(e) Gould (2000:294-297) discusses Sulloway (1996) with sympathy. This seemed relevant given the importance of the latter for the draft constitutional amendment for an Economic Supreme Court. However, Van den Berg (2004) in Dutch NRC-Handelsblad reports that the validity of Sulloway’s finding is seriously questioned in Nature.
(f) I reread Ayer (1936, 1978), “Language, truth and logic”, and was struck by his discussion of Poincaré. Ayer, page 115: “For a well-chosen definition will call our attention to analytic truths, which would otherwise have escaped us. And the framing of definitions which are useful and fruitful may well be regarded as a creative act.” In the “definition & reality methodology” the idea is that definitions concerning stylized facts are “useful and fruitful”. Williams (2002), “Truth and truthfulness”, is advised reading. What I take from it is that people have a ‘sense’ what is true or not, whether they are right or not, and that society can benefit from giving proper way to this ‘sense’. Now, what would be a proper way ? My approach is to give more attention to science and the scientific attitude.
(g) Colignatus & Hulst (2003) is a Dutch booklet that summarizes the scientific argument in this book for the Dutch lay public. This booklet also relates to the murder of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002. There is a peculiar streak in Dutch society that is wildly at odds with its reputation for tolerance. Namely, the Dutch can react strongly to someone who threathens their view of the world. A similar phenomenon can be observed in other cultures too, but it is strong in Holland. My inclination is to link this phenomenon to the observation in Cavalli-Sforza (2000:184) of different mentalities in France: “Hervé Le Bras and Emmanual Todd [1981] have recently refined ideas by the French sociologist Fredericq Le Play. They believe three major types of families exist in France. (…) have proposed a controversial but stimulating hypothesis that says family structure influences political structure”. These types are related to the history of Celts, proto-Basque and Franks. My impression is that Dutch society is similarly subject to some cultural mentality.
(h) When I discussed the consequences of the CPB censorship for public health, this caused developments that led to my dismissal in August 2004 from the Erasmus MC Dept. of Public Health. This is another breach of the integrity of science. Dutch readers are referred to my website. All this is too fresh to include it in this book.
(i) November 2, 2004, Holland saw Theo van Gogh murdered. He is a grandson of Vincent van Gogh’s brother Theo (the elder). The younger Theo is said to have been a talented though controversial film director. The Van Gogh family had donated its collection of paintings to the state and Theo van Gogh had trouble finding funds to develop his talent. When he was murdered he was completing his film 0605 of the murder of Pim Fortuyn. Van Gogh’s murderer of Moroccan decent expressed his delusion of the 9-11 ideology. This is a new element in Dutch society that can only be understood with the input of the Bush policy on Iraq. It must be noted though that Theo van Gogh protested regularly to that other original streak in Dutch society referred to above, namely that Holland is not as tolerant and open as it may seem. One can summarize the situation as that a truly tolerant Holland would have had no fertile ground for that 9-11 ideology, while the resulting criminal extremist killed the critic of that intolerant streak.
(j) There are some Dutch books that deserve an English translation. Here I only translate the titles. Klever (1990), “Pure economic science”, takes his position in Spinoza and argues that economic science should be developed from first principles in a deductive fashion. This strikes me as quite similar to the “definition & reality methodology”. Mathematical economics already had the deductive approach, and econometrics assumed that only statistical approximation was feasible, but we can do better if we can find definitions that fit stylized facts. Klever also recovered Franciscus van den Enden (1665, 1992), “Free political theses”. That author was a teacher of Spinoza and his book argues that democracy is the only form of government that can safeguard stability and general welfare. Klever (1981), “Dialectic thinking”, must be mentioned for a better understanding of the deductive method. His discussion of Poincaré and his pupils, for example, clarifies the creative element in mathematics. Guépin (1985) “Civilization” and Guépin (1994) “The difference in opinion” defend classical rhetorics as the essence of civilized mentality. These books provide a wealth of information and are a useful antidote to expecting too much from deduction only. He highlights the tension between rhetorics and deduction by criticizing Socrates that it is rather easy to impress people by goading them into inconsistencies when they have not first defined their terms properly. (Rhetorics cannot make fun of rule based inference if the only goal of rhetorics is to get better inference.) Guépin also highlights that deduction thrives with dichotomy but hesitates with the sorites, i.e. the problem of accumulating grains of sand until the mountain moves.
Autobiographical note
This book completes a project that started in 1989 and that is closely related to the Fall of the Berlin Wall in that year.
At that time in 1989, and in fact from 1982-1991, I was employed as a ‘economic scientific researcher’ at the Dutch Central Planning Bureau (CPB), which institute can be compared to the US Council of Economic Advisers. The CPB provides the executive branch with economic projections and with evaluations of policy proposals. In 1989 I was involved in test runs for a study of the economy for the long run till 2015, later published as the CPB (1992a&b) “Netherlands in Triplo” and “Scanning the future”. The test runs showed continued economic problems, and this caused me to consider some points. If the Bureau would publish bad weather projections, then these might cause the government to enact economic reforms that would self-unfulfill the projections. Secondly, my CPB colleagues Van Schaaijk (1983) and Bakhoven (1988) had presented a solution approach to unemployment that did not get the attention that it deserved. Thirdly, when the Wall fell, it was obvious that continued unemployment in Western Europe would be detrimental to economic recovery in the East, and this suddenly made unemployment much more important than it had been before. So in November I wrote an internal memo Colignatus (1989) proposing various economic reforms that might be considered as research projects not only for the final version of the long run study but also for the medium run.
Then, in December, in deciding on the annual pay rises, the CPB directorate withheld part of the normal raise for me, and my section chief informed me that it would have been better if I had not written that memo. Apart from the bizar sensation that a hundred billion dollar invention was being punished instead of rewarded, I also experienced the sensation that comes when the dime drops or when the pieces of a puzzle fall together. I could not escape the conclusion that I was confronted with a particular piece of evidence of stagnation in policy making, and that improper means were being used to influence scientific discourse. Taking stock: my career position was blemished, my creative contribution was branded as weird instead of simply creative, and I was apparently supposed to no longer judge ideas on their own value but on some line that was decided by the directorate. If these methods were used, I could understand why colleagues Van Schaaijk and Bakhoven had become silent on their important contributions to the solution approach, or had left the Bureau altogether.