Modern capitalism and science have evolved together since the
Enlightenment. Advances in ship building and navigation enabled the Age
of Discovery, which opened up new trade routes and markets to European
merchants. The United States’ Department of Defense research and
development agency helped create the precursor to the internet. The
internet now supports software and media industries worth trillions of
dollars. On the flip side, some of America’s greatest capitalists and
businesses, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Bell Labs, gave us
everything from electricity production to the transistor. Neither
science nor capitalism can succeed without the other.
However, science’s star is now dimming. Part of this is due to political
intervention, but so too has capitalism played a hand in science’s
struggles. While corporations sponsor a significant portion of funding
for scientific research, this funding too often comes with undisclosed
conflicts of interest. Or corporate pressure may influence results in
other ways.
Stanford’s John Ioannidis studies the methodology and sociology of
science itself: how the process and standards for empirical research
influence findings in ways that some may find inaccurate. On this
episode of Capitalisn’t, Ioannidis joins cohosts Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales to discuss the future of the relationship between capitalism and science.
Audio Transcript
John Ioannidis: Wrong incentives, wrong financial incentives for scientists, even in democratic societies, can be problematic.
Bethany: I’m Bethany McLean.
Phil Donahue: Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed’s a good idea?
Luigi: And I’m Luigi Zingales.
Bernie Sanders: We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.
Bethany: And this is Capitalisn’t, a podcast about what is working in capitalism.
Milton Friedman: First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed?
Luigi: And, most importantly, what isn’t.
Warren Buffett: We ought to do better by the people that get left behind. I don’t think we should kill the capitalist system in the process.
Bethany: Today’s topic may seem a little bit different for us because we have a guest who is a scientist.
Luigi: Why does a podcast about capitalism want to
talk about science? Because capitalism and science were born roughly at
the same time, they share a common cultural foundation, and there is a
mutual dependency between the two. Modern capitalism cannot exist
without the fruits of science. And modern science is supported by
capitalist institutions that finance laboratories, R&D, and
universities.
Bethany: Their success is intermingled in
complicated ways. If per-capita income today is 27 times what it was 250
years ago, and if life expectancy is twice as long as it was 250 years
ago, is that due to the success of capitalism, or the success of
science, or both?
Luigi: And the question is, if science is in a
crisis, how does this affect capitalism as we know it? In fact, we can
argue that maybe it’s capitalism itself or capitalist incentives that
are responsible for the science crisis. If we think that science is
guided by disinterested inquiry, capitalism is guided by profit. To what
extent is this profit motive impacting science and, indirectly, the
success of capitalism?
Bethany: Or to what extent is it politics that are impacting both?
To discuss this topic, we are delighted to have with us John
Ioannidis, a physician-scientist who is a professor at Stanford
University and one of the world’s most-cited scientists. He has more
than 600,000 Google citations.
Luigi: His most famous paper is “Why Most Published
Research Findings are False,” which actually started the field of
metascience. In it, Ioannidis argued that a large number, if not the
majority, of published medical-research papers contain results that
cannot be replicated.
Bethany: He also, I think, has additional work
showing that citations can themselves be bought. So, maybe we should be
careful about citing his citations. Anyway, there is no better person to
discuss with us the topic of a science crisis and why it matters.
John, I wanted to start with some of your history. What made you an
unorthodox thinker? About 20 years ago, you published research showing
that most published claims were false. What do you think it is about
your personality that started you down this path?
John Ioannidis: I’m not sure it’s a personality
issue. It’s just the natural evolution of what I was witnessing and the
research that I was doing. It was just very common to see mistakes,
flaws, difficult to replicate, implausible results, very weird claims.
If anything, my interest was in rigorous methods. I am the kind of
person who’s more interested in methodology rather than the results. The
results are interesting no matter what. I think if you use rigorous
methods, there’s no good result or bad result. They’re all results to be
respected.
Luigi: May I suggest that the reason is that you had
to spend, I think, six months in the military service in Greece after
being a doctor? I had to do one year of military service in Italy after I
got my undergraduate degree, and that made me an anarchist for the rest
of my life.
John Ioannidis: That’s a very interesting
possibility. I hadn’t really made the connection, but who knows?
Obviously, the military is a crazy world, and any notion of rationality
and reason probably disappears very quickly.
Bethany: I did not know that about you, Luigi. So, see, all these years into our podcast and I’m still learning something all the time.
Before we move on to more recent history, I’d love for you to talk a
little bit about COVID and what happened to you in the pandemic when you
voiced some unconventional views.
John Ioannidis: It’s what happened to many people
who voiced any views, not conventional or unconventional. Even the
definition of what is conventional or unconventional can be challenged
depending on whom you ask.
I think that many scientists very quickly realized that they either
had to completely silence themselves, distance themselves—"Don’t deal
with that. It’s just a crazy world out there”—or if they continued to be
engaged, they took sides. So, they said, “Wait, I need some
protection.” But that probably led to some huge polarizing effect.
Personally, I didn’t feel that I should seek protection from anyone. I
have always argued that politics and this type of forces should not
subvert science. They should not affect scientific thinking and
reasoning and evidence.
I was just reporting what I found, and that made some people very
happy and some others very, very angry. But it’s sad that some people
would just feel that numbers had a color, that they belong to political
parties, that they belong to partisan groups, that you had to find one
number in order to be a good Democrat or a good Republican, a good
supporter of someone. That’s very sad, but—
Luigi: I think that one of the concerns was that, of
course, COVID was extremely disruptive or potentially disruptive to
economic activity. The economic incentives to minimize the effects of
COVID were enormous. This is where trust in science came in big time.
There was a fraction of the population that did not trust the science
and did not trust the results. To be honest, I think that some
scientists or pseudoscientists were claiming that the damages were much
lower because they wanted to continue business as usual. I think that
this created a fracture in the population about this topic.
John Ioannidis: I think it’s a very complex
narrative, and I think what you point out is valid. There were not one
or two voices. There were zillions of voices out there, some of them
more rational than others, some of them just very heavily
conspiratorial-theories oriented. But many people were dissatisfied with
what they saw as science or what was being sold as science or followed
the science to them. They felt that it was affecting them in multiple
ways that were mostly negative.
After a certain point, I think that they generalized their negative
response to anything that came out of science, that science is yet
another conspiracy of the powerful, against me, against my life, against
my family, against my world. It’s not for me. It’s not trying to help
me. It’s just trying to make money, help some big tech, some big pharma,
some powerful people. It’s exploiting me, it’s killing me, it’s harming
me, not for me. Science is my enemy. Very sad. Extremely sad....
