Classical liberals are rightly accused of droning on about the pitfalls of state control and the hubris of planners. The reason we get so tedious about it is, well, because we’re right: Many of the problems we face are caused by overconfident planners who presume to know the way things should be run for the rest of us. From farm production to business licensing, a bevy of elected or self-appointed “experts” presume to know the proper manner and metrics of modern life.

Friedrich Hayek called this phenomenon “Scientism”—an over-vaunted sense that if things could simply be measured and monitored accurately enough, the world would run smoothly along deterministic, scientific lines. Instability and inefficiency, goes the logic, would be ironed out by careful planners with the right information, making the world more safe, just, and prosperous. Quite the reverse is true, as has been shown over and over and over again. From Cuba to Korea, from the soviets of Petrograd to the city council of San Francisco, we keep falling for the mistaken notion that highly dynamic systems can be directed from on high.

One of the reasons this fatal conceit gains such perennial traction is because the “science” in Scientism is so generally misunderstood and over-trusted. Of course, science and the enlightenment principles that undergird it is a phenomenally effective method for understanding the world. Don’t assume this is a polemic against expertise or a defense of know-nothingism. Science is a careful, deliberative, fundamentally self-doubting protocol. Scientism is a fundamentally faith-based belief that “science” has all the answers. The very success of science in so many sectors has led us to accord it an over-inflated reputation for generating predictable results in others. Take, for example, rocket science. Most of us assume scientists have a firm grasp of orbital mechanics and can easily get rockets where they need to go. Newtonian mechanics, after all, has been “solved.”

But that’s the thing: It hasn’t. Not remotely.

The “Three Body Problem” is a disconcerting case in point. Newton’s elegant mathematical models, for all their vaunted predictive powers, work only for describing and predicting the orbits of two gravitationally attracted bodies. Add just one more and the complexity does not just go up by, say, a factor of 30 percent, but infinitely. The system becomes inherently chaotic and fundamentally unpredictable. This is why the SIV-B stage of the Apollo 12 moon rocket is stuck in an indeterminate limbo between the earth and the sun. And it is why it came as such a surprise when it was discovered re-entering earth’s orbit, having been injected into a heliocentric one by the scientists who designed it (my grandfather among them). 

Mathematicians and physicists have wrestled with the Three Body Problem for centuries, and with only a very few exceptions, the problem is inherently unsolvable. Yes, we can obviously make it to the moon using Newtonian mechanics, and yes we can derive usable approximations by treating orbital interactions as two-body problems over the short run (ignoring comparatively negligible masses and so on), but there is no computational model that can say with any certainty where, for instance, Mercury will be in the long run (bets are that it is ejected from the solar system, but it’s only a guess). “Secular Chaos” in astrophysics jargon is the reason that we not only do not know the answer, but also the reason we cannot know the answer in any definite sense. It’s fundamentally like the weather—we can make reasonably accurate predictions in the near-term, but no computer on Earth can hope to make weather predictions a year or even a month in advance. The model of a “clockwork universe,” or of nature as a precisely predictable machine is fundamentally, scientifically incorrect.

So what does this all have to do with Scientism and the pitfalls of state control? Physics and economics are both sciences, and both have a great deal of predictive modeling capacity. However, they have their inherent limits, limits often ignored in the overly credulous faith-system of Scientism. Simply put, writes Friedrich Hayek:

The confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems.

Scientism and state control are mostly evident in the field of applied economics, or at least the sort of economics employed by macro-planning state agents where its inherent limits are not fully understood. Witness the fitful efforts of the Federal Reserve to achieve its three basic goals of “maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.” Its failure to control, for example, price volatility in US markets reflects the misguided Scientist view that a set of prescriptive recipes is all that is needed to safely manage an economy. Because the governors of the Fed are convinced of their analytic accuracy, they fall victim to the mistaken assumption that they can meaningfully direct an inherently chaotic system. The New York Times noted last year how misguided this can be:

Beating inflation is crucial for the Federal Reserve. But so is promoting full employment. And don’t forget about preserving the stability of the financial system. Each of these goals is exemplary on its own. Put them all together in the current environment, however, and you get head-spinning problems.

Head-spinning indeed. In fact, it is precisely the kind of Three Body Problem in economic science that plagues the science of astrophysics. While the Fed is certainly capable of influencing the amount of cash in circulation (affecting inflation), it is far from able to simultaneously manage effects in the broader market like employment and price stability. Dynamic interactions in these sectors are so intensely unmanageable that it explains why volatility under the Fed is so comparatively similar to economic periods without the Fed. In economics, things are often not only far more complicated than we imagine, but more complicated than we can imagine (to paraphrase an oft-quoted expression from ecology). In the face of this fact, the Fed’s activities ought to be highly constrained or eliminated.

Classical Liberals, the direct descendants of the Enlightenment project and the scientific revolution, are right to be skeptical of Scientism. As Hayek pointed out, Scientism is to merely identify with the form of scientific procedure (careful metrics) while ignoring the substance of the scientific method (constant self-checking doubt). A proper understanding of the essential limits of scientific understanding helps us know what we can and cannot meaningfully manage. Three Body Problems, therefore, are useful reminders to be intellectually humble and to recall the limits of scientific knowledge. Understanding science as a discovery process (rather than as a set of scriptural recipes) can help us avoid the pitfalls of statism and its associated failures in managing human affairs.