MIT as Political Microcosm

For me, it all starts with MIT, which I treat as a condensed microcosm that reveals a larger set of wider-ranging issues. I went there to study policy and political science – what they call Course 17 – and as MIT is an engineering school, I thought that the department’s take on policy would be from an engineering perspective or at least accommodate an engineering perspective. After all, the mascot of MIT is “the Engineers,” so there are reasons to believe this is the case. However, that has not been my experience. My experience has been that MIT is surprisingly politically correct. Of course, it remains to be defined just what “political correctness” means, and there are several possible definitions. But the way it was implemented at MIT was quietly, pervasively, and powerfully. That is, if you held views that ran counter to accepted wisdom, then that was a problem.

Now you might ask, “What’s an example of accepted wisdom, and what’s wrong with it?” Well, I had a problem with the way democracy was treated as an unquestioned good, which is a view held by Noam Chomsky, which for me is a bright red light indicating “problem.” From an engineer’s perspective generally and an electrical engineer’s specifically, that view is highly problematic because we did not decide whether an answer to a hard electrical engineering problem was correct or not through voting. So how did we tell? Well, there was the matter of mathematical expertise, but even that was somewhat flawed, because how can you tell the transformation from the physical to the mathematical representation is correct? That answer is, “by experiment.” That is, the ultimate arbiter of correctness is a theory’s ability to predict the future as confirmed by experiment. Richard Feynman (MIT ’39) said at Cornell (1964) that there are three parts to science: (1) you guess it – i.e., theory; (2) you compute the consequences of the guess – i.e., experiment; and (3) if the guess doesn’t square with the consequences, then you’re wrong. It is that relationship between theory and experiment that provides the core of science.

Now there is a saying in academia that fields that are truly scientific don’t need to include the term “science” in their names. For example, computer science often amounts more to hacking than science, but computer science provides ample opportunities to determine if the code works starting with compiling and moving on to more sophisticated testing. Political science however is in my experience deeply problematic because too often policies are judged by their intentions and implicit flattery rather than logic, plausibility, or likely results. This is a problem because I expect that the policies that determine and guide our life should be crafted with the same care that engineers create Porsches or iPhones, but this simply is not the case. Moreover, even believing that this should be the case is controversial because it threatens those who have based their careers in making arguments that rest on a more… emotional and self-interested foundation, which has led to many of today’s political problems. Instead, a more cognitive and commons-oriented perspective is required, but because such change is fundamental it will threaten the status quo and prove controversial. Be that as it may, this is the challenge of the 21^st century politics. What we see now under President Obama, the European Union, and other institutions such as NATO, the IMF, the WTO, the UN, and the Federal Reserve are the dying embers of 20^th century social bargains coming under increasing pressure and eventual failure. The studies found here recognize this reality and choose to understand why this is the case in order to postulate policies that will lead to more stable and sustainable results.