Poetry Today

Poetry doesn't matter to most people. They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry.

In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, and they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps falsely, that people actually liked poetry. It provided them with narratives that entertained and inspired. It gave them words to attach to their feelings. They enjoyed folk ballads, too. In a sense, music and poetry joined hands.

In the 20th century, something went amiss. Poetry became "difficult." That is, poets began to reflect the complexities of modern culture, its fierce disjunctions. The poems of Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens asked a lot of the reader, including a range of cultural references to topics that even in the early 1900s had become little known. To read Pound and Eliot with ease, for instance, one needed some knowledge of Greek and Latin poetry. That kind of learning had been fairly common among educated readers in the past, when the classics were the bedrock of any upper-middle-class education. The same could not be said for most readers in the 20th century — or today, when education has become more democratized and the study of the classics has been relegated to a small number of enthusiasts. The poems of the canonical poets of high modernism require heavy footnotes.

Yet poetry can make a difference in the lives of readers. I've always known that myself, having read and written poems for at least four decades. Every morning I begin the day with a book of poems open at the breakfast table. I read a poem, perhaps two. I think about the poetry. I often make notes in my journal. The reading of the poem informs my day, adds brightness to my step, creates shades of feeling that formerly had been unavailable to me. In many cases, I remember lines, whole passages, that float in my head all day — snatches of song, as it were. I firmly believe my life would be infinitely poorer without poetry, its music, its deep wisdom.

One tends to forget that poetry is wisdom. I was in Morocco recently, and a devout Muslim mentioned to me that the Prophet Muhammad, in his book of sayings, the Hadith, had said as much. But the Koran also teaches, I was told, that poets are dangerous, and that decent people should avoid them. That reminded me of Plato, who wished to ban all poets from his ideal republic because he thought they were liars. Reality, for Plato, was an intense, perfect world of ideas. The material world represents reflections of that ideal, always imperfect. Artistic representations of nature were thus at several removes from the ideal, hence suspicious.

But Plato also had other worries about poets. In the Republic, he complained that they tend to whip up the emotions of readers in unhelpful ways. They stir feelings of "lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure." Poetry "feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up," he said, while only the "hymns of the gods and praises of famous men" are worthy of readers. The law and reason are far better.

Although Plato didn't quite sink the art of poetry, he cast suspicion on the craft, and poets since then have rarely been comfortable with their place in society. Even the popular Romantic poets — Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others — lived on the edge of the social whirl, not quite respectable. More recently figures like Allen Ginsberg have derided their country. Poets have an unruly streak in them, and have not been the most welcome guests at the table of society.

Teachers and professors have long considered poetry a useful part of the curriculum, and one of the last places where poetry remains a central part of the culture is the classroom. To a degree, poets have been "domesticated" by the academic village, welcomed into its grove. Frost was among the first poets to get a big welcome on the campus, and he taught at Amherst College for much of his life, with stints elsewhere. He spent his last decades crisscrossing the country, appearing at colleges, reading and lecturing to large audiences. He believed firmly in poetry as a means of shaping minds in important ways.

In "Education by Poetry," one of his finest essays, Frost argued that an understanding of how poetry works is essential to the developing intellect. He went so far as to suggest that unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values, "you don't know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you." Those are very large claims.

Poets do make large claims, and they are usually a bit exaggerated. In his "Defense of Poetry," Shelley famously wrote: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." I prefer the twist on that offered by a later poet, George Oppen, who wrote: "Poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world."

I don't especially want poets to make laws or rule the world. For the most part, they would perform very badly in those public ways. The world of the poet is largely an interior world of the intellect and the emotions — where we mostly live, in fact. And poetry bolsters that interior realm. In a talk at Princeton University in 1942, when the world was aflame, Stevens reflected on the fact that the 20th century had become "so violent," both physically and spiritually. He succinctly defined poetry as "a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pushing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of poetry, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives."

The pressure of reality is indeed fierce, and yet poetry supplies a kind of counterpressure, pushing back against external forces that would overwhelm and obliterate the individual. Poets give a voice to the world in ways previously unacknowledged. We listen to the still, small voice of poetry when we read a poem, and that voice stands in ferocious contrast to the clamor in the culture at large and, often, to the sound of society's explosions.

I always define poetry for my students as a language adequate to our experience — to our full experience, taking into account the interior valleys, the peaks, the broad plains. It gives voice to tiny thoughts, to what the Scottish poet and scholar Alastair Reid, in a lovely poem, calls "Oddments Inklings Omens Moments." One does not hope for poetry to change the world. Auden noted when he wrote in his elegy for Yeats that "poetry makes nothing happen." That is, it doesn't shift the stock market or persuade dictators to stand down. It doesn't usually send masses into the streets to protest a war or petition for economic justice. It works in quieter ways, shaping the interior space of readers, adding a range of subtlety to their thoughts, complicating the world for them.

Language defines us as human beings. We speak, therefore we exist. We have the miraculous ability to gesture in words, to make statements and requests, to express our feelings, to construct arguments, to draw conclusions. Poetic language matters because it is precise and concrete, and draws us closer to the material world. In Nature, Emerson argues that the sheer physicality of words points us in directions that might be called "spiritual." He puts forward three principles worth considering:

"Words are signs of natural facts."

"Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts."

"Nature is the symbol of the spirit."

Those statements formed a platform of sorts for the Transcendental movement, which studied nature closely for signs of spiritual life. The principles remain worthy of reflection. At some level, words suggest natural facts: "rock," "river," "bird," "cloud." The leap comes in the second statement, which posits a spiritual world. One can, I think, leap beyond conventional notions of spirituality here and acknowledge a deep interior world wherein each of us lives, no matter what our religious persuasion. I think of a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins: "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed." The mind has those heights and depths, and few have not sensed them, stood in awe of their terrifying majesty. That is the spiritual realm, which one can extend in any direction. Nature becomes, at last, Emerson's "symbol of the spirit," and poetry itself embodies that nature. It is part of it. It mirrors the vast interior world, populates it with images and phrases, provides a basis for the reality of individual lives.

I could not live without poetry, which has helped me to live my existence more concretely, more deeply. It has shaped my thinking. It has enlivened my spirit. It has offered me ways to endure my life (I'm rephrasing Dr. Johnson here), even to enjoy it.

Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at Middlebury College. His latest book, Why Poetry Matters, was published in April by Yale University Press.

Gene Weingarten

Fiddling Around With History
Gene's idea wasn't old, it was well-aged



You may like or dislike my columns. You may think I am a fine fellow or a jackass. But there is one fact you may no longer dispute: I am a brilliantly original thinker.

I would not say it if I didn't have proof, namely, the Pulitzer Prize. I won it for an article I wrote last year about what happened when a world-famous violinist played for spare change, incognito, for three-quarters of an hour outside a subway station. Playing his priceless Stradivarius, violin virtuoso Joshua Bell, a onetime child prodigy, made a few measly bucks and change. Most people hurried past, unheeding. It was a story about artistic context, priorities and the soul-numbing gallop of modernity.

The stunt, which I had ginned up, was judged to be completely groundbreaking. The rush of adulation from inside my profession was immediate and intoxicating; suffice it to say that at the Pulitzer ceremony in New York, a beautiful and talented young journalism student was clearly disappointed to learn I am married.

Quite pleased with myself, I returned home to find waiting for me an e-mail from a man named Paul Musgrave. Paul works in Yorba Linda, Calif., at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, a fact that is irrelevant to this story except that, wafting as it does from the grave of the man The Washington Post did so much to destroy, it smells faintly but ominously of payback. Besides, as you will see, every last thing you are about to read, in some measure, relates to everything else.

Musgrave told me that he'd been scrolling through microfiche while researching an unrelated project when his eyes fell on a story in the Indianapolis Times from May 1930. It was a wire account of a remarkable thing that had just happened in Chicago. In a stunt ginned up by a newspaper named the Post -- the Chicago Evening Post -- violin virtuoso Jacques Gordon, a onetime child prodigy, performed for spare change on his priceless Stradivarius, incognito, for three-quarters of an hour outside a subway station. Most people hurried past, unheeding. The violinist made a few measly bucks and change. It was a story about artistic context, priorities and the soul-numbing gallop of modernity.

I immediately fired off a return e-mail to Paul Musgrave. It consisted of two four-letter words, both in capital letters, the first of which was HOLY.

In the days that followed, I obtained a copy of the original article from the long-defunct Evening Post. The main story, bylined Milton Fairman, was on Page One, under the headline "Famous Fiddler in Disguise Gets $5.61 in Curb Concerts." The story began: "A tattered beggar in an ancient frock coat, its color rusted by the years, gave a curbstone concert yesterday noon on windswept Michigan Avenue. Hundreds passed him by without a glance, and the golden notes that rose from his fiddle were swept by the breeze into unlistening ears ..."

We learn from this story that two of the handful of songs played by Jacques Gordon were Massenet's "Meditation" from "Thais" and Schubert's "Ave Maria." Two of the handful of songs played by Joshua Bell last year were Massenet's "Meditation" from "Thais" and Schubert's "Ave Maria." Of the hundreds of people who walked by Gordon, only one recognized him for who he was. Of the hundreds of people who walked by Bell, only one recognized him for who he was.

I telephoned Bell -- he, too, had not heard about this other street corner stunt. But, though Jacques Gordon died two decades before Bell was born, Bell knew of him. The two men had shared something intimate. From 1991 through 2001, Bell played the same Strad that Gordon had once owned, the same one Gordon had played on the Chicago streets that day in 1930. For 11 years, Bell's fingers held the same ancient wood.

There were differences between the two impromptu performances; Bell played indoors, but Gordon did not, meaning that some of Gordon's music evaporated into Chicago's frisky winds. Eventually, Gordon drew a small crowd; Bell never did. But the biggest difference is that the Evening Post's story -- the brainchild of Michael W. Straus, the paper's brash young city editor -- was a one-day minor curiosity. Mine, kept alive and aloft by the might of the Web, went global.

I'm sitting here looking at my Pulitzer Prize, which is awarded in part for "originality," and I'm laughing. Is ignorance a defense? Is there a statute of limitations on originality? Is 77 years okay? Mostly, I'm thinking that around the year 2085, a writer -- someone who hasn't been born yet -- is going to wake up one day with this really terrific idea ...

Gene Weingarten can be reached at weingarten@washpost.com

Christopher Hitchens

Heat and Light: Christopher Hitchens and His Critics
By Max Dunbar
The case against Christopher Hitchens can be summarised, broadly, in a kind of comic list as done by the British satirical magazine Private Eye:

He supported the Iraq war
He likes a drink
He smokes, as well
He supported the war
He tends to be aggressive in debate
He likes a drink
He supported the war
Er…
…That’s it.

In a sense he needs no introduction. (His entry in the contributors’ biographies of this book simply reads: ‘Christopher Hitchens is Christopher Hitchens.’) He is one of the West’s most prolific journalists, speakers and essayists, with a love of literature and hatred for oppression and superstition everywhere. A one-time Marxist, Hitchens’s politics could be defined not so much as ideological but a broad opposition to establishment power and discourse, and solidarity with victims of cruelty. Crucially coupled with this is an independence of mind. As he says in Letters to a Young Contrarian: ‘Dammit, I have only one life to live and I won’t spend a moment of it on some dismal compromise.’[1]

It was inevitable that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this combative intellectual would confront a Left that had become narrow-minded, reactionary, stagnant with ideological conformity and pious self-satisfaction. The occasion was the 2001 attack on New York orchestrated by a wealthy group of religious fanatics. Hitchens was outraged by the conventional left opinion that the attack was a reasonable consequence of past American crimes and that bin Laden’s suicide bombers represented the cry of oppressed Muslims:

Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there’s no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about ‘the West,’ to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don’t like and can’t defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.[2]
Hitchens went on to argue for the war in Afghanistan, and then for the war in Iraq. He based his support for the latter mainly on solidarity with Iraqi and Kurdish dissidents, who had no illusions about Bush’s motives but saw the invasion as their last and best chance to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

This did not make Hitchens popular. The predominant opinion, from the pages of liberal broadsheets to far-left meeting rooms, was that the Bush administration was capitalising on the September 11 attacks to launch an imperialist project to destroy Islamic culture and control Middle Eastern oil supplies. The assumption was that no progressive case for war could be made.

We shouldn’t be too hard on the left in general here because the main opposition to this lazy consensus came not from conservatives but other lefties: novelists, journalists, activists and bloggers willing to defend secularism and support comrades in the Arab world rather than the dictators and priesthoods they were forced to live under. These men and women were duly excommunicated and denounced as racists and neocons. But Hitchens made the first hairline crack of this historic schism.

Christopher Hitchens and his Critics is a collection of Hitchens’s political writing over these vital years. There is also a range of critical responses to his arguments – not as wide a range as it could be because Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and many others refused to let their criticism of Hitchens be reprinted in the anthology. ‘It is a disheartening irony,’ the editors write, ‘that all the authors who refused permission are, or have been, robust defenders of free expression and the dialectical exchange of ideas.’[3]

The language of apostasy dominates. Hitchens is perceived to have ‘changed sides’ after September 11; critics tend to focus on the act of changing sides rather than Hitchens’s reasons and arguments for doing so.

In truth, there was no Damascean conversion in the Manhattan ruins. The editors rightly state that, on a range of issues from the Rushdie fatwa to the Clinton presidency, Hitchens’s relationship with the mainstream left was always ‘fraught and complicated’[4]. And it was natural that such a fierce secularist should respond to religious terrorism in the way Hitchens has.

His problem with many on the left is that their reflexive opposition to the West has caused them to support any far-right theocratic movement as long as it occasionally targets Western soldiers. He calls them ‘fellow-travellers with fascism’[5] and the crew of frauds and demagogues in the back end of this volume seem to have been assembled to prove his point.

First up is Norman Finkelstein, an academic who declared at the time of the Lebanon war that ‘for those who believe in freedom and dignity, we are all Hezbollah now.’[6] This year he met with the terrorist organisation and told reporters that ‘I think that the Hezbollah represents the hope. They are fighting to defend their homeland.’[7] As Hitchens says: ‘I am not sure I am ready to hear that it is I who have capitulated to the forces of reaction.’[8]

Finklestein’s article is quoted enthusiastically by Richard Seymour, a British far-left activist who runs an unreadable blog called ‘Lenin’s Tomb.’ In a long, scatological closing essay, he reveals that Hitchens changes his mind a lot, and had doubts about the Iraq invasion as late as 2002. Fine. Naturally, if Hitchens had always argued for war, that would prove his bloodthirsty dogmatism.

Seymour claims that the jihadis and ex-Baathists in Iraq are a ‘grassroots guerilla movement, one that has arisen because of the brutality of the occupation’[9] and although he concedes that ‘there is certainly an element that behaves in an abominable fashion, the bulk of resistance attacks are overwhelmingly directed against US troops, not civilians.’[10] His sources for this statement are the CIA (!) and a bunch of antiwar websites similar to his own. So, as well as believing that the murder of young working-class Americans is somehow understandable, we are supposed to perceive the killing of trade unionists[11] and aid workers[12] and the bombing of mosques[13] and UN buildings[14] as mere collateral damage. If you judge a man by his enemies, Hitchens comes off well.

At least Finkelstein and Seymour engage with what Hitchens says. As Cottee and Cushman put it:

Trawling through the endless critical commentary directed at Hitchens, one is struck not just by the outstanding ferocity of it all but also by the fact that the focal point of critical interest is virtually the same: the all-too-human Christopher Hitchens, and not his actual arguments.
In particular, almost every critical article includes a snide allusion to his love of drinking. In a piece on Counterpunch, Jack McCarthy focuses entirely on Hitchens and alcohol, giggling that ‘you can't help but conclude that the man gives new meaning to the phrase ‘a drunk in denial.’[15] Come on. Either Hitchens is an alcoholic or he isn’t. If he is, alcoholism is a disease and Hitchens needs help and support, not ridicule. If not, what you have written about him is libel. Which is it? It’s a sign of the left’s increasing puritanism that it makes such a fuss of dissenters’ drinking habits.

I think Cottee and Cushman are wrong, though, to claim that Hitchens has not been ‘trenchant enough, at least in print, about the many failings of the Bush administration.’[16 ] In just part one of this volume I counted dozens of attacks, from the US alliance with the Saudi and Pakistan dictatorships (p50) to Bush’s subsidy of $43m to the Taliban, a few months before 9/11, to fight the war on drugs (p43).

And yet there are valid criticisms of Hitchens’s approach. Reading through his pieces on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, you can’t help but note his laughable optimism about casualty figures, his glib and premature triumphalism. The incompetence of the Bush administration was massively underestimated, and not just by Hitchens. Interventionists were made complacent by relatively easy campaigns in Kosovo and Sierra Leone and thought Saddam would be overthrown with a minimum of casualties.

At what point do you admit that the whole thing might have been a mistake? When 100,000 are dead? Half a million? At what point in the bodycount does your support turn from principle to nightmare utopianism? It’s a shame that the editors only include Hitchens’s early pieces, when the war looked just about successful, and omit his later work, where he is increasingly disillusioned. (In particular, Hitchens’s piece about Mark Daily, a soldier killed in Iraq who was inspired to fight by Hitchens’s articles, is profound and moving.)[17]

In the end, it’s hard not to agree with Johann Hari: ‘To rally the left to solidarity with the victims of Ba'athism and Islamism is an honourable cause; to do it with the weapon of neoconservatism was a catastrophic misjudgement.’[18] Hitchens is right in principle but as a strategist he has real problems.

Another factor is his aggression. In a culture that prizes equivocation, compromise and ambiguity, Hitchens’s direct approach has been taken as intimidation, even bullying. Stefan Collini is quoted as saying:

One gets the strongest possible sense of how much it matters to prove that one is and always has been right… There is a palpably macho tone to all this, as of alpha males competing for dominance and display.[19]
It’s this tendency that has led to Hitchens being slapped with the tired label of ‘atheist fundamentalist’. He’s also seen as lacking the sense of the sanctity of life: there are quotes in this volume of Hitchens rejoicing at the deaths of jihadists, and his indifference to the demise of Christian fundamentalist Jerry Falwell shocked Fox News. (He has said that ‘I like it when bad people die.’[20])

Yet this hate for his enemies, although it can be shocking, is not entirely dishonourable. The editors of this volume say that ‘From the perspective of Greek antiquity, there was nothing remotely odd or morally dubious about praising the merits of hatred.’ They then quote Aristotle: ‘Hatred of tyrants is inevitable, and contempt is also a frequent cause of their destruction.’[21]

It’s a misconception that the absence of conflict is possible or desirable. One of Hitchens’s favourite aphorisms regards heat and light: people say that in discussion we need to generate light rather than heat, but basic physics tell us that it’s heat that generates light. That insight and truth spatter like sparks from the fires of aggression.

It is the achievement of Christopher Hitchens to have kept these fires burning so brightly and for so long. Friend or enemy, you have to recognise that, and this anthology makes a fascinating introduction to this eloquent and tireless debater.

Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left, ed. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, New York University Press, 2008.

Notes

1. Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens, Basic Books 2001, p 45
2. Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left, ed. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, New York University Press 2008, p46
3. Ibid, p29
4. Ibid, p35
5. Ibid, p81
6. From Finkelstein’s website, July 2006.
7. Haaretz, January 8 2008.
8. Hitchens, p252
9. Ibid, p324
10. Ibid, p323
11. Hadi Saleh of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions was murdered in his Baghdad home on January 4 2005. This obituary states that: ‘His IFTU comrades described the killing as bearing all the hallmarks of the former security services. His union files and membership records were ransacked.’ Guardian, January 20 2005.
12. Marla Ruzicka, a campaigner for compensation for civilians injured by the US military, was killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad. Washington Post, April 18 2005.
13. A typical attack on a Shia mosque killed fourteen people. BBC, January 21 2005.
14. The explosives that destroyed the UN building in August 2003 ‘appeared to have come from Saddam Hussein's pre-war arsenal.’ BBC, August 21 2003
15. ‘Another Ad Hominem Attack on Christopher Hitchens,’ Jack McCarthy, Counterpunch, February 21 2003.
16. Hitchens, p24-5.
17. ‘A Death in the Family,’ Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, November 2007.
18. ‘The pro-war left's disastrous misjudgment,’ Johann Hari, Independent, July 23 2007
. 19. Hitchens, p3
20. Interview with Jage Toba, Plum TV, added to YouTube, January 31 2008. 21. Hitchens, p6. I’m reminded of the Clinton Tyree character in Carl Hiaasen’s fabulous crime novels: ‘Nothing shameful about anger, boy. Sometimes it’s the only sane and logical and moral reaction.’ Sick Puppy, Pan 1999.

David Bonderman

Breakfast with the FT: David Bonderman

It is 7.30am at the St Regis Hotel in New York and the Astor Court, where breakfast is served, is almost deserted. The St Regis is a staid Midtown hotel built in 1904 that sits between Fifth and Madison avenues. Many of the staff appear to be only slightly younger than the hotel itself. When David Bonderman, irreverent billionaire co-founder of buy-out firm TPG (formerly Texas Pacific Group), saunters in, the underemployed staff scurry over to greet him by name. Bonderman always stays in the St Regis when he passes through New York. He says it is because he is loyal (although he later tells me that loyalty to the undeserving is his biggest flaw) and because they unpack his bags for him.

This is going to be a swift meeting: the end of the buy-out boom has hardly slowed TPG, and Bonderman is going on from our breakfast to Wall Street. In April, the firm led a $7bn infusion into troubled Washington Mutual, the largest savings and loan bank in the US. Last month, it injected £180m into Bradford & Bingley, the largest lender to landlords in Britain. During the first week of June, TPG and Goldman Sachs sold Alltel, a cellular telecoms group, to Verizon Wireless and made $1.3bn on the sale, having held the company for a mere seven months. TPG also became the envy of its peers when the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange gave the company almost $3bn to manage, the largest-ever single allocation to a US private equity firm.

Once a bankruptcy lawyer, Bonderman, 65, is now one of the most prominent figures in the dizzying world of private equity, named as the 105th richest American, with a net worth of about $3.3bn, according to the 2007 Forbes 400 List. He is a big, dishevelled man, sometimes seen wearing socks that don’t match (although TPG is co-owner of Neiman Marcus, arguably the swankiest department store chain in the US).

He orders only an orange juice. It arrives immediately and my attention is distracted as I watch him shovel copious amounts of ice into the glass with a silver spoon from a silver bowl. He never drinks coffee and eyes my cappuccino with scepticism.

I start by asking what he was doing in Texas – he flew from there into New York the previous night on his private jet – and he tells me he was visiting a power plant he took over last year when TPG and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co bought Texas utility TXU. It was one of the biggest (and last) acts of the buy-out boom. “The two boilers are 26 storeys high,” he says approvingly.

Bonderman logs about 2,000 hours a year on his jet. Though long interested in aviation, he has never been tempted to get a pilot’s licence. He confesses that he lacks the attention span. “People who know me find the idea scary,” he had told me at an earlier meeting. In an early deal, he rescued Continental Airlines and once sent his inedible dinner to the airline’s chief executive officer with a note of complaint. Bonderman also noticed the potential of Ryanair, the Irish airline that has become a British byword for low-cost air travel, and has been chairman of its board since 1996.

I also know from previous meetings that he doesn’t waste time on small talk, and today I notice he wears no wristwatch and doesn’t carry a BlackBerry. He repeatedly asks me the time and looks at the clock on his mobile phone. He is not a gadget person. Unlike fellow financial titans such as David Rubenstein, co-founder of Carlyle Group, who told his staff that the happiest day of his life was the day internet access was installed on his private jet, Bonderman says he doesn’t generally respond to e-mails over the weekends.

What goes on behind the hedge fund?
The fashionable finance worlds of private equity and hedge funds can seem impenetrable fortresses designed to keep outsiders at bay. So, to detangle TPG from PG Tips, here’s a demystification guide by Henny Sender and Isabel Berwick.

Private equity: Last year’s Masters of the Financial Universe, private equity firms used a mix of cash from their own investors and many billions more, borrowed from banks and the debt market to buy ever-larger listed companies including retailers such as Alliance Boots and rental car firm Hertz. The private equity business model is to buy up firms, delist them from the public stock market and then resell them, making billions in profits in the process. Now that banks are far less willing to lend to private equity firms, last year’s masters are less feared and envied. Even so, plenty of private equity money is still sloshing about, this time scooping up riskier bargains – such as TPG’s recent investment in Bradford & Bingley.

Hedge fund: A hedge fund is a big pool of investor money. Its managers can buy and sell anything. The name comes from a hedge fund’s nimble ability to bet on rising and falling markets – so hedging its bets. Crucially, hedge funds can do something not open to the big mainstream funds (unit and investment trusts). They can “sell short”, which means they buy (or, to be accurate, pay to borrow someone else’s) shares and then sell them. They are gambling that the price falls, so when the original owner wants the shares back, the seller re-buys them and hands them back, making a quick profit.

This month the UK regulator, the Financial Services Authority, told hedge funds to stop undermining the banking system by using short selling to lower the prospects for banks’ rights issues (when banks sell new shares in the market to raise some quick cash). The “hedgies” aren’t happy at all. Watch this space. Hedge funds have traditionally looked with envy at their competitors in private equity firms. That’s because the latter have much more patient investors and funds with an average life of 10 years.

Venture capital: A more old-fashioned word (and world) than private equity but it means a similar thing. These days, venture capital money mainly flows into small and start-up companies, and into buy-outs. Private investors can also buy into venture capital trusts, which invest in small companies and come dangling tax advantages in their wake.
Bonderman rarely grants interviews and is reluctant to discuss personal matters when he does, although he is known to have five children from two marriages – the two youngest are still at school. He grew up in Los Angeles, attended the University of Washington in Seattle, graduating in 1963, and went on to Harvard Law School. He practised as a lawyer in Washington, DC, and taught briefly at Tulane Law School in New Orleans before leaving academia in 1983 to work for the Texan tycoon Bob Bass in his Robert M Bass Group. This is where he met James Coulter, who is still his business partner. Bonderman and Coulter are probably the most successful-ever private equity investment team, with Bonderman cast as the risk-taker and the younger Coulter the restraining influence.

In 1988, while still at the Bass Group, Bonderman and Coulter brokered the deal that made them stars. The two put $150m into American Savings Bank and made billions for Bob Bass when they sold it. “The government waived all these rules to encourage capital to come in freely,” Bonderman reminisces when I ask him about it. “The government absorbed all the losses. Private capital was much scarcer then than now. The dynamics have changed.” The duo left Bass’s operation and founded Texas Pacific Group in 1992.

Many successful investors balance their faith in their deals with a sense of paranoia, obsessing on how to hedge the risk. Bonderman has such confidence in his own judgement that it is up to his partners, notably Coulter, to hold him back. The downside for his colleagues is that when TPG is too cautious and loses lucrative deals to competitors, Bonderman chides them publicly for their caution.

TPG’s April deal to save Washington Mutual (WaMu) was on the same scale and audacity as the American Savings Bank rescue. Rivals such as KKR and Carlyle Group had looked at WaMu and concluded that it was too early to wade in. But Bonderman loves the WaMu deal – as he loves all his deals. He has served on the board at WaMu and is familiar with its management. “Where WaMu gets to is more important than when it gets there,” says Bonderman. “This is the strength of private equity. We can be patient.”

He may need to be unnaturally patient in the coming months. The private equity boom is over, credit markets are frozen and many financial firms are in trouble but Bonderman relishes the challenge. He has a war chest of some $25bn. “Private equity does better in bad markets than in good markets,” he says, eyeing my plate of sliced bananas and noting that now prices for companies are dropping to reasonable levels. “To buy inexpensively is always better.”

While most of his peers make some effort to answer questions they don’t like, Bonderman doesn’t bother with niceties. Instead, when I ask whether any of TPG’s companies are performing poorly or how much money he has raised in China, he just says flatly: “Why would I answer that?” He doesn’t save his disdain for journalists either – he rarely networks with corporate America or attends high-profile charity events, preferring to relax at his ranch in Colorado, which is so vast that his partners refer to it as the “Bonderosa”. There is another home in Fort Worth but he doesn’t have the string of foreign mansions that other private equity billionaires seem to accumulate.

Bonderman’s abrasive style has landed him in trouble more than once. At a Hong Kong conference last year his comments about Japan were so abusive that his colleagues, who were sitting close to the front, put their heads in their hands. First he criticised the ritualistic, slow approach of the Japanese to doing deals. His subsequent comment that, “They hate us but that’s OK because we hate them, too,” went down badly, as did, “Besides, look at the demographics. There will be fewer of them soon.” His partners have now banned him from setting foot in Japan. He periodically insults the French with equal passion.

In the annual meetings for investors, he will often wear the same sweatshirt three days in a row, which some may take as a lack of respect. For our breakfast he is at least wearing socks that match. By 8.15am, the ice in the orange juice has melted and the Astor Court is filling up. Among the new arrivals, to Bonderman’s relief, is Marc Lasry, founder of Avenue Capital and a long-time friend with a shared interest in politics, particularly Democratic politics. (Chelsea Clinton works for Lasry although she took time off to campaign for her mother.) Bonderman happily pulls up a chair for Lasry. I take advantage of the interlude to take a few spoonfuls of muesli and spear a few slices of banana.

The staunch Democrats discuss the state of the campaign. Bonderman is a fan of Obama even if he concedes that Clinton “had better [fundraising] concerts”. Bonderman’s 60th birthday party, held in Las Vegas five years ago, featured the Rolling Stones.

“My 15-year-old daughter can run this country better than the current president,” Bonderman observes dryly. He is highly critical both of the Bush White House and financial supervisors. “This administration has been in cahoots with ostensibly independent regulators,” he says. “They have been priming the pump as if this country has been in recession a long time. We’ve had low taxes and have increased spending wildly and that is obviously unsustainable over the long term. We will pay the price for years of the excesses under our current president, Mr Fillmore.” During the last presidential campaign, Bonderman famously wondered whether comparing President Bush to the unsuccessful 13th President of the US was an insult to the dead man.

Catch-up over, Lasry rejoins his own breakfast gathering, the waiters solicitously remove the abandoned chair and Bonderman suddenly perks up. It seems to have dawned on him that a morning interview with a journalist may not be a total waste of time. He wants to make a technical point, through me, about current accounting policies, which mean that the debt of his companies, such as the recently acquired TXU utility, now trades at less than 100 cents on the dollar. He is convinced that when the debt matures, holders will get 100 cents on the dollar. “The accounting policies are absurd and destabilising,” he announces in his usual dismissive way. “You ought to write about that.”

Bonderman rarely speaks out on such narrow issues, preferring sweeping hyperbolic statements, such as: “The current president’s policies will drive the dollar to zero.” But the accounting issue is being hotly debated, with some experts saying that that the new regime – which forces many financial players to value their securities at the price they would fetch if sold in the market at that very instant, no matter how turbulent the market – has amplified the credit crisis. That in turn has made the banks more reluctant to lend to private equity firms and has hurt their business. (The matter is still being discussed. US Treasury officials say they might tweak it slightly but nobody is expecting a big change.)

It is now 8.45am and from his non-breakfast at the St Regis, Bonderman has to drive down to Wall Street to attend a meeting at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His driver is waiting. In another demonstration of Bonderman’s loyalty, I discover that Boris, a fierce Ukrainian, has been his driver in New York for the past 20 years. From the Fed’s fortress-like quarters, Bonderman will go directly to LaGuardia airport where his jet, “DB” written on its tail, will take him to Seattle to visit WaMu.

“You haven’t eaten those bananas,” he deadpans, finally forking a few slices as he pulls back his armchair. Then he wanders off distractedly, en route to further world domination, staff bowing in his wake.

Henny Sender is the FT’s international finance correspondent

......................

Astor Court
St Regis Hotel
Two East 55th Street at Fifth Avenue, New York

1 x cappuccino $12
1 x Bircher muesli with sliced banana $21
1 x orange juice $9

Total $42

American Males

Last year a few video trailers for Chad Kultgen’s novel The Average American Male came online. In one, a man bitches about the price of the dinner, demanding a blow job in return. In another, a man tells a girl he loves her only to get her to give him a blow job. And finally, over dinner with his girlfriend’s family, when the father asks, “We’re just wondering when we’re going to see a ring on our little girl’s finger,” the Average American Male replies, “As soon as she learns to swallow without gagging and take it up the ass without crying.”
If the novel itself had been as violently offensive as the ad campaign, it would have at least been interesting. Instead, Kultgen had about as much insight into the typical male psyche as Maxim. The only thing he really seemed to know was that men like blow jobs. How edgy.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is worried that this surge in misogyny — the violent porn, Girls Gone Wild, and I’m sure he would include The Average American Male — is one of the signs that something is wrong with our men. He previously blamed women for this trend in Hating Women: America’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex. His argument was something along the lines of, “Put some clothes on, tart.” Now he looks into the male half of the species in The Broken American Male: And How to Fix Him. He theorizes that the stunted adolescence, the frat-boy mentalities that are never outgrown, the high divorce rate, and the growing number of women who would rather live alone than with men demonstrate that there is something seriously wrong with the state of masculinity. It is our toxic culture that is destroying men.

Boteach provides a checklist to help diagnose brokenness. Does a man watch TV for more than two hours a night, drink daily, and look at pornography? Is he uninterested in sex and envious of his friends’ success? Boteach knows how to fix him. Most importantly, the man should be married if he’s not already. In Boteach’s world, women are the nurturers and the civilizing force. Men are the heroes and the heads of their households. With woman as the caretaker and man as the provider, we can create strong families with beloved children and happy parents. By redefining success in terms of a happy family, rather than financial gain, and by shutting out the culture of pornography and celebrity worship, man can become whole.

He does not blame feminism for the state of masculinity, or so he says. But having read his thoughts on femininity before, I read The Broken American Male wondering how long it would take before women became the problem. That would be 47 pages. “[M]en are with women who have in turn been with so many other men that the modern American male feels that his very anatomy is being measured against some standard that he cannot attain.” Sluts! I noticed that in his book about femininity he did not have a corresponding chapter about women’s bodies being compared to men’s former sexual partners, not to mention every woman on television, in movies, on billboards, in pornography; or that chick he saw on the elevator and used as a masturbatory fantasy earlier that day.

If anything, The Broken American Male is a 291-page argument for why women should not get married to men. Boteach tries to convince us that men and women need one another, and that their lives are fuller and happier together. We all know the statistics on how marriage benefits men, as they’re always trotted out on CNN Health during slow news days. Married men earn more money, live longer, lead healthier lives, and have more sex than unmarried men. No one talks about the benefits of marriage for women. That’s because the story there is much more complicated. Married women report feeling more content than single women, but marriage cuts women’s earning potential, increases the load of housework, and causes worse health, according to Anne Kingston’s The Meaning of Wife: A Provocative Look at Women and Marriage in the Twenty-First Century. If statistics aren’t enough to convince a woman to run screaming from a diamond ring, a few anecdotes from Boteach’s marriage counseling sessions should do it.

Sobbing through her words, [one woman] said, “My husband puts me down constantly. He finds fault in everything I do. Nothing is good enough… If I take the kids somewhere, he asks why I was out of the house. If I don’t take the kids anywhere, he calls me lazy. I can’t do anything right!”
…I asked [her husband], “Can you think of one good thing about your wife?” He paused for what seemed like a long while, then lifted his eyes at me and quietly said, “No.”

Men can’t help this verbal abuse when they’re broken because, “Men are not as sturdy as women. They are more compartmentalized, more naturally fragmented. Our culture has broken men further. But they were fragile from the beginning and ripe for breaking.”

Boteach has identified some symptoms of a problem, but he’s wrong about both the diagnosis and the treatment. He talks about culture as if it were a completely external, separate thing from mankind, as if we were just dropped here and the pornography and “soulless capitalism” are our natural predators. The solutions he offers — restoring man as the head of the household, assigning women the role of “nurturer” — have been tried before. They were called the 1950s, and they led to all sorts of social unrest, the sexual revolution, and second-wave feminism. I think we can go ahead and mark that down as not a real solution.





It’s the same diversionary tactic from the so-called culture wars. Blame pornography and abortion and godlessness for the ills of the modern man, instead of examining what might really be going on. Charlie LeDuff writes in the introduction to US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man, “Men crave dignity and fulfillment, and when they cannot attain those, they become unhappy, quarrelsome, small-minded, blowhards, overintellectuals, chauvinists, cowards, dopers, abstainers, aesthetes, racists, talk show know-it-alls and critics.” That explains books like Average American Male and Men Are Better Than Women by “Dick Masterson,” I suppose. (A typical sampling from Men Are Better: “A woman having babies is like an octopus shooting ink at a hungry shark. Except this octopus has six tentacles in the shark’s wallet and also whore paint all over its face.” It’s labeled as a humor book.)

Eight years ago, Susan Faludi published Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man and explained that the issue is economics, not culture. Things have decayed since then, as the government’s economic policies continues to erode the middle class, and blue-collar industries come close to disappearing all together.

Joe Bageant did not sit down with the intention of diagnosing the real problems of contemporary American men in Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War. But in his chapter on why the working poor in red states vote Republican, he nailed it. He catches up with an old friend — Tom Henderson —with whom Bageant used to smoke pot and talk about changing the world, only to find him working at a factory, watching Fox News, and voting Republican.

The seemingly hateful values that many working people display when it comes to sexuality and race are not rooted in any inherent malevolence. The Tom Henderson who once loved to play folk guitar on the porch at night did not mutate into the iron heart he is today of his own volition. Nam did part of it; the increasing brutality of the American workplace did most of the rest. Tom was strong enough to beat heroin but no match against the increasing meanness at the heart of our Republic…

[F]or the people, it is football and NASCAR and a republic free from married queers and trigger locks on guns. That’s what they voted for — an armed and moral republic. And that’s what we get when we stand by and watch the humanity get hammered out of our fellow citizens, letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit.

Meanwhile, when Rabbi Boteach creates scapegoats like feminism’s “masculinization” of women, it feeds the toxic atmosphere that creates the culture he so rails against. Boteach cannot heal the culture by trying to retreat to the fictional simplicity of a bygone era. • 30 April 2008

Happiness

Hedonic Man
The new economics and the pursuit of happiness.

Alan Wolfe



A REVOLUTION IN ECONOMICS (MUNICH LECTURES IN ECONOMICS)
By Bruno S. Frey
(MIT Press, 240 pp., $35)

PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: THE HIDDEN FORCES THAT SHAPE OUR DECISIONS
By Dan Ariely
(HarperCollins, 280 pp., $25.95)

I.

When I first began hearing about what Bruno S. Frey, professor of economics at the University of Zurich, calls the "revolution" in his discipline, my reaction was one of delight. As far as I was concerned, it could not happen fast enough. Neoclassical economists had insisted upon the primacy of self- interest only in order to model human behavior, but the way rational choice theory developed (at the University of Chicago in particular) suggested that self-interest was not just a fact for these thinkers, but also an ideal: not just how people do act but also how they should act. Their relentless advocacy of market-based public policies was finally ideological--and, by my lights, ideologically wrong. Also the jargon grew impenetrable, and the mathematics ostentatious and obnoxious. When Chicago-style economists started to apply their methods to other social science disciplines, and then to virtually all the perplexities of human life, the charge of academic imperialism could be added. Friedrich August von Hayek and Milton Friedman had always seemed to me to be marginal and somewhat bizarre thinkers, especially when compared to such intellectual titans as John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. The rapid spread of their ideas throughout so much of academia did not bode well for the future.

And so I was heartened by the first sustained attacks on neoclassical economics. For one thing, the thinkers who launched them--Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky--seemed to be geniuses of some sort. Both had good reason to become fascinated with how human beings make decisions. Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934 and raised in Paris; his family decided to remain in France after the Nazis took over the country, and then to rely on business connections to spring his father from the death camps, and then to move to Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel. Tversky, born in Haifa in 1937, earned, at the age of nineteen, Israel's highest military decoration, for rescuing a fellow soldier from an exploding device, in the process injuring himself. These men grew up under conditions that might have led them to divide the world into black and white, good and evil, but this did not happen. Instead they developed an appreciation of human complexity, even a love for it. "Some people were better than others," Kahneman described what he learned from his parents, "but the best were far from perfect and no one was simply bad."

The collaboration of Kahneman and Tversky produced one of the major intellectual accomplishments of the late twentieth century: a series of ingeniously designed experiments that raised uncomfortable questions about "utility maximization," which was the major assumption of microeconomics. To wit: it makes no difference in theory whether you lose a ticket to a play or lose the $10 that the ticket cost, but when people lose the ticket they are far less likely to buy another one than when they lose the money. Kahneman and Tversky's explanation is that we create a mental account such that it makes sense to us to pay $10 to see a play but not $20, even though the utility sacrificed by losing the ticket and the money is identical.

Tversky died of cancer in 1996. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, and is an emeritus professor at Princeton. Between them, they rattled the role of reason in the pantheon of human motives. They made clear that even if we think we know what is in our own best interest, we frequently make decisions based on misinformation, myopia, and plain quirkiness. The picture of human nature that they developed was--in contrast to the world of homo economicus-- ironic, skeptical, almost wickedly complex.

No single figure did more to bring the insights of these two economic psychologists (or psychological economists) to economics than Richard H. Thaler of the University of Chicago. "When I read this paper," he wrote of Kahneman and Tversky's classic article "Judgment Under Uncertainty," which appeared in 1974, "I could hardly contain myself." Although trained in neoclassical economics, Thaler developed something of a furtive addiction to what his immersion in psychology had revealed to him. In the 1970s he spent considerable time with Kahneman and Tversky, after which he published a series of papers applying their insights to a wide range of economic activity, especially those involving finance. Quasi Rational Economics, published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1991, collected those early papers and made them influential. The title of the volume suggested that we are not always rational and we are not always irrational. Yes, people deviate from the models of human behavior associated with neoclassical economics, but usually "in well-defined situations under careful laboratory controls," as well as "in natural settings such as the stock market." The theme of Thaler's book was that traditional economic assumptions about human behavior needed to be altered, not replaced.

What Kahneman and Tversky began and Thaler solidified is now frequently called behavioral economics. Its leading figures continue to sparkle. Steven D. Levitt, the co-author of Freakonomics, writes decent prose--or at least is willing to work with a journalist who does; and he, too, teaches at Chicago. The topics that behavioral economists address range far and wide, and often have little to do with the realm of getting and spending. They are interesting, intriguing, and sometimes too cute: raising children, deterring crime, gambling, choosing names. The public-policy implications associated with this way of thinking are anything but predictably right-wing, and in the person of Austan Goolsbee, another economist at Chicago who is also Barack Obama's chief economic adviser, they now figure prominently in American politics.

Thaler has recently collaborated with his former legal colleague Cass R. Sunstein (a frequent contributor to these pages) on a book called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which introduces a concept that the authors call "libertarian paternalism." This provocative oxymoron seeks a middle way between laissez-faire and the heavy hand of governmental regulation: public policy, by providing "choice architecture," can push people toward decisions that make the most overall sense, as opposed to coercing them or being indifferent to their preferences. Only time will tell whether "libertarian paternalism" offers a new way of thinking about public policy that can lead to major legislative accomplishment, or instead represents the kind of bland centrist politics that a decidedly non-Chicago economist, Paul Krugman, denounces as hopelessly naive. But there is no denying that just as Levitt brought behavioral economics to the best-seller lists, Thaler and Sunstein are bringing it to the think tanks and maybe even to the West Wing.

The revolution begun by Kahneman and Tversky is now some three decades old, and it is generating excitement well beyond the borders of academe--and so this is a good time to examine whether it has lived up to its promise. Bruno S. Frey's Happiness and Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational together offer a fine occasion to begin such a reckoning. Not all the revolutionaries in economics are discussed by Frey; the media star Levitt does not even make an appearance. Ariely, who teaches at MIT, helps to fill in the picture. Like Levitt, he has climbed the best-seller list with some of the most counterintuitive findings of behavioral economics. One is dry and humorless, the other is sprightly and inviting, but between them these books offer an overview of what this new economics is all about, and enable us to evaluate whether it is as innovative as its adherents claim.



II.

One major conviction drives the new economics. Economists used to believe that it was unnecessary to measure utility except in this way: the price that a person was willing to pay for something established its utility, and so there was no need to dig any deeper, to examine what was driving the psyche of the economic actor. But the behavioral revolution in economics challenges this assumption. It is based on the idea that we must look into that black box called the human mind to find out whether the things that we say we want really do give us pleasure. Utility, after the revolution, is no longer abstract. It is lived, experienced; it is existential. And fortunately, or so these books argue, the field of psychology has uncovered timely and fascinating truths about the ways our minds work, and these insights may breathe new life into the old idea of utility. Hedonic psychology, happiness research, behavioral economics, economic psychology, the study of well-being, judgment and decision-making--call it what you want. Suddenly everything we thought we knew about economics begins to look different.

Happiness, of course, is anything but a new idea in Western thought. It is, for one thing, the core principle of utilitarianism, the philosophical outlook associated with James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, according to which the most accurate description of human beings is that they seek pleasure and avoid pain. Dickens rather brutally satirized the utilitarians with the unforgettable character of Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times, and ever since the notion of human beings as calculators of pain and pleasure has been subject to the withering criticism of philosophers, who have shown that utilitarianism pays inadequate attention to the full complexity of human decision-making, particularly in the moral sphere.

But the new economics proceeds in perfect indifference to Gradgrind and the philosophers. It is, in fact, a revival of utilitarianism. In 1999, the Russell Sage Foundation published Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, edited by Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener, and Norbert Schwarz. Intended as a major statement of the new field's potential, the volume included Kahneman's seminal essay "Objective Happiness," in which he tells the following story. Someone tells us that Helen had been happy in March. How do we know? If the issue is how sick Helen had been, we would know how to answer the question. Suppose Helen's temperature had been taken every ten minutes for every day of the month. With that data we could plot the results and come up with an answer that any objective observer could accept: if Helen had never registered a fever during that time, we could conclude incontrovertibly that she had been well. We need not even have monitored her so carefully. If her temperature readings had been sampled at random intervals, we could still decide, with a statistically ascertainable degree of certainty, that her health had been fine.

Is happiness any different? No, according to Kahneman, at least not in theory. The Victorian economist Francis Edgeworth, a disciple of Bentham, understood as much: he anticipated using a "hedonimeter" to measure the goodness or the badness of the things that we encounter in daily life. Edgeworth, Kahneman believes, was on the right track. It is true that the mind is a complex thing and we are unlikely ever to have perfect measures of what the neo-utilitarian Kahneman calls "instant utility," or the immediate good sensations or bad sensations that register in our minds every time we encounter something in the world. Still, weaker measures of instant utility are available to us. Why not sample Helen's feelings just as we sample her temperature?

"Helen might be probed at irregular intervals by a beeper mounted in a special watch, which also displays a scale on which she can select a value that describes the GB [good-bad] value of the moment," Kahneman suggests. It still might be difficult for her to compare the pleasure of eating a slice of key lime pie with, say, the pleasure of an orgy with six of her friends. (This is my example, not Kahneman's.) Still, all is not lost. Helen can simply be instructed about the scales appropriate for different kinds of experiences. "Fantastic" can have one meaning in the context of a dessert and another in the context of group sex, and any subject can learn which attributes best go with which experiences. (Sex, as we learn from another tool of the new economics-- the Day Reconstruction Method, which asks people to recall everything they did on a particular day--takes up on average ten minutes out of every twenty-four hours, compared to socializing and relaxing, which occupies 120 minutes.)

Helen, of course, does not exist. This is a thought experiment. The premise of Kahneman's article is that we should not be satisfied with the techniques available to measure happiness, but should think more about what happiness actually is, and then develop techniques appropriate to it. Some types of experiences "will eventually be clarified by studies of relevant brain activities." Helen "could eventually learn" to compare pleasures across different realms of life. Greater validity of the kinds of reports that Helen gives "may emerge from research on the neuropsychology and psychophysiology of affect." Some day, in other words, Edgeworth's hedonimeter will be a staple of academic departments of psychology and economics, and that day may well come soon: "The movement from science fiction to practical application is likely to be rapid in this domain." Writing in the future tense may seem an odd choice for a social scientist interested in people's behavior in the here-and-now, but every proclaimed revolution in the social sciences--from the behavioral revolution in political science of the 1950s to the fascination with evolutionary theory today--promises something new around the corner.



Kahneman's essay was published almost a decade ago. Where are we now? If Frey's book is any indication, the revolution in economics has taken a giant step backward. Happiness, Frey tells us, need not be established objectively at all. We can instead rely on what he calls "reported subjective well-being." Even if you have not heard this term, you most likely know to what it refers. Surveys routinely ask people questions like this one, which is included in the Euro-Barometer Survey: "On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with the life you lead?" And that, pretty much, is Frey's exciting new method. Take people's answers, run the correlations with other variables, and get your findings. And so we learn that people who watch a lot of television are less likely to say that they are satisfied with their lives than people who watch less. This is important, Frey concludes, because it shows that "individuals have systematically imperfect foresight and control over their own behavior in a major present-day human activity." They know that watching television is not good for their happiness, but, being weak of will, they do it anyway.

From the standpoint of the right to privacy, I confess to being, well, happy that economists are not using hand-held computers to monitor people's thoughts every fifteen minutes or so. But from the standpoint of what we know about the world, it seems anything but revolutionary for economists to rely on surveys that have been around, relatively unchanged, for more than half a century. Asking people how they feel about their lives is something that social scientists do because it is something that social scientists can do. Anyone who has conducted a survey knows how imperfect a measure of anything it is. Indeed, it was precisely because the answers people give to questions are so dependent upon random events or arbitrary word order that Kahneman began his quest for the holy grail of scientistic precision. Frey recognizes these limitations, and cites a paper by Norbert Schwarz and Fritz Stark in Well-Being that leaves the validity of such subjective reports in tatters. Still, he winds up using them anyway. "It is a sensible tradition in economics to rely on the judgment of the persons directly involved," he maintains. "People are reckoned to be the best judges of the overall quality of their lives, and it is a straightforward strategy to ask them about their well-being."

If this is the best Frey can do, it helps to explain why old Edgeworth is not in the economics Hall of Fame. People buy televisions, including very expensive high-definition ones. They sign cabletelevision contracts that cost more than their electric bills. They spend time in front of the television that could be spent accumulating higher incomes--or, for that matter, enjoying their daily ten minutes of sex. Does this mean that watching television makes them happy? There can never be a perfect answer to that question: it is no more likely that our minds possess something called H, a constant measure of happiness applicable to all forms of experience, than that they possess something called G, general intelligence that can be measured through testing.

The proper question, therefore, is not whether happiness is better measured objectively or subjectively. It is, rather, the question of which of the many imperfect measures of happiness we ought to rely upon. If Frey is right that people are the best judges of their own lives, shouldn't we rely on the preferences revealed by their judgment to buy and watch television? After all, price is measured ordinally: $100 is one hundred times greater than $1. But life satisfaction, by contrast, is measured cardinally: the extent to which "very satisfied" is better than "satisfied" has to be established arbitrarily. Between two imperfect metrics, surely it is better to choose the one with fewer measurement problems. That is why economists started assuming that income can be used to measure welfare, or price to ascertain utility to any particular person.

Purchasing a television is not, of course, a life-and-death decision--which suggests that when we move away from the commodities of everyday life to more serious issues, we might be justified in using subjective methods. But this does not follow. The Scandinavian countries have high suicide rates. Suicide is generally associated with depression. May we conclude, then, that Scandinavians are unhappy? That, too, is a hard question to answer, especially because Scandinavians generally tell survey researchers that they are satisfied with their lives: 64 percent of Danes, for example, compared with 16 percent of the French. Here we have a choice between two measures of happiness, both of them problematic: suicide rates, which, while not always accurate--in more religious societies coroners are likely to record suicide as death by natural causes--are at least factual; and subjective well-being, which is deeply imprecise and dependent upon mood. Which to choose?

For Frey, this is a no-brainer: he downplays suicide rates, explaining them away, without providing any evidence, by saying that Scandinavians also have high divorce rates and tend not to believe in God. Emile Durkheim long ago demonstrated that suicide rates tell us something about social solidarity (as do divorce rates, by the way); but Frey insists that subjective measures of well-being have an advantage that outweighs more objective data. Alas for the cause of science, this advantage has little to with reliability or validity, but a lot to do with money: "The great advantages of this measurement approach lie in its good performance relative to its cost and its availability for a large number of countries and periods." Frey's preference for subjectivity is determined objectively: by price.

All this might not be a problem if the findings established by relying on subjective well-being taught us things we otherwise would not have understood. But just as revolutions in social science are always predicting future benefits that never seem to materialize, they also possess an unfortunate tendency to nail down exceptionally trivial findings. Frey's revolution is no exception. Imagine a graph in which we rank on the vertical axis answers to questions about life satisfaction by country, and on the horizontal axis the number of terrorist incidents experienced in those countries. It turns that people who live without terrorism are happier with their lives than people who live with it. I don't know how much government officials would be willing to pay for such allegedly revolutionary advice, but if I were told by my expensive consultants that "curbing terrorists is ... important to making the population happier," I would ask for my money back.

And so it goes. Unemployed people are less happy than those with jobs. People who live in rich countries are happier than those who live in poor ones. Inflation harms individual well-being. Married people are happier than single people. Americans are made less unhappy by economic inequality than Europeans. I guess it is good that someone has come along and established these things. But is this a science, let alone a scientific revolution? Give me rational choice theory any day: at least in my own area of concern, the sociology of religion, it has established one surprising finding, which is that even when it comes to matters involving another world, people pick and choose their faith based on its costs and benefits in this one.



III.

The social sciences are not just empirical; they are normative, too. It was precisely the insistent normative preference for market-based social arrangements that turned me against Chicago School economics. Governmental regulation is always sub-optimal, they inevitably maintained. Individual freedom is worth more than social equality. If market logic works for firms, surely it can work for recruiting an army, fighting poverty, or providing kidneys. Non-Chicago economists were subtler about these matters, and at times questioned the reliance on markets; but for the many sons and daughters of Milton Friedman, we are hard-wired to be rational choosers, and any efforts we make to direct the course of our actions collectively are bound to fail. Myself, I do not believe that any of these propositions bring us closer to a good society. Other people feel differently. Democracy requires that we argue out our differences. But democratic debate is not well served by pretending that the empirical findings of a single controversial approach in a single academic discipline contain definitive answers to these questions.

Despite all this, Frey believes that a focus on happiness can help us resolve some of the normative questions that we face. Is democracy a good form of government? If so, is more democracy better than less? Relying upon surveys of reported well-being, Frey answers both questions in the affirmative. And there is a superficial plausibility to this line of argument; the Declaration of Independence, as Frey points out, mentions happiness as one of the rights endowed to us by our creator, and at least one major political philosopher, Aristotle, insisted on the importance of eudaimonia, which is usually translated as happiness. There is, moreover, a remarkable correlation between democracy and subjective happiness: one study of twenty-eight countries showed the lowest percentage of very happy people in Hungary, Russia, Latvia, and Slovakia, all very recent democracies, and the highest in such well-established democratic societies as Ireland, the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. And then, of course, there is the authority of Bentham, who argued that society ought to be organized to provide the greatest good to the greatest number of people; if democracy does that, as the evidence seems to show, then democracy is normatively preferable to nondemocracy on utilitarian grounds.

Here, alas, is where utilitarianism's severe limitations come into play. Although he was raised on the idea, John Stuart Mill eventually found utilitarianism far too limiting to account for what is most valuable in human existence--as he famously put it, "Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." For all its identification with happiness, utilitarianism (its critics rightly claim) all too often rationalizes cruelty. As Bernard Williams once pointed out, it would justify the decision of someone who murders one person to save twenty people, and such a justification, by focusing only on the consequences of our actions, leaves no room for considerations of integrity and recognizes no moral commands against killing. Along similar lines, when the animal-rights activist and committed utilitarian Peter Singer argued that it is justified to kill infants who suffer from Down syndrome, he did not exactly improve utilitarianism's ethical reputation. Philosophers continue to debate Bentham's legacy, and distinctions and qualifications multiply, but it would be difficult to find any modern moral theory more discredited than this one. If you believe that human beings come equipped with a conscience capable of distinguishing between right and wrong, then you ought not to go where Bentham wishes to lead you. But the revolution in economics now proclaims--as Kahneman (along with Peter P. Wakker and Rakesh Sarin) put it in an article in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1997--that we should go "back to Bentham." It appears that Kahneman, Frey, and others in this tradition will take a satisfied fool any day.

But are democratic societies happy because they are composed of satisfied fools? Utilitarianism cannot answer that question. It can demand that societies ought to be evaluated for the happiness that they produce, but it cannot tell us, at least not without being tautological, why we ought to prefer happiness in the first place. For Frey it is simply self-evident that we should prefer happiness to unhappiness. But Mill, for one, was not convinced that this would always be the case. The remarkable chapter on the "Crisis In My Mental History" in his Autobiography hauntingly documents his disillusionment with the enshrining of happiness as the highest human goal. And in his brilliant and affecting essays on Bentham and Coleridge, he made his preference for the latter unmistakable. What was lacking in Bentham, Mill argued, was a full humanity, which must include a tragic sense of life. Poets, by contrast, when they peer deeply into the nature of things, do not reveal much that is pleasant; but for all their melancholy, they shed light on what it means to be human. In art, in philosophy, in religion, in all the inquiries into the meaning of human life, an unhappy consciousness may take us further toward understanding than a Bovary-like contentment.

The same is decidedly not true of politics, of course, where discontent all too often is accompanied by blood. Yet the notion that we should prefer democracy to other forms of government because democracy better maximizes happiness is too Brave New World-ish even for Frey to accept. Western societies consider wealth important, and so they develop a measure of it called gross national product to judge their progress. If happiness is important, then we ought to have a "national happiness indicator" to measure how far we have come. Frey ponders the idea, but he elects not to endorse it. He worries that benevolent dictators might arise who will attempt to make people happy over their objections. He points out that once we begin to use measures of personal satisfaction-- eudaemonistic standards--for policy purposes, people might begin to lie about how satisfied they really are. Far better, then, that economists should simply study happiness and make policy recommendations, but leave individuals free to decide whether or not to follow them. If they do, fine. The choice for Frey, as for the neoclassical tradition in economics, ought to be left to the individual.

But what if people reject the option that gives them the greatest amount of happiness? In line with his preference for individual choice, Frey wants to leave that option open to them--but when people exercise it, surely they are expressing a preference for something other than happiness, whether it be autonomy, self-esteem, loyalty, or a recognition that it would in fact be wrong to take a life even if your actions improved the overall happiness of your fellow citizens. And so even though we are told on the first page of Frey's book that "the ultimate goal of most human beings is to be happy," we are informed at the end of the book that "whether happiness is the ultimate goal of individuals, or whether it is only one of several goals, constitutes a deep and much-discussed question in philosophy," and is therefore by implication not resolvable by economists. It took Frey an entire book written on behalf of the priority of happiness to conclude that it might not have such a high priority after all. And after this breathless tour through the new economics, we are left to understand that economics will not do the trick. Frey is certainly right about the limitations of economics in the matter of the most profound questions of human life. But there is also another implication that is not addressed: if happiness is only one of many goals that human beings seek, then making happiness central to economics is unlikely to cause much of a revolution in the field.

Even more serious problems emerge when Frey tries to make the case that more democracy is better than less democracy. By more democracy, Frey refers to such forms of direct voter participation as the initiative, the referendum, and the recall. In Switzerland, where Frey lives, it is possible to correlate where people stand on the life-satisfaction survey with the extent to which their cantons rely on direct democracy: the greater the participation of ordinary people, he reports, the greater the happiness. The same is not quite true in the United States, where states with direct democracy provide fewer services for their citizens, but (Frey hopefully adds) also spend more on education. The United States, moreover, like Switzerland, has a federal system of government, and federalism, he argues, promotes happiness as well, because decentralized and overlapping political units are more democratic than highly centralized and authoritative ones.

Except for trying to show how economists can address problems faced by other social science disciplines, Frey is not particularly interested in what those disciplines have to offer, and so he ignores the large body of research conducted by political scientists showing the flaws of direct democracy. (To cite only one example, this one involving happiness: California's initiative process is fueled by substantial levels of cynicism toward politicians, and, by promising more than it can deliver, it adds to public frustration with politics. ) But this is the least of his problems. For when he addresses the problem of democracy in explicitly normative terms, Frey actually finds himself advocating something that would not allow individuals to exercise much control over the political decisions that are made on their behalf.

The problem, as he analyzes it, comes down to this: in the absence of competition, political leaders will form "cartels" designed to "exploit the voters." Direct democracy is therefore a good thing, because it breaks up such monopolies, which, in turn, explains why members of the political cartel oppose such populist measures. Empirically speaking, Frey offers no evidence for this claim--most likely because there is none: referenda almost never emerge from below, but are usually the product of one elite group trying to rally public support in order to defeat another elite group. The same is true of federalism. It was enshrined in the American system of government not to extend democracy but to protect slavery, and "state's rights" has been the rallying cry of regional elites ever since. In the real world, both direct democracy and federalism further elite control, and for one obvious reason: in any kind of democracy, representative or direct, people do not themselves rule, but choose the leaders who do. The more power those leaders have, the better able they are to deliver to the people what they want. By dismissing political leaders as little more than members of a self-interest cartel--economists of both the neoclassical and happiness persuasions find as many cartels in politics as they fail to find in business--Frey's preference for direct democracy and federalism would weaken democracy rather than strengthen it.

On normative as well as empirical grounds, then, the kind of economics that Frey rejects seems preferable to the kind that he espouses. Toward the end of his book, Frey proposes what he calls "positive Constitutional economics." Rules would be created to prohibit politicians from exploiting citizens. (Frey does not say who would make those rules.) Judges would be charged with enforcing the rules. Citizens could veto legislation and legislators could veto citizen initiatives. Federalism would be strengthened by decentralizing power, not to the states but to an entirely new political element that would have limited and defined functions, allow citizens to opt in or opt out, and organize people on the basis of commonly chosen interests as opposed to "archaic nationalism committed to pieces of land." Frey calls his preferred form of federalism "FOCJ," for units that are functional, overlapping, competing, and jurisdictional. We already have some sense of how they work; the process by which states outbid each other to attract business comes fairly close to his model. And we know what such a system produces: a race to the bottom, leaving everyone--except a few CEOs and stockholders--unhappy.

None of Frey's empirical findings are revolutionary, but his normative conclusions certainly are. Modestly, Frey calls them "to some extent radical, but not outlandish." In fact, they are radical and outlandish. At least the old Chicago School economics advocated a minimal state. Frey advocates no state at all, at least not in the sense in which nation-states have been the primary focus for political action in the modern world.



IV.

Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational is the latest book by a behavioral economist to hit the jackpot. The reason for its popularity is not hard to discover. The experiments that it describes are as titillating as they are ingenious. Here is one of them. People were asked some rather suggestive questions, such as whether they would find it exciting to spank their sexual partners or to be tied up by them during the sexual act. After their answers were duly recorded, they were asked if they would be willing to respond to the same questions, only this time at the height of sexual arousal produced by masturbation. It turns out that when we are aroused we are completely different than when we are not aroused: we are more hospitable to risk, more irresponsible, more emotional. Ariely therefore concludes that people who have no idea what they will think or do when aroused cannot know themselves very well, and the implications are dramatic: "Our models of human behavior need to be rethought. Perhaps there is no such thing as a fully integrated human being. We may, in fact, be an agglomeration of multiple selves."

Before one concludes that behavioral economists are obsessed with sex, it should be pointed out that the masturbation experiment is the only one discussed by Ariely that requires this particular kind of self-help. The others are designed to show just how odd our behavior can be in the circumstances of everyday life. Ariely and his colleagues set up a stand and offer Lindt truffles for 15 cents and Hershey's Kisses for a penny: 73 percent of their customers choose the former, 27 percent the latter. Then they lower the price of the truffle to 14 cents and offer the Hershey Kiss for free, and now 69 percent choose the Kiss and only 31 percent the truffle. Calculating utility cannot explain this result. In both cases, the cost difference is identical. So it seems that we attach an almost mystical meaning to the idea of getting something for nothing. Zero is not just another number. It plays tricks with our rational minds.

Each chapter in Ariely's book explores a similar conundrum. We attach a higher value to the things we own and are trying to sell than to the things other people own and are trying to sell to us. We try to keep as many options open as possible, even though we are actually better off with fewer. We procrastinate, even when it makes us worse off to do so. We consider it perfectly normal to pay for a meal in a restaurant, but rude and impolite to pay for a meal prepared by a mother-in-law. Our seemingly independent decisions are inevitably influenced by the decisions made by others. Instead of wanting a product and then ascertaining how much it costs, we let the cost of a product determine whether we want it. In sum, Shakespeare was way off the mark when he wrote, "What a piece of work is a man." If anything, Ariely concludes from all the experiments he lays out in loving detail, "we are not noble in reason, not infinite in faculty, and rather weak in apprehension."

If Shakespeare was wrong, it should not surprise us that economists, at least those not blessed with the insights of this radical new approach, are wrong as well. Like Frey, Ariely concludes that his discipline needs a revolution. "We are all far less rational in our decision making than standard economic theory assumes," he asserts. "Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless--they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains." Those are bold words. If they are true, then not only is economics in trouble, but just about everything we believe about the way our societies ought to be organized is wrong. We should not have an economic system that encourages rampant self-interest. Public policy should not be designed around strictly economic incentives. Subsidies for business, the provision of pensions to the elderly, and (of immediate relevance to the masturbation experiment) the way we control the consequences of teenage sexuality--all this will have to be rethought to take account of how we actually behave, as opposed to how economists have long told us we should behave. All these, I hasten to add, are conclusions that, normatively speaking, I like: better to have health care provided to all with government help than to rely on the selfinterest of doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies. The problem is that the evidence Ariely offers in their support does not support them.

Before we start pulping all the economics textbooks, let alone rethinking a century's worth of public policy, we ought to pay a bit more attention to the actual details of Ariely's experiments. Consider the masturbators. This experiment involved a fairly narrow segment of the American population: all the subjects were male, young, and students. Why them and not, say, fiftysomething housewives? Ariely justifies his decision to focus solely on men because "in terms of sex, their wiring is a lot simpler than that of women." He does not tell us why he chose students, but we can guess: students are plentifully available, and securing their participation is cheap. Daniel Kahneman hoped that economic psychology could figure out what it needed to study and then develop the appropriate technologies; but in reality, as both of these books demonstrate, it works the other way. Technique comes first in the new economics, just as it did in the old, and conclusions follow. Ariely may want us to believe that his findings are startling; his methods, however, could not be more conventional. Survey researchers have been asking the same kinds of questions for ages, and psychologists have been studying students since experimental psychology was first developed as an academic discipline.

No one should underestimate the difficulty of persuading people to participate in psychological experiments. Availability is an important consideration in such research, which is one reason why psychologists continue to probe the behaviors of students, even though it has long been recognized that relying on them introduces bias into the results. At best, what we learn about some students might tell us things about all students, although it is still rather hard to imagine students at a conservative Christian college agreeing to answer questions while masturbating. At worst, and the worst is all too common, male students at MIT or Berkeley tell us only about male students at MIT or Berkeley, and perhaps not all that much about foreign students, older students, or female students.

Ariely is obligated to remind his readers, most of whom are neither psychologists nor economists, of the problems of selection bias that follow from his over- reliance on students as subjects. But he fails to do so. In fact, he does the opposite: he generalizes from MIT classrooms to humankind as a whole, and with abandon. This might be called the technique of the Big Slip, gliding imperceptibly from a controlled and artificial experiment to breathtaking generalizations about matters that have puzzled philosophers and theologians through the ages. It makes for entertaining reading. Alas, it tells us little about the kind of creatures we are. One simply cannot go from oversexed young men to conclusions about how our brains are wired, especially when, as Ariely himself has pointed out, women are wired differently from men. Not everyone is divided internally between placid normality and wild passion. Some people are asexual. Others opt for chastity. Still others are sexually omnivorous. What a work is man, and woman, indeed.



Besides selection bias, there exists another reason to question experiments that use students as subjects. The problem is not just that students are young, disproportionately affluent, often inebriated--Ariely conducted some of his experiments in bars--and (if they are psych majors) self-selected. The problem is also that they are in college or graduate school and not yet out in the world. Experience with the world teaches us many things. One of them might be how to better control our emotions during sexual arousal. Another lesson is that there is no such thing as a free Hershey's Kiss. (Although Ariely used MIT students for one of his experiments about free candy--indeed, he even used nine- year-old trick-or-treaters--he also used shoppers in a mall.) A third lesson is that doors in life close as you get older. And a fourth is that there are some things you simply cannot postpone. This is usually called learning, which may confidently be defined as absorbing experiences so that the decisions you make are neither predictable nor irrational.

Generally, though not always, we learn with age. There is a term for that as well, and it is maturation. By basing so many of his findings on students, Ariely concentrates on people who have learned little and matured less. No wonder they are irrational--and predictably so. They are precisely at that stage of life when they tend not to think about other people, the future, or even the mess in their rooms. They are not only different from other people; they are different from the kinds of people they will become when they accumulate more experience of life. It makes a certain amount of sense to do experiments with them. It would make more sense to repeat the same experiments not when they are aroused, but when they are older. If rats can learn, surely MIT students can as well.

And if all this were not enough, Ariely's descriptions of his experiments with students contain yet another flaw: none of his experiments fail. Whether or not our irrationalities are predictable, Ariely's chapters are--and relentlessly so. Each chapter begins with a description of the way we are supposed to make decisions, and proposes some clever ways of testing the proposition, and--lo and behold--discovers through an experiment that this is not how we make them at all. Now, if I went shopping for a car and was told by the dealer that the used car he is selling happens to be perfect--that many tests were conducted on it and it passed every one with flying colors--I would be inclined to distrust the information that he was providing. All cars have flaws, if you look long enough. I confess to feeling much the same way about what Ariely is trying to sell me. I have been a social scientist long enough to know that not every hypothesis is always confirmed: neither life nor social science works that way. Either Ariely is the greatest designer of psychological experiments who ever lived, or he is failing to include in his thesis-driven book experiments that show that people can behave rationally after all.

It sounds harsh to say, especially about a social scientist who so clearly loves what he does, but in the absence of any accounts of failed experiments, it is difficult to take what Ariely tells us at face value. Which would you rather have, he asks at one point, a free $10 gift certificate or a $20 gift certificate for which you must pay $7? When I read that, the rational answer was immediately obvious. But Ariely claims that "most" people at a Boston mall irrationally chose the one that saved them $10 rather than the one that saved them $13. So curious minds want to know: how many is "most"? What differentiated those who chose the one option from those who chose the other? Were people given five seconds to answer, or a minute? Even if a statistically significant number of people chose the wrong answer, does this mean that they are irrational or just mathematically challenged? Falsifiability, one of the cardinal inclinations of scientific inquiry, just does not seem to happen in Ariely's research. He calls himself a scientist, but the methods that he describes lack any appreciation of the many false starts, delayed gratifications, and unexpected findings that are invariably part and parcel of the scientific enterprise.

No wonder, then, that when we move from the flaws inherent in the experiments that Ariely conducts to the sweeping statements of the human condition that he draws from them, we are still on the shakiest of grounds. Ariely describes what he calls the "main lesson" from his experiments this way: "We are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend." In which case it is not just economics that needs a revolution, but philosophy as well. Kant's insistence on autonomy, the importance that Mill attached to individual self-development, even the religiously inspired ideal that we can model ourselves on the image of God--all these notions represent an impossible dream. Since students in experiments cannot figure out what makes the most sense for them economically, we must reject the Enlightenment.

It is not Adam Smith's conception of the free market that Ariely seems willing to throw out; it is his entire moral philosophy. The interests can no longer control the passions. There are no impartial spectators. The market will not set us free, because our fate is in the hands of forces beyond our control. Perhaps you can begin to see why, in comparison to this, there might be something to be said for Smith-influenced neoclassical economics after all. However limited their imaginations, rational choosers are not pawns.

Ariely eventually wakes up to where his analysis is leading him--and decides that he does not wish to go there. "Once we understand when and where we may make erroneous decisions," he writes on the last page of his book, "we can try to be more vigilant, force ourselves to think differently about our decisions, or use technology to overcome our inherent shortcomings." This is encouraging, even optimistic--but it stands in rather sharp opposition to all the conclusions that Ariely draws from his experiments. He is strikingly similar to his masturbating students, only in reverse: the Dan Ariely who gets all excited about describing the details of his research does not seem to know the Dan Ariely who finally gets around to pondering their implications in relative calm. An agglomeration of multiple selves, indeed.

Of all the Victorians, it is not Edgeworth or Mill who should have the last word on Ariely. That honor falls to the mathematician Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, "it means just what I choose it to mean, nothing more, nothing less." The same is true of Ariely. Our shortcomings are "inherent," but we can nonetheless overcome them. Our irrationalities are "predictable," but they are also correctable. Our brains are "wired," but we still have free will. We are "pawns" in a game of chess, but we can also act, if not like queens, then at least like bishops. By the time I finished Predictably Irrational I had pretty much the same view of human beings as when I began: imperfect creatures, but also quite capable of improving on their condition by learning from their mistakes. Some revolution.



IV.

The approaches of Bruno Frey and Dan Ariely goad us in slightly different directions. Ariely cares not a whit whether munching Lindt truffles or Hershey's Kisses actually improves our happiness, while one can easily imagine Frey correlating their respective consumption rates with measures of life satisfaction in every Swiss canton. (Lindt was founded in Frey's Zurich.) Still, the parallels between them are striking, and it is not just their common indebtedness to Daniel Kahneman and, by extension, to Amos Tversky. Both authors begin with a radically simple premise: in one case, that happiness is our greatest priority; in the other, that we always act irrationally. Both spend whole books demonstrating that, as a consequence of their blinding insight, the discipline of economics needs to be overhauled. And both conclude that the world is not so simple: we seek goals other than happiness; and for all our irrational predictability, we can be both rational and unpredictable. Each author announces a revolution and then, before closing, offers an epitaph for its passing.

One has to wonder why the revolution in economics failed so badly even before it really got off the ground. Neoclassical economics may in some ways be preferable to what the revolutionaries offer, but it remains a vulnerable approach, stuck in unrealistic assumptions about human behavior and all too complacent about the beneficial equilibria established by markets. Nor can one deny the ingeniousness of the early days of economic psychology, especially the inventive puzzles that Kahneman and Tversky devised. If ever a field were ripe for revolution, it is economics. Yet if these two books are any indication, supply and demand, marginal utility, rational choice, and cost-benefit analysis are not going away. At best, economists will tweak their models a bit to account for some of our odder calculations. More likely, they will simply reiterate their belief that we need not examine the internal mechanisms of utility satisfaction because the price someone is willing to pay for something is really all we need to know.

Since they fail so conspicuously to live up to what they promise, these books reveal more about the sociology of the academy than they do about the behavior of ordinary people. The rules of academic life seem to require two inclinations--and they work at cross-purposes. One is that each generation must set out to topple the findings and the methods of the previous one, which means that we always seem to have a "new social history" or a "linguistic turn" or a "cognitive revolution." (Even neoclassical economics, which is presumably about to give way to hedonics, was the enfant terrible of the discipline not that long ago, intent on toppling Keynesianism.) It is all-important to be at the cutting edge. You have to a write a dissertation showing that someone else was wrong. The bigger the apple cart you overturn, the better your chances for success. Like Newton, academics stand on the shoulders of giants--but they stand upon them to bury them.

At the same time, the academic world, for all its leftism in politics, is a strikingly conservative world in temperament. Innovation and individual initiative are distrusted. Tenure rewards those whose accomplishments are dated and punishes those who are too daring. You must show deference to your elders, or, as they are called in the academic world, your mentors. It is not good to call too much attention to yourself in what you write. The rules of advancement are strict, and everyone understands them: if you fail to follow them, the fault is your own. If you want to think for yourself, try the business world.

In line with the side of academic life that insists upon the new, those committed to economic psychology quickly moved beyond thought experiments to grand proclamations. Thaler's Quasi Rational Economics was cautious about touting the insights offered by the new approach, but much that came afterward would dispense with wishy-washy qualifiers such as "quasi." ("Our aim in editing this book," reads the preface to Well-Being, "was not at all modest: we hoped to announce the existence of a new field of psychology.") Academics tire of approaches the way consumers tire of goods; there are conferences to be organized, special issues of journals to be published, departments to be rebuilt, best-sellers to be written. Why proclaim a revision when you can announce a revolution?

At one and the same time, however, the self-proclaimed revolutionaries, for all the enthusiasm with which they announce their discoveries, hew carefully to the old ways of doing things. Bruno Frey's book conforms to all the conventions of academic discourse. True, English is not Frey's first language, yet his relentless use of the passive voice and reliance on deadly prose have more to do with the way economics is written than with the way German is written. Like economists of any persuasion, Frey wants to be protective of his own discipline's turf even as he ventures onto the turf of others. He, like others in his discipline, can only correlate; he cannot establish causality. Neoclassical economists may not like what Frey has to say, but they will recognize the way he says it. Reading Frey, we are worlds away from the era in which economists were learned outside their field and wrote books that would become classics of human understanding.

Dan Ariely's contribution is also, in its own way, quite conventional. It is true that he challenges the near-religious conviction with which economists cling to the idea of rationality. But Ariely's subjects are consumers all the same, constantly on the lookout for bargains, even if they are not always shrewd enough to obtain them. (For both these economists, shopping--or, more generally, spending--is the archetypal human activity.) Behavioral economists, Ariely included, are fascinated by gambling, an arena in which people constantly misread the odds against them. But the people they study are not Pascalian bettors wondering about divine grace, nor are they statesmen pondering the risks of going to war. The errors of judgment they make are small ones. Little is at stake in the questions they are asked about chocolate candies, and even less because the circumstances in which they are asked those questions are so artificial. When it comes to human understanding, the ambitions of the revolution are paltry. What began as a movement marked by a curious, if not actually humanistic, sensibility has transformed itself into a one-dimensional vision of human nature in which the perfect rationality of neoclassical economics is replaced by an equally simple-minded conception of human beings as either happiness maximizers or perfect fools.

Ariely's contribution could not be more different from the work of most neoclassical economists: he is willing to write for a popular audience and thus to face the special scorn that academics reserve for those who sell many books. (Even here, though, Milton Friedman was the pioneer.) Ariely adheres to the conventions of successful nonfiction writing as fiercely as Frey does to the conventions of university-press publication. Predictably Irrational is filled with lots of advice to ordinary people dressed up with the authority of science; with descriptions of experiments meant to make the author seem risque; with confessional asides giving readers insights into the person whose words they are reading. (Ariely, although born in New York, grew up in Israel, and he writes movingly about his recovery from serious burn injuries suffered at the age of eighteen when a flare exploded in his presence. I leave it to others more familiar with Israel to ponder what it is about the Israeli experience that prods one to looks beyond classical rationality.)

In his autobiographical comments written on the occasion of winning the Nobel Prize, Kahneman wrote about Tversky this way: "Amos was often described by people who knew him as the smartest person they knew. He was also very funny, with an endless supply of jokes appropriate to every nuance of a situation. In his presence, I became funny as well, and the result was that we could spend hours of solid work in continuous mirth." Like them, and at times like Steven Levitt, Ariely aims to tickle the funny bones of his readers. There is a smartalecky quality to behavioral economics.

Reading the insistence of Ariely and others who maintain that everyone who studied human beings before behavioral economics came along was wrong, I conclude that we should once and for all stop calling for revolutions in our understanding of ourselves, and end this remarkable presumption. In the long history of humankind, the social sciences were developed only recently, but we have been trying to figure ourselves out since we first began to think. It defies the imagination that one new methodology or theoretical assumption is going to topple all previous efforts to understand the human condition. Sometimes revolutions in our understanding of the world do happen--they tell me that Albert Einstein led one (and that, having done so, he spent the rest of his life running down the wrong paths)--but they are rare in the physical sciences, and they are next to nonexistent in the social sciences. Human beings are indeed charming and perverse and altogether fascinating creatures, and the study of ourselves is among the richest of intellectual endeavors. We ought to give ourselves a bit more credit than the revolutionists of the social sciences extend to us: we pursue many goals at the same time, and we do so in all kinds of predictable and unpredictable ways.

And yet it is possible to understand us--slowly, patiently, in fits and starts, and with due respect for those who have been studying us for so long. That is why the history of social theory is still of philosophical interest, whereas the history of natural science is of almost no scientific interest: we still repair urgently to Weber and Durkheim, but we may safely forget about phlogiston. In both the social scientific and humanistic studies of human existence, it is not a revolution that we need. What we need are observations and suggestions and ideas, collected one at a time, by different people, from different disciplines, with different methodologies. That is not sexy, but neither is it easy.