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Government Involvement with Science And Art
An interview with Noam Chomsky
By Noam Chomsky and Ollie Mikse
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It's not just talk radio. You can read it in the front page of the New York Times. There was an article a couple of days ago asking if global warming is science or snake oil? They presented two views to balance it. One was the view of 99 percent of people who know anything about the topic. The other was the view of Senator James Inhofe who says it's all fake and a couple others, or maybe Rush Limbaugh. Those are the two views. You don't say that about the flat earth hypothesis or did the holocaust happen? You don't balance two views like that.
To get back to your question, if you look at popular attitudes, they're dangerous and they're affected very significantly by massive propaganda. If you want to get to the core of irrationality, the deepest level has to be market systems. In a market system—we have only a partial market system—but markets have inherent what they call "inefficiencies," really lethal inefficiencies. We're living through one right now: the financial crisis. It's an inherent part of markets that if you make a transaction, then you look out for yourself not other people. That's called in economics an externality. If you're, say, a Goldman Sachs executive and you make a loan or investment or something, if you're functioning "properly" you cover your own risk. But you don't cover what's called systemic risk—the risk to society and the system in general.
When you look at most of the business world—particularly the energy corporations, but also the business world in general—for them the survival of the species is an externality. When you're making decisions you cannot take that into account. They're legally obligated not to take it into account. If you're a CEO of a corporation you are legally obligated to maximize profit and market share, not to pay attention to consequences. If you did you'd be out of a job because someone else would come in who is interested in profit. That's inherent to markets. You can find ways to counter them with large-scale regulation and other stuff, but in a market system what you have is the business community committed to destroying everything they own and making it impossible for their grandchildren to survive. It's not that they're bad people. If you ask them, do they care about their grandchildren, they say sure, they'd do anything for them.
Meanwhile, in their institutions, they have to disregard it. So there's massive business propaganda trying to convince people that humans have no effect on global warming because that doesn't increase short-term profit. If they knock down energy legislation, they'll do better in the next quarter. Those are very profound irrationalities. One of the consequences is that there's a very destructive belief system.
In your book Failed States, one of the points you bring up is how government policy is very frequently the opposite of what people want. Is it the same when it comes to science, research, and the arts?
The way public opinion is portrayed is incredibly misleading. For example, take welfare state policies, social policies, aid for the poor, Social Security. What you read in the headlines is that the public is against them. If you take a look at social attitudes, they're entirely different. Even among people who identify themselves in polls, there's still considerable majorities and support for education and health, the government, for the poor and so on. There are only two exceptions that are striking. One exception is blacks. People who call themselves conservative or "anti-government" think we're giving too much to blacks. Take a look at the black population: it's a deep depression for them right now. But we're giving too much away to them. That's an example of old-fashioned American racism.
The other exception is welfare. People say they're opposed to welfare. That's a Reaganite contribution. If welfare means some rich black woman driving up in her limousine to get your hard-earned money at the welfare office, people say they're against it. On the other hand, if you ask the same people, "Are you in favor of more government aid to, say, women who have low income with children?" They say they're in favor of that, but they're not in favor of "welfare."
You get the same answer to foreign aid. A large majority say we give too much away to those "undeserving" people out there. Then when you ask the same people what they think foreign aid should be, it turns out it's far higher than what it actually is. You have to be really careful in studying what attitudes really are.
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