Is Knowledge No Longer Power?
Knowledge is the best decision tool we have. Its widespread use, impact, and general acceptance as the primary basis for decision making across a wide range of human activities is why knowledge is power. This seems self-evident in most aspects of life. If you’re baking a cake, you vary from the recipe at your peril. If you’re putting someone on the moon, you better understand and apply the laws of physics.
As a graduate student in public policy at the University of Michigan in the 1980s, I learned the value of using data-driven analysis to generate the knowledge necessary to evaluate current policy and make decisions about policy development. I believed that throughout my future career that approach would become the norm in American society: Cost-benefit analysis would one day be king.
Graduates of programs like mine now occupy advisory and decision-making positions in Washington, state capitals, and major corporations, where they promote and use the methods I learned in class. Yet the continued success of their collective efforts seems in doubt.
Public trust in the credibility, validity, and value of the use of knowledge in decision making is being attacked. Questioning of political institutions and processes, spearheaded by populist opinionmakers who dominate various media, has helped produce an oppositional, non-knowledge-based approach to public discourse and decision making that is deeply hostile to knowledge-based decision making. This approach is now the norm at the highest levels of government, championed by the President himself.
The spirit of Lyndon Johnson’s call to “come reason together” seems lost as well. That ability to reason together grew out of a shared commitment to work through issues, allowing diverse political actors to jointly achieve policy objectives during much of the latter half of the 20th century — in no small part due to mutual recognition that knowledge formed the basis for effective decision making.
The debasement of knowledge as a crucial tool in decision making has impacted more than the federal government — it’s impacted the business and financial world as well:
“Tariffs will make our Country MUCH STRONGER, not weaker. Just sit back and watch!”
The response of the markets to the President’s tweet: The S&P, Dow, and Nasdaq rose.]
The business community has long held that tariffs impede economic growth, making that response unlikely. No longer. Many financial commentators suggested that day that investors and analysts remained optimistic things would work out with China no matter how bad the current situation seemed. Yet it’s worth asking: What knowledge was — is — that sentiment based on?
Listening to the President has become a little like attending the theatre: you know what you’re seeing isn’t real, and your ultimate experience hinges on your ability to suspend disbelief. For Trump supporters, suspending disbelief is par for the course, as is a refusal to hold the Administration accountable for its behavior. The media has attributed various characteristics to Trump supporters, including alt right ideology, party line adherence, economic status, or fringe Christian beliefs. For those unwilling to engage in categorization, there is also the “it’s all so confusing” explanation, which asserts the inherent difficulty people face in having to sift through various sources of real and “fake” news.
Yet another explanation is worth considering: we may care less than we used to about having ‘good reasons’ for making substantive decisions. It’s possible that President Trump gets a pass based on more than feelings of ideological, emotional, or pragmatic affinity, but also on a growing laziness in how we process and act on information.
It seems fair to say that a value for using knowledge (that is, factual information) as a basis for decision making has long been part of the American story. False information has not been considered an acceptable basis for making most real-world decisions. Now, however, it appears that the standards by which we determine information to be accurate and actionable have been muddled, to the point where fiction has become as acceptable as fact for decision making, especially if that fiction is shared among groups of like-minded individuals with no sense of personal or shared accountability.
Equalizing fact and fiction involves trashing the concept of factual knowledge. Francis Fukuyama and others have described the “post-fact” world as one where:
“… virtually all authoritative information sources (are) called into question and challenged by contrary facts of dubious quality and provenance”.
Not only are facts called into question, but so are the methods and approach used to generate them. Thus, the scientific method developed over centuries is suddenly no better than any other approach to interpreting climate change, nor are the practitioners of that method more suited to make decisions about climate than any other individual. As President Trump famously said regarding decisions of the Federal Reserve: “… my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”
The scientist’s humility in acknowledging that “truth” is a well-supported hypothesis is completely absent in the shared fiction approach. There is no way to disprove one’s gut other than to decide and see what happens. If things go south, rationalizations can be made to avoid self-correcting what the gut is saying. If things go well, then the ends justify the means.
The belief that knowledge should guide decision making is currently under attack by those who would throw out the primary tool we have to address the challenges we face. Through re-establishing a commitment to knowledge — and to reasoning together — we have a chance to successfully address these challenges. Failure to do that leaves us vulnerable to those in the wider world who still understand that knowledge is power.
