The Seen and the Unseen

On a recent blog post by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek pointing out (for the millionth time) that America is not deindustrializing, a Jayson Ramos responded to a comment from me saying: “So whom [sic] is Mr. Korol supposed to believe? You and Dr. Boudreaux—or his “lying eyes”?”

This is a common “gotcha” style question meant to imply that the experts on a matter are out of touch and/or making things up.  However, the good scientist knows that the eyes are not lying, but rather they are simply one tool of understanding.  Our eyes provide us with valuable (seen) information.  But what is unseen is of vital importance, too.

A simple example to make my point: my eyes looking out my office window show a beautiful sunny day. A thunderstorm is forming off in the distance, but it’ll likely go south. A good day for a walk, no?

But my weather app, pulling data from the National Weather Service in New Orleans, says otherwise. Although it is barely 9am, we have a real feel temperature of 104°. It says the air is heavily humid and breathing may be difficult, especially for folks like me with asthma.  They also say we could get a thunderstorm later.  So, who am I to believe? My lying eyes or some meteorological nerds in New Orleans?

It turns out: the nerds were right.  As soon as I stepped outside to take out the garbage, I was hit by the heat and humidity.  Although the garbage compactor is about 100 yards away, I got in my car and drove to it.  And, as it gets darker as I write this, they’re likely to be right about the storm, too.

Did my eyes lie 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 have no north-facing windows).  My eyes saw the truth, but just one part of it.  The NWS saw much more and provided me with additional information.  What was unseen to me was just as important as what was seen.

With US manufacturing, it is the same.  It is easy to see the Rust Belt- to see many once great towns laid low.  When I lived in Syracuse, New York, it was heartbreaking to see such beautiful façades fallen to disrepair, to see such grim poverty in a once-shining city.  No one denies that similar stories play out in cities around the US.  But there are also cities being transformed by new construction in Tennessee, Massachusetts, Alabama, Mississippi, and the Carolinas.  In fact, US manufacturing construction spending is at the highest level since data has been recorded (2002).  The recent jump is due to subsidies and incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, but note that spending has been generally trending upward since 2011.  Even within those old Rust Belt cities, new life is being born: art halls, breweries, museums, and all sorts of other development are moving into old factories.

Science teaches us to search for the unseen.  Science teaches us to use all our senses in conjunction with sense and reason to make conclusions and inferences. Sight is an important sense, but it is obscured by a veil.  The goal 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, it leads to incorrect conclusions about the state of the US economy and US manufacturing.