Welcome to the age of government by reading list – Telegraph Blogs

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As the Queen returns from Ireland, another state visit is getting under way. The dignitary in question has been greeted with the customary solemnities: a suite of admiring profiles, audiences with David Cameron and Ed Miliband, a seminar at No 10, a talk at the Royal Society of Arts. Yes, the arrival of David Brooks is a pretty big deal. You may be forgiven if you don’t immediately recognise the name – unless you work in Westminster, in which case you definitely won’t be. Brooks, you see, is a New York Times columnist, and the author of The Social Animal, the latest must-read in the corridors of power. The book – a big hit in America – argues that people are driven more by their unconscious instincts than by rational thought, and are profoundly influenced by deep-rooted social norms. According to the commentators, it promises to transform policy-makers’ understanding of the world, provide “a framework for modern Conservatism” – even, wonder of wonders, to articulate the meaning of the Big Society in a way people actually understand. You might say, then, that The Social Animal is “the best book… in the past year, and the most important book for Conservatives in a lot longer than that”. Except that the review I’m quoting there is of The Pinch, by David Willetts. But the same words could have been used about Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Or The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. Or Freakonomics, or The Political Brain, or Influence, or The Long Tail, or The Wisdom of Crowds, or Connected, or Bowling Alone, or Tides of Consent, or The Case for Working With Your Hands, or The Hidden Wealth of Nations, or The Paradox of Choice, or any of a dozen more. As a glance inside a bookshop will show you, the past decade has seen a boom in what is often called “pop sociology” – books by planet-brained academics or journalists that promise to explain today’s horribly complex world in terms of a simple, extremely powerful idea. And Westminster, being full of similarly bookish, planet-brained types, has lapped them up. The result is that, where once it was think tanks which provided the intellectual ballast to government, today it is as likely to be publishing houses. The “libertarian paternalism” set out by Thaler and Sunstein, which argues that you can get people to make better life choices by subtly changing the way those choices are presented, has spawned Downing Street’s Behavioural Insight Team, aka “the nudge unit”. David Willetts’s book on generational unfairness, The Pinch, has been seized upon by all three parties. Lord Layard’s writings on happiness, and how it doesn’t necessarily depend on having more money, have informed David Cameron’s concept of measuring national well-being as a complement – even an alternative – to gross domestic product. Now, I’m a huge fan of this kind of thinking: I’ve got a copy of Brooks’s Meisterwerk sitting on the bedside table on top of a mountain of similar tomes. But I can also see how easy they are to mock, particularly once people stop engaging with the ideas and start treating the books as status symbols. Just as Wall Street high-fliers one-up each other with their business cards in American Psycho, so do policy wonks try to trump each other with their latest reading: “Oh, you’re still on The Spirit Level? Yes, I used to find that convincing, too…” Being au fait with the latest must-read gives you the invaluable feeling that you’re one step ahead of your rivals, that your interpretation of the political landscape is that bit more sophisticated and effective. Yet there are dangers of government-by-reading-list, and not just in the form of eye strain (although any Tory MP who ploughed through the 38 volumes of “Cameroonian” summer reading recommended by their colleague Keith Simpson in 2008 deserved some kind of long service medal). The problem is what happens when the theories are presented as high-concept magic bullets, able to solve messy, intractable policy problems at a stroke. In that context, it’s intriguing how many titles and subtitles in the genre contain words like “hidden” or “secret” or “invisible”. Many of the most successful present themselves as instruction manuals for the human psyche, holding out the promise that if you push particular buttons, people will act in certain ways (voting Tory, say…) without even realising why they’re doing so. This is a theme running through much recent writing on psychology, economics, biology, advertising and now politics: that humans aren’t calculating, rational entities, but great big bags of unthinking prejudices, tics and preferences. Given the low regard in which many politicos hold the public, you can see why this would be so appealing: rather than having actually to engage with the voters, they can simply manipulate them into doing what’s really best for them. And if the latest theory fails to change the world in the way you’d hoped? Well, there’s this fascinating new hardback they’re raving about in New York…

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Well, I agree with much of that, especially the point about these works being status symbols. On the other hand, I think this is rather an improvement over simply wallowing in local prejudices and whatnot. If Adam Smith published the orginal Wealth of Nations today it might well simply be lumped into the same category.

There's rather more to it than saying that people are a bag of unthinking prejudices though. For example, the book Out Of Control by Kevin Kelly, pop science rather than pop psych strictly speaking, also makes a cogent argument for the limits of deliberative organisational structures which characterised the rise of government and corporations by analogy to complex biological and environmental systems.

The fact that humans aren't wholly rational isn't really a surprise. There was an C18th industrialist who refused ever to laugh becuase he thought it was irrational; we've come a long way from the early days of mechanisation that prompted people to pursue perfect rationality and have started to realise that control, both personal and institutional, is a limited tool.