Markets never act in a vacuum. As all economists point out, a stable government, an honest court system, an honest banking system, adequate patent laws, an adequate transportation system and a healthy information flow are all needed for an efficient market. All of this infrastructure impinges on the flow of trade and creates a market structure, as do societal morals and social goals. As pointed out by Marshall Stahlins, the entire agricultural market in the US would make a radical shift if people suddenly found it acceptable to eat dogs rather than keep them as pets. It is absurd to claim markets should or even can operate freely with no structure or cultural framework. Why then is there almost no discussion of these extra- market structures? Here are extra-market questions which must be answered before markets can do their job:

• What kind of patent laws work best? How do we protect intellectual property?
• What kind of court system gives rise to the most efficient markets? Who should be allowed to sue whom?
• What is the best role for government to play in market structure?  Most businesses want governments to protect them abroad but leave them alone at home. Is this how it should be?
• Surely laws to protect people from unscrupulous business practices are needed. What form should they take to be most effective? (See Secret History of the War on Cancer by Devra Davis for a rundown of unscrupulous business practices in the recent past.) What about taxes and regulations to prevent businesses from acting unscrupulously?
• What is the role of information in market structure? How much is enough and who should provide it? Should we trust multinational corporations to be forthcoming with information which shows their product in an unfavorable light?
• What is the best way to limit monopolies? Sometimes a big monopoly (or near monopoly) can provide more through economies of scale than a collection of smaller entities. How do we know when this is the case? Are 10 companies enough to prevent a monopoly? Five? How do we decide?
• How should ‘commons’ (common goods) be introduced into the market? Surely everyone should be allowed to have clean air. How clean and how do we protect it?
• What about the environment (so called external costs), can they be included in mainstream economics and if so, how?
• Surely we should measure economic efficiency by more than just raw wealth. What other factors should be used? Health? Longevity? Happiness? How do we measure these things and how do we assign them proper weight?
• How do we value natural and non-renewable resources such that they will be protected in a capitalist system?
• Do humans really only act out of greed as Adam Smith claimed in The Wealth of Nations? Probably our entire business structure would fail if most of the people involved weren't honest, at least most of the time. Humans are motivated by honesty and many other emotions besides greed which flies in the face of the most basic assumption of economic theory.
• How should the markets be structured to maximize the attainment of social goals and what are those social goals anyway?

Mainstream economic theory purports but be a 'scientific' theory. As such it gains great a great deal of respect. But is it really?

• Mainstream economic theory (equilibrium theory) began being constructed as a mathematical theory about the same time as Newton's mechanics. In fact much of our current economic theory was modeled very closely on the thermodynamic theory of that epoch by substituting physical variables such as energy with economic variables such as utility. The creators of this economic theory thought that they had constructed a scientific theory of economics (partly because it was highly mathematical). It was widely believed at that time that both physical scientists and economists were discovering natural laws laid down by God (this is in fact where the 'invisible hand' originated; economists of the time were referring to the hand of God as the creator of the natural laws at work in economics and this is why many conservatives adhere so tightly to free market concepts; they believe it is the will of God). Since this time, thermodynamics has been significantly overhauled as has much of science. Economic theory, however, has kept its original concepts, based on now out modeled physical theory, and has simply tacked on more mathematics. So basically, economic theory today is a version of physical theories from 300 years ago which have since been abandoned.
• Cases where the 'invisible hand' has apparently worked to provide an effective market are given as scientific evidence that the free market works. But there are two problems here because these examples are nearly always after the fact (unlike true scientific theories which make predictions of future events).
  • Cases where the invisible hand has not worked well are cited, not as failures of the theory but rather as cases where the market hasn't had time to work or the market has been constrained in some way (government, laws, tax, other market structure, etc.). What, exactly, would constitute a clear and unarguable example of the failure of the invisible hand? If we wanted to set up an experiment or situation where we could say "if x happens under these conditions, y and z the theory of the invisible hand is just plain wrong" what would that experiment look like? The fact that such a test is not available indicates that, just as in the cases of psychoanalysis and horoscopes, we have a theory which is not scientific because it cannot be tested. Nonscientific theories may be useful (as is psychoanalysis) but we must be careful about pinning too much faith in them as a way to plan for the future. 
  • Much of the evidence for the success of capitalism is based on figures which come out of economics, for example GDP. But some people have suggested that GDP is not a useful measure of growth because (for one) it does not include the possible depletion of natural resources. For example it has been argued that reported growth in the US during certain periods actually came from using up irreplaceable resources rather than any real economic development. Selecting data in a way that supports your theory while omitting data to the contrary is definitely not a scientific approach.

  If economic theories represent natural laws, what exactly is a 'market failure'?

Some further problems with mainstream economic rhetoric (i.e. the ‘invisible hand’):

• Classical economic theory is based on the idea that humans are predominately motivated by cost and in a rational way so that if left to their own devices (with no interference whatsoever) they would make good economic decisions. Clearly this is not true. People are motivated by moral sense, altruism, greed, advertising. None of these is rational. Stock market bubbles would not occur if humans were rational. If suicide bombers are any indication, religious motivation can be and often is much stronger than economic self interest. I would venture to say that most humans act morally and ethically, most of the time. In fact the entire premise of most religions is that humans must NOT be motivated solely by economic self interest (i.e. greed). If economic theory and religious moralists are both right, one can only conclude that capitalism would not work in any society with strong moral behavior. The opposite sentiment, that a society which is strongly capitalistic cannot be moral, seems to have more evidence.
• It is simply not true that “a rising tide lifts all boats”. As Kevin Phillips points out in Wealth and Democracy, the gap between the wealthiest people and the bottom 10% in this country has be widening over the past 30 years. Globally the economic differential between the top one fifth and the bottom one fifth has grown from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1995.
  
• There are plenty of examples where collaboration achieves more than competition. A prime example is open source software which is free and owned by no one. The vast majority of Internet servers in the world run Apache web servers with open source Linux operating systems because they are by far more stable and robust compared to available commercial products.
• There are many examples where a particular social goal cannot be achieved only by market mechanisms. We would never have had the Internet if it had been left only to businesses. Nor the atomic bomb, nor universal education (literacy), nor universal health care in Europe, nor the end of smallpox in the world. All of these projects were carried out by rational choices made by governments and inter-governmental agencies. Capitalism is successful in China in the absence of democracy, which tells us that free markets do not need democracy (let alone create democracies). If we want a democracy and the freedoms that come with it we must look to mechanisms beyond the market. From these examples it should be clear that many important projects must be planned and carried out entirely outside the realm of the markets.
• Corporate America is not at all an example of a competitive capitalist system. Large corporations are not run by entrepreneurs they are run by CEOs who arguably have more of a commitment to their own short term economic well being (e.g. a golden parachute) than the long term economic well being of the stock holders. Large corporations also are able and willing to distort the markets using law suits, lobbying, and misinformation in the form of advertising in a way that is contrary to the assumptions of a free market of equal competitors and buyers.
• In some cases (because of economies of scale) monopolies (which are non-capitalist by nature) or near monopolies produce products more efficiently than would a larger collection of smaller competing entities. The car industry is an example.
• Growth in consumer products is assumed to be not just desirable and foremost but absolutely necessary for a capitalistic system. As interpreted in modern American economic practice this slants the economy towards consumption and greed while overlooking two important topics:
• Growth of non-consumer products such as health care, infrastructure (roads, electrical system, Internet), leisure time, preservation of natural resources (e.g. clean drinking water) is neglected. Tangible goods are over emphasized in the current system whereas the non tangible benefits of modern society tend to be under emphasized.
• The military industrial complex is overlooked entirely. This large portion of the US budget (around a quarter of the GDP) is not allowed to be part of the ‘free market system’ and until very recently has seldom scrutinized at all by economists involved in government planning. President Regan managed to spend nearly $3 trillion dollars in the biggest military build up since the second World War with almost no objections from the economic sector. War is bad economic policy yet it is clear from history that any government that possesses an army will eventually use it. If economists really think that capitalism will make the world a better place (in contrast to war) why don’t we do away with the military and instead use economic leverage in the world (e.g. a Marshall plan)?
• It is not true that planned economies always fail or are always bad. The US was successful in World War II in large part due to a totally planned economy, devoted exclusively to the war effort. Socialist economies such as the Scandinavian countries have done better than 'pure' capitalist economies in general. History also shows us that taxing corporations and the wealthiest few percent does not do economic harm. For example, in spite of much higher tax rates the European economy has outstripped the US economy in several periods of time since the second World War. A mixed economy, with large measures of government interference, can be very successful. For example the US became a great economic power during a period in which it strongly protected its markets with stiff import tariffs. The pressure on third world countries to open their markets to unrestricted trade seems a bit unreasonable if not unfair given the economic histories of the most successful countries in the world.
• In general economists tend to use linear modeling which assumes incremental (i.e. linear) changes. But a parable shows this isn't a good way to proceed. If you start out lifting a baby calf every morning you cannot assume that sometime in the future you will be able to lift a full grown bull. There are two problems here:
• Often economic changes are not incremental and when they aren’t, normal economics breaks down (e.g. natural disasters, market crashes, etc.). In these cases we should NOT rely on economics to solve these problems, at least in the short term. As an example, the free market has not yet, fiver years later, repaired the economic damage done in Louisiana by hurricane Katrina. As another example, global warming is a gradual process but could, at some point, reach a tipping point where change would happen very quickly. A solution to global warming which uses incremental economics will fail in this case. As a final example, in general famines don't occur because of lack of food. What happens in most cases is a group of people, due to a natural disaster, cannot afford to buy food. In fact there are several cases where famine regions continued to export food because people outside the region could pay and those inside could not. Surely we should not step back in these cases and 'let the market take care of the problem'. It is immoral to let people starve.
• Secondly, reasoning based on incremental changes does not deal well with long term effects. It may make perfect economic sense in the short term to pollute a stream  or the atmosphere under the theory that we can incrementally reverse the process but go far enough and the long term effects may be irreversible.
• Humans have the capability to plan for the long term. We know oil will run out sometime in the relatively near future. So why wait until there is an economic pinch to start planning on alternatives? Surely it does not make sense to sit on our thumbs and say, oh, well, when oil gets expensive enough someone (that would be the so called ‘alarmist’ scientists I guess) will figure out an alternative. Surely it does make sense for some entity with a much longer vision than the typical business model 10 year strategic plan to invest in the exploration of alternatives. The history in the US of nearly level energy consumption but with increased economic development for 10 years is a good example of how governmental incentives can prime the pump for development of new technologies; we should use this as a model and not be slaves to a purely capitalistic idealism.
• Classical economic theory assumes consumers have, and act on, good information: individuals seeking their own advancement is what makes the whole thing work. However decisions made by individuals are not necessarily always for their own good nor made with good information. Romans in 200 AD placed a high value on lead eating utensils and lead water pipes but we do not because we have information about lead poisoning which they did not have. Individuals cannot always be expected to know what is best for them, particularly in the case of long term problems such as pollution which will affect future generations. Economics does not deal well with the situation where a significant number of people are misinformed. And it is often the to the economic advantage of a particular business to not be forthcoming with information about their products (e.g. tobacco industry attempts to stifle information about links to cancer). In these cases it seems appropriate for the government to, at the minimum, supply the information if not actively protect people from their own ignorance.
• The value of used books, vinyl records, antiques and many other items changed drastically when eBay started helping buyers and sellers communicate. This shows that market structure (a human decision) affects market success. Will there be other examples in the future of new communication instruments which make the market even more efficient? eBay is structured to allow competitive bidding on a certain time scale. There are other ways to set up this market (other bidding strategies could be implemented). Might some of them make this market even more efficient? How do we find out? The stock market is likely to go all electronic in the next few years. Will that help or hinder trade? These decisions have NOTHING to do with capitalism, per say and everything to do with human imagination and emotions, things which are not factored into classical economics.
• Property rights are important because they give incentive and time for a person or company to develop a product and see a return for their effort. But what about drug companies which buy up patents to stifle competition so that prices remain high? Property rights protect innovations but also inhibit competition so how do we decide where the proper balance is?
  • Capitalism and the science that supports much of today’s technological advances thrive on the free flow of ideas yet we see that some drug companies have policies of refusing to release important research information about their drugs for fear this information will impact sales or reduce their competitiveness. How can we protect the free exchange of ideas yet also protect intellectual property rights?
• Monopolies stifle competition. But how do we decide how many independent companies are needed to foster competition? One single giant computer company in the world is too few but is two enough? How about 10? How do we decide and if we did decide that 10 were the right number how would we achieve that? Should we have 10 car makers in the world, is this enough? How do we know?
• The perception of well being (happiness if you will) seems to have other factors than wealth.
  • By some measures Americans are not as happy as people in some other countries. One reason appears to be the differential in wealth between the richest and poorest. In countries where the gap is lowest the perception of well being is the highest, regardless of total wealth. In other words there are people in countries which are poorer than the US who report that they are happier and better off than people in the US report themselves to be. In the US this income gap is widening. So should the goal of our economic system be wealth or well being (as measured with instruments other than wealth)? After all, we all know there is more to life than money.
  • Likewise people in some other countries find health to be a much more important issue than wealth. They are willing to pay more in taxes to support universal free health care. People in these countries report a higher satisfaction on health issues than do people in the US. Again, should the goal of our economic system be wealth or well being (as measured with instruments other than wealth)? In these cases wealth is not a proxy for happiness.
  • There are other measures of economic well being. The UN uses the Human Development Index which includes GDP, average life span and education levels. Other suggestions are to include some measure of natural resources, both renewable and non-renewable which are not typically included in GDP. An index which took into account the rate at which a country is using its natural resources might more accurately reflect the result of these kinds of economic decisions (e.g. A country could temporarily boost GDP by squandering a natural resource on the short term. A recent analysis of the American economy (NPR report) suggests this may be occurring in this country, we are using resources in a non-sustainable way, much like living a more affluent life by running up debt.)
• To date, standard economic theory has been very unsuccessful in including environmental issues or problems of limited resources (resources, including environmental ones) are considered infinite. These issues are treated as "externalities". In other words, the theory doesn't know how to deal with them, they have to be included ad hoc. What is the value of clean air? What about wild animals. One study came up with a value of $11 for a bald eagle (based on what people were willing to pay to see one at a national park). Does this sound reasonable? Are they still worth that if they totally disapear?
  • Capitalists often claim that when a particular natural resource is exhausted another resource will be found to replace it. The parable often told is that crude oil replaced whale oil when whale oil ran short. What is not mentioned is that the number of oil producing species of whale was reduced to (and remains at) 5% of their original numbers or less. The point is that allowing the market to exhaust a particular resource (as opposed to providing incentive for the market to find a different source before the resource is exhausted) is a decision. Not to decide is to decide. Should we wait until all the forests are gone before looking for alternatives to wood? Should we wait until all the fresh water is polluted before looking for alternatives to water?
  • Economics typically under values natural resources. Companies that use the water in a river or air rarely pay for the use of those resources, in many cases even when they cause a significant amount of pollution. History shows it is not true that individual consumers can apply enough pressure to a company to keep it from ecological damage, only an aggregate such as a government can do that. Some economists turns this argument around and say that this is an argument which says that we should not have commons (all animals should be owned) and not worry about external costs (the government or economic pressure such as boycotts of polluters will take care of things). But maybe instead these examples are telling us something else, namely that economic theory is flawed, that some economic decisions are best made outside of the free market. It does not seem to be possible for anyone to own the world’s collection of wild geese or a pod of whales. Water flowing underground cannot be contained (or even tracked in some cases) and so cannot be owned. Just as monopolies have to be limited by the intervention of government, natural resources must be inserted into the market by government regulation.
  • It IS possible to set up markets in such a way that problems such as pollution are taken into account. The buying and selling of air pollution shares for sulfur dioxide has worked extremely well in cleaning up that particular problem. But notice this requires setting up an artificial market. The market works (is the most efficient way to get things done) in this case but only when it is structured appropriately. The government had to step in and create the market for air pollution shares. The lesson is that markets CAN solve problems but not without some help from institutions which act outside of the market.
• Drug companies today do not develop cures for diseases which only affect the third world because they cannot make money on them. Insurance companies want to drop members who are sick because they cost the company money. Some individuals want to receive their Social Security money directly, not realizing it was created to be more like an insurance policy than a retirement fund. It does not appear that the health care market, operating on pure free market principles can handle these situations. So how do we encourage the health care market to effectively take care of individuals who cannot afford to take care of themselves?
• Do we always want markets to be efficient? Jarred Diamond in his 2003 after word to 'Guns Germs and Steel' mentioned the German Beer industry as being very inefficient. Because of purity laws and regulations basically each small town has a beer monopoly with very little possibility of competition with other beer manufactures either within Germany or from the outside. Because these breweries remain small they gain no economy of scale and are thus inefficient. This could be changed by removing the laws that stifle competition. But evidently the German people would rather suffer this inefficiency and remain loyal to their local brewery. And I can't blame them, why would they want to switch to mass produced beer like Bud Light?
• A problem with large multinational companies is that it is difficult to get good information about them. Are they running sweatshops in China? Are they selling below cost to take over a market? Are they treating their employees fairly (and what does that mean)? Are they treating the environment fairly? What about service, something you don't always need much of but when you do is very important? Too often people only look at the cost of a certain item without thinking about these other issues. You may switch to a different cell phone company based on price but then find out you don't get the service of your old company. Regulation is a way to force disclosure of information. The dairy industry should be forced to tell us the expiration dates of the milk they sell. Food producers should be forced to tell us what is in their product and maybe even more (was the food produced in an environmentally conscious way? Were the employees at the plant treated fairly? etc.)
• Economics would dictate that allowing children to work 80 hrs a week in unhealthy conditions is ok if it allows a business to compete. According to economic theory this has the merit of increasing employment and gradually raising incomes, thus eventually insuring economic success with concomitant improvements in life situation. However, most societies agree that child labor, unhealthy working conditions, insufficient food and shelter are not desirable. Most societies would agree that labor supply and demand should be left to follow free market dictates once basic needs are met (and a discussion of basic needs is needed here). So for moral (extra economic, social) reasons free markets must be limited in situations where basic needs are not being met. It is a social value (one many societies admire) to decide to have a slower growth for all than a rapid growth for some and starvation for others. To mandate ‘free trade’ with no restrictions and unlimited growth no matter what the social consequences is to make a different social (non economic) decision. These are not choices as to whether economics is to be applied or not, economics acts in both cases but on different market structures.
• Paul Wiess in Physics Today, July 2004: "In the 1970's Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen tried to demonstrate the relationship between economics and thermodynamics, the basic physics of energy. He observed that most economists believe that "the economic process can go on, even grow, without being continuously fed low entropy", which in a thermodynamics context means "without receiving new energy". As we approach the end to our easy access to energy, the defining economic currency will be dominated by availability of energy units rather than by an artificial currency, be that gold or dollars. The point here is that there IS such a thing as an exhaustible resource, that being energy.
  "This change in economic theory is well illustrated by the silicon photo voltaic cells that brilliantly accomplished their mission in space flight in 1972 at an affordable economic cost. Yet, if they had to provide us with indispensable alternative energy, they would have had to operate continuously for at least 20 years just to replace the energy invested (or consumed) in their production. By 1999, photo voltaic cells were reported to produce their investment energy in about 3-7 years."  There is a difference between the economics of energy and the physics of energy, and in the long term, the physics of energy will limit the supply of energy, not the economics. In this case economic theory has to fail (or be modified).

An interesting example of the failure of the capitalistic ideal is Argentina. In the late 1980s Argentina tried to follow the textbook example of low government involvement, privatization of companies and low barriers to trade; Reganomics as formulated and promulgated by the IMF. The result was an economic crash in 2001 with estimations in the hundreds of thousands of people dying due to food shortages, not to mention a bank freeze on all private funds for a year (imagine if you couldn't take your money out of the bank for a year) and an eventual devaluation of the peso to 30% of its original value (imagine if a dollar was suddenly only worth 33 cents at the store). The following articles are an analysis of what occurred. If this was an example of the invisible hand making market corrections, can't we do better?

• The easy explanation: Robert Kuttner.

• Backup article: Michael Mussa.

• The gory details: Wikipedia.

• Social unrest caused by the collapse: Roger Burbach.

What is science?

Contrary to what many people think (and often want) of science, science is not a body of 'facts' and/or laws that are 'true' in some absolute sense. Instead it is a process where the 'facts' and 'laws' may change, be evaluated in a different light or discarded altogether. This scientific process includes the following features:

• Empirical data. Science is applicable only to events in the physical world that can be demonstrated repeatedly and/or under controlled situations. It is very unlikely that science will ever tell us what beauty is, what is moral, whether capitalism is better than socialism, whether to have nuclear weapons or what we should do about world hunger. It can inform those questions (for example science can tell us how to grow more food and how to build a nuclear weapon) but it cannot tell us what the answers are to those questions or even whether we should pursue them.
• Skepticism. Scientists don’t try to prove theories or hypotheses. They try to disprove them. Confirmations of a theory are not as important as evidence that a theory is wrong. If we look for confirmations that our horoscope is correct we will always find them but disconfirmations are what make them false, not conformations. A thousand confirmations does not make it correct but a few unambiguous pieces of data to the contrary means there is a problem with the hypothesis. A handful of incontrovertible mammalian fossils found in the early Paleozoic era (before dinosaurs) would do serious damage to the theory of evolution. Many scientists have tried to disprove evolution (think of the Nobel prize if they could!) but so far all of the objections raise against it have been explained.
• Risky predictions. A scientific theory makes risky predictions, specific projections about what will happen under a given circumstance or the precise way in which data from the past will fit together. If the prediction fails it greatly weakens the hypothesis or theory. Einstein’s theory of relativity predicted a specific amount bending of light by gravity – had this not turned out as he predicted the theory would have been wrong. Horoscopes, psychoanalysis and the invisible hand of the market generally do not make risky predictions, but often we may point to examples of confirmation afterwards. A theory that explains everything (prices go up when supply is limited) but predicts nothing specific (tomorrow the price of oil will go up by 50%) is not a scientific theory.
• Consensus. Scientific hypotheses that are not completely agreed on, theories which are still under debate by scientists do not go into the text book. Consensus wins; the alternative theories do not go into the textbook until there is overwhelming data to support them. There are several alternatives to Einstein’s theory of gravity but they are still being debated in the technical literature so they do not appear in the text books. 99% of the scientists in the world think evolution is correct and less than 1% disagree so alternatives to evolution are not (and should not be) taught in schools. Global warming is another hypotheses which has very strong scientific consensus. Peer review of published scientific papers (where generally three experts review a submitted paper before it is accepted) is part of the process of gaining consensus.
• Informed criticism. You cannot accurately critique a theory until you understand it. I often meet people who don't believe in relativity or quantum mechanics ("it is just too weird to be true"). But this comes from people who do not understand these theories or the immense quantity of data that support them. Before you can make a useful criticism of any idea or theory you have to understand what it is your are criticizing. Most scientists hope that their students will eventually make improvements and corrections in the current understanding but first those students have to understand the theory in order to know where the problems are. The consensus mentioned above is a consensus of informed criticism.
• Fruitfulness. One judge of a scientific theory is how it guides research and how it suggests new avenues for development in the field. The framework of evolution is and has been an important part of our understanding of biology as a whole. It is a very rare scientific article in the field of biology that does not invoke evolution as the framework for understanding the question at hand. Evolution suggests new lines of research and provides tools to tackle new problems. It is very dangerous to discredit a theory which provides us with a framework and the tools for understanding both genetic diseases and mutations in infectious diseases such as AIDS and flu. Even incorrect or partial theories can be scientifically useful if they lead to new areas of research.
• Coherency. Science is a whole piece, you cannot reject part of it and keep the rest. For example evolution is part and parcel of the rest of the body of scientific knowledge. Genetics does not make sense without evolution and vice versa. Molecular biology, the fossil record, genetic engineering, why we have to get a different flu shot every year, animal breeding, natural selection and evolution all fit together in such a way that stripping out evolution would destroy the coherency of our understanding. The same laws of physics that give us cars and cold beer apply in the biological world. The idea of coherency is used to test ideas in science. If we do an experiment to test a new idea we assume (for the time being at least) that other concepts are to be trusted. So for example we assume that we understand how voltmeters and electric circuits (i.e. electromagnetism) work when we do an experiment in quantum mechanics. Hypothesis are always tested using other (generally more accepted) facts and theories.
• Progress. At one time alchemy was considered a possible field of science as was astrology. As our understanding of chemistry and astronomy improved we discarded alchemy and astrology. It was perfectly reasonable that Newton did alchemy and Kepler did horoscopes because there were no alternative theories that were better. It would make no sense today to teach alchemy or astrology in a science class because those ideas are obsolete. Perhaps in a history class but alchemy and astrology are no longer considered science. It is important that we teach our children the very best theories we have, not the discarded alternatives.
• Rationality. Notice that if there is progress, some of what we think we know will eventually be proved to be wrong. When and if that occurs we should be willing to change our point of view. We now know that Newton was wrong about some things but that doesn't mean he was not a scientist. Was he  irrational to believe in alchemy? Crazy? No, he just didn't have good information. It is perfectly rational to change our minds when we get better information (even if the change is diametrically opposite to our previously held view). Scientists should be rational in the sense that they are willing to admit they are wrong when confronted with the evidence and be willing to change their point of view. [Of course, being humans, this is very hard to do and historically we often see famous scientists holding some pretty strange views, even after confronted with better data (some people say that old theories don't ever die, just old scientists). Consensus and the peer review process is part of the mechanism that helps force scientists to be rational.]
• Persistence. Scientists do not discard a theory until there is a clearly superior alternative. We might not like a particular theory, we may not believe a particular theory, we might work very hard to disprove a particular theory and we might even know for sure that a theory is flawed in a certain way but until there is something definitively better we present that theory as the winner. Our current understanding of super conductivity is one such case. It works well for some superconductors but doesn't explain everything. It is still in the textbooks and is still taught because, currently, it is the best we have.

All opinions are those of the author, Kyle Forinash. They do not reflect the opinions or policy of IUS or any other entity or person (but they should!).