Losing Legitimacy

To explain why I think we deserve it, let me start by telling you a story. One of my dad’s high school friends (let’s call him Jeff) got a fancy finance job with a big bank straight out of college. He worked his way up the corporate ladder, charming and impressing his supervisors at every turn until he was a multimillionaire who wielded enormous financial power. In other words, he earned his way into the ranks of the economic elite.

Without going into personal details, suffice it to say Jeff did his job wrong. He was involved in what we now call “predatory lending” and helped cause the 2008 recession. He wound up being fired, saw his name smeared in several national newspapers, and retired in shame to a beautiful hilltop mansion with dozens of servants. Where he proceeded to use is newfound free time to climb the seven summits and pursue other expensive recreational endeavors. Talk about taking responsibility!

Of course, that’s not Jeff’s side of the story. What we call “predatory lending,” he called “giving people a chance at home ownership.” He really believed it, too, at least until the system blew up. Plus, it’s not like it was his idea. He may have been one of the few people actually running the show, but it wasn’t like he performed the analyses that told him the sorts of financial practices he was involved in were a good idea. He was simply acting according to ideas and incentives produced by economists like Alan Greenspan. So it wasn’t malice that led him to help crash the economy in 2008. It was an honest mistake. A mistake for which hundreds of millions of people, not including him, and not including Alan Greenspan, wound up paying a heavy price.

This problem is not just present in finance. The same perverse incentives that shield us elites from our bad decisions are very nearly ubiquitous. Let’s talk about science (my own profession) for a moment.

I have type 1 diabetes, along with several other autoimmune diseases. Like most people with chronic diseases, I wanted to actually do something about it. When I was 6–7 years old, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation was confident that they were hot on the trail of a cure. With adequate funding, they said they could cure type 1 diabetes “within 5–10 years” (those who work in bioscience may recognize “within 5–10 years” as a recurring, rather dishonest trope). If I could raise enough money, I wouldn’t have to deal with finger-sticks and injections anymore, I wouldn’t have to fear dying by seizure in my sleep anymore, my blood wouldn’t turn to poison from a simple arithmetic error anymore, and my friends wouldn’t mock me as a degenerate weakling anymore.

I took them at their word (and to be fair, the JDRF was just taking the actual scientists at theirs), and so I walked from door to door around the neighborhood asking people for money to donate to the JDRF. I asked every member of my church, every teacher at my school, and when I went to friend’s houses to play, I often bailed on the playdate to ask every household in their neighborhood for money, too. At the end of the day, I raised over ten thousand dollars. The JDRF gave me a plaque to commemorate, I got to speak at the local Kewanis club, and I was overwhelmed with pride and hope.

Twenty years later, my blood can still turn to poison in my sleep, I still live life as a human pincushion, and the JDRF is hardly even talking about the possibility of a cure anymore. As far as I was concerned, the scientific community was full of empty suits who were more than happy to take my money and sell me false hope. The good news is that I don’t give up that easily. I decided that if I wanted the job done right, I had best go do it myself. So I worked my ass off in school, got involved with research as an undergraduate, and then started looking at PhD programs.

I was paranoid about not getting accepted anywhere, so I sent hundreds of emails to potential advisers and applied to twelve programs. I was accepted by ten, and went to interview with nine of them. In the process, I spoke to dozens of scientists about their research, and it was positively enlightening. Most of them were in it for the prestige, more so than to reduce human suffering. Yale was the worst offender in this regard, so I turned them down. Among those scientists who were doing medical research out of genuine human compassion, most struggled to maintain funding, and nearly all had a hard time making their work materially relevant to the lives of people who, like me, actually have the diseases they were studying.

At the end of the day, I found a strong lab at a strong institution doing genuinely useful work for the right reasons. But I have to say, that isn’t the norm. And if you don’t believe me, consider that biology is suffering a replication crisis to the point that some analyses estimate only around 11% of publications are reproducible. Some of that is honest mistakes, some of it is fraud, and most of it lies somewhere in between. But you know what I’ve never seen in bioscience? I’ve never seen a laboratory go out of business. We’re not allowed to fail. For all the complaints about fierce competition for academic positions, it seems that for one thing, you’ve largely won the game once you get that job, and for another, the incentives in the competition are to publish a whole bunch of papers.

My personal mission is to do work that will withstand the test of time and help people outside of the ivory tower, but my professional incentives are utterly irrelevant to that mission. Besides perverse incentives, many people are more focused on the prestige of being a scientist than they are in doing useful work. If you fail to do good work, you can waste massive sums of taxpayer money to no avail, or perhaps even add to the burden of disease. And when that happens? Most likely, there’s no downside for you personally. We get all the prestige and comfort of an elite profession, and bear virtually none of the costs of our mistakes. No wonder there are a lot of papers that fail to replicate.

I could go on and on about the issues in bioscience all day, but perhaps it’s more useful at this point to just list notable examples of why the everyman might not trust the elites. I’ve already mentioned the 2008 financial crisis and the replication crisis in biology. Turns out, there’s a similar replication crisis in psychology, and that’s before you even look at the extreme political bias in the social sciences. Al Gore told us that Mt Kilimanjaro would lose its snow cap by 2015, yet here we are in 2017, and Kilimanjaro is still covered in snow (note that this doesn’t falsify climate change, it just means Al Gore went too far).

You know what else we’ve done wrong? We’ve used amphetamines and other stimulants to drug little kids into submission when they act up in the classroom. I’m sure some of them really need it, but nearly 10% of schoolchildren using hardcore stimulants is downright dystopic. We’ve taken billions of dollars in research funding to address diseases like diabetes. Meanwhile, in the world outside the ivory tower, the population is almost absurdly sick. If you’re already inclined to distrust authority, none of these considerations is going to restore that trust. And as the icing on the cake this year, Brexit was guaranteed to fail (but didn’t), Trump was guaranteed to lose (but didn’t), the British economy was guaranteed to collapse if Leave won (but hasn’t), and the American economy was guaranteed to collapse if Trump won (but hasn’t).

Take a look at that track record. Sure, I’m maligning the experts more than is really fair, and sure, there have been some victories I’m not mentioning. But if you’re part of the labor class and already resentful of those softy intellectuals who get paid to sit in front of a computer all day, why the hell would you trust us? Would you have faith in the experts telling you that “97% of climate scientists believe in global warming” or that “science says vaccines don’t cause autism” or that “economists unanimously agree on free trade” or <insert appeal to expert authority here>? Of course you wouldn’t. We’ve given you no reason to trust us.

And not only do we get it wrong at least as often as not, we bear none of the costs when we do. We may lose our jobs if we screw up really bad, but we’re already rich for the most part, and there’s almost no way we’re ever going to wind up really and truly destitute. Economists and bankers can play dangerous games with other peoples’ 401(k)s and then retire to hilltop mansions. Scientists can publish a slew of questionable articles leading to major public health errors, and then still get to keep the prestige that comes with their title. Politicians can make major policy errors that harm millions of people, but they almost certainly won’t be harmed themselves. Journalists could conspire to lie to us and we’d never even know. Consequences are for the little people.

You may have noticed that I’ve used “we” or “us” several times in this essay. I don’t exempt myself from this criticism. When it’s my feet, kidneys, and eyes on the line, I’m heavily invested in lifestyle management of diabetes. It’s cheaper than relying on drugs, and it gives me some control over my own fate. But in my capacity as a diabetes researcher, I largely follow my professional incentives. The words “therapeutic target” often appear in my publications, referring to hypothetical drugs that I as a diabetic don’t actually want.

I work hard and make real sacrifices to ensure that my studies are part of the minority of scientific work that can be replicated, but what I can actually do with my job and what needs to be done are often two totally different things. The dissonance keeps me up at night. The masses increasingly distrust me, and I know that I deserve it.