Using a compass and a map to find one’s desired direction.
Wikimedia Commons / Audrius Meskauskas

Echo chambers   for different ideological orientations abound throughout the modern world. One can see them in academia, in the major news media, and of course in political parties. They exist to confirm our biases, and to comfort us in our basic ideological beliefs. They help us to subsume information confirming what we desperately want to believe, while rejecting all data casting doubts on our convictions. Fundamentally, they are an outgrowth of wishful thinking. In the Western World, who is most guilty of indulging in this confirmation bias?

The Major Ideological Sides in the Western World, and Their Biases

Before I rush to judgement,  let us take a look at the two major ideological sides in the Western world. There are certainly more than two ideological groupings in the West, but all of them are but special cases of the two major classifications. The first and the most popular of them in the last century we can call dirigistes, believers in dirigisme. These are the folks who believe the state and its coercive power of law should be the fundamental tool to solve all social and economic problems. In the United States, dirigistes are usually called progressives. They are often called “liberals” in the U.S., but this is a great error. Progressives have long since given up a belief in a small, limited government. They tend to be anti-free-market and enemies of corporations. They also tend to desire an accumulation of more government power and ever increasing taxes.

The second major grouping is of those who believe government programs and actions most often create far more problems than they solve. In the United States they are usually called “conservatives” but this is very much a misnomer. All ideological sides have aspects of society they would like to change, and other aspects they want to conserve. They merely have different lists. A much better label for these people is “neoliberal”, since they believe in classical liberalism and in free-markets. They often advocate taking powers away from the central government, reducing government spending, and reducing taxes. Neoliberals would much prefer societal problems to be solved by individuals and voluntary organizations of individuals. If governments are absolutely necessary, neoliberals would rather have the problems attacked at the lowest possible level of government.

These two portraits are very broad-brush renditions. One can find many exceptions. Just because dirigistes generally want a larger, more powerful government does not mean they all yearn for a dictatorship. Just because neoliberals want a smaller, less powerful government does not mean they hunger for anarchy. Nevertheless, these portrayals are predominantly accurate, and suggest the usual reactions of each side to our common problems.

These two major ideologies give their adherents a map to reality. Unfortunately, maps are not necessarily accurate. Cartographers may inadvertently introduce errors that lead us astray.

If measurement problems can cause errors in a physical map like those above, how much more can we expect errors in a map of abstract ideas about reality? Confirmation bias on all sides blinds us to whatever wrong directions our ideological maps are sending us. Which ideological groups are most susceptible to this self-deception? Even more important, how can we all avoid confirmation bias?

How To Avoid Confirmation Bias

The only way  to escape confirmation bias is to constantly demand an agreement between data and ideology consistent with everything else that we know. Empiricism led us out of superstition during the Age of Enlightenment, and empiricism should be the lodestone pointing us toward the truth. If our ideology is our map, observations are our compass, telling us the direction to go on the map.

There are some real difficulties in doing this. Not the least of these problems is confusing opinions with knowledge. Only after opinions are confirmed by observation after observation can we consider them to be real knowledge. Once we grant the transition of an assertion from opinion to fact, any parts of our ideology inconsistent with that fact must be modified to make it consistent. That can be a lot of work.

Much of that work must be spent in research, reading, and thinking. Especially in a representative democracy, ordinary citizens have an obligation to perform this labor in order to cast an informed vote. Luckily, in this age of the internet we have a very large set of both opinion and data on many different websites with many different ideological orientations. You can find a list of links to some of my favorite sources on my page for favorite websites.

So, Who Is Most Guilty of Confirmation Bias in the West?

A clue  to who is deluding themselves the most can be found in the persistent populist revolts against the dirigiste Western elites. The ordinary people making up the bulk of Western electorates have become extremely uneasy with the degree of Western economic decay. They are also downright alarmed about the cultural suicide implied by their elites’ multicultural choices. Multiculturalism, itself an outgrowth from the incredibly incoherent and absurd ideas of postmodernism, is riven with contradictions almost demanding the dissolution of Western cultures invaded by outside cultures.

Western elites of the center-left to left have demonstrably led their peoples down a path toward increasing economic, cultural, and physical insecurity. This can be seen in declining secular growth rates of their GDPs, averaged over the business cycle. With the one startling exception of Ireland, they are all poised to go from secular stagnation into outright secular contraction. You can see this in the plots below of 10-year moving averages of GDP growth rates.

The shocking contrast of Ireland compared to the poor results of other European countries and the United States is quite instructive. It is discussed in the post The Great Irish Economic Experiment with Capitalism.

The social costs implied by these falling GDP growth rates can be seen in the example of France, as shown in the CBN News video from 2015 below.

Could it be any clearer there is something vitally wrong about our elites’ beliefs concerning social reality? The counter-example of the Republic of Ireland screams out the fault lies with governments’ mismanagement of their economies and other systems of interacting human beings. Yet, a vast amount of history tells us governments can not micromanage human systems without creating other and even more severe problems than the ones they attempt to solve.

Amazingly, the dirigiste elites do not seem to realize there is something wrong with their picture of social reality. Progressives in the U.S. instead give a number of other explanations. The situation seems to be roughly the same in Europe. American progressives have explained their losses in 2016 as due to American racism, misogyny, fascism,  and treason on the part of Donald Trump colluding with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton. They explained American economic decay and secular stagnation as caused by market failures and greedy corporations. Somehow they could not see it was government itself that was the cause of all these problems. If you are a progressive and do not agree that government is the biggest cause of economic problems, here are some links to posts justifying the assertion.

• The Causes of the Great Depression
• Why Did the Great Depression Last So Long?
• Causes of the 2007-2008 U.S. Financial Crisis
• Economic Effects of the Dodd-Frank Act
• Why Have ZIRP and QE Failed?
• Economic Damage Created by the Fed
• The Debilitating Effects of Obamacare
• Big Corporations Abandoning the U.S. at an Increasing Rate — This was during the Obama administration.
• Obama Has Not Produced An Economic Recovery
• The Federal Government’s Projected Bankruptcy
• U.S. Economy and StockMarkets, October 2016
• How Is the Weather Like a Country’s Economy?
• The Lies Progressives Tell (Especially to Themselves!)
• More Lies Progressives Tell To Themselves
• Even More Lies Progressives Tell To Themselves!

Additional evidence from other countries with all stages of economic development and with many different types of economies is provided by the following posts.

• Comparing the Economies of All Countries on Earth
• Historical Lessons on Economics and Politics
• More Historical Lessons From Europe
• Lessons From The Developing World
• The Human Development Index and Economic Freedom

By spinning the tale that our problems are the results of free-market capitalism and market failures, dirigistes are completely ignoring the dominant role of government. Could dirigistes turn the argument around to say neoliberals are ignoring the roles of capitalist greed and market failures? The reason they can not is all of the hard data taken from many reliable institutions that went into the posts listed above. These include various federal government institutions such as the Federal Reserve Economic Database, the Department of the Treasury, and the Congressional Budget Office. They also include international institutions such as the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Can We Save Ourselves?

Some time ago,  a reader accused me of being guilty of confirmation bias in a particular post. My reply was,

If I exhibit “confirmation bias”, it is a bias confirmed by an incredibly large amount of historical and economic data. Far too much data than could possibly be fit within a single post, which is why I produced that long list of links to my past posts discussing that data …

That is the only possible defense against such an accusation. No one should be embarrassed by a strong bias, so long as that bias is strongly supported by observed facts. I apologize to no one for believing in James Clerk Maxwell‘s four equations for the electromagnetic field. At the same time, as soon as my beliefs can not explain what is observed and they are fundamentally challenged, I must either modify my ideology to achieve consistency with facts, or abandon it for a better world view.

That is what is required to save ourselves.

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