David Brooks starts out talking about Richard Thaler, but he moves on to recommend a forthcoming book by Alan Jacobs, called How to Think. Brooks writes,
Jacobs nicely shows how our thinking processes emerge from emotional life and moral character. If your heart and soul are twisted, your response to the world will be, too. He argues that by diagnosing our own ills, we can begin to combat them. And certainly I can think of individual beacons of intellectual honesty today: George Packer, Tyler Cowen, Scott Alexander and Caitlin Flanagan, among many.
My thoughts.
1. Read the column. It sounds as though Jacobs focuses on tribal dynamics. I expect his themes will overlap with my own Three Languages of Politics. The book will be tomorrow, and unless I am put off by perusing a sample or other reviews, I expect to read it.
2. Thaler’s focus, which is irrational (in the economic sense) individual choices, differs from Jacobs’ focus, which is how social context can influence us to have an unreasonable attachment to our opinions. In that sense, the Thaler opening is a head fake, and I think that the column would have been better without it.
Regarding Brooks’ choices of beacons:
1. Good for Scott for getting some well-deserved publicity.
2. I’m an appreciator of Cowen’s writings, but he would be well down my list of possible “beacon” examples, even among the small subset of DC-area libertarian economists, certainly well below Kling.
It just doesn’t make sense to call someone a beacon of intellectual honesty whose writing is constantly being scrutinized – with good reason – for esoteric Straussian subtexts, which is probably both necessary and to the net good in this day and age, but is still clearly, “enlightened, strategic dishonesty,” in its fundamental character.
Of course Brooks himself could be sending a Straussian signal about all that, or playing a role in the Straussian mutual marketing compact.