Science as the Division of Labor

I give you two ideas in Economic thought: the division of labor, and opportunity cost.

The division of labor is the idea of tasks becoming increasingly specialized--like an assembly line--in order to maximize the efficiency of output. If I spend all day milking cows and my brother spends all day shearing sheep, more sheep will be sheared and more cows will be milked than if I had taken it upon myself to do both tasks alone.

While most people think of the "cost" of something in terms of monetary value, economists describe the cost of anything in terms of the opportunities that were foregone in order to attain it. In other words, when I spend five bucks on a McDonald's value meal, the cost of that meal isn't $5. It's everything else that I could have used that five dollars to buy, but now cannot because I have traded it for the food. This notion is referred to as the "opportunity cost" of a thing, rather than the monetary cost.

A common corollary to the opportunity cost theory is that information is costly. Even if you don't have to pay money to read this blog post, you have to spend time actually reading it. Spending that time means foregoing all the alternative use of that amount of time--hence, information always has a cost. This is because everything has a cost.

Recently, a commenter stated:

We all have jobs. Everyone from janitors to CEO's and mechanics to mechanical engineers. They spend a majority of their time (most likely) working on whatever it is they specifically do. In order to engage in debate of any scientific nature they have to essentially stand on the backs of people whose job it is to actually do the science. We trust those people who have made it their JOB to find this information out to be correct and to make sure that the others in their profession are correct.

The fallacy of this logic becomes more apparent, I think, when put into context by the notion of the division of labor.

Think about this for a moment: you are shopping for a new car, and are approached by a salesman. He says "you need to buy this car, it's the best one that there is." Would you trust him at his word?

"How do you know that?" You might feel compelled to ask.

"I don't really know anything about it, my job is only to specialize in selling things," he tells you casually, "but a whole bastion of experts on car design, manufacture, and electronics have collaborated to produce this automobile, and I don't think that you or I have the experience necessary to judge their conclusions on the matter."

Wouldn't you be a little...skeptical?

It's the same with science. Scientists are in essence a function of the division of labor; they are specialists in certain categories of information. Just as the assembly line was valuable because it allowed the production of good cars at a cheaper price, so are scientists valuable for producing information that would be too costly for an amateur to find. After all, if we are responsible for both milking and shearing, we aren't going to be doing nearly as much of either than if there were two of us, with each of us specializing in one or the other.

Likewise, the microbiologist specializes in producing information that could be helpful to the marine biologist, and vice versa. If there were no division of labor among biologists, scarcely anything would be learned on any given subject.

However, that doesn't mean that all information is created equal. Let us return to our car salesman example, only this time apply it to a conversation between a microbiologist and a marine biologist.

Microbiologist: The behavior of that dolphin you are studying is coming as a result of exposure to a particular strand of E. coli that I have been studying very intensely.

Marine Biologist: How do you know that?

Microbiologist: It is not for you, a non-Microbiologist, to ask that. As the sole microbiologist between the two of us, my conclusions are to be trusted as valid.

Do you see the absurdity yet? Just because you specialize in producing something doesn't automatically give your product any kind of value. I think it can be taken as trivially true that it's just as easy to mass produce crap that nobody wants as it is to mass produce stuff that people will actually buy.

Likewise, it's at least as easy to produce bad information as it is to produce accurate information. There is no more reason to accept the word of a specialist, or many specialists, than there is to blindly accept the word of the car salesman. The responsibility of what to believe and what to buy is, in each case, on no one's back but your own.