Neurath's Boat

Being tough on terror

I happened to read the ProJo today, and it did not disappoint; as is usually the case, the editorial page had an item that made me quite angry.  It's also very frustrating, because I don't know what to do about it.  The authors apparently believe that the torture of an unknown number of Iraqis and Afghans, including dozens of deaths by torture, as well as the untold thousands killed during the fighting, constituted "tiptoeing" in the middle east.

They contrast our recent efforts with WWII, when we levelled cities.  Of course, most civilized people now think that was probably not justified, and probably didn't do any good anyway.  Speer, who was in a position to know, seems to have thought that the allied bombing campaigns mostly served to ensure that he had no trouble convincing Germans to work to defend the fatherland, since it made it so clear to all that they were under attack by especially ruthless enemies.

Unfortunately, the message that being brutal to people who may not yet be your enemies is not the way to deal with your actual enemies is very hard to sell.  Though I consider the U.S. treatment of prisoners (and of Iraqis in general) to be a very serious moral issue, I suspect drawing attention to it will only make leftists like myself appear soft on terror.  Is there any way to frame it that won't make this ultimately a vote-winner for the right?  But perhaps it doesn't matter how this influences electoral results in the short term; probably it is necessary to emphasize that some of us are not OK with policies of responding to terror with terror, in order to ensure it doesn't come to be viewed as a universally acceptable practice.

Gore in 2008?

It's awfully early to be deciding on a presidential candidate; probably a half-dozen worthy contenders nobody is presently talking about will have made an appearance by the time of the primary race.  But we have to do something to entertain ourselves.  I haven't changed my mind about Howie; I'd love to see the doc run again.  I think Kerry shouldn't run, partly because I think the last campaign showed how hard it would be for him to win, and partly because I think we'd like to keep him in the Senate (sure, in Massachusetts, if he didn't run for Senate a Democrat would almost certainly replace him, but he's been pretty good in the Senate, and seniority matters there).  I think Hillary is a much better choice than seems to be generally believed.

However, I've been an on and off fan of Gore for a long time (I was hoping he'd be the presidential candidate for the Democrats in '88).  Having now been informed by Ezra that Gore supports single-payer health care, I have to say he's looking a lot more appealing as a possibility.  I think that's an excellent issue for Democrats to rally around.  There is strong evidence that one of the main reasons our health care is so expensive is that vast sums of money are wasted by various parts of the system trying to make other parts of the system pay.  The single-payer model would obviously eliminate all of that waste, so there's reason to think insuring all Americans could end up being cheaper than our present failure to insure tens of millions.  Canada, among many other countries which succeed in covering everyone, spends less per capita on health care than we do.

Further, while the insurance companies could be expected to fight this tooth and nail, there's even cause to hope that other business sectors might support this measure; GM wants relief from the current system, and as I already indicated in an earlier post, Toyota also prefers to operate in an environment free of insurance company extortion.  So this might not be as bad an issue for fundraising as at first appears.

As for those who encourage a more moderate approach, Kerry had the most sensible moderate approach I could possibly imagine.  He proposed national catastropic health care insurance, to intervene and cover the extra costs if a particularly severe health problem ended up costing more than $50,000.  This would, obviously, help greatly with one of the huge weaknesses of the current system; it would mean insurance companies would have less incentive to deny insurance to those at risk of catastrophic illness, because the costs to them would be constrained.  But this eminently sensible, moderate plan got nowhere.  I say it's time we give extremism a shot.  Whether it's Gore or someone else, whoever runs for the Democrats next should advocate single-payer.

Conceptions of political freedom

I've been looking forward to the next post in Elizabeth Anderson's series on freedom, and it is now up.  This one stresses the need for the rule of law in order to protect any kind of meaningful political freedom.

The London shooting

There's a pretty interesting discussion of it here, which I discovered via Crooked Timber.  The more perspectives the better, certainly; I'm surprised an MBA's perspective was so to the point.

Atheism and evolution

One theme which often comes up in the debate over evolution is that the anti-evolution side insists that evolution is anti-religion, while the pro-evolution side insists that evolution and religion have nothing to do with one another, so religious people should leave evolution alone.  Strategically, there may be some merit in this argument.  Certainly it is a fact that most of those who believe in evolution are also religious, so it's not as if believing in evolution requires you to reject religion.

However, I think there is a problem with claiming this total disconnect between the issues of religion and evolution.  The main reason I am an atheist is because, when I look around at the universe, it doesn't particularly look like the sort of thing which has been designed by an intelligence for some purpose.  Now, of course this is not a conclusive argument; intelligences are capable of having all sorts of strange purposes, and an intelligence capable of creating a universe would presumably be capable of having purposes far beyond my understanding.  But, while it's always necessary to remind ourselves that we could be wrong, this shouldn't preclude us from accepting what our best evidence seems to be telling us, and in this case what that evidence seems to be telling us is that there's no God out there.

If this is a reasonable way of thinking, then evolution is not actually irrelevant to the issue of theism vs. atheism; obviously, the pattern of life on this planet is one of the things which appears considerably more comprehensible if one assumes there's no God pulling the strings.  Certainly it's hard to see why the God of any of the major religions wouldn't have done lots of meddling, and yet to all appearances life has developed over time in ways completely explicable by evolution, with no signs of meddling whatsoever.  So, it seems to me that the anti-evolutionists are, kind of, right; evolution provides a reason not to believe in God (though, sadly for their cause, it provides a good reason).

The obvious response to this is to push the faith line, and say that belief in God has nothing to do with the evidence.  I suppose there are some who would take that line, but I fear there are too many who retreat to this position when the going gets tough, while normally insisting that their beliefs about God are as reasonable as can be.

Subjectivism and Realism

While I apparently have some philosophical readers, I expect that my last two substantial posts might have bored any readers who came here for politics.  This post will not return to politics directly, but will address an issue often raised in the context of political debates.  I want to talk about ethical subjectivism (sometimes people use "relativism" to refer to the same thing) and ethical realism, and eventually connect that to larger philosophical issues.

It seems to me that the view that ethical principles are objective is not nearly as problematic as is often argued.  There's a view of how objective ethical principles can be discovered which has long been a part of the utilitarian tradition and which is, so far as I can tell, now held by many in other ethical traditions.  We can view our ethical intuitions, our judgments about particular moral cases, as data, and we can try to construct theories which serve to explain and unify those judgments.  It is difficult to see anything in such a procedure which is more problematic than the way we proceed in the sciences, by treating our observations as data and constructing theories to explain those observations.

Of course, people don't all agree about the data, but that's true in science as well.  Some phenomena are extremely difficult to observe, and some people simply have disfunctional sense organs.  Further, treating ethics on a par with science in this way certainly doesn't rule out reform; our scientific theories sometimes lead us to reject some of our observations, and likely a good moral theory will similarly entail some revision of what we count as reliable moral judgments.  Similarly, disagreement about what theory really does best explain the data is not much of a disanalogy; there is widespread agreement in some sciences about some issues, but certainly not in all sciences about everything.  If ethics is similar to science, it's surely similar to a science in which we haven't made much progress, but that's a far cry from an argument that there's nothing objective in ethics at all.

Still, having said all this in favor of the reasonability of ethical realism, I do not endorse that position myself.  It seems to me that everything which might make us think ethics is objective can be adequately handled by some kind of Humean view.  If what's right is determined by our individual feelings about things, that does not eliminate the need for ethical investigation and debate; very often, our feelings concern what outcomes we desire, and it can be very difficult to determine how to bring about or avoid particular outcomes.  It is unclear that productive ethical debate very often includes much more than that.

Of course, it is philosophers who worry if subjectivism accurately characterizes ethical debate.  The more common worry outside the seminar room is that if ethics is just a matter of our feelings, doesn't that mean whatever feels right to someone is right?  But surely lots of horrible things we don't want to endorse feel right to all sorts of bad people.

Partly, I think this is already answered by looking at the need to evaluate not only our feelings about outcomes, but the empirical questions of how those outcomes can in fact be brought about.  That doesn't resolve the whole issue, though; likely some people act in ways we'd want to condemn because they have fundamentally different feelings, not because they disagree about the methods for bringing about particular outcomes.  However, even in those cases, I'm not sure how badly off the subjectivist is.

It is often emphasized by ethicists that ethics is supposed to be a practical endeavor; the goal is to figure out the right way to live, and encourage people to follow it.  So I think it is instructive to ask, as a practical matter, what can be done about people with fundamentally different feelings.  Hume said sympathy was the most fundamental feeling relevant to morality; consider someone who lacks that, a sociopath.  To be consistent, it seems a Humean must say that when such a person engages in theft, say, or murder, they are in a sense not acting wrongly; their feelings don't oppose the actions they are taking.  But this sense is not very important to how the rest of us should deal with a sociopath.  Surely we need to defend ourselves; that the sociopath considers his actions justified is irrelevant to our concerns.  Many possible options are available, such as prison or simply killing the sociopath.  I have never been able to determine why anyone would think subjectivism rules out dealing with such problems in the same ways as other moral theories would recommend.

If I can't see where the problem is for the subjectivist view, it should come as no surprise that I equally can't see the advantage for the objectivist view; they are two sides of the same coin.  Sure, on the objectivist view the sociopath is just wrong about some moral facts.  But as far as the practical matter of how to deal with him, I can't see how that helps in the slightest.  Does anyone really think a sociopath could be brought around by being subjected to Kant's proof of the categorical imperative, or Mill's arguments from Utilitarianism?  Mill didn't think so; indeed, even for much easier cases he had doubts about how much could be done for the sufficiently morally confused.  That was why he emphasized early education so much.  And of course Plato, to take another prominent ethical objectivist, clearly believed that there were hopeless cases; part of the point of Gorgias and of book I of Republic is that Callicles and Thrasymachus are just such hopeless cases (and in the case of Thrasymachus, we're also shown how to deal with a hopeless case.  Thrasymachus is treated as a wild animal, pretty much how I say a Hume-style subjectivist should view a sociopath).  The practically available options are pretty much the same, either way; if someone's moral outlook is just too fundamentally off, you're pretty much left with brainwashing or violence as a response, whether you think that the outlook being off involved factual error or distorted feelings.

Because of this absence of any practical difference, I tend to favor subjectivism simply because it seems to make less extravagant claims.  However, the absence of a practical difference means I also don't think this issue is very important, certainly not nearly as important as some of the debates over it might have led one to believe.

I claimed I'd try to link this to larger issues, but I think this post is already pretty long, so I'll do that very briefly.  It is my suspicion that objectivity in general, at least in the deep metaphysical sense many philosophers intend, is not of any more value than the objectivity in ethics I discuss here.  So, in the end, I agree with Bentham and Mill that ethics is something like science, but not for the same reason.

Carnapian pragmatism about ontology

Earlier this summer, I sat in on a couple of sessions of a reading group on ontology, in which one of the texts we examined was Sidelle's argument for essentially Carnap's view.  Carnap thought that the ultimate questions of what things exist depend on how you want to talk about them, and which way of speaking about things was to be preferred was a purely practical question.  It seems such sensible views are on the ascendant, at least if the conference Chalmers reports on is any indication.  Chalmers himself apparently advocates a Carnapian view of ontology, and was apparently not alone at the conference.  If only his views on the philosophy of mind were so reasonable.

The only rival view which I think is anywhere close to being as tenable is universalism, which allows unrestricted mereological composition.  What that means, for the non-philosophers, is that any two things considered together constitute a third thing.  There is a thing which is my left toe plus one of the electrons running through my computer as I type this plus the moon.  No combination of things is too gerrymandered to count as a further thing according to universalism.  Of course, we rarely talk about absurdly gerrymandered things except when giving examples to explain universalism, but I don't know how serious that flaw is.  David Lewis, among the most prominent universalists, explained away this sort of problem by saying that normally we speak with restricted quantifiers; when we talk about what things there are, we're almost always talking about what relevant things there are, so the fact that we wouldn't ordinarily refer to the mereological sum of two apples on a table as a third thing on the table doesn't mean it isn't there, only that we don't normally consider it relevant.

Since there is indepedent evidence that we restrict quantifiers a lot (one of my favorite examples from Lewis:  "all the beer is in the fridge" can frequently be used to say something true, even though it's never been the case that all the beer in the world has been in any particular fridge, because we immediately understand that the 'all' is being restricted to the relevant beer, perhaps the beer brought for the party), I think it's reasonable to appeal to restricted quantifiers to resolve problems.  However, once this move is made, I don't really see a whole lot of difference between the Carnapian view and the universalist view.  Of course, believing that you can adopt whichever view you like is adopting the Carnapian view, so unless there's a difference I'm missing Carnap presently wins this debate for me, but only by a narrow margine.

Still serious, in a way

But this highly recommended link is definitely not as dry as my last post, in more than one sense of dry.  Via Chris Clarke.

Circularity and the Analytic

I recently read Michael Friedman's Reconsidering Logical Positivism.  As one might have guessed from the title of the blog, or one of my earlier posts, I think the renewed interest in positivism in recent years is a positive (sorry) development in philosophy.  A short summary of Friedman's thesis in this book is that the positivists were much more Kantian than is generally recognized, and also more sophisticated than a lot of their critics give them credit for.  He particularly examines the views of Carnap.

While Friedman defends Carnap from many of his critics, he apparently believes a roughly Quinean line of criticism can be successful.  If he's right about that, then a lot of people need to take a close look at those arguments, as Kantian views have thrived since the collapse of positivism.  If positivism was more Kantian than is generally believed, but the Kantian view doesn't work either, then that would present serious problems for many modern philosophers.

Myself, I am not convinced by Friedman's Quinean arguments.  In essence, Quine complains that analyticity is impossible because analytic truths can't just be arbitrary and do the job that is required of them, but there is no way to make them non-arbitrary, except by connecting them to experience.  At least, that's my brutally oversimplified version of Quine's argument.

One worry about relying on experience in any way to justify logic and mathematics is that surely we need logic and mathematics in order to make the kind of sophisticated determinations which would be necessary to figure out what our experience requires in terms of logic and mathematics.  So an appeal to experience appears likely to be inevitably circular.

Certainly Quine's own theory is circular.  In "Epistemology Naturalized", he suggests that we should trust our methods of inquiry to be truth-indicative, because earlier homonids who were bad at discovering truth would have been weeded out by natural selection.  But the evolutionary theory Quine appeals to here was, of course, discovered via our current methods of inquiry.  So our methods of inquiry tell us evolution happened, and evolutionary theory tells us our methods of inquiry can be trusted.  It's all very Cartesian.

Of course, one of the reasons philosophers are still fascinated by Descartes is that the Cartesian circle is so hard to break.  I do not believe Carnap thought he could break it.  His analytic truths were not meant to be any kind of absolutely certain starting points (otherwise what was up with the principle of tolerance?)  Rather, he thought it was useful to treat some statements as analytic in his sense, where of course determining what's useful does depend on our experience and there is a certain degree of arbitrariness and triviality in the whole procedure (his response to Quine in the Carnap volume of the Library of Living Philosophers is especially clear on this point).  Certainly it is possible to draw a line between the analytic and the empirical, as Grice and Strawson emphasized in their response to Quine, and whether it is useful to do so is surely an empirical question, and one for which Carnap tries at various times to provide evidence, and against which Quine only raises a priori criticisms.

That 5% unemployment rate

I hope you all already read Brad DeLong, but if not, at least check out what you need to know to respond to Republicans who assure you the economy is going great, pointing to the low unemployment rate.

More on Republican terror fighting effectiveness

Apparently, there's good reason to think that the London bombings could have been prevented, were it not for another typical case of the Republicans pursuing political gain at the expense of security.

Alternatives to the Larry Summers theory

This describes some data absolutely everyone should know about.  I wonder what the situation is like in philosophy, which is as male-dominated as any science but which rarely is the subject of detailed studies.  I fear there's little reason to think we do any better.

Modal properties of referring expressions

A fascinating development in the Rove case, presented in a manner I find irresistable.  BTW, names aren't really rigid designators; cluster theories can be saved!  (disclaimer:  as mentioned earlier, I cannot claim to be a specialist in philosophy of language, so my opinions in this area, while of course correct, should not be treated as authoritative or supported by decisive argument).

Euthanasia

Thanks to Lindsay Beyerstein's post at American Street, I was directed to a New York Times article of interest.  Apparently some Dutch doctors have a proposal for standards for active euthanasia for infants whose circumstances are sufficiently hopeless that allowing them to live a little while longer would only serve to protract suffering.  The interesting thing about the article is that it comes off as favoring this proposal; the Dutch doctors are presented as possibly (probably?) representing a step in the direction of moral progress.  Being the raving consequentialist that I am, I tend to agree, of course, but I share Beyerstein's surprise that this viewpoint is being presented in a major newspaper in the current climate.

Comparative advantages

I've seen a few references to this story in the lefty blogs, and it's certainly one worth hearing about.  Apparently, Toyota is building a new plant in Ontario rather than in the American south.  Toyota cites two reasons for favoring Ontario, despite promises of larger subsidies and tax breaks from southern states.  First, Ontario has better educated workers, so Toyota expects to save money on training.  Second, Canada's single-payer health care system means Toyota won't have to pay for health insurance for the full time workers.

The main lesson the lefties have been drawing from this is that spending money on education and health care can be good for your economy, despite requiring higher taxes.  This is almost certainly true, and is a good supplement to all the moral arguments in favor of providing everyone with good education and health care.  I hope that aspect of the issue continues to be widely discussed.

However, I would also like to point out another lesson of this story, one on which I will disagree with some of my fellow liberals.  I've mentioned in previous posts my enthusiasm for free trade.  This story highlights one of the reasons I do not think the "fair trade" some of my fellow leftists endorse is a necessary or desirable alternative to simply making trade as free as possible.  Many leftists fear that free trade will encourage some kind of race to the bottom, with businesses moving all operations to countries with the least regulations and fewest public services (and so lowest taxes).  This does not actually seem to be what happens.  To a great extent, wages are (relatively) high in the wealthy countries because there are so many advantages to doing business in a country with a functional infrastructure, political stability, and healthy and educated people that in quite a lot of industries it is worth the cost of paying more for workers in those countries.  Conversely, wages are extremely low in poor countries largely because most industries could not afford to both pay high wages and deal with all the massive inconveniences of operating in a third world country.  Freeing up trade won't change those facts; it will just mean more specialization (those industries better suited to rich countries will be more concentrated in rich countries, and conversely) and so more productivity all around as countries focus more on what they're good at (which is the whole point of trade, of course).

Of course, other factors do operate (I am somewhat inclined to believe Adam Smith's conspiracy theories about how and why wages tend to be kept lower than they would be in a truly free market), but those factors have nothing to do with how much free trade is allowed, and restricting free trade does nothing to address those factors (indeed, Adam Smith argued that the larger, more complex, and freer the marketplace, the harder it is for those conspiracies to influence wages).

I should add that when I say I advocate straight up free trade, not tied to labor restrictions or environmental restrictions or anything like that, I do mean it in both directions.  Many "free trade" agreements not only fail to include provisions to increase labor and environmental standards, they include provisions to restrict those standards.  I object to both ways of tying free trade to unrelated issues, and the latter ties are probably overall the more damaging.

Effectiveness of Homeland Security

I don't know how to make an issue of this, but I am quite annoyed that there are people who think America's not having been attacked again since 9-11 indicates that the Republicans have been doing something right on keeping us safe.  8 years elapsed between the first attack on the WTC and the second, successful attack.  Of course, good things were being done on security in the mean time (by Clinton), but one other conclusion that seems obvious is that Al Qaeda has never been in a position to make frequent attacks.  So the lack of attacks on us in the past few years is quite insufficient to suggest that we're doing anything new and productive on security.  Al Qaeda failed to launch an effective attack on us for 8 years when there was no Patriot act, so there's no reason to think the Patriot act is responsible for their recent lack of successful attacks in the U.S.  Al Qaeda failed to launch an effective attack on us for 8 years when we weren't occupying any Middle Eastern countries, so there's no reason to think our occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq is responsible for their recent lack of successful attacks in the U.S.

I realize that so far it has proven nearly impossible to stop the Republicans for taking credit for successes that aren't really successes, but I guess I'm unwilling to give up trying.

Philosophy of Rovian Language

Mark Liberman challenges someone to step up to the plate concerning what the statements of Rove and his lawyer actually asserted.  I only ever took the one philosophy of language seminar, and it was more than ten years ago, so I don't think I'm up for this task myself, but it certainly looks like a fruitful area to investigate.

On skepticism

Brian Weatherson drew my attention to this fascinating example of a collision between philosophical thinking and real-world thinking.  It does raise the question of why the system should reward people who are clearly either liars or delusional, as most of those who say they are certain they will never repeat their crimes must be.

Background on the Plame affair

This isn't a huge secret, but I think it should probably be more widely known than it is.  The Joseph Wilson who's been a target of a Republican conspiracy which, of course, included the famous outing of his CIA wife, is a hero.  The BBC mentions his activities around the time of the first Iraq war here.  Of course, it's old news that the Republicans have no respect for real American heroes, but it's news that needs to be repeated as often as possible.   

Interpreting advice from economists

I've now been linked by Majikthise, which makes me feel obligated to post something decent.  This is probably a good thing; I usually work better under pressure.

I've been reading Freiheit und Wissen recently, and it has made me think about an issue to which I don't know the solution.  A particular recent post that has made me think about the issue is cntodd's discussion of CAFTA.  Now, I do not know if CAFTA is a good idea or not.  Some people I respect make the argument that any free trade agreement at all should virtually always be supported, because free trade is generally good, so it's vital to keep up the momentum toward more free trade.  I find that argument somewhat suspect; surely accepting really bad free trade agreements will have the undesirable effect of encouraging future free trade agreements to include equally bad elements.  On the other side, I've encountered arguments that CAFTA is in fact really bad, that in particular it imposes the absurd, draconian U.S. intellectual property approach on other countries, and also actively hinders pro-labor efforts in the poor countries which would be part of the deal.  Thus, I am inclined to be tentatively anti-CAFTA.

So that's my position.  Cntodd makes an additional argument against CAFTA which I would like to examine.  First, he argues that CAFTA isn't really providing free trade, because it has too many exceptions.  Fine; this is one of the reasons I'm tentatively on the anti-CAFTA side.  Surely if the point is to encourage free trade, only agreements that actually produce more free trade are desirable.  However, cntodd takes this as a launching point for one of the most bizarre anti-trade arguments I've ever seen from a leftist.  He argues that the conservatives who have posed as champions of free trade, such as Reagan and the Bushes, have consistently failed to practice what they preached; in general, their agreements have fallen far short of free trade goals.  Cntodd suggests that this is because they realized free trade isn't really good for the economy, and so preferred other policies.

Of course, "good for the economy" can be interpreted in many different ways.  Since cntodd seems to be agreeing with Reagan and the Bushes, I'm assuming he's interpreting it as "good for the prosperity of everyone, or at least most people."  In that case, I am quite astonished; I would not have thought that someone as generally far left as cntodd would have had any inclination to think that being good for Americans in general would ever be a central motivation for a Reagan or Bush policy.  Personally, I quite agree with cntodd that Reagan and the Bushes have been poor free traders, but I can't understand why he thinks this is because they knew free trade would be bad for the country.

Perhaps the reason is that, like many far leftists, he is suspicious of the value of free trade, and so he's automatically assuming that anybody who agrees with him in finding free trade suspect must be right, even if they're wrong about lots of other things.  And that, finally, brings up the main issue I wanted to discuss.  My opinions on economic policy are, to a considerable degree, determined by what I can pick up from economists.  I'm not an economist myself, so I feel like the best course I can take is to, for the most part, defer to experts.  However, it is clearly necessary to be cautious in so doing, and try to correct for obvious biases in the experts when I can detect them.

Notably, a majority of economists seem to have a pro-wealthy bias.  They tend to conflate policies which are good for the rich with policies that are good for the people in general.  It is not difficult to see why economists would tend to have such biases; anybody with even a passing familiarity with economics will be able to see the obvious there.  The wealthy have a lot more money with which to pay economists, and economists are, if nothing else, quite perceptive about which side of the bread has the butter on it.

Still, economists are scientists of a sort.  They construct theories on the basis of evidence about what the effects of various causes are, and while they'll generally spin their conclusions to suggest that effects for the rich are generally desirable, they do know some things about how particular causes link to particular effects.  Further, they do not all share the irritating bias toward the rich; economists like Brad DeLong and Adam Smith seem to be genuinely interested in making everyone better off.  So, when Brad DeLong and Adam Smith agree with all the other economists in saying that free trade is good (as they do), I tend to conclude that the evidence suggests it probably is one of those policies that's really good for everyone, not just for the rich.

However, sadly, economic policy is not generally decided by the Adam Smiths and Brad Delongs of the world.  The economists who favor the rich tend to have more influence, and non-economists tend to have more yet.  So any actual "free trade" agreement will tend to have been heavily influenced by lobbying groups which are not interested in the well-being of everyone, and which in many cases are pursuing (often not even competently) the well-being of a very narrow class indeed.

This doesn't happen only in the area of free trade.  When the IMF imposes conditions on loans, the conditions are usually devised on the basis of fairly uncontroversial economic principles.  However, exactly how to meet the IMF conditions is always up to the government seeking the loan.  Obviously, those governments tend to do their best to make sure their supporters (the entrenched wealthy kleptocracy) do not end up suffering any of the pain of the conditions, and since it is the corruption of that class which is usually responsible for the biggest problems in third world countries, immunizing them from the costs of reforms (by finding clever ways to impose the costs on others) largely guarantees that the reforms will not end up actually having the benefits the IMF hopes for.

So free trade agreements will often tend to not provide the kind of free trade benefits the few idealistic economists hope for, and IMF-inspired reforms and austerity programs are well-known not to provide the kinds of benefits the IMF is (I am idealistically hoping) genuinely trying to achieve.

Of course, one of the effects of both of these phenomena is to encourage the well-justified suspicion of economics among the leftists.  Economists have some good evidence about what will be good for everyone, but they also have some good evidence about what will be good for the rich or for their particular patrons, and they try to sell policies in the latter categories as if they were in the former category.  So it is quite understandable that many would come to see all their recommendations as part of a great scam.

So, my questions are, first, how do we get the policies which are known to be good for people in general on the public stage; how do we separate them from the self-serving policies of the few?  And, second, how do we get anyone to support them?  If we do manage, by some miracle, to get policy-makers discussing policies which will bring genuine free trade, or anything else that is of general benefit, how do we persuade the justifiably skeptical that these policies are not just more scams?