Liberals do not pretend to know what the future will bring, and so are skeptical about planning.

From The Science of Liberty by Timothy Ferris.

When liberalism is evaluated quantitatively, via the social science of economics, it comes off rather well. By fostering individual creativity and free markets, liberalism has created enormous prosperity—but it seems that a dash of government involvement helps, too. Party politics may be a crude metric, but the United States in the past half century has experienced faster GDP growth, lower unemployment, and higher corporate profits during Democratic than during Republican administrations. The stock markets performed better, too, with annualized returns on investment averaging almost 9 percent when Democrats were in office against less than 1 percent for the Republicans. It is not yet possible to identify exactly which conditions best bolster a free-market economy’s production of wealth—given the internal differences in the geography, history, ethnicity, and other conditions of various nations, there may be no one best way to set the dials—but it is clear that almost everyone is economically better off in the liberal-democratic, free-market states. Eighteen of the world’s twenty largest economies circa 2007 were liberal democracies—the exceptions being China, a communist state which boosted its economy into double-digit growth rates by admitting free-market practices, and Russia, which was foundering between democracy and oligarchy on an ocean of petroleum profits. That same year, all forty of the world’s cities said to offer the “highest quality of life” (measured in terms of thirty-nine factors ranging from recreational opportunities to political stability) were in liberal-democratic nations. It also appears that liberalism really does move humanity toward universal peace: Seldom do liberal democracies make war on one another, and as the world has become more liberal it has also become more peaceful.

But how, exactly, does liberalism facilitate scientific inquiry, and science benefit liberalism? Primarily through change and creativity.

Liberalism stands out among political philosophies in its readiness to embrace change. Liberals do not pretend to know what the future will bring, and so are skeptical about planning. They stress the importance of individual creativity, noting that humans are profoundly ignorant and so must be free to keep learning. As the liberal economist Friedrich Hayek declared, “All institutions of freedom are adaptations to this fundamental fact of ignorance, adapted to deal with chances and probabilities, not certainty. Certainty we cannot achieve in human affairs.”

Prior to the rise of science and liberal democracy, people had few choices other than to put their faith in a regnant belief system (which was girded against dissent by the power of church and state) or reason their way to an idiosyncratic system of their own (which unless done discretely could land them in jail). Science opened up a third option. Scientific research, whether conducted by an eccentric loner or a club of propertied gentlemen, could adduce facts of universal validity—facts objectively verifiable from every point of view. Such phenomena are called invariant, meaning that they are the same regardless of the perspective from which they are examined. All scientific laws are statements of invariance, and as such transcend both official dogmas and individual subjectivities. Liberalism’s claim that all humans have equal rights is therefore mirrored in the universal validity of scientific facts. “Far from being relative truths, scientific results tend to make everyone’s truth property the same across cultures,” noted the American philosopher Robert Nozick. “In this sense, science unifies humanity."

The party comment is discordant in an otherwise critically important summary. The successes noted are a product of the unique American culture and institutions (including institutions of government) and not especially attributable to individuals and parties. With economic cycles and policy implementation lag times of a decade and more, the party changes attendant to a 2/4 year cycle of elections is not especially consequential. But fundamentally Ferris is correct, the classical liberal system has been an incredible experiment beneficial to all humanity.

What I think he is missing, or at least overlooking, is the sustained attack on classical liberal ideas from exogenous sources (example, China and Russia) and internally from repressive totalitarian philosophies such as social justice, postmodernism, critical theory, etc..