Today in TCSDaily, Michael Strong wonders whether academia might be made better of by encouraging professors to place monetary bets on the future states of the world which their theories imply.

The credibility of academia is based on the notion that professors are “experts in their field” who have achieved their position by means of a track record of exemplary scholarship. In the hard sciences, where “exemplary scholarship” is based on scientific work that is consistent with empirical research, this credibility is based on a solid foundation. Outside the hard sciences, the foundation for the credibility is more tenuous.

In the hard sciences non-obvious facts, such as the existence of unimagined planets and elements, were predicted in advance of discovery. It is striking that one of the few non-obvious predictions in the social sciences, the prediction by Mises and Hayek that communism would fail due to the lack of price information, was ridiculed or neglected in the social science literature from the 1930s until the 1990s, when it suddenly became accepted wisdom. Paul Samuelson’s Principles of Economics 13^th edition, published in 1989, claimed “the Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.” The “skeptics” being sneered at here are Mises and Hayek. Samuelson’s economics textbooks, selling more than 4 million copies, represented “expert judgment” in economics throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.

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The issue would be harmless enough if nothing were at stake but thousands of delusional professors taking a few billion dollars out of our economy. But lives are at stake. In 1989, when some academic economists were still praising the Soviet economy, I had dinner with an Egyptian reporter who noted that the Soviet Union had to change because a generation of Soviet military advisors, sent to advise “third world” nations such as Egypt, had discovered, to their humiliation, that ordinary Egyptians had cars, refrigerators, and a host of modern conveniences that were only available to the nomenklatura of the Soviet Union. Throughout the world more than four million leaders and professionals were taught to believe that Samuelson’s work was authoritative. His judgment was a major force for defining economic reality for the entire world throughout the second half of the 20^th century. And he was completely clueless regarding the state of the Soviet economy.

The article is based on Robin Hanson’s essay Could Gambling Save Science?: Encouraging an Honest Consensus

Read more: Put Your Money Where Your Theory Is

Previously: Consensus View