The politics of milkshakes

Should we make it illegal to study the social sciences? Imagine the amount of tendentious rubbish we could erase from the world if we did. The economists who pretend on Newsnight that they know what’s going on, when they haven’t a clue. The sociologists fabricating evidence to support their inane and inevitably woke theses. The lies masquerading as fact and able to gull the public because of the spurious claim that they are ‘scientific’. There is no science in economics or sociology, interesting though those disciplines might be once they have been shorn of their pretensions.

Let me give you a recent example. A company called Civic Science, based in Pittsburgh, published the results of its latest research last week, and won some jubilant headlines in the perpetually credulous, unthinking liberal press over here. Apparently 56 per cent of Americans think that Arabic numerals should not be taught to schoolchildren. Ha! You morons! The numbers we use every day are Arabic.