David Brooks’ column on Malcolm Gladwell’s new book is interesting. (I haven’t read the book yet, but I’ve read a bunch of the reviews and commentary). I think David’s basically right when he writes:

Yet, I can’t help but feel that Gladwell and others who share his emphasis are getting swept away by the coolness of the new discoveries. They’ve lost sight of the point at which the influence of social forces ends and the influence of the self-initiating individual begins.

Maybe it’s my blinkered dogmatic conservatism speaking, but I don’t see the newness in Gladwell’s argument. Oh I’m sure he marshals new evidence and all that. He’s a good popularizer of the latest academic literature (or at least of the latest literature that supports his arguments). But this supposed tension between the role of the group and the individual, free will versus determinism (either cosmic or social), is all very old stuff. New data comes in on all sides of these argument all the time. I know the genetic determinists say otherwise, but they were destined to! I think the notion that we will ever fully settle any of these debates to the satisfaction of the average citizen is scientistic hubris.

Brooks also writes:

As usual, Gladwell intelligently captures a larger tendency of thought — the growing appreciation of the power of cultural patterns, social contagions, memes. His book is being received by reviewers as a call to action for the Obama age. It could lead policy makers to finally reject policies built on the assumption that people are coldly rational utility-maximizing individuals. It could cause them to focus more on policies that foster relationships, social bonds and cultures of achievement.

I’m not sure what to make of this. One of the things I really liked about that talk by Deirdre McCloskey I attended a couple weeks ago was a little riff she did on the role of culture. According to McCloskey (I’m quoting from memory), the economist’s vision of human choice is boiled down to three possible answers: “Yes,” “No” and “three dollars and fifty cents.” In other words we can agree, disagree or offer a price. Everything else humans say is so much auditory fluff and gum-flapping to the economist’s ear. McCloskey says, No, no: Culture matters. How we talk about society helps form society. And the kind of society we have places enormous constraints on economic mechanisms and the economic expectations and ambitions of individuals and the public. I agree with that entirely, and it sounds like Brooks and Gladwell would too. (I think one of the best demonstrations of this point can be found in Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment in which Murray notes that some societies, some communities, are simply better at producing greatness in individuals than others are.)

What bothers me about the idea that social planners in the “Obama age” [shudder] will use these sorts of insights to break out of the “assumption that people are coldly rational utility-maximizing individuals” is that I don’t think government works on that assumption enough. If you’re even remotely sympathetic to Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, the idea that our politics have been overly dominated by an excessive reliance on cold, rational, utility maximization will strike you as something close to batty. Bush’s faith-based initiatives certainly weren’t conceived by Vulcans. And, Obama has explicitly embraced the idea of carrying on something similar. Also, recall that Obama said in that debate that he would be inclined to raise capital gains taxes out of a sense of “fairness,” even if it cost the government revenues (thankfully, so far that Obama seems to have disappeared). The abracadabra word “social justice” has never had a lot to do with efficiency. The great social policy success of the last couple decades stemmed from Washington’s very grudging acceptance of the assumption that many welfare recipients were in fact “utility-maximizing individuals” and once we treated them as such, we improved their plight, and society’s, significantly. People are more than simple rational utility maximizers. But if the state worked on the assumption that they were more often, the state would get us into trouble less.

I don’t believe the government should be entirely mute on issues of culture (nor, again, do I believe it ever has been). But using the latest pop-social science as a writ to justify a major foray into social planning — in the literal sense of the word — is an unpleasant thought. We’ve always known that culture matters enormously. Hayek is among the best thinkers on this point. But Hayek is also among the useful critics of the idea that the government can “plan” a society. I’m looking forward to reading Gladwell’s book, but somehow I doubt he’ll overturn Hayek.