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By Root 1042 0

we are using it to reason about how other people behaved—or will behave—in circumstances about which we have at best an incomplete understanding. At some level we understand that the world is complicated, and that everything is somehow connected to everything else. But when we read some story about reforming the healthcare system, or about banker bonuses, or about the Israel-Palestine conflict, we don’t try to understand how all these different problems fit together. We just focus on the one little piece of the huge underlying tapestry of the world that’s being presented to us at that moment, and form our opinion accordingly. In this way, we can flip through the newspaper while drinking our morning cup of coffee and develop twenty different opinions about twenty different topics without breaking a sweat. It’s all just common sense.

It may not matter much, of course, what conclusions ordinary citizens reach about the state of the world in the privacy of their own homes, based on what they’re reading in the newspaper or arguing about with their friends. So it may not matter much that the way we reason about the problems of the world is poorly suited to the nature of the problems themselves. But ordinary citizens are not the only ones who apply commonsense reasoning to social problems. When policy makers sit down, say, to design some scheme to alleviate poverty, they invariably rely on their own commonsense ideas about why it is that poor people are poor, and therefore how best to help them. As with all commonsense explanations, it is likely that everyone will have his or her own views, and that these views will be logically inconsistent or even contradictory. Some may believe that people are poor because they lack certain necessary values of hard work and thrift, while others may think they are genetically inferior, and others still may attribute their lack of wealth to lack of opportunities, inferior systems of social support, or other environmental factors. All these beliefs will lead to different proposed solutions, not all of which can be right. Yet policy makers empowered to enact sweeping plans that will affect thousands or millions of people are no less tempted to trust their intuition about the causes of poverty than ordinary citizens reading the newspaper.

A quick look at history suggests that when common sense is used for purposes beyond the everyday, it can fail spectacularly. As the political scientist James Scott writes in Seeing Like a State, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were characterized by pervasive optimism among engineers, architects, scientists, and government technocrats that the problems of society could be solved in the same way that the problems of science and engineering had been solved during the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. According to these “high modernists,” the design of cities, the management of natural resources, even the business of running an entire economy were all within the scope of “scientific” planning. As one of the undisputed high priests of modernism, the architect Le Corbusier, wrote in 1923, “the plan is generator; without it poverty, disorder, willfulness reign supreme.”16

Naturally, the high modernists didn’t describe what they were doing as an exercise in using their common sense, preferring instead to clothe their ambitions in the language of science. But as Scott points out, this scientific aura was a mirage. In reality there was no science of planning—just the opinions of individual planners who relied on their intuition to speculate about how their plans would play out in the real world. No one doubts that men like Le Corbusier were brilliant and original thinkers. Nevertheless, the outcomes of their plans, like Soviet collectivization or Le Corbusier’s Brasilia, were often disastrous; and some of them, like the social engineering of Nazism or apartheid in South Africa, are now regarded among the great evils of the twentieth century. Moreover, even when these plans did succeed, they often did so in spite of themselves, as individuals