sawyl | It's the evidence, stupid! (Reply)

I've long argued that faith is a deeply damaging force because of the way it corrodes the power empirical evidence and reinforce wishful thinking. Here is Alan Sokal in the Guardian, citing a particularly heinous case of wishful thinking:

The extreme example of the government's cavalier attitude towards truth and evidence was, of course, the selling of the war in Iraq. Rather than dispassionately using intelligence information to help evaluate policy options, Bush and Blair's operatives pressured their intelligence agencies to find "evidence" - exaggerated, tendentiously interpreted, or simply fraudulent - supporting a predetermined policy. The result is the mess we're now in. Globally, the Iraq war has helped recruit a new generation of militants for al-Qaida; in the Middle East, it has strengthened Iran. All of this could easily have been predicted before the war. And of course it was: not only by leftists, but also by those few conservatives who had not succumbed to the hubris of overestimating their own power.

And least anyone thinks that the war in Iraq has had any positive effects, Stiglitz and Bilmes' book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, tells a rather different story. Here's a quote, from a Guardian interview with Stiglitz, which puts the amount of money wasted on war that stemmed from wishful thinking at its worst, in perspective:

By way of context, Stiglitz and Bilmes list what even one of these trillions could have paid for: 8 million housing units, or 15 million public school teachers, or healthcare for 530 million children for a year, or scholarships to university for 43 million students. Three trillion could have fixed America's social security problem for half a century.

But instead of doing all that, the US government spent three times that on a war and, in the process, bankrupted their population and caused a large part of the world economy to go for a burton:

"A lot of people didn't expect the economy to take over the war as the major issue [in the American election]," says Stiglitz, "because people did not expect the economy to be as weak as it is. I sort of did. So one of the points of this book is that we don't have two issues in this campaign - we have one issue. Or at least, the two are very, very closely linked together."

And it is the world economy that is at stake, not just America's. The trillions the rest of the world has shouldered include, of course, the smashed Iraqi economy, the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead, the price, to neighbouring countries, of absorbing thousands of refugees, the coalition dead and wounded (before the war Gordon Brown set aside £1bn; as of late 2007, direct operating costs in Iraq and Afghanistan were £7bn and rising). But the rising price of oil has also meant, accoring to Stiglitz and Bilmes, that the cost to oil-importing industrial countries in Europe and the Far East is now about $1.1 trillion. And to developing countries it has been devastating: they note a study by the International Energy Agency that looked at a sample of 13 African countries and found that rising oil prices have "had the effect of lowering the average income by 3% - more than offsetting all of the increase in foreign aid that they had received in recent years, and setting the stage for another crisis in these countries". Stiglitz made his name by, among other things, criticising America's use of globalisation as a bully pulpit; now he says flatly, "Yes, that's part of being in a global economy. You make a mistake of this order, and it affects people all over the world."

Truly, staggeringly, damning.