Political lobbyists are pretending to be NGOs & fooling tax dept.

 Jaitirth Rao in The Print

There has been quite a bit of noise about the current dispensation being against what is referred to as “civil society”. One expects this kind of diatribe from illiberal Lefties. But such is the stranglehold of these ideas and ideologies that this slanted view has now started gaining wider traction. The principal objection seems to be that the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act 2010 is being weaponised against some NGOs. This and related issues are worth examining in some detail.

When the Congress-led UPA 2 introduced draconian provisions in the FCRA law in 2010, I had gone on record opposing it. My article on that issue is available in the public domain. I mention this because I want it to be clear that I am not the usual adversary — the “fascist” supporter of the FCRA.

The FCRA is supposed to regulate foreign contributions. It has a provision that if foreign funds are received by an NGO, then the latter is required to use it for its own charitable purposes. The funds are not to be diverted to other NGOs or charity organisations. Based on the advice of some dubious and clever chartered accountants, some NGOs, instead of making contributions to other non-profits — which they are now prohibited from doing — have come up with an “innovative” solution. They are “paying” other NGOs for “services”. These services are usually in the grey and ambiguous domain of “consultancy”. Now, clearly, the NGOs are trying to “indirectly” achieve what the law prohibits them from doing “directly”.

None of these NGOs are babes in the woods. They are acquainted with common law cases. There are hundreds of cases in the US, a country close to the purse strings of these NGOs, saying that it is impermissible to do indirectly what is not permitted directly. How can it be that if the Indian State invokes a common law principle so clearly enunciated in the US, it suddenly becomes a fascist enemy of decent NGOs? As it turns out, virtually all the regulatory action against foreign-funded NGOs has been for this reason. 

Don’t tread where MNCs failed

As someone who has dealt with tax authorities in nine different countries over the last 49 years, let me assure the clever chartered accountants advising these NGOs that corporations and banks have been experimenting with these devices and playing with these loopholes for decades and have rarely, if ever, succeeded. The amateurish attempts by these NGOs to fool the tax department are going to get them nowhere. Where large multinational corporations (MNCs) have failed, NGOs should not tread.

Several ill-advised NGOs have gone one step further. They have tried to pretend that contributions received from their foreign donors have not been donations but payments for the elusive consultancy services rendered by their Indian arms for their foreign payments. Such obviously foolish attempts are bound to get them into trouble. There is no point in complaining after the fact.

Foreign-funded NGOs are welcome in our country if they wish to perform “charitable” acts like helping the visually challenged, the terminally ill, or the differently abled. As a country, we have been reasonably kind in supporting causes like leprosy alleviation or livelihood creation, even if the ultimate aim behind these good deeds has been religious proselytisation. In this regard, we have gone against the dictums of MK Gandhi who vociferously opposed “do-good” missionaries. But when foreign-funded NGOs start getting involved in political lobbying in India, we have a problem.

Some of us are old enough to remember that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) subsidiary, the NGO known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, funded Indian magazines like Quest in the ’50s and ’60s. Some of us have also read the testimony of Soviet Union archivist Vasili Mitrokhin who regularly made sure that more copies of Russian translations of Hindi poets were printed and “sold” than their Hindi originals. This too happened in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Again, some of us remember that the head of the Ford Foundation in Delhi could get on to Jawaharlal Nehru’s calendar easily and that some of our tragicomic policy initiatives came from this august institution. Foreign-funded NGOs trying to tell us what taxation policies we should follow are really pushing their luck. And that is exactly what several of them have done before and are doing right now. Fortunately, one of them is now under a regulatory scanner. The Indian State, as is usually the case, has been dilatory. But better late than never.

The anti-State menace

Foreign-funded NGOs and foreign media have been against the Indian State and any strong dispensation for more than 70 years now. They prefer pusillanimous clientelist governments in India. They pilloried Panditji for his soft stance with the Soviets during the 1956 Hungarian revolution. They are now upset that we are not as anti-Russia as they would like. They have also made a devil’s bargain with blatantly Islamist organisations such as the US-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

This is why they prefer to refer to Indian Muslim gangsters as politicians. They talk of trigger-happy police officers in India. There are, of course, no such officers in the US. They prefer to characterise the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 as obnoxious and anti-Muslim. I beg to differ. The Act is in favour of persecuted religious minorities in India’s neighbouring countries. These NGOs and the media do not bleed for Sikh shopkeepers, Hindu girls, and Parsis in our neighbourhood. They support the quixotic “farmers’” agitation in India when everybody knows that it was a “middle-man” affair. And they are silent about Canada’s blatant persecution of its truckers.

Let us now revert to our own domestic uncivil society. Under the previous dispensation, a bunch of impractical Lefties got together. They had never run factories or created jobs but managed to ingratiate themselves with the powers that were and became members of the pompous National Advisory Council (NAC). Their “advice” usually resulted in the active sabotage of the intelligent policies that Manmohan Singh was trying to implement. One feels sorry for Singh, who had to constantly look over his shoulders to avoid being bitten by this overweening Dracula. The combined NGO menace got so bad that the hapless former PM, in an interview to Science journal, blamed American NGOs for sabotaging the India-US nuclear deal, which had the support of the elected governments of both countries.

The simple fact is that the so-called civil society NGOs, who had support from the NAC and who could defy Singh quite easily, are now defanged and stand without protection. All that they can do is write strong pieces in the English press in India and appeal to their patrons in foreign papers to give them some oxygen. There is an old English saying: “They say, let them say…”

Call them by their right name

It is interesting to note that for the illiberal Left, references to “civil society” almost invariably mean references to NGOs, many with explicit political agendas. Are Sangeetha Sabhas, Bhajan Mandalis, regional associations (like Kannada Sangha in Mumbai, Maratha Mandali in Chennai, Odiya Sahitya Sabha in Bengaluru, Durga Puja Association in Pune), and traditional charities (like the Red Cross, Saint Judes, National Association for the Blind) not part of civil society? If any of them run afoul of tax authorities, will there be any media coverage? The French traveller Alexis de Tocqueville makes reference to voluntary organisations as being central to the American democratic experience. To this day, more the three-quarters of the fire brigades in American small towns and suburbs are manned by volunteers. Churches and synagogues organise charitable activities. Rotary, Lions, and Giants clubs are part of civil society as also oddly enough is the Masonic Lodge.

All of these institutions derived their funding from members of their immediate physical communities. This is the civil society that de Tocqueville praised. He would be shocked if told that quasi-political lobbying groups who obtain money from foreign countries in order to influence American politics were to be referred to as members of the voluntary, citizen-supported civil society, which he held up as exemplars of grassroots democracy.

We need to get our vocabulary right and refer to political lobbyists by their correct name. Our ancients told us that getting the right “nama-rupa” or “word and form” will automatically make our arguments solid. When we revert to that tradition, it will be clear that genuine members of civil society are not complaining. Political lobbyists are indulging in grievance-mongering, which I hope and pray we quietly ignore.

Is it possible to have Freedom and Equality?

 

The Dead Cat Strategy - A Good Way to Overcome Poor Performance

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

On January 27, 2022, former prime minister Imran Khan alleged that the co-chairperson of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Asif Ali Zardari, had hired assassins to kill him.

Outside Khan’s hardcore group of followers, very few treated the allegation with any seriousness, even though, understandably, the PPP was not amused. Ever since his ouster in April last year, Khan has been churning out one bizarre claim after another in his daily addresses and press talks.

Of course, being a classic populist in the mould of Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Khan hardly ever provides any compelling evidence to back his allegations. Like his populist contemporaries, he too is more interested in remaining in the news and in Twitter trends. The other reason is to deflect the media’s attention away from the plethora of scandals involving his immediate family, his party personnel and himself.

These scandals have begun to engulf him, now that he doesn’t have the kind of protection that he once enjoyed from the military establishment and the judiciary when he was PM. The scandals have dented his self-styled image of being ‘incorruptible’.

By delivering speeches almost on a daily basis that are studded with sensationalist claims and allegations, Khan is using what has come to be known as the ‘dead cat strategy’ or ‘deadcatting’. Both these terms were first floated in 2013. They are derived from a theory of a political strategist who has a history of working for right-wing parties. This is also the reason why deadcatting is often seen as a strategy that has mostly been applied by right-wing politicians and contemporary populists.
 
Both the terms are associated with the Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby. Crosby strategised the British populist Boris Johnson’s campaign for the 2008 London mayoral election that Johnson won. Crosby was first appointed by Johnson’s Conservative Party (CP) during the 2005 parliamentary elections, which the party lost.

But after working successfully with Johnson during the 2008 mayoral election, Crosby became the CP’s central strategist. In a 2013 article for the Daily Telegraph, Johnson excitedly explained Crosby’s strategy. He wrote that one of Crosby’s tactics included, (figuratively speaking) throwing a dead cat on a dining table on which people sat talking about an issue that was detrimental to the interests of a politician. So, once they see the dead cat, their attention is drawn away from the issue and towards the dead cat. Now the dead cat becomes the issue.

‘Dead cat issues’ are thus sensationalist, formed to draw the people’s and the media’s attention away from the issues that have become increasingly problematic for a politician. Johnson continued to apply this strategy when he was appointed PM in 2019. As PM, he went on deploying dead cat issues to divert the media’s attention away from the many holes that he kept digging and falling into.

But deadcatting has its limits. There are but so many dead cats one can throw on the dining table. In 2022, becoming increasingly controversial, Johnson was forced to step down as PM by his own party. The media had stopped talking about dead cats.

In 2019, the populist president of Mexico Andrés Manuel López held a press conference to announce that he had written letters to the Pope and the Spanish government, demanding that they should apologise for invading Mexico… 500 years ago. This out-of-the-blue declaration surprised many. Why was a president who had vowed to resolve Mexico’s many problems, now suddenly talking about a 500-year-old invasion?

According to the British political journalist and author Andrew Scott, López had made a sizeable number of promises, which included introducing widespread land reforms, poverty alleviation and the elimination of Mexico’s deadly drug mafias. Failing to deliver on any of the promises, López deployed the dead cat strategy. The ploy was absurd, but it did catch the media’s attention.

However, not everyone was impressed by the president’s ‘bold’ initiative to get the Pope and the Spanish government to deliver an apology for a centuries-old invasion of Mexico, whose main victims were the country’s indigenous Indian communities. The famous Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa suggested that the letters should have been delivered to López himself, because he had done absolutely nothing to better the conditions of the impoverished Indian communities, except churn out populist slogans and display meaningless stunts.

In the early 1980s, when India’s Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) was largely a fringe far-right Hindu nationalist outfit that had no mentionable economic programme, it started to encourage groups who had begun to plan building a temple on the site of a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya. The BJP turned the mosque into a ‘national issue’.

This was BJP’s dead cat that provided it mainstream traction. And so are the claims by the current BJP government, which uses these to keep the media’s attention focused on the so-called existentialist ‘threat’ to India from Pakistan and by India’s Muslims.

Imran Khan has been deadcatting ever since his government started to unravel from 2020 onwards. Some of the favourite dead cats of Pakistani politicians are ‘issues’ of morality and faith. As a PM who was struggling to deliver the grandiose promises that he had made, and facing increasing criticism, Khan decided to declare himself as the leading crusader against Islamophobia.

He started to write letters to the United Nations and other leaders of the ‘Muslim ummah’, urging them to facilitate his idea of formulating a blasphemy law which could be applied internationally. His ministers jumped in, claiming that he was fighting an international ‘jihad’ against Islamophobes and should be hailed for this.

When this dead cat could not distract the media enough, Khan threw in a bigger dead feline, by claiming that the US was conspiring to oust him from power. After being shown the door by a no-confidence-motion in the parliament, he’s been tossing dead cats with increasing frequency.

Recently, one also saw the current finance minister, Ishaq Dar, deploy the dead cat strategy after being castigated by the media for failing to stabilise the economy. He had been brought in as a miracle worker, but his performance has been rather dismal.

Being a Pakistani, he of course began to tweet verses from Islam’s holy scriptures, indirectly suggesting that the failing economy was due to the mysterious ways of cosmic forces. Ironically, rather than diverting attention, this dead cat ended up magnifying his failings.

Indian Political Parties are Family Fiefdoms or Personality Cults

 

5 yrs back, India ‘legalised’ political corruption. Now, the time to end opaque funding is here

 

Assamese sink with Shiv Sena

 

Science is political

People who say “science is political” usually aren’t just stating facts - they’re trying to push something on you. Don’t let them

Stuart Ritchie
 

The statue of David Hume on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile


Imagine you heard a scientist saying the following:


I’m being paid massive consultation fees by a pharmaceutical company who want the results of my research to turn out in one specific way. And that’s a good thing. I’m proud of my conflicts of interest. I tell all my students that they should have conflicts if possible. On social media, I regularly post about how science is inevitably conflicted in one way or another, and how anyone criticising me for my conflicts is simply hopelessly naive.

I hope this would at least cause you to raise an eyebrow. And that’s because, whereas this scientist is right that conflicts of interest of some kind are probably inevitable, conflicts are a bad thing.

We all know how biases can affect scientists: failing to publish studies that don’t go their way; running or reporting the stats in ways that push the results in a favoured direction; harshly critiquing experiments they don’t like while letting equally-bad, but more sympathetic, ones off the hook. Insofar as a conflict of interest makes any of these (often unconscious) biases more likely, it’s not something to be proud of.

And that’s why we report conflicts of interest in scientific papers - both because it helps the reader understand where a particular study is coming from, and because it would be embarrassing if someone found out after the fact if nothing had been said. We also take steps to ensure that our conflicts don’t affect our research - we do double-blinding; we do replications; we post our data online; we try and show the world that the results would’ve been the results, regardless of what we were being paid by Big Pharma.

We can also all agree that conflicts of interest aren’t just financial. They can be personal - maybe you’re married to someone who would benefit if your results turn out a particular way. They can be reputational - maybe you’re the world’s no.1 proponent of Theory X, and would lose prestige if the results of this study didn’t support it. And they can be political - you can have a view of the world that comports with the research turning out one way, but not another.

When it comes to political conflicts of interest, I’ve noticed something very strange. I’ve noticed that, instead of treating them like other kinds of conflicts—where you put your hands up and admit to them but then do your best to make sure they don’t influence your science—scientists sometimes revel in political conflicts. Like the fictional conflicted scientist quoted above, they ostentatiously tell us that they’re being political and they don’t care: “don’t you know”, they scoff, “that science and politics are inseparable?”

Indeed, this phrase—“Science and Politics are Inseparable”—was the title of a Nature editorial in 2020, and it’s not hard to find other examples in popular-science publications:


Science Has Always Been Inseparable From Politics (Scientific American)


News Flash: Science Has Always Been Political (American Scientist)


Science Is Political (Chemistry World)


Yes, Science Is Political (Scientific American)

When Nature, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Scientific American all either strongly criticised the Trump administration, or explicitly endorsed Joe Biden for US President during the 2020 election campaign, they were met with surprise from many who found it unsettling to see scientific publications so openly engaging in politics. The response from their defenders? “Don’t you know science is political?”.

What does “science is political” mean?

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of what people might mean when they say “science is political”:

The things scientists choose to study can be influenced by their political views of what’s important;

The way scientists interpret data from scientific research can often be in line with their pre-existing political views;

Since scientists are human, it’s impossible for them to be totally objective - anything they do is always going to be tainted by political views and assumptions;

It’s easy for scientists to forget that human subjectivity influences a great many aspects of science - even things like algorithms which might seem objective but often recapitulate the biases of their human creators;

Even the choice to use science—as opposed to some other way of knowing—in the first place is influenced by our political and cultural perspective;

A lot of science is funded by the taxpayer, via governments, which are run by political parties who set the agenda. Non-governmental funders of science can also have their own political agendas;

People of different political persuasions hold predictable views on controversial scientific topics (e.g. global warming, COVID vaccines, nuclear power, and so on);

Politicians, or those engaged in political debate, regularly use “science” to back up their points of view in a cynical, disingenuous way, often by cherry-picking studies or relying on any old thing that supports them, regardless of its quality.

There’s no argument from me about any of those points. These are all absolutely true. I wrote a whole book about how biases, some of them political, can dramatically affect research in all sorts of ways. But these are just factual statements - and I don’t think the people who always tell you that “science is political” are just idly chatting sociology-of-science for the fun of it. They want to make one of two points.

1. The argument from inevitability

The first point they might be making is what we might call the argument from inevitability. “There’s no way around it. You’re being naive if you think you could stop science from being political. It’s arrogance in the highest degree to think that you are somehow being ‘objective’, and aren’t a slave to your biases.”

But this is a weirdly black-and-white view. It’s not just that something “is political” (say, a piece of research done by the Pro-Life Campaign Against Abortion which concludes that the science proves human life starts at conception) or “is not political” (say, a piece of research on climate change run by Martians who have no idea about Earth politics). There are all sorts of shades of grey - and our job is to get as close to the “not political” end as possible, even in the knowledge that we might never get fully get there.

Indeed, there’s a weird reverse-arrogance in the argument from inevitability. As noted by Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Talking about the impossibility of true rationality or objectivity might feel humble - you're admitting you can't do this difficult thing. But analyzed more carefully, it becomes really arrogant. You're admitting there are people worse than you - Alex Jones, the fossil fuel lobby, etc. You're just saying it's impossible to do better. You personally - or maybe your society, or some existing group who you trust - are butting up against the light speed limit of rationality and objectivity.

Let’s restate this using a scientific example. We can all agree that Trofim Lysenko’s Soviet agriculture is among the worst examples of politicised science in history - a whole pseudoscientific ideology that denied the basic realities of evolution and genetic transmission, and replaced them with techniques based on discredited ideas like the “inheritance of acquired characteristics”, helping to exacerbate famines that killed millions in the Soviet Union and China. That’s pretty much as bad as politicised science gets (you can bet your bottom ruble, by the way, that Lysenko himself thought that “science is political”).

If you think you’re better than Lysenko in terms of keeping politics out of your science (and let’s face it, you totally do think this), you’re already agreeing that there are gradations. And if you agree that there are gradations, it would be daft—or highly conceited—to think that nobody could ever to do a better job than you. Thus, you probably do agree that we could always try and improve our level of objectivity in science.

(By the way, by “objectivity” I mean scientific results that would look the same regardless of the observer, so long as that observer had the right level of training and/or equipment to see them. In the case of Lysenkoism, the “science” was highly idiosyncratic to Lysenko - things could’ve been entirely different if we ran the tape of history again with Lysenko removed. In the case of, say, the double-helix structure of DNA, we could be pretty confident that, were there to have been no Watson or Crick or Franklin or Wilkins, someone would’ve eventually still made that same discovery).

We already have a system that attempts to improve objectivity. The whole edifice of scientific review and publication—heck, the whole edifice of doing experiments, as opposed to just relying on your gut instinct—is an attempt to infuse some degree of objectivity into the process of discovering stuff about the world. I think that system of review and publication is a million miles from perfect (again, I wrote a book about this), but that’s just another way of saying: “the objectivity of the system could be improved”.

And it could be. If scientists shared all their code and data by default, the process would be a little more objective. If scientists publicly pre-registered their hypotheses before they looked at the data, the process would be a little more objective. If science funders used lotteries to award grant funding, the process would be a little more objective. And so on. In each of these cases—none of which give us perfect objectivity, of course, but which just inch us a little closer to it—we’d also move further away from a world where scientists’ subjective views, political or otherwise, influenced their science.

The fact that we can’t get rid of those subjective views altogether can serve a useful purpose: there’s a good argument for having a pluralist setup where people of all different views and perspectives and backgrounds contribute to the general scientific “commons”, and in doing so help debate, test, and refine each other’s ideas. But that’s still not an argument against each of those different people trying to be as objective as they can, within their own set of inevitable, human limitations.

After a decade of discussion about the replication crisis, open science, and all the ways we could reform the way we do research, we’re more aware than ever of how biases can distort things - but also how we can improve the system. So throwing up our hands and saying “science is always political! There’s nothing we can do!” is the very last thing we want to be telling aspiring scientists, who should be using and developing all these new techniques to improve their objectivity.

Not only is the argument from inevitability mistaken. Not only is it black-and-white thinking. It’s also cheems. Even if we can’t be perfect, it’s possible to be better - and that’s the kind of progressive message that all new scientists need to hear.


2. The activist’s argument

The second point that people might be making when they say that “science is political” is what we could call the activist’s argument. “The fact that science is political isn’t just an inevitability, but it’s good. We should all be using our science to make the world a better place (according to my political views), and to the extent that people are using science to make the world worse (according to my political views), we should stop them. All scientists should be political activists (who agree with my political views)”.

If my opening example of the scientist who’s proud of his or her conflict of interest moved you at all, you already have antibodies to this idea. You should ask what the difference is between a financial conflict of interest and an ideological one.

The activist’s argument is often invoked in response to other people politicising science. For example, after the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, it was discovered that the white nationalist gunman had written a manifesto that referenced some papers from population- and behaviour-genetics research. This led to explicit calls to make genetics more political in the opposite direction (including banning some forms of research that are deemed too controversial). An article in WIRED argued that, in the wake of the killings:

…scientists can no longer justify silence in the name of objectivity or use the escape tactic of “leaving politics out of science.”

This argument—which is effectively stating that two wrongs do make a right—seems terribly misguided to me. If you think it’s bad that politics are being injected into science, it’s jarringly nonsensical to argue that “leaving politics out of science” is a bad thing. Isn’t the more obvious conclusion that we should endeavour to lessen the influence of politics and ideology on science across the board? If you think it’s bad when other people do it, you should think it’s bad when you do it yourself.

Of course, a lot of people don’t think it’s bad - they only think it’s bad when their opponents do it. They want to push their own political agenda and just happen to be working in science (witness all the biologists—why is it always biologists?—who advertise their socialism, or even include a little hammer and sickle, in their Twitter bio; or on the other hand, witness all the people complaining about “wokeness” invading science who don’t bat an eyelid when right-wingers push unscientific views about COVID or climate change). There’s probably little I can do to argue round anyone who is happy to mix up their politics and their science in this way.

But there are a lot of well-meaning, otherwise non-ideological people who use the argument too. At best, by repeating “science is political” like a mantra, they’re just engaging in the usual social conformism that we all do to some extent. At worst, they’re providing active cover for those who want to politicise science (“everyone says science is inevitably political, so why can’t I insert my ideology?”).

If you explicitly encourage scientists to be biased in a particular direction, don’t be surprised if you start getting biased results. We all know that publication bias and p-hacking occur when scientists care more about the results of a scientific study than the quality of its methods. Do we think that telling scientists that it’s okay to be ideological when doing research would make this better, or worse?

If you encourage scientists to focus on the “greater good” of their political ideology rather than the science itself, don’t be surprised if the incentives change. Don’t be surprised if they get sloppy - what are a few mistakes if it all goes toward making the world a better place? And don’t be surprised if some of them break the rules - I’ve heard enough stories of scientific fraudsters who had a strong, pre-existing belief in their theory, and after they couldn’t see it in the results from their experiment, proceeded to give the numbers a little “push” in the “right” direction. Do we think a similar dynamic is more, or less likely to evolve if we tell people it’s good to put their ideology first?

If we encourage scientists to bring their political ideology to the lab, do we think groupthink—a very common human problem which in at least some scientific fields seems to have stifled debate and held back progress—will get better, or worse?

And finally, think about the effect on people who aren’t scientists, but who read or rely on its results. Scientists loudly and explicitly endorsing political positions certainly isn’t going to help those on the opposite side of the political aisle to take science more seriously (there’s some polling evidence for this). Not only that, but the suggestion that some results might be being covered up for political reasons can be perfect tinder for conspiracy theories (remember what happened during the Climategate scandal).

A better way

When scientific research is misappropriated for political ends, either by extremists or by more mainstream figures, the answer isn’t to drop all attempts at objectivity. The answer is to get as far away from politics as we can. Instead of saying “science is political - get over it”, we could say:

We’ll redouble our efforts to make our results transparent and our interpretations clear - we’ll ensure that we explain in detail why the conclusions being drawn by political actors aren’t justified based on the evidence;

We’ll make sure that what we think are incorrect interpretations are clearly described and refuted;

We’ll do the scientific equivalent of putting our results in a blind trust, by using the kinds of practices discussed above (open data, pre-registration, code sharing) and others, to lessen the effect of our pre-existing views and ensure that others can easily check our results;

We’ll tighten up processes like peer-review so that there’s an even more rigorous quality filter on new scientific papers. If they’re subjected to more scrutiny, any bad or incorrect results that are the focus of political worries should be more likely to fall by the wayside;

We’ll expand our definition of a conflict of interest, and be more open about when our personal politics, affiliations, memberships, religious beliefs, employments, relationships, commitments, previous statements, diets, hobbies, or anything else relevant might influence the way we do our research;

We’ll stop broadcasting the idea that it’s good to be ideological in science, and in fact we’ll make being ostentatiously ideological about one’s results at least as shameful as p-hacking, or publishing a paper with a glaring typo in the title;

We’ll restate our commitment to open inquiry and academic freedom, making sure that we keep an open—though highly critical and sceptical—mind when assessing anyone’s scientific claims.

To repeat: I don’t think it’s possible to fully remove politics from science. But it’s not all-or-nothing - the point is to get as close to non-political science as we can. By following some of the above steps (and I’m sure you can think of many other ways - another one that’s been discussed is the idea of adversarial collaboration), we can combat misrepresentation of research by using high-quality research of our own.

This is all rather like the discussion of the “Mertonian norms” of science, which are supposed to be the ethos of the whole activity - universalism (no matter who says it, we evaluate a claim the same way), communalism (we share results and methods around the community), organised scepticism (we constantly subject all results to unforgiving scrutiny), and, most relevant to our discussion here, disinterestedness (scientists don’t have a stake in their results turning out one way or another). These aren’t necessarily descriptions of how science is right now, but they’re aspirational - we should do our best to organise the system so it leans towards them. The idea that we should loudly and proudly bring in our political ideologies does violence to these already-fragile norms.

And we really should aspire to disinterestedness. The ideal scientist shouldn’t care whether an hypothesis comes out one way or another. And since, because they’re human beings, the vast majority of them really do, we should set the system up so their views are kept at arms’ length from the results. At the same time, we should remind ourselves of some very basic philosophy via David Hume in 1739: “is” and “ought” questions are different things. The “is” answers we get from science don’t necessarily tell us what we “ought” to to, and just as importantly, the “ought” beliefs from our moral and political philosophy don’t tell us how the world “is”. To think otherwise is to make a category error.

Or as Tom Chivers put it, somewhat more recently:

Finding out whether the Earth revolves around the Sun is a different kind of question from asking whether humans have equal moral value. One is a question of fact about the world as it is; to answer it, you have to go out into the world and look. The other is a question of our moral system, and the answer comes from within.

The inspiring, resounding peroration

The view that scientists should do their best to be as objective as possible is a boring, default, commonly-believed, run-of-the-mill opinion. It also happens to be correct.

The problem with boring, default, commonly-believed, run-of-the-mill opinions is that you don’t get a thrill from reciting them or shocking people with their counterintuitiveness. The fire that powers so much online activism just isn’t there, and the whole thing comes across as rather dull. So in an attempt to remedy that, let me try and make my position sound as exciting as possible. Ahem:

Science is political - but that’s a bad thing! We must RESIST attempts to make our science less objective! We must PUSH BACK against attempts to insert ideology—any ideology—into our science! We must STRIVE to be as apolitical as we possibly can be! I know that I’m a human being with my own biases, and so are you - but objective science is humanity’s best tool for overcoming those biases, and arriving at SHARED KNOWLEDGE. We can do better - TOGETHER.

Hmm. I’m not much of a speech-writer, and that felt a little bit embarrassing. But remember well that cringey feeling: that’s exactly how you should feel the next time someone tells you—with a clear, yet unspoken, agenda—that “science is political”.

Should Minority Vegetarians Impose their Food Habits on Majority India?

 

New India, Inequality and Ideology

 

Understanding Prashant Kishore

 

Free Market Economics for Dummies - Cambridge University Lecture

 

Brilliant Political Satire in Malayalam - ശ്രീനിവാസൻ ചേട്ടന്റെ സൂപ്പർ ഹിറ്റ്‌ കോമഡി

 

Politics and Marriage - Malayalam with English Subtitles

 

Scammers, Godmen, Political Parties use similar techniques to manipulate minds

 

Reversing Love Jihad in Kerala

 

Do rich countries undermine democracies in developing countries? Economic History in Small Doses 3

Girish Menon*

The IMF led consortia (World Bank, WTO…), have represented the interests of the rich countries. Historically, they have advocated free market policies in developing countries. Whenever such weak economies got into economic trouble the consortia have insisted on harsh policy changes in return for their help. By such acts, are the rich countries really helping the growth of democracy in developing countries?

---Also read

1. Ideological Positions and Economic History

2. Is Corruption An Obstacle to Economic Growth? - Economic History in Small Doses 1

3. Are Democracy and Capitalism in Conflict? Economic History in Small Doses 2

---

Free market policies have brought more areas of our life under the ‘one rupee one vote’ rule of the market. Let us examine some of these policies:

The argument is framed thus, “politics opens the door for perversion of market rationality; inefficient firms or farmers by lobbying their politicians for subsidies will impose costs on the rest of society that has to buy expensive domestic products.” The current farmers’ agitation in India is being tarried with this brush.

The free marketer’s solution is to ‘depoliticize’ the economy. They argue that the very scope of government activity should be reduced to a minimal state through privatisation and liberalisation. This is necessary, they argue, because the politicians are less competent and more corrupt. Hence, it is important for developing countries to sign up to international agreements like the WTO, bilateral/free trade agreements like RCEP or TPP so that domestic politicians lose their ability to take democratic decisions.

The main problem with this argument for depoliticization is the assumption that we definitely know the limits where politics should end and where economics should begin. This is a fundamental fallacy.

Markets are political constructs; the recognition of private ownership of property and other rights that underpin them have political origins. This becomes evident when viewed historically. For example: certain tribes have lived in the woods for centuries until the point when this land is sold off by the government to a private landowner and then these tribespeople now become trespassers on the same land. Or the re-designation of slaves from capital to labour was also a political act. In other words the political origins of economic rights can be seen in the fact that many of these rights that seem natural today were once hotly contested in the past.

Thus when free marketers propose de-politicizing the economy they argue that everybody else accept their demarcation between economics and politics. I agree with Ha Joon Chang when he argues that ‘depoliticization of policy decisions in a democratic polity means – let’s not mince our words – weakening democracy.’

In other words, democracy is acceptable to free-marketers only if it does not contradict their free market doctrine. They want democracy only if it is largely powerless. Deep down they believe that giving political power to those who do not have a stake in the free market system will result in an ‘irrational’ modification of property and other economic rights. And the free-marketers spread their gospel by subtly discrediting democratic politics without openly criticising democracy.

The consequences have been damaging in developing countries, where the free-marketers have been able to push through anti-democratic actions well beyond what would be acceptable in rich countries.

* Adapted and simplified by the author from Ha Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans - The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations & The Threat to Global Prosperity

Economics for Non Economists 1: What is a free market economy?

by Girish Menon

Suma, you have asked a really fundamental question and I will try to answer it in two parts viz;

-         What is a market economy?

And

-         What does free mean in the context of free market economy?

So let’s start with the first aspect – What is a market economy?

The activity of buying or selling a good is called a market transaction or a market activity. Thus a market is a set of arrangements where goods are exchanged for money.

Today most countries in the world adopt the market model for the production and consumption of goods and services. They believe in the Adam Smith quote, ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’

Google Dictionary defines self interest (own interest) as ‘one's personal interest or advantage, especially when pursued without regard for others.’ Some economics texts assume that the self interest of a goods producer is to earn profits whereas the self interest of a consumer is to maximise her happiness by paying for goods she requires.

Adam Smith’s theory expects citizens in an economy to be both producers and consumers of goods. As a producer you are expected to generate a profit from your toils. You, as a consumer, are expected to use the profits to buy other goods to live your life.

Based on the above logic, market theory predicts that if all the citizens of an economy are left to pursue their self interest then it will result in the automatic production of all goods and services that citizens require in order to be happy.

Though Adam Smith preferred the word ‘invisible hand’, I have used the term automatic. Google dictionary defines automatic as ‘working by itself with little or no direct human control’. In other words producers make and sell goods which they think will be demanded and hope to profit from it. There is no authority other than their anticipation of consumer needs that guide their decision to produce and sell goods. Similarly, consumers pay for a good because they think it will make them happier and there is nobody telling them what to buy and consume.

Thus, a market economy would be an economy where the production and consumption of all/most goods and services is determined by the self interest of its producers and consumers. This system is also known as capitalism.

 ----

So, what is a free market economy?

These days it’s not only the UK, USA etc. but many other countries who call themselves free market economies. But are they truly free market economies where the production and consumption of all goods are determined automatically with its citizens unabashedly following their self interest?

I notice that you seem to be shaking your head. Especially in this Covid climate you will have noticed the role that the UK government has played in your life and the way it has affected your pursuit of self interest and happiness. So what I will now do is list the conditions necessary for Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand to work:

1. There are many buyers for a good in the market and no buyer is large enough to get a discount on the price.
2. There are many small sellers of a good in the market and no seller is large enough to set its own price.
3. The goods produced and consumed are identical or homogeneous. In other words a consumer cannot recognise the producer of the good.
4. There must be freedom of entry to the market – or no barriers that prevent a potential producer from entering the market.
5. There must be freedom of exit from a market – if a producer wishes to quit a market then s/he should be able to do so freely and without any sunk costs.
6. There must be perfect knowledge. Producers must have full knowledge of the technologies used by its rivals and consumer preferences. Consumers must be aware of the short and long term benefits and costs from consuming a good.
7. The factors of production must be mobile. It means that the land, workers, machines used for producing a good should be easily redeployed to producing any other good when demand changes,
8. There must be no transport costs.
9. There must be independence in decision making. No external forces affect the decision making ability of producers and sellers.
10. No externalities. The act of production and consumption based on self interest should not result in benefits or costs to third parties.

I am sure that after you have read the above conditions you will agree that neither the UK economy nor for that matter the Indian economy is anywhere close to being a free market economy. I don't think there is a single economy in the whole world that satisfies most of the conditions of a free market.

I will now let Ha Joon Chang have the final word on free markets:

“The free market (economy) does not exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries (by governments) that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How ‘free’ a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined ‘free market’ is the first step towards understanding capitalism.’

@@@@@

• When I presented this article to Suma she said, 'Girish, you have not understood my question. I meant where can I find the free goods that should by definition be there in a free market?' 

Capital and Ideology with Professor Thomas Piketty

Ha Joon Chang speaks: Economics for the people

Lecture 1.1 - The Nature of Economics

Lecture 2 - What is wrong with Globalisation?

Lecture 1.2 - Why all economics is political

Lecture 7 - Inequality - What is it and why does it matter

Lecture 9 - The role of the state

Lecture 5 - Why are some countries rich and others poor?

Lecture 8 - Understanding Production

Lecture 10 - Finance and financial crises

Lecture 3 - Conceptualising the individual

Lecture 12 - Industrial policy

Lecture 4 - Can economics save the planet?

Lecture 6 - Will robots take your job?

Lecture 11 - Can economics save the planet?

Economic development

Richard Wolff: Political Strategy for Transition