Want to take a guess at the most conservative department in a typical US University? Religion? Nope, usually a total nut house. Engineering? Close, but these guys are only conservative in the amount of time they devote to even thinking about politics. Hard sciences: Chemistry, Physics, Biology? Absolutely not, all their support comes from the public purse via some politician swallowing their Chicken Little disaster scenarios about rapacious Chinese imports or monster hurricanes.  Give up? Economics. (or see this Academic paper.)

My theory about why Economics is so conservative (at a whopping 25% Republican!) is that they have to deal with real data about real people. Liberal Arts is in their own little world somewhere between 1968 and 1972, whereas the sciences are in an ivory tower with a weather radio that carries only news about Congressional science budgets. Which is why they support tax-and-spend politicians. One would imagine that  economists have got a better grip on fiscal responsibility and perhaps this accounts for their (relatively) strong Republican percentage.

And maybe that accounts for why so few college kids seem to take Economics. Or perhaps I am over-generalizing, perhaps it is only MSM journalists, lawyers and politicians who avoid the field. In any case, Thomas Sowell makes the argument repeatedly that there is a great deal of populist misinformation about economics. Such as blaming the gas price spike on greedy corporate price gouging. Or miraculously eliminating poverty by raising the minimum wage. It reflects not only a very poor education, but a tendency to avoid responsibility and willingness to demonize others.  It demonstrates a distrust for entrepreneurs, and a love for big government solutions. In other words, the Socialist education of the 20th Modernist Century.

However as this experiment in Socialism failed, the War on Povery, the New Society, the New Deal (a damning review) all failed to meet their goals or even 50% of their goals. Many economists have suggested that the New Deal prolonged the Depression, that the New Society made crime worse, that the War on Poverty increased the number of welfare moms. We would have been better off, they argue, if we had done nothing at all, sort of like Calvin Coolidge's view of the stock market crash.

So now we have a cognitive dissonance. We have a conflict between those who thought they had an economic solution, but found it didn't work. What to do? PoMo to the rescue! PoMo rejects absolutes, such as real income or inflation adjusted prices, and focusses on relative quantities, such as the fact that no one thinks they are rich. You know the old saw, "How much money would it take to be happy? A little more.", where we replace say, $1M, with a derivative, "more". PoMo prefers the process, the derivative, the slope, the difference to the quantity itself. If classical economics is about money, PoMo economics is about who has more (or less) of it. Most of Sowell's columns are addressing PoMo economics.

As compelling as Sowell is, he remains a classical economist, so to understand PoMo economics, we need a true believer. The ideal spokesman turns out the be a conflicted soul, someone who has been an evil capitalist, but now repents of his ways and is wooing the elite, someone who has not other-people's-money but his own money to spend, the richest man in the world, Bill Gates.

Perhaps for tax purposes or perhaps for altruism, he founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. First he tried to correct the educational system, which he said was plagued with underachievers. So did he offer incentives to study, encouraging parents to get involved, scholarships? No, he funded more schools, greasing the machine, focussing on the process. Now he wants to fix the world's economic ills the same way. In his Harvard commencement speech this year, this is what he stressed as the most important world problem.

   But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.
   I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.
   I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.
   But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

Pure PoMo economics.

So how does he confront the fact that statistically speaking, he is the largest contributor to the world's inequity today? By blaming the system that allowed him to become so rich. Pause a moment and let this irony roll around the tongue. Communists said it was money that was evil. Socialists said that making money was evil. Bill is saying that making too much money is evil. All of these groups deny personal responsibility for evil, though Bill comes closest to admitting guilt  And the quickest way for Bill to improve the world statistics? Jesus already answered that question.

Okay, we'll be more realistic, is Bill advocating microcredit, more ownership, entrepreneurs, like the garage business he began some 25 years ago? He explains the work of the Foundation.

    So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How could the world let these children die?”
   The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.
   But you and I have both.
   We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.
   If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.
   I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: “Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just … don’t … care.” I completely disagree.

Let's pause again, and consider his PoMo economics. Disparities exist, Bill says, because the market is Darwinian, even though people aren't. In contrast, classical economists view people as rational consumers (e.g. Darwinian), and the market as a maximum cooperative solution (e.g. non-Darwinian).  Bill's solution is to reform the system by limiting its choices, whereas classical economics would liberate the consumer by giving him more choices. In Bill's solution, Utopia is both known and achievable, in classical economics, Utopia is both unknown and unachievable. (After all, wasn't it Jesus who contradicted Bill when he said "the poor you will always have with you.")

Finally look at Bill's definition of sustainability, "meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians," The feudal society of medieval Europe managed to be sustainable without either of these, as do most Muslim countries today. One gets the sense that Bill is more concerned about sustaining the right sort of process, "profits and votes" than about sustaining the people.

Bill continues,

   The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.
   To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.

The irony here, is that Bill's entire Microsoft empire was built around an operating system that is too complex to maintain. But the complexity was entirely of his own making, because he refused to modularize and allow competition; he wanted to control everything. Likewise, Bill thinks that if he were President of the UN, he would have the control to bring about "caring capitalism" but he worries about complexity. Poverty is only too complex if he thinks he has to remain in control, like some central planner in a Communist economy.

So he turns to history to find an example where success was possible despite complexity, he wants to show that government largesse combined with compassion can change the course of nations. He points to the Marshall plan that is credited with the restoration of war-torn Europe.

 Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: “I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation.

But was the Marshall plan responsible for the success? John Tammy disagrees.
The reason PoMo economics fails, is the same reason for the hedonist paradox, when we strive for happiness, we are eternally unhappy, because we have made the journey into the goal. We have added to the whims of fate the additional unhappiness of our doomed efforts to control the universe. It is a death spiral of recursion. Likewise, when we strive for equity, we enable inequity, because we have made the journey into the goal, we naturally have to give power to some groups to control the inequity of others, and those losing power are now even more unequal than before, and on it goes. The recursion inherent in this effort causes the complexity that so frustrates Bill. The system is irredeemable because it is the system that is the problem.

How did his first philanthropic effort succeed, the reformation of failing schools? Not too well, says Business Week, evidently they've had to close the schools that got Bill's funding.

But PoMo economics isn't really about success, or numbers, or even sustainability. It's about  me, my guilt and my salvation. Here's Bill's final charge to the Harvard graduating class,

I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities … on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.
Good Luck.

They'll need it.