Brooks apparantly is the kind of guy you don't want in a study group. Confident, outspoken, and wrong. Some great moments in fakery:
Once, not that long ago, economics was the queen of the social sciences. Human beings were assumed to be profit-maximizing creatures, trending toward reasonableness.
First things first: "reasonableness" has nothing to do with economic theory. This is the kind of misapprehension that Econ 101 teachers have to correct on the first day of class. Brooks fudges the terminology a bit: the word he's look for is "rational" and it specifically does not envoke notions of "reasonableness." Rather, it means that given the information available, people should make decisions based on calculated expected payoffs. Their calculations don't have to be reasonable in any way, they just have to be believed. Also, it should be noted that the responsible social scientist will never disregard the word "should" in the above formulation. Anyone employing the social theoretical aspects of economic theory for predictive purposes will soon learn why it's called the "dismal science." In the difference between the "should" and the "does" happen, we can learn something interesting about a culture, or about our own assumptions.
As societies grew richer and more modern, it was assumed, they would become more secular. As people became better educated, primitive passions like tribalism and nationalism would fade away and global institutions would rise to take their place.
Actually, this sounds a lot more like modernization theory than economic theory, with a tablespoon of globalization theory thrown in. It won't be terribly important to most people, but it's derived from a different body of literature than economics: more Max Weber and the "Iron Cage", less Adam Smith and the "Invisible Hand."
All of this has thrown a certain sort of materialistic vision into crisis. We now know that global economic and technological forces do not gradually erode local cultures and values. Instead, cultures and values shape economic development. Moreover, as people are empowered by greater wealth and education, cultural differences become more pronounced, not less, as different groups chase different visions of the good life, and react in aggressive ways to perceived slights to their cultural dignity.
I'm not sure which culture(s) Brooks is talking about, because he never really says. Let me go out on a limb here and say he's got some form of Middle Eastern / Arab / Muslim culture in mind. In this case, Brooks has really got the bush-colored glasses on. Let's just say that the major lessons of the last few years say nothing about cultural conflict arising out of mismatched conceptions of the good life. Sites of conflict have, for the most part, been plagued by poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment (except for Iraq, but you can't really blame local culture for that one, can you?). The Sudanese genocide isn't motivated by questions of middle class consumer priorities.
Economics, which assumes people are basically reasonable and respond straightforwardly to incentives, is no longer queen of the social sciences.
The events of the past years have thrown us back to the murky realms of theology, sociology, anthropology and history. Even economists know this, and are migrating to more behaviorialist and cultural approaches.
Again, "rational" not "reasonable" and it doesn't mean the same thing. There's something about his general approach that makes it seem like he's saying the world has changed, and economics no longer has the answers. I would say the world has kept on going and economics has simple proven to be woefully unprepared to explain social phenomena outside of consumer transactions. When people complain about the economic approach requiring a conversion of all utility into a common currency (usually dollars), economists simply responded that it's a requirement of the model. Personal sentimental benefits? Convert to dollars. Benefits to life and limb? Convert to dollars. Aesthetic enjoyment? Convert to dollars. That way, we can make trade-offs among essentially incommensurable payoffs.
Of course, the problem was always that the world is a murky, mysterious place. Any attempts to stuff it into a clean, concise model are going to come up short. Why do people prefer what they prefer? Why, when, and how do preferences change? How do decisions made in public view differ from those made in private? These are questions economics never was able to answer very well. If the softer social sciences seem murky to Mr. Brooks, that's because they better reflect the operation of society.
If the big contest of the 20th century was between planned and free market economies, the big questions of the next century will be understanding how cultures change and can be changed, how social and cultural capital can be nurtured and developed, how destructive cultural conflict can be turned to healthy cultural competition.
Leave it to Brooks to learn exactly the wrong lesson from all this. If he knew anything about anything, he'd realize that the 20th Century, the 19th Century, the 18th Century, and probably most modern centuries were all about how cultures changing. Cultural change is exactly what modernization is all about, and it hardly began with the Russian Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or 9/11. What Brooks has in mind, however, is more about imperialism than anything else, dressed up with words like "nurture" to make it sound all kind and just.
Last, let me say that his last bit about "health cultural competition" is what always makes me queasy about free-marketeers. First, they propose a social order based on self-interested profit-maximizers in competition with one another over scarce resources. Then they try to cover up its crude brutality by calling it "healthy competition" or worse, "coopetition." Competition is just a nicer word for conflict. And when culture is on the line, there's a lot more at stake than getting the best bargain. What really bugs me about the current conservative movement is this: they created this world. Reagan and Milton Friedman and neo-liberal economic planners tried to spread free-market competition over the developing world like jam on toast. Now, they turn around and say that "cultures and values shape economic development." It's as if they're saying, "look what these primitive peoples did with my precious economic theories." From a scientific point of view, they're on the verge of the ultimate violation. They've developed their theories, set them to work in a political program, and discovered serious problems. Now, it seems that rather than revise or abandon their theories, neo-libs are trying to deploy "murkier" social sciences to figure out how to fix the data to fit their assumptions.
