This is the first in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.
David Brooks’s column, “The Protocol Society,” is a typical Brooksian muddle in which Brooks attributes evolutionary changes in economic behavior to the “discoveries” of contemporary economists.
Despite Brooks, there is nothing new (of value) under the sun of economic analysis. The practitioners of today who draw on sociology and psychology are simply returning to the roots of economics — the description of human behavior — which can be found in Adam Smith and his successors, well into the 20th century. This “old school” of literary economics didn’t give way to the “new school” of mathematical economics until after WWII, when Paul Samuelson led the profession down the dead-end street of convoluted, abstract theorizing.
The difference between the old-old school and the new-old school is that the moderns rely less on introspection and casual observation and more on data collection, “laboratory” experiments, statistical analysis, and the research findings of sociologists and psychologists. That this is not an unalloyed blessing can be seen in the “accomplishments” of a leading member of the new-old school, one Richard Thaler, whom Brooks omits to mention. Thaler’s specialty, which has been dubbed “behavioral economics”, focuses on the psychology of decision-making and how it leads individuals to make what Thaler believes are sub-optimal and even unwise choices. From there, Thaler and his collaborator, Cass Sunstein, have ventured into normative policy recommendations, which they dub “libertarian (or soft) paternalism”.
Needless to say, actual libertarians (and others) find much to criticize in Thaler’s normative prescriptions, which carve out a role for government in “nudging” people in directions that “wise men” like Thaler and Sunstein would like to seem them nudged. For much more about the fallacies and dangers of “libertarian paternalism”, see this post.
In any event, Brooks writes as if there were a real difference between economic activity in the 19th century and economic activity in the 21st century. As if, for example, there wasn’t a lot of brainpower and organizational skill involved in the “second industrial revolution” of the last third of the 19th century. As if, to take another example, the “protocols” of the modern food court didn’t have their counterparts in the market squares of yore. As if, to take a final example, the manufacture of steel, autos, and other durable goods didn’t (and doesn’t) involve massive capital investments (many of which were made possible by patented processes and machinery), so that the average cost of making each unit declines markedly as the rate of output rises. It is as if the 21st century simply arrived, bright and shining, with no connection to the past.
On the whole, Brooks is onto something, which is that economists are getting back in touch with the realities of human behavior. However, he is guilty of a gross attribution error. He writes as if there were something new in economic behavior because economists are now better able to describe it. The same attribution error is found among teenagers (of every era), who believe that sex didn’t exist until they discovered it.
Other posts in this series: