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| George Caleb Bingham, "Raftsmen Playing Cards", 1847. Saint Louis Art Museum via New York Times. David Brooks at left in the green trousers, left out because he's a four-flusher and can't count. |
Shorter David Brooks, "At the Edge of Inside", New York Times, June 24 2016:
When you are located neither in in the core of an organization nor outside it, but just at the edge of the core, you could be a genuine reformer, like Senator Lindsey Graham or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Some people might not like you very much, but we need such people now more than ever. Lincoln, too, and the behavioral economist Richard Thaler, co-author, with Cass Sunstein, of Nudge (2008), whose theories can "make it easier for people to save money, eat healthily and more," according to the TED Radio Hour, which shows you just how edgy-on-the-inside he is.
Actually that's not what Brooks says about Thaler. He says,
When the behavioral economist Richard Thaler uses the lessons of psychology to improve economic modeling, he is operating just inside the edge of his own discipline and making it better.
But I don't feel that's 100% accurate. I think you could say Thaler uses the lessons of psychology to explain what's wrong with economic modeling as it's done (its presumption of rationality on the part of homo economicus), rightly I'm sure, but he doesn't use it to improve modeling; he does it to justify his own work as a purveyor of interesting anecdotes instead of models, and assert that you can do useful work
even if you're no good at math:
