The seen and the invisible

On one recent blog post by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek, in which he points out (for the millionth time) that America is not deindustrializing, a Jayson Ramos responded to a comment I made saying: “So who [sic] is Mr. Korol should believe? You and Doctor Boudreaux – or his ‘lying eyes’?

This is a common “gotcha” style question, meant to imply that the experts on an issue are out of touch and/or making things up. However, the good scientist knows that the eyes do not lie, they just are An instrument of understanding. Our eyes provide us with valuable (seen) information. But what is unseen is also of vital importance.

A simple example to illustrate my point: my eyes looking out my office window show a beautiful sunny day. A thunderstorm is forming in the distance, but it will likely move south. A good day for a walk, right?

But my weather app, which collects data from the National Weather Service in New Orleans, says otherwise. Even though it’s barely 9am, we have a real wind chill of 104°. It says the air is very humid and breathing can be difficult, especially for people like me with asthma. They also say we could have a thunderstorm later. So who am I to believe? My lying eyes or some meteorology nerds in New Orleans?

It turns out: the nerds were right. As soon as I stepped outside to take out the trash, I was hit with the heat and humidity. Even though the trash compactor is about 100 yards away, I got in my car and drove there. And now that it’s getting darker as I write this, they’re probably right about the storm, too.

Have my eyes lied to me? No: they told me the truth. The sun was out. The storm I saw did go south. But another storm is coming from the north (I don’t have north-facing windows). My eyes saw the truth, but only part of it. The NWS saw much more and provided me with additional information. What was unseen to me it was as important as what it was seen.

It’s the same with American production. It’s easy to see the Rust Belt, to see how many once great cities have been destroyed. When I lived in Syracuse, New York, it was heartbreaking to see such beautiful facades fall into disrepair, to see such stark poverty in a once shining city. No one denies that similar stories are playing out in cities across the US. But there are also cities being transformed by new construction in Tennessee, Massachusetts, Alabama, Mississippi and the Carolinas. In reality, US construction spending for industry is at the highest level since data were recorded (2002). The recent jump is due to subsidies and incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, but keep in mind that spending has generally been on an upward trend since 2011. Even in those old Rust Belt cities, new life is being born: art halls, breweries, museums and the like. all kinds of other developments are moving to old factories.

Science teaches us to search for the invisible. Science teaches us to use all our senses in combination with reason and reason to draw conclusions and conclusions. Sight is an important sense, but it is hidden from view by a veil. The purpose of education is to help sharpen our other senses so that we can pierce that veil. It is the poor scientist who relies only on what is seen; as we see with Mr Korol, this leads to incorrect conclusions about the state of the US economy and US production.