.

Gender, as a term of identity, is much like that of religion. We know that most people born to Muslim parents will live their lives as Muslims; but it would be wrong to put the world ‘Muslim’ on a person’s birth certificate. A person born into a Muslim family may choose to not be a Muslim. It’s even trickier with Jews. To be an ‘Ashkenazy Jew’ is widely used as an ethnicity (eg in ancestry DNA tests), as well as a descriptor of a person’s faith, or an ancestor’s faith. This is because of the widespread social practice – covering three millenniums – of Jews to reproduce within their religious community. Over time, a religious group thereby becomes an ethnic group. Nevertheless, a person born into a Jewish family can disavow Judaism, but will still have the same ethnicity as their siblings who retain their birth faith.

A birth certificate is the official documentation of a birth, not a documentation of a person’s life, nor a documentation of a person’s subjective status on their eighteenth birthday. It’s meant to be a document of a person’s biology, not of their culture.

The issue does arise however, about the need to have a widely-used document that states who someone ‘is’, rather than what they ‘were’. Our common practice is to use passports and drivers’ licences for this purpose. But its an ad hoc solution.

Given that, in the 2020s, fewer people will travel internationally and more people are choosing not to drive (or choosing to delay gaining a driver’s licence), it is now time that New Zealanders ‘bite the bullet’ and develop an official domestic system of identity documentation; a present-focussed (rather than past-focused) system that easily allows a person to revise their identity when any aspect of their identity changes. Some categories of identity – eg gender, religion, ethnicity – could be optional inclusions. A person’s sex would not be required. The items of information needed would be a photo, a signature, a date of birth (to indicate age), a social security number, and a person’s immigration status. (With immigration status shown, a person’s place of birth would not be required.)

Do we need to indicate sex at all on a birth certificate? We don’t include ethnicity. I would argue ‘yes’, a person’s sex is an important part of their birth identity. (And, much academic research focusses on different life outcomes and options and discriminations based on their sex, even if much of its publication is couched in the subjective language of gender. Sex, like age, is a fundamental human attribute.) Harari (p.172) notes that “there is some universal biological [my emphasis] reason” why we have regarded, throughout history, the distinction between males and females as important. I presume it relates to their distinctly different biological roles in the literal reproduction of our species.

There is no equivalent imperative to define a person by their ethnicity, although some societies still do. (This is a touchy hypothetical point though, because there were once multiple species – not races – of humans. Even politically correct people today hang on to the idea that it is acceptable to be disparaging to extinct species of humans – eg Neanderthals – whereas they should not be disparaging to more recent victims of genocide, such as Tasmania’s first peoples. The boundary between extinct human species and extinct ethnicities is not clear though; it’s still accepted practice to call an allegedly ‘uncultured’ person a ‘philistine’. Also, especially in this modern era of DNA sequencing, we know that neither the genomes of native Tasmanians nor native Europeans [Neanderthals] are extinct.)

Marriages and Unions

An interesting episode in New Zealand’s political history is when, half a decade ago, New Zealand was one of the first jurisdictions to redefine the word ‘marriage’. The legislation came up, purely by chance, as a private member’s bill, and was promoted as an exercise in the right of two men (or two males) or two women (or two females) to love each other in the same public sense as a man and a woman (or a male and a female) could. Very few people disagreed with that right, which already existed. (It’s a bit like the ‘anti-hate speech’ bill which we are told to expect this or next year. We already have laws against hate-speech.)

There was a small issue, a problem with the earlier ‘Civil Union’ legislation, brought in about 15 years ago by the then Helen Clark led government. Imagine a Venn Diagram with ‘marriage’ on one side and ‘civil union’ on the other. While the two sides largely intersected, in some respects a civil union was wider in scope (same-sex relationships) and in other respects marriage was wider in scope (eg in the rights to adopt children). What we did, in effect, was to extend the scope of the Civil Union legislation, and then to redefine a ‘civil union’ as a ‘marriage’. The first part of this process was necessary, the second part was not. In doing so, we removed by diktat the meaning of a word – marriage, the union of an adult male and an adult female – that had existed since Adam and Eve, or Rangi and Papa.

The logically obvious approach to take was to make traditional marriage a cultural subset of an enhanced legal institution; a subset of a properly defined civil union. (An unpleasant linguistic analogy is that of ‘murder’ being a cultural subset of the legal term ‘homicide’.) In that way, marriage could still have been what it always was (a popular name for a union between a man and a woman), and there would have been no basis for any discrimination between same-sex and different-sex unions. In that case, marriage would have disappeared as a legal construct, while maintaining its popular role as a reproductive union.

My understanding is that the then Attorney-General, Christopher Finlayson, held essentially this same view. But hardly anybody – least of all people like myself, or Christopher Finlayson – wanted to be seen as gay-bashers or as neanderthals, as all opponents of gay-marriage were framed as being. At that time, there was no space for nuanced opposition to the legislation; in the public eye, re that issue, a person was either a progressive or a philistine.

At least the idea of a biological-based reproductive union still exists, albeit as a phrase – heterosexual marriage – rather than as a word. So all is not lost. Problematic though is the fact that – by affirming the legal meaning of the word ‘marriage’ – the concept of a de facto marriage, a favoured union for many people, has become an oxymoron.

Science, Knowledge, and other related Concepts

We have a number of important words – science, knowledge, truth, facts, claims, information – that have related meanings, but distinctively different (albeit nuanced) meanings.

A few weeks ago, a group of University of Auckland scientists wrote to the New Zealand Listener, arguing that traditional Māori knowledge (and modern knowledge developed through that Mātauranga Māori framework) was not science. While they were correct – science and knowledge are not the same thing – the uncritical reaction was immediate and unforgiving.

Knowledge derives from three things: observation (and measurement), reasoning, and literature (ie culture). Knowledge is evolving, and much of what was knowledge in the past would not be classed as knowledge today (eg Galen’s paradigm of medical knowledge). Much that is knowledge – such as complex knowledge that passes to us through literature – is unverifiable, but it tells us who we are, and how we see the world and how we think about it. (Early medical knowledge may not be classed as knowledge today, but the historiography of early medical knowledge certainly would be classed as knowledge today.)

Science is very much a method – associated with the Age of Reason – that can only create negative knowledge. Scientific research can only falsify propositions; it cannot declare them to be ‘true’; and, in practice, most falsification is based on probabilistic arguments devised by statisticians.

Empirical knowledge about the stars sufficient to enable trans-oceanic navigation is no more ‘science’ than is knowledge about which herbal remedies relieve certain conditions of pain or disease. Ptolemaic astronomy, traditional Polynesian astronomy, and Copernican astronomy all equally convey practical navigational knowledge. Polynesian astronomical knowledge is ‘true’, as observational knowledge; but it’s not science, it cannot be falsified. Ptolemaic astronomy, likewise, enabled navigation. But it offered an explanation for the movements of celestial objects that has been proven to be false. Likewise, Copernican astronomy is also false – the sun is not at the centre of the universe – but in an important scientific sense it is less false than Ptolemaic astronomy. Copernican astronomy made it possible to create further truths that are even less false (eg those associated with Gallileo, Kepler and Newton). These are evolving truths that are progressive – in the Vogellian sense – without which humans could never have visited the moon.

Truth is a philosophical rather than a scientific concept. If I say that I believe Vitamin C supplements are good for a person’s health in some circumstances, then I know that that is true, because I know what I believe. Further, that belief is verifiable (sort of) if I am observed to be taking Vitamin C supplements; although I could be taking the supplements as part of an experiment, and not necessarily because I believe they are good for me. Beliefs are truths, albeit subjective truths. I know what I believe, even if you don’t. If I believe in flying pigs, then it is true that I believe in flying pigs.

A scientific truth is a plausible ‘claim’, or ‘hypothesis’; an assertion of objective truth. By its very nuanced meaning, all scientific truths are provisional. A scientific truth, by definition, must be conceptually falsifiable.

Information is a mix of all the above-mentioned: science, knowledge, truth, facts, claims. Information makes no special claim to truth, and may be intentionally false, or an untested claim.

Trivial truths may be called facts. My date of birth is a fact. The size of a crowd for an event at Eden Park is a fact, but only has meaning if contextualised; it needs to be ‘time-stamped’, because the crowd size varies during an event. And even then, the truthful meaning of a time-stamped fact may vary; 50,000 people may have turned up by 7:30pm on the day of a given event, but most those people may have left soon after. The size of the crowd at 9:00pm is an alternative fact. For an event to be truthfully classed as more popular than another event, it depends on the duration of the crowd as well as its peak size.

One important kind of truth is abstract (or a priori) truth. Mathematics is a set of such abstract truths. 2+3=5 is a truth. So is +x+(-x)=0; the truth that underpins double-entry bookkeeping (where ‘x’ can be any number). So is i²=-1, where i is by definition the imaginary number which makes that truth true.

Historical Truth

A particularly important class of truth is ‘historical truth’. Historical truth is a set of facts underpinned by a set of counterfactuals that confer meaning or explanation onto that truth. Facts can be observed; that’s the easier part. Counterfactuals can only be argued; they can only be reasoned, because, by definition, they did not happen.

Much of what we think of as history is sequences of facts; many of these are provisional facts which may be disputed because of gaps or anomalies in the documentary record. Further, such facts are often interpreted. Was a recovered archaeological monument a temple, or a palace, or a parliament?

That James Cook and Jean-François-Marie de Surville unknowingly crossed paths off Cape Reinga in December 1769 is a fact. The date of that crossing is an unresolvable fact, because 17 Dec 1769 on Surville’s calendar would have been 16 Dec 1769 on Cook’s calendar. (I thank Mike Lee, former Auckland Councillor and author of Navigators and Naturalists for alerting me to this!) This is because Surville’s voyage was travelling towards the east, while Cook was travelling towards the west. (And for Surville, New Zealand’s north cape was one bit of land – now named in his honour – while Cook saw and named North Cape, another piece of land; close but not the same.)

The deeper historical truth is that these voyages changed New Zealand (named ‘New Zealand’ in the 1640s, after Abel Tasman’s voyage, so both navigators knew in advance that New Zealand was there, and that New Zealanders were fierce) forever. Possibly an even deeper historical truth is that, even if none of these three European voyagers had ventured to these islands, Europeans would still have come to – and colonised – New Zealand, and before the year 1800.

The last-mentioned ‘probable truth’ is a counterfactual. It is a fact that all the Europeans who visited New Zealand in the eighteenth century knew in advance that it was there. It is an argument, however, to claim that Europeans would have visited New Zealand before 1800 even if they had not known it was there. The argument is based on two main pieces of reasoning: first that Europeans at that time believed that there was land in our part of the world even before they knew it was there; and, second, Europeans had become a global voyaging people, much like the Polynesians before them. So, sooner or later – most likely sooner – they would have found us anyway, by chance.

This counterfactual actually devalues the significance of the ‘discoveries’ of Cook et. al., because others would have made them had they not made them. But the fact that Cook – and men of the French Enlightenment – made voyages to New Zealand when they did (in the era of the ‘Noble Savage’), may be important in that other people with less reputable motives could have made those first contacts instead.

The history of New Zealand can only be understood through well-argued counterfactuals; how did what actually happened differ from the other likely scenarios that might have happened. This applies, obviously, to all aspects of history, and not just the history of early encounters between Pakeha and Māori, between Europe and Aotearoa. To establish the best historical truths available, the most critical skill is to be able to present one or more well-argued counterfactuals. The art of argument is essential to the acquisition of historical knowledge.

Counterfactuals, as mentioned, represent alternative probabilities. There is another kind of counterfactual, an ideal counterfactual, which considers what might have been the best historical possibility. And knowledge of ideal counterfactuals can inform the future. In my example case above, relating to early post-contact New Zealand, we can imagine ‘win-win’ scenarios in which post-contact history might have worked out better for all parties. (We can also imagine other ‘win-lose’ scenarios, bearing in mind that today’s progressive narrative is that post-contact factual history represents one such ‘win-lose’ scenario.) Thinking about win-win historical scenarios can help us to think about win-win futures. But there is one proviso, and that is that well-intentioned behaviours do not necessarily bring about desirable outcomes; and selfishly-intentioned behaviours do not necessarily bring about undesirable outcomes. (Unintended and unforeseen consequences constitute one of history’s major themes.)

Covid19 Delta

A final example of historical truth worth mentioning here is that relating to the ongoing outbreak of Covid19 in New South Wales, Australia. I heard on the news last night some gentleman claiming that we are now in a near-existential battle between humanity and delta.

Certainly, the way the story is being reported is that all would be well for us on the viral front if only the delta mutation of the covid virus had not happened. Thus, the story we are getting comes with an ordained (rather than argued) counterfactual; that delta, and only delta, is the beastie. An alternative counterfactual is that what is happening in Australia is much the same as what would be happening there had delta not evolved. After-all, South America – consider Uruguay as a particularly pertinent case – experienced something much worse, and without a hint of delta.

If we go back to the story of the near-existential battle between humanity and delta, where delta is an allegory for a strengthened foe, an important factor is whether humanity (the good guys) are stronger or weaker than in previous episodes. If humanity this year is weaker – ie less immune to respiratory viruses – than last year then the present weakness of humanity may be the key determinant of events, meaning that the New South Wales event might have happened regardless of delta.

Yet the narrative we have may be useful, if not true. If the message is that humanity has to strengthen in order to match a stronger foe – eg strengthen through taking vaccines – then the ‘official’ narrative, though probably not true, nevertheless supports good behaviour.

Finally

By losing language, and conflating words with similar meanings into the same meaning, we lose our ability to conceptualise the alternative realities which represent the pathways to better futures. Too many words today become synonymous with hyperbole. Other words morph into their opposites.

Science is a particularly important word. Unlike ‘marriage’, if the word ‘science’ loses or changes its meaning, eg morphing with ‘knowledge’ and ‘facts’, there is no other word or phrase which we can use, in its stead, to mean what ‘science’ has meant. Indeed, all the slightly synonymous words used above – science, knowledge, truth, facts, claims, information – may all be coming to mean ‘beliefs’. In other words, all these nuanced words – with their underlying objectivity – may be lost in favour of post-modern subjectivity.

Our most important word may be the word ‘otherwise’. It is the word that indicates a counterfactual – a blend of imagination and argument that we need to make sense of our world, and to make progress in it.

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Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

contact: keith at rankin.nz

This 21st century epoch is coming to be one of ‘existential crises’, meaning that various large-scale dangers are increasingly coming to be seen to threaten ‘our’ existence, where ‘our’ most commonly relates to people, but may also relate to multicellular life on Earth. An existential catastrophe might fall short of human extinction; a loss of civilisation would also qualify.

The greatest threats to humanity?

In May on RNZ (Radio New Zealand), Toby Ord discussed a whole range of threats, but emphasised ‘man-made’ threats of human origin over geological and celestial risks such as volcanoes, earthquakes, and asteroids. In his discussion, pandemics were treated as essentially ‘man-made’.

The main existential threats of human origin mentioned were – in no particular order – pandemics, artificial intelligence, climate change, world war, and global poverty. The latter – global poverty – was particularly noted as a problem of ‘moral paralysis’. He believes that “if global poverty was to no longer exist [in the future] at the current levels it was it now, then people would look back and be dumbfounded by the moral paralysis of people”.

While he said, “it was crucial to devote resources to ensure we do not fail the future or past generations”, it is not clear that the form of ‘effective altruism’ that he subscribes to is the answer to the conundrum posed. In our cynical world, we are much better at identifying problems than at actually addressing them.

The Social Dilemma

I watched this Netflix feature documentary about social media and artificial intelligence – The Social Dilemma – a few days ago. The trailer finishes: “If technology creates mass chaos, loneliness, more polarisation, more election hacking, less ability to focus on the real issues, [then] we’re toast. This is checkmate on humanity.”

The existential issue here is the way that, in commercial societies, the mass of people are manipulated (‘influenced’, ‘nudged’) to behave in ways that enable a small elite to successfully pursue the petty yet destructive end of ‘making money’. (In market economies, money works as a ‘means’, not as an ‘end’.) While advertising and other forms of persuasion and guided misinformation have been around for as long as people have existed – and there’s also plenty of deception practiced in nature by other species – the nature of 21st century social media technology makes the processes of manipulation and deception so much faster and more overwhelming. The manipulators now have the means to ‘win’ by creating something akin to a monetary black hole, an outcome that represents the destruction of manipulated and manipulators alike.

This is the ‘artificial intelligence’ variant of the ‘moral paralysis’ problem identified by Ord.

Non-Existence

Of course, to properly understand existence, we have to have some sense of non-existence. Human extinction is no more non-existence than is the death – or non-birth – of an individual person. To appreciate the boundaries of the universe – boundaries in time and space – many of us turn to cosmologists and their astrophysicist colleagues.

On Sunday, RNZ listeners heard astrophysicist Katie Mack discussing cosmic endings, including the eventual fate of the universe. (Interestingly, although the scenarios posited related to billions of years in the future, listeners were engaging from a human-centric viewpoint, pretty much in denial that humans may well be practically extinct by the year 2525, as the famous song goes, long before any cosmic event could possibly affect us.)

The problem with this scientific approach is that it is unable to give any meaning to the concept of ‘non-existence’. We are left to, sort of, imagine a universe that is infinite in both space and time, and also completely empty of mass and energy. But that’s not non-existence.

For non-existence we have to go outside the realm of physical science, and to imagine a ‘being’ that does not exist; an ‘entity’ that does not exist, except, that is, in the imagination of those with a capacity for abstract thought. Such a ‘being’ is of course ‘God’, Who exists only in the non-physical realms of human experience, and Who therefore is not subject to the laws of physical existence. ‘God’ is a very neat and universal solution to the problem of non-existence, and can be applied through literature or mathematics to all aspects of non-existence; not only to the non-existence of the physical universe.

I learned maths before the era of Google. And I was fortunate to have had the same very very good maths teacher from the third form to the fifth form. (I remember him carefully erasing the blackboard of modular arithmetic calculations, so that the next class to use the classroom would not think that he was mad; in one useful version of modular arithmetic, 7+7=2. I also remember learning about Group Theory, and the reaction of one classmate who cried out “What is the use of this?”; and the story told about how the foundations of Group Theory were rapidly scribbled in 1831 by a 20 year old youth – Évariste Galois – who knew he would die in a duel the following morning. That’s a personal existential crisis, if ever there was one.)

As a young man, there were two numbers that particularly fascinated me. One was googol. In those days, ‘googol’ was unambiguously a number, a very big number. The name was coined by a nine-year old, in 1920, so we should actually be celebrating the centenary of googol this year. A googol is 10¹⁰⁰; that is, 1 followed by 100 zeros. Googol took hold of my youthful imagination. (Actually, since then, the number that fascinates me more, today, is 1 googol minus 1. That’s 100 nines; or IG in post-modern Roman Numerals. Quite easy to write, but I challenge anyone to name that number.)

The other number that truly fascinated (and fascinates) me is the number that, for me, best describes God. It is the solution to the simple equation:

•   x²+1 = 0      (alternatively, this means that x is the square root of minus one)

There is no solution. The solution for x does not exist. But, just as the physical universe (universes?) may be best described mathematically as an 11-dimensional multiverse, this little problem of non-existence is not going to get in the way of a creative mathematician. It turns out that, while non-existent, this particular entity is mathematically useful. Just as God is useful enough to have been imagined. The solution to this little algebraic problem is ‘i’, which stands for ‘imaginary number’; it could also stand for ‘abstract intelligence’. Or for God. God is the intelligent construct of the imagination, that enables us to conceive non-existence in a practical and useful way. Practical abstract intelligence, through mathematics and through faith, was the precursor to civilisation.

Our Maker as an Accountant

This brings me to Judith Collins, putative Prime Minister of a National Party led government.

Two weeks ago, she invoked our Maker in an ambiguous political speech, and proceeded over the next few day to reiterate her belief in God – and to pray in view of the television cameras after she voted.

Collins said that a prominent critic of hers “still needs to meet his Maker”. She subsequently explained that we all die one day, and that we all meet our Maker. This idea is an excellent example of the practical utility of God. The idea is that we should live our lives as if – at our ‘end of life’ – we will have to account for our actions and choices. It’s an idea that no doubt helps many of us to lead better – more moral – lives than we otherwise would.

Accountancy is the world’s oldest profession; no other occupation could be called a profession in the absence of an accounting mindframe. So, it is appropriate that our most practical image of God is as an Accountant Creator, deft in the art of existential double-entry bookkeeping. The cosmic Big Bang is most practically thought of as the Creation of the universe from which nothing (literally nothing) became a universe of matter and energy, and a parallel universe of anti-matter and anti-energy. The end of the universe will be when God’s ledger once again balances at zero on both sides.

The universe is a miracle. Indeed, it is good to have political leaders who believe in miracles. And so, each individual life is also a miracle. It is a matter of practical convenience to think of our Maker as also our Accountant (as distinct from our accountant). We are in our Maker’s debt. Should we pay the debt back? Is that what we do when we meet our maker? Or, could we think as a good life as ‘servicing’ our existential debt?

Should we pay the debt forward instead of paying it back? Paying the debt forward would seem to me to be the central concept that underpins the effective altruism which Toby Ord understands as necessary to get us past the year 2525.