Epistemological Modesty

David Brooks in his column from Monday articulates a big fear I have about Obama's agenda: the potentially vast difference between his enormous ambitions and what a complex, top-down organization like the U.S. government is actually able to achieve, the difference between what we would like to do and what we can know and effectively achieve.

The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.

Brooks then talks about some of the 20th century intellectuals that pointed out liberalism's faults:

These writers... had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.

Though he goes on to point out that Obama's people have a policy humility that the creators of previous social-engineering failures did not, he is still worried by the tremendous scope of Obama's agenda. And, I have to say that I agree a bit. Though I am a liberal and have more faith that we've learned how to do top-down social change, listening to Obama's speech on Tuesday, the scale of the ambition just got to me: millions of jobs created, radical changes in health care, energy and education, new climate change policy, cutting the deficit in half, tax cuts for the middle class, and a promise not to raise them (during what time period, it's not clear). He even hopes for a cure, literally, for cancer. I mean, come on!

I do think Obama can't be timid. Now is the time for bold plans -- the problems we face are simply not problems that can be postponed. The world is already broken. And some of the things he wants to do, like re-vamping health care, might be part of the solution, placing the country on a better long-term path to health (in the case of health care by, I think, dealing with costs that will eventually strangle us if left alone.) Still, I'm a little skeptical -- can we really take seriously the idea that taxes will not have to be raised on the middle class at some point in the next eight years? But, as Brooks notes, the stakes are too high, and we all have to hope that Obama proves the skeptics wrong.