The world is a complex system, full of non-linear relationships, feedback loops and tipping points.

Niall Ferguson has an extended set of articles discussing civility in public debate with particular attention paid to the behavior of Paul Krugman. There is a common bullying posture in pundit professors such as Krugman and Harold Bloom in which they seem to spend a lot of time in ad hominem attacks on others as a means of bolstering their own credibility. It is a little bit odd. They are professors from reputable universities, it would seem sufficient to simply make their argument without indulging in vitriol and destruction.

However, Ferguson has an interesting passage on the larger context.

The historian's world is a complex system, full of non-linear relationships, feedback loops and tipping points. There is more chaos than simple causation. There is more uncertainty than calculable risk. For that reason, there is simply no way that anyone - even Paul Krugman - can consistently make accurate predictions about the future. There is, indeed, no such thing as the future, just plausible futures, to which we can only attach rough probabilities. This is a caveat I would like ideally to attach to all forward-looking conjectural statements that I make. It is the reason I do not expect always to be right. Indeed, I expect often to be wrong. Success is about having the judgment and luck to be right more often than you are wrong.

On both Europe and the approach of the financial crisis, I would say that - unlike Paul Krugman - I was right more often than I was wrong. But so what? When investors and fund managers are right more often than they are wrong, they are rewarded - handsomely. When they are wrong more often than they are right, they lose money or clients, usually both. The world of public intellectuals is different. Using their academic credibility to pontificate about the future, professor-pundits can be wrong again and again without losing money or their tenured jobs. Many distinguished and lucrative careers have been based on just such a pattern of unpunished error. By the same token, the returns on being right are surprisingly low. A book sells because its prediction fits the mood of the moment. The author may get a bonus - in the form of additional sales - if he turns out to be right. But he doesn't have to return the royalty checks if he turns out to be dead wrong.

So we public intellectuals should not brag too loudly when we get things right. Nor should we condemn too harshly the predictions of others that are subsequently falsified by events. The most that we can do in this unpredictable world is read as widely and deeply as we can, think seriously, and then exchange ideas in a humble and respectful manner.

I was thinking about the paradox of academic freedom and insularity just the other day. I believe that one of the great benefits of the American University system is its capacity to insulate intelligent people from the hurly burly of the world which is "too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." You need variation in any system in order to adjust and evolve and universities, with their tenure and insulation give leeway for new ideas to blossom outside the harsh selection process of the market. BUT . . .

That very protection also fosters ideas which not only are wrong (i.e. wouldn't survive in the real world), but which can be immensely destructive and detrimental. Marxism in its various forms leaps to mind as an intellectual construct which, when ported into the real world, inflicted great death and suffering wherever it was adopted. Lesser conceits out of the hothouse of academia that retard progress include some of the more extreme forms of feminism, critical race theory, liberation theology, and others.

The paradox is that academic hot housing does generate ideation and variation but in that process, absent any accountability, some of those ideas can develop so far that they end up imposing costs on people in the real world.

So how do you protect academics so that they can foster new and creative thinking (i.e. free them from the constraints of accountability) but at the same time ensure that there is a modicum of reality in amongst their ideas? I don't know, but I think that is the nut that needs cracking.