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as well. But relying on unaided intuition to reason through these sorts of questions can also be limiting. It’s fine to argue, as many people have argued recently, that banks whose actions result in systemic risk ought to be held accountable for that risk, say by purchasing “systemic risk” insurance or being required to increase their capital reserves. But without a sound understanding of systemic risk, it is impossible to measure how much systemic risk a particular action creates, and therefore how much of a penalty ought to be imposed for taking it. Likewise, it is one thing to point out that we place too much emphasis on outcomes when evaluating processes, or attribute too much importance to “special people” in determining those outcomes. But it is quite another to come up with better measures of performance and a better sense of how complex social systems like companies, markets, and societies actually work. As important as it is to think through these issues, in other words, it is also important to do more than simply argue about them. And on this point it is worth asking what, if anything, social science might be able to offer.

CHAPTER 10

The Proper Study of Mankind

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of mankind is Man.

—Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man”

When Alexander Pope published his “Essay on Man” in 1732 our understanding of the world was very different from what it is today. Written just decades after Isaac Newton’s masterpiece, Principia, had laid out the mathematical principles of planetary motion, Pope’s essay arrived when intellectuals were still wrapping their heads around a concept that must have been staggering at the time—that the laws governing the motion of everyday objects here on Earth were exactly the same laws as those governing the heavenly spheres. In fact, they were still grappling with the idea that physical “laws” of any kind could be written down in terms of mathematical equations, and that these equations could then be used to predict with uncanny precision the future behavior of everything ranging from tomorrow’s high tide to the return of distant comets. It must have been a magical time to be alive when the universe, so long an enigma, seemed suddenly to have been conquered by the mind of a single man. As Pope himself said,

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.1

For the next three centuries, the knowledge of mankind would swell inexorably, sweeping before it the mysteries of the world. The results have been impressive. We have theories of the universe that go all the way back to the big bang, and telescopes that peer across galaxies. We have sent space probes out of the solar system and put men on the moon. We have built bombs that can level an entire city, and missiles that can fly through a window. We have measured the earth to great precision and understood its inner workings. We have engineered immense buildings and bridges, and changed the shape of rivers, mountains, even coastlines. We have clocks that can measure time in billionths of a second, and computers that can search through every word ever written in less time than it takes to write just one. In science, it seems, we can make the angels dance on the head of a pin.

It’s pretty obvious that social science has not kept up, but it’s easy to infer the wrong lesson from this observation. I was reminded of this problem recently by a physicist colleague of mine who complained to me that he’d been reading a lot of sociology, and that in his opinion the problem with the discipline was that it hadn’t discovered any laws of human behavior that were anywhere near as general or accurate as those he was accustomed to in physics. Instead, it seemed to him, sociology was just an endless conglomeration of special cases, when someone did something for some reason one time, and someone else did something else for some other reason at another time. As a physicist, he found this lack of lawlike behavior particularly frustrating. After all, it is hard