Dear Humberto and Colleagues:

            Well, sure, it sounds like a good thing.  It's surely an 
improvement over endless, and meaningless, existence theorems, or 
endless, and meaningless, t statistics.  It gets back to the spirit of 
the Blessed Adam Smith, or even the Honored Alfred Marshall, in looking 
into the ordinary business of life with all the tools of inquiry that 
one can think of instead of a tiny selection of tools developed by Paul 
Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow.

            But notice the narrowing Science-worship in the piece.  This 
is typical of the Times, and of the times.  Let me give you an example 
from the admirable (if misled) Douglass North.  North believes that one 
can achieve "an understanding of . . . how individuals make choices 
under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity" by the study of what he 
calls "brain science."  As a scientific program this seem doubtful, at 
any rate for the next couple of hundred years.  He is looking into 
popular summaries of recent research in biology for understanding the 
way in which the mind acquires ideas, ideologies, and prejudices in an 
economy.  It's not a promising place to look, at any rate compared with 
the 4000-year exploration of the way in which the mind acquires ideas, 
ideologies, and prejudices that we call literature and its descendents 
in philosophy, theology, and criticism.  We can probably learn more 
about such matters from The Epic of Gilgamesh or Paradise Lost, from 
Confucius or St. Paul or Hume, not to speak of the explosion of 
literature and the humanities since the 19th century, than from what we 
are likely to learn from brain scans and psychological experiments for a 
long time to come. 

North has gone from doubting Max U in economics to adopting another form 
of Max U in biological psychology.  I suppose the
hold of allegedly "scientific" methods on men of his generation 
overwhelms his common sense.   "Science" to North is science as
demarcated c. 1950 among the less sophisticated thinkers (which lets out 
Wittgenstein, for example, or Willard Quine, or Michael
Polanyi, or a young Thomas Kuhn; it includes Daul Samuelson, Kenneth 
Arrow, and Milton Friedman).  A scientistic reductionism seems to figure 
in how he himself acquired his ideas, ideologies, and prejudices about 
people and history.  "Clearly [brain sciences] underlie
institutional change and therefore are a necessary prerequisite to being 
able to develop a theory about institutional change."  So too
the chemistry of proteins and the laws of quantum mechanics, not to 
speak of the physics of formation of heavy elements in supernovae, 
"underlie" institutional change as well.  They too are a necessary 
prerequisite to a theory of institutional change.  Forget about the best
that has been thought and written.

In 2005 North writes, "I have gone much more deeply into cognitive 
science and attempted to understand the way in which
the mind and brain work and how that relates to the way in which people 
make choices and the belief systems that they have."
The word "choice" is important.  As an economist he thinks of "choice" 
as the snappy calculations that Max U is supposed to make, and
so he went in search of similarly snappy models of mind in biology.  But 
the belief systems of people do not for the most part come
from the snapping close of a mathematical proof, such as that the square 
root of 2 is irrational, or an imagined decisive experiment
in dropping balls of different weight.  Literature and its offshoots 
reveal, and explore, and are part of, and praise or damn,
deliberation under prudence and temperance (as in Nichomachean Ethics, 
Bk. III; Sense and Sensibility), impulsiveness (Madame Bovary),
faithfulness (Antigone), perfidy (The Peloponnesian War, Bk. V, 85-113), 
justice (Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals), injustice
(Max Haavelar; Uncle Tom's Cabin), physical courage (Nj?ls Saga), 
cowardice (Lord Jim), moral courage (Augustine's Confessions,
Huckleberry Finn), love (Anna Karerina; The Tale of Genji), hate 
(Othello), hope (Julian of Norwich).  And on and on and on. 
Preferring an amateur's grasp of recent "science" to the educated 
imagination 2000 B.C.E. -the present was not a very good
plan of research.

Regards,

Deirdre McCloskey