Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [1]
The sum total of this activity has far exceeded the level of effort that Gribbin’s offhand remark implied was required. So what have we learned about those problems that social scientists were so worked up about back in 1998? What do we really know about the nature of deviant behavior or the origins of social practices or the forces that shift cultural norms—the kinds of problems that Becker talks about in his book—that we didn’t know then? What new solutions has this new science provided to real-world problems, like helping relief agencies respond more effectively to humanitarian disasters in places like Haiti or New Orleans, or helping law enforcement agencies stop terrorist attacks, or helping financial regulatory agencies police Wall Street and reduce systemic risk? And for all the thousands of papers that have been published by physicists in the past decade, how much closer are we to answering the really big questions of social science, like the economic development of nations, the globalization of the economy, or the relationship between immigration, inequality, and intolerance? Pick up the newspaper and judge for yourself, but I would say not much.3
If there’s a lesson here, you might think it would be that the problems of social science are hard not just for social scientists, but for physicists as well. But this lesson, it seems, has not been learned. Quite to the contrary, in fact, in 2006 Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican from Texas, proposed that Congress cut the entire social and behavioral sciences budget of the National Science Foundation. Bailey Hutchison, it should be noted, is not antiscience—in 2005 she proposed doubling funds for medical science. Rather, it was exclusively social science research that she felt “is not where we should be directing [NSF] resources at this time.” Ultimately the proposal was defeated, but one might still wonder what the good senator was thinking. Presumably she doesn’t think that social problems are unimportant—surely no one would argue that immigration, economic development, and inequality are problems that are somehow unworthy of attention. Rather it appears that, like Gribbin, she doesn’t consider social problems to be scientific problems, worthy of the prolonged attention of serious scientists. Or as Hutchinson’s colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Tom Coburn, put it three years later in a similar proposal, “Theories on political behavior are best left to CNN, pollsters, pundits, historians, candidates, political parties, and the voters.”4
Senators Hutchinson and Coburn are not alone in their skepticism of what social science has to offer. Since becoming a sociologist, I have frequently been asked by curious outsiders what sociology has to say about the world that an intelligent person couldn’t have figured out on their own. It’s a reasonable question, but as the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld pointed out nearly sixty years ago, it also reveals a common misconception about the nature of social science. Lazarsfeld was writing about The American Soldier, a then-recently published study of more than 600,000 servicemen that had been conducted by the research branch of the war department during and immediately after the Second World War. To make his point, Lazarsfeld listed six findings from the study that he claimed were representative of the report. For example, number two was that “Men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits during their Army life than soldiers from city backgrounds.” “Aha,” says Lazarsfeld’s imagined reader, “that makes perfect sense. Rural men in the 1940s were accustomed to harsher living standards and more physical labor than city men, so naturally they had an easier time adjusting. Why did we need such a vast and expensive study to tell me what I could have figured