Intellectual Silos in Academia

Last fall I discussed a debate over colonialism. Bruce Gilley,  a political scientist at  Portland State University  wrote an article titled “The Case For Colonialism.” The reaction was so negative that the article was retracted and the publisher of Gilley’s forthcoming book decided not to publish it. [1]

The response was painfully unfair. Yet in spite of the retraction (the article was re-published in Academic Questions ) his argument sparked debate. The adversarial positions were made clear.

All too often in academia, however, one intellectual viewpoint simply ignores another.

In 1994, Joseph Stiglitz wrote the book Whither Socialism? [2] At the time, Stiglitz chaired President Clinton‘s Council of Economic Advisors; in 2001 he received the Nobel Prize. In other words, he was (and is) a leading economist.

In Whither Socialism? Stiglitz challenged the assumptions of mainstream or neo-classical economics. He argued that economists have ignored how costly information can be and how important prices are in providing information to buyers and sellers. And because there is no single, reliable source of information, centralized control of market decisions is inefficient. Without this understanding, he said, many economists have been misled into favoring socialism.

Economist P. J. Hill reviewed Stiglitz’s book.[3] After acknowledging its value, he said, “However, the book is also somewhat maddening to read in that it ignores so much of the recent developments in economics that shed light on the very issues that Stiglitz is concerned with.”

In particular, Stiglitz had dismissed Austrian economics, including Friedrich von Hayek’s article “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” published in 1945 in the American Economic Review. It was exactly about the difficulty of centralization due to the cost of information. And that was in 1945! Austrians have been exploring thE subject ever since.

Stiglitz failed to mention Hayek’s article or even George Stigler’s more mainstream article on “The Economics of Information.” Both Hayek and Stigler received Nobel prizes in economics. But their views were outside Stiglitz’s Keynesian perspective.

Stiglitz came upon some of the insights himself, but wouldn’t it have been better if he had built on their analyses rather than belatedly discovering them on his own? How could he have known so little about his own discipline?

That’s what I mean by intellectual silos.  I’m going to give one other example of silos and then (in a future post) discuss whether historians face such a problem.

Nowhere are the intellectual silos so far apart as in what is called climate science. You’ve undoubtedly heard that 97 percent of all scientists believe the earth is threatened by rising temperatures due to human-produced levels of carbon dioxide (and a few other gases). In other words there is a “consensus” about the dangers of climate change. Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer examined the sources of those figures and found them to be sketchy, overstated, incomplete, and misinterpreted.

Many brilliant scientists question the notion that we are experiencing a “climate crisis.” Yet their substantial research on climate change has been largely ignored by other scientists. They are dismissed as “skeptics,” or by the harsher term, “deniers” (harsher because it implies that their ignorance is similar to those of Holocaust deniers).

Brilliant though these scientists are, they have been relegated to a silo somewhere far, far away. I’m going to list here the names of some and give you a hint of their powerful credentials. [3]

Among them:

• • Lennart O. Bengtsson, director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany
  • John R. Christy, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville
  • Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology
  • William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Princeton
  • David Legates, professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences and the Physical Ocean Science and Engineering Program in the School of Marine Science and Policy at the University of Delaware;
  • Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, emeritus, at MIT
  • Patrick Michaels, former research professor in environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and former president of the American Association of State Climatologists
  • Nir J. Shaviv, professor and chair of the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Willie Soon, astrophysicist, geoscientist, and receiving editor in the area of solar and stellar physics for the New Astronomy. 
  • Roy Spencer, Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (on NASA’s Aqua satellite).

These are prominent thinkers. And this list does not include famous scientists who have died, most recently Fred Singer. Are you ready to dismiss their thinking? If so, I would like to know why.

Coming up:: My answer to the question of whether history is also divided into silos.

[1] It will be published this coming September by Regnery. Gateway.

[2] Joseph Stiglitz, Whither Socialism?  (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

[3] P.J. Hill, Review: Whither Socialism? Bulletin: Association of Christian Economists (Fall 1996): 33-34.

[4] Further discussion about these skeptics can be found in my post on  LibefrtyandEcology.org.

Image is by 1778011 on Pixabay.