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David Brooks and the gospel of progress

by Robert Teitelman | Published October 21, 2011 at 1:21 PM

In the New York Times Friday, Oct. 21, David Brooks finishes off the week with a column extolling a memoir by Princeton psychologist and Nobel prizewinner Daniel Kahneman. It doesn't bother me that Brooks plugs Kahneman's book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow," as a "major intellectual event," or that an excerpt just happens to be running in the Sunday Times Magazine, a major intellectual organ, or that he wrote about the book a mere month ago. Why not? Revenues are a little soft around the Times these days. It doesn't even bother me that Brooks goes weirdly over the top, praising Kahneman, a pioneer, with the late Amos Tversky, in behavioral economics (and various related fields), as "the Lewis and Clark of the mind." (What's that make Sacagawea? Or Jefferson? Does the mind have rivers and mountains?) Brooks, he says about himself, will tell us in this column how the pair "will be remembered hundreds of years from now, and how their work helped instigate a cultural shift that is already producing astounding results."

Really? Hundreds of years? And what are those astounding results? This brings us to one of those potted Brooksian paragraphs where he compresses most of recorded history into a single thought. "Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers and that when they depart from reason it's because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment." But Kahneman and Tversky thought differently. After some experiments -- great idea! -- "[t]hey proved that actual human behavior often deviates from the old models and that the flaws are not just in the passions but in the machinery of cognition."

Evidence for these astounding results follows: explanations about variations in the way professional golfers putt, Israeli parole boards vote and shoppers buy soup. If you think carefully about these "illustrations," none of them are provable, though they're endlessly fascinating (much as the theories of the behavioral evolutionists are speculative, if unprovable, since we can't get back there to interrogate early men about their dating habits). They are, as is much of what has come to be known as behavioral economics, theories of why people act the way they do. Now there's nothing wrong with that and Kahneman and Tversky were pioneers of an inventive and revelatory field and Kahneman undoubtedly deserves his Nobel (Tversky, alas, had died) as much as anyone.

But Brooks' notion that they single-handedly changed the way humanity thinks about human behavior is hyperbole. Artists, philosophers, even theologians and divines have been acutely aware of the complexities of the human psyche for a very long time. Shakespeare was no slouch, for instance, and neither was Tolstoy, Dickens, Henry James. Outside of economics and certain social science faculties, in fact, the propensity of humanity to act wildly out of their self-interest and in ways that those who disagree with them would call irrational -- crazy, mad, even lunatic -- has been known for some time; consider any of the great criminals of the 20th century, like Hitler, Stalin or Mao. You can trace the power of utility maximization back to Jeremy Bentham (Adam Smith recognized the importance of self-interest, but he was part of the Scottish Enlightenment, which meant he had a far more sophisticated psychology than simple self-interest) and through the evolution of economic thinking, but it was only after World War II (and after Keynes, a formidable and complex psychologist himself) that the field became a fortress of formalism, that is, of mathematical model building, and began to narrow its definitions of rational self-interest. Economics yearned to become a predictive science like physics, and that meant a certain strategic reductionism.

Alas, the crooked timber of humanity can't be pounded straight. Kahneman and Tversky are right: We're more varied and strange and, let's be frank, possess a wider range of definitions of both utility and self-interest, than most social scientists, and certainly most economists, will allow. If Kahneman and Tversky have ushered in this new age beyond utility maximization, then why doesn't someone tell the Nobel folks, who last week awarded this year's prize in economics to two American proponents of the rational expectations hypothesis, which depends on a kind of causal logic based upon a psychology of, well, rational utility maximization. Yesterday I posted on the Nobel and recent work arguing that rational expectations has it fundamentally wrong.

Again, this is not a knock on Kahneman and Tversky, who performed nobly to break down closed doors and explore more deeply into the human psyche. But none of this work is certain. Deep in the column, Brooks launches into a long recitation that sums up his conclusions (I'm not sure if Kahneman would share them all) by reading the post-Kahneman social sciences literature. Each of his statements may be true, or they may not be false. "We are players in a game we don't understand. Most of our thinking is below awareness. Fifty years ago, people may have assumed we are captains of our ships, but in fact, our behavior is often aroused by context in ways we can't see. Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things ..." And on and on and on.

In short, Brooks is applying his own orthodoxies to complexities that escape any social scientist. Odd for a conservative, he is arguing that we were once stupid ("fifty years ago"), but we are now enlightened. Ah, progress. Perhaps it's his way of pushing his own most recent book, "The Social Animal." That I understand. He's pursuing his own self-interest. - Robert Teitelman

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