Democracy vs Science

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehcY37DW2og

Attached link is Professor David King's lecture on the challenges we face as a global community. A vast summary of today's major issues, but I only wanted to draw attention to one statement here. At about 13:50 in the video, we are told that science alone cannot govern, and democracy is needed also. The example given is that the Chinese government is the most scientifically savvy government in power today. I'm going to assume it is their success in achieving their goals that gets them credit here, and their human rights record that is used to demonstrate why democracy is needed also.

My thought on this one though, is how can democracy and science ever go hand-in-hand when the 'scientific savvy' of a government is much greater than the scientific savvy of the average voter? We are told that smear campaigns on GM foods by the media influenced the population of europe to reject GM foods, and this has been devastating for economies of countries reliant upon stable crop yields. Clearly the voting public cannot be relied upon to make scientific voting decisions on matters of scientific complexity.

Both professor Sir David King and the royal society have come out to say that we need nuclear power in the short to medium term to make up our energy requirements in the UK in order to give time for renewable energy technologies to develop into economically viable options. Yet nation-wide there is great support for the conservative, liberal democrats and even the green party, who are all opposed to nuclear power.

Can science ever be given the freedom to govern logically without an iron fist in a country where the majority of people are not scientifically minded and the media has the greatest influence on political opinions?

Radical Economics Lost in Isolation

In the fourth of the open lectures I have begun attending within London’s city centre, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo presents a lecture about sales pitch for her book, ‘Dead Aid’. This book consists of a critique of financial aid as provided by governments and large multiorganisational companies to African states. A great shame that given a vast audience of eager young academics, the respected speaker begins by declaring that the lecture will contain limited content in order to encourage readers to buy the book to see what is left out. A woman who apparently cares deeply for the state of Africa and the suffering that comes with immense poverty, given an open stage on which to lecture tomorrow’s economists, focuses on personal monetary gain. The word sell-out springs to mind...

Not a great start, but onwards with an open-mind. Summarising then, the content of the lecture;

1. 1) Corruption ensures the money is poorly spent, preventing aid reaching the people to which it was intended.
2. 2) Countries suffer poor national governance, becoming completely dependent upon third party governance that provides the majority of the public services.
3. 3) The well established view of the media of Africa as a collection of countries who all need help and can’t look after themselves has a damaging impact on the confidence of the inhabitants, discouraging entrepreneurship and ambition.

The solutions being to phase out these large hand outs, focus on development, usage of international financial markets for funding, the tackling of corruption through the growth of a middle class and some good PR and positivity. Dambisa seems to draw the line here, indicating she feels that an economist’s role ends at identifying the greatest levers to change as opposed to being an expert in policies for moving these levers (fair enough). All very good (technical difficulties of implementation aside...) and certainly seems to be an improvement over the existing model of “throw money at the problem until it goes away”.

Yet I found myself losing interest. This happened when I began to feel that the bigger picture was missing. Is not the (generally accepted) forecast for Africa devastation due to a changing climate, the spread of the Saharan desert to encompass the vast majority of northern Africa and depleting fresh water sources? What reason is there for an economist to seek ways of turning yet another continent into a thriving, carbon booming economy, charging blindly towards a greater demise? Is it even appropriate for an economist to not even mention this side of things, when discussing the long term future of an entire continent? Surely we can’t hope to address the problems of Africa in isolation?