Most of us living on this earth believe launching a global war simply to employ people is immoral. This is not part of our politics but our moral conviction.
The E wrote:PeterZ wrote:Agreed. I would posit that some goals with real world, objective metrics may bridge such divides.
Improving unemployment is a good one. Create some measurable amount of net new jobs than existed at beginning of the term. Improving the median wage by some stated amount or percentage. Whatever policies that are consistent with those goals should be fine for most people. That is the sort of ideology free goals I am discussing. Like South Africa using their policy on private hunting preserves owning the elephants in their property to increase the elephant population, effective policies might by distasteful but they do work.
Holding one's ideologically sensitive nose in the presence of effective policy is a measure of adulthood.
Okay. You know what a really good way of creating jobs is? Invading China. Lots of job opportunities in that; kicking off a world war requires lots of manpower after all.
Now, obviously that's an absurd example. But ideology can never be counted out completely; there are for example schools of thought that claim that removing as much regulation as possible from the economy will create growth, whereas other schools hold that we can create an environment conducive to more entrepreneurship can be created by creating a robust social safety net.
Both positions can be argued for, both have compelling evidence behind them all over the globe, but they are obviously incompatible to some extent. It is impossible to do both, so which solution should we choose? That's where ideology creeps in again and again.
The idea that we should just science it out and choose the option the objective data points out to us is incredibly compelling. But it doesn't work out that way: The only way to run experiments to get data is by doing it live, and that's obviously a bit risky.
