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achieving consensus around matters of social justice or designing institutions that cope with uncertainty—can ever be “solved” in an engineering sense, no matter how much basic science we acquire. For problems like these, we can still discover that some solutions work better than others—using, for example the kind of bootstrapping and experimental approaches outlined in Chapter 8 or the deliberative approach to democracy that political philosophers such as John Rawls and Michael Sandel have long advocated. But the exact cause-and-effect mechanisms may remain forever elusive.

Ultimately, we will probably need to pursue all these approaches simultaneously, attempting to converge on an understanding of how people behave and how the world works both from above and from below, bringing to bear every method and resource that we have at our disposal. It sounds like a lot of work, and it will be. But as Merton noted four decades ago, we have done this kind of thing before, first in physics and then in biology and then again in medical science. Most recently, the genomics revolution that began more than fifty years ago with the discovery of DNA has long promised more in the way of medical treatments than it has been able to deliver; yet that hasn’t stopped us from devoting enormous resources to the pursuit of science.26 Why should the science required to understand social problems such as urban poverty or economic development or public education deserve less attention? It should not. Nor can we claim anymore that the necessary instruments don’t exist. Rather, just as the invention of the telescope revolutionized the study of the heavens, so too by rendering the unmeasurable measurable, the technological revolution in mobile, Web, and Internet communications has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of ourselves and how we interact. Merton was right: Social science has still not found its Kepler. But three hundred years after Alexander Pope argued that the proper study of mankind should lie not in the heavens but in ourselves, we have finally found our telescope.27 Let the revolution begin.…

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been in the writing for more than three years, and on my mind for twice as long as that. During that time, I’ve been fortunate to work at some incredible institutions and with many equally impressive people. I’m grateful to all of them, but a few deserve special mention.

First of all, I’m deeply grateful to Yahoo! for providing such a stimulating and supportive research environment over the past three years. It is surprising to many people that a major US corporation in this day and age would choose to invest in a research organization that is dedicated to producing and publishing basic science, and yet that is precisely the mission of Yahoo! Research. Not that our more than 100 research scientists don’t make a significant contribution to the corporate bottom line (note to shareholders—we do). Nevertheless, the freedom and flexibility that we experience—including to write books like this one—is remarkable, and a tribute to the leadership of Prabhakar Raghavan, the founding director. I’m also grateful to Preston McAfee and Ron Brachman for their support and encouragement, and to my colleagues Sharad Goel, Dan Goldstein, Jake Hofman, Sebastien Lahaei, Winter Mason, Dave Pennock, David Reiley, Dan Reeves, and Sid Suri, from whom I have learned so much. I’ve yet to meet a group of people who can be so argumentative and yet so enjoyable to work with.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, I spent several formative years in the sociology department at Columbia University and remain indebted to them for hiring me in the first place (without a sociology degree), as well as for patiently tolerating my ignorance of sociology and educating me in the discipline. I can’t claim to have become a “real” sociologist, but I’m certainly far more of one than I would have been otherwise. In particular, I’m grateful to Peter Bearman, Jonathan Cole, Michael Crow, Jeffrey Sachs, David Stark, and Harrison White for their support