Sometimes 2+2=5

David Brooks has a good column today on the financial crisis and the limited utility of economics in explaining and predicting human behavior:

One gets the sense, at least from the outside, that the intellectual energy is no longer with the economists who construct abstract and elaborate models. Instead, the field seems to be moving in a humanist direction. Many economists are now trying to absorb lessons learned by psychologists, neuroscientists and sociologists.[…]

Economics achieved coherence as a science by amputating most of human nature. Now economists are starting with those parts of emotional life that they can count and model (the activities that make them economists). But once they’re in this terrain, they’ll surely find that the processes that make up the inner life are not amenable to the methodologies of social science. The moral and social yearnings of fully realized human beings are not reducible to universal laws and cannot be studied like physics. 

There is a blog meme going around now, started last week by Tyler Cowen, on the ten books that most influenced your view of the world. (If you’re interested: Yglesias’ list; Ross Douthat’s list; Will Wilkinson’s list; Conor Friedersdorf’s list. There are plenty more out there.) I ought to make my list sometime. But for now I will note that high atop that list would be Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. I think it is the best explication of human psychology I have ever read. This part goes to David Brooks’ point about the impossibility of reducing human behavior to a set of univeral laws or math formulas:  

A man, whoever he is, always and everywhere likes to act as he chooses, and not at all according to the dictates of reason and self-interest; it is indeed possible, and sometimes positively imperative, to act directly contrary to one’s own best interests. One’s own free and unfettered volition, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness, that is the one best and greatest good.

Dostoevsky writes that a man will always commit abominations counter to his interests, “just so that he can assert, as if it were absolutely essential, that people are still people and not piano-keys,” merely played upon by the laws of nature, science, and mathematics.

More than that: if men really turned out to be piano-keys, and if it was proved to them by science and mathematics, even then they would not see reason, but on the contrary would deliberately do something out of sheer ingratitude in order, in fact, to have their own way. And if they had not the means to do this, they would contrive to create destruction and chaos, invent various sufferings, and so still have their own way! […]

If you say that all this, the chaos and darkness and cursing, could also be reduced to tables, so that the mere possibility of taking it into account beforehand would put a stop to it, and reason would still hold sway—in that case men would deliberately go mad, so as not to possess reason, and thus still get their own way!

The attempt to correct men’s wills simply by revealing to them where their best interests lie is doomed to fail, because conforming to the dictates of reason will not alone satisfy our demand for recognition, for individual volition. We can all agree, Dostoevsky says, that two-and-two-make-four is an excellent thing; “but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing.”

Since I mentioned our demand for recognition I’ll have to mention that another book on my most influential list is Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama uses the philosophical constructs of Locke, Hobbes, and Hegel to explain human behavior as an ongoing struggle for individual recognition, which culminates in the triumph of liberal democracy as the governing ideology best suited to deliver such recognition.

There are a lot of books, fiction and nonfiction, that in various ways deal with two-and-two-make-five. Thinking them over, I find that many of them would be likely to appear on my "most influential" list. Some might even make my "favorite books" list, which is a very different sort of list.