Friday, October 7, 2016

The Conceited and Mistaken Bill Nye

A Don Boudreaux letter to The Intellectualist:
Sir or Madam:

In “Bill Nye: Leaders Who Are Ignorant of Science Pose Danger to Society” (Oct. 6), you write that Bill Nye (“the science guy”) “wants science literacy to be a national priority so that people can understand that the daily magic around them every day – all the technology, medicine, and innovation that makes our lives easier, isn’t some kind of wizardry – it’s cold, hard science.”

I’m all for scientific literacy.  But Mr. Nye errs in suggesting that the marvels of modernity result simply from cold, hard science.  These marvels also require free, private-property markets that not only create the prosperity that enables many people to devote their lives to scientific study, but also that unleash and direct the entrepreneurial energies necessary to transform scientific knowledge into actual, useful, and widely available goods and services.

It is indeed appropriate to understand and praise, which Mr. Nye does, the elegant science embedded in the likes of refrigerators, smart phones, and guaranteed overnight package delivery.  But it is equally appropriate to understand and praise, which Mr. Nye does not, the daily magic of decentralized, bourgeois markets that continually coordinate the productive efforts of literally billions of people spread around the globe into a vast and unprecedentedly productive market economy – a market economy that alone ensures that the science that Mr. Nye rightly celebrates is regularly put to use for the benefit of the masses.

As marvelous as weather apps and jetliners are, the global competitive market – guided by prices, profits, and losses – is even more marvelous.  And yet the stupendous achievements of markets are regularly ignored by scientists such as Mr. Nye, who conceitedly but mistakenly presume that their expertise in hard science imparts to them an adequate understanding of the functioning of the economy.  It does not.  And their failure to grasp this fact reveals in them a most unscientific turn of mind.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA  22030
The above originally appeared at Cafe Hayek.

3 comments:

  1. I really liked Bill Nye when he stuck to teaching kids science on TV (pre Global Warming hysteria). Now he's just another member of the dreary scold class.

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  2. ─ These marvels also require free, private-property markets that not only create the prosperity that enables many people to devote their lives to scientific study, but also that unleash and direct the entrepreneurial energies necessary to transform scientific knowledge into actual, useful, and widely available goods and services. ─

    It is a sad thing that smart people such as Nye and others fail to understand that the reason why we have scientific advancement is because of Division of Labor and capital accumulation. It would be pretty darn difficult for a person to learn *anything* about the universe or have time to contemplate nature if he or she has to earn a meager existence by fighting beasts or digging for worms, each and every hour of his or her existence. Without capital accumulation which is derived from Division of Labor, there can't be science - PERIOD.

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  3. See "Bill Nye and Scientism" by (actual scientist) Willie Soon.
    http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/05/24/bill-nye-scientism/

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