Why “Scientific” Government Fails
Calvin Coolidge (left) took aim at the progressive ideas that shaped the administrative state under Woodrow Wilson (right)
By Michael C. Aronstein
Addressing the American Bar Association in 1922, Vice President Calvin Coolidge took aim at what today we call the administrative state.
Coolidge observed the growing power of the federal government. “Behind very many of these enlarging activities lies the untenable theory that there is some short cut to perfection,” he said. But no act of legislation could eliminate the “human element in our affairs.” Government, the vice president reminded his listeners, does not have a unique “supply of ability, honesty, and character necessary for the solution of all these problems, or an executive capacity great enough for their perfect administration.”
Four years later, as president, Coolidge challenged the progressive ideas that shaped the administrative state. Reflecting on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, President Coolidge said, “It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern.”
But Coolidge warned that “no progress can be made beyond” the truths outlined in the Declaration. “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.”
Coolidge clearly had in mind the Progressive movement led by Woodrow Wilson, who had left the White House only a year before Coolidge addressed the bar association. It was Wilson, America’s only PhD president, who advocated “scientific” government—an ever more powerful administrative state modeled on Otto von Bismarck’s Germany.
Wilson embodied a movement still influential today: arrogant positivism.
The Limits of Positivism
Positivism conflates the predictive successes of physical science with a presumed capacity to apply deterministic models to human society.
Dazzling scientific and technological advances reshaped the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Think of Thomas Edison’s innovations in electricity, Henry Ford’s assembly-line production, and Albert Einstein’s work in theoretical physics. Einstein revolutionized scientific thought in his annus mirabilis of 1905. His groundbreaking work on relativity, though understood by only a handful of physicists, became an emblem of what scientific genius could achieve.
The popular reverence for science led social scientists to seek similar prestige and influence by claiming mathematical rigor and certainty. Economics offers perhaps the most striking illustration of the transformation. Economists moved away from the more philosophical approach of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, turning instead to quantitative methods. Never mind that economics deals with the inherent complexity and unpredictability of human behavior.
The Federal Reserve—founded in 1913 under Wilson—employs more PhD economists than perhaps any other institution. Yet it has repeatedly failed to foresee or prevent financial crises. In this young century alone, the Fed failed to anticipate the dot-com bubble, the housing collapse and subsequent global financial crisis, and the inflationary surge that followed unprecedented monetary expansion.
These limitations illustrate the fundamental limits of applying the methods of the hard sciences to human decision-making, cultural shifts, and global interconnectedness. Repeated disappointments in economic forecasting and policy engineering fuel growing public distrust in once-revered institutions—leading to unrest and a sense that the establishment’s “experts” lack genuine insight.
Today, more economists acknowledge the shortcomings of purely quantitative approaches. They recognize the need to examine human agency and behavior as driving forces behind economic activity.
The Lure of Pseudo-Science
Positivism also leads to pernicious pseudo-scientific ideas. Wilson and his fellow progressives illustrate this danger.
As Christopher Cox documents in Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, Wilson did not merely resegregate the federal workforce; he also adopted the supposedly scientific tenets of eugenics. In 1911, as governor of New Jersey, he signed a law authorizing the forced sterilization of the “hopelessly defective and criminal classes.”
Wilson was far from alone. Many leading figures on the left embraced eugenics, as Princeton University scholar Thomas Leonard has shown. Advocates included economist John Maynard Keynes, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, and Fabian socialists George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells.
Progressives did not invent eugenics, but they did give eugenic ideas the force of legislation. Their faith in expert-driven governance led to laws that would “scientifically” manage human populations.
In other words, an understandable admiration for scientific progress morphed into a dangerous belief that experts could “perfect” society.
Calvin Coolidge understood this risk. In his 1926 speech on the Declaration of Independence, the president said:
We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp.
Coolidge’s Warning
Coolidge offered a prescient warning in his 1922 address to the American Bar Association:
When legislation fails, those who look upon it as a sovereign remedy simply cry out for more legislation. A sound and wise statesmanship which recognizes and attempts to abide by its limitations will undoubtedly find itself displaced by that type of public official who promises much, talks much, legislates much, expends much, but accomplishes little.
As Coolidge predicted, the overreliance on government and “experts” leads to public disillusionment with policy failures and discredited forays into social engineering. But paradoxically, these failures often result in public cries for still more government intervention.
Instead, as Coolidge urged, we must “supplement the appeal to law, which is limited, with an appeal to the spirit of the people, which is unlimited.” We need a federal government that once again confines itself to “providing those fundamentals of liberty, order, and justice for which it was primarily established.”
Michael C. Aronstein is a writer and investment manager focusing on the intersection of philosophy, applied economics, and markets. He has published articles and been a guest speaker in a variety of financial, academic and general-audience venues.