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Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely of M.I.T. says “life with fewer market norms and more social norms would be more satisfying, creative, fulfilling and fun,” reports David Berreby in The New York Times. Dan arrived at that insight not during his day job as an analyst for the Federal Reserve, but while hanging out “at Burning Man, the annual anarchist conclave where clothes are optional and money is banned.” Dan says that Burning Man is “the most accepting, social and caring place I had ever been.” If that sounds crazy, well, Dan might admit that it is—or at least that it’s irrational, which leads directly to his point. As David Berreby summarizes it, Dan’s point is this: “We aren’t cool calculators of self-interest who sometimes go crazy; we’re crazies who are, under special circumstances, sometimes rational.” That idea is at the center of Dan’s book, Predictably Irrational, in which he takes on the notion of the fundamental assumption of free markets—that is, that they “produce the best solution to any problem.” As one solution, Dan proposes a credit card programmed to decline excessive, irrational transactions. Unfortunately, the major bank to which he proposed the idea apparently found it irrational. The Craftsman In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett “gathers case after case in which we see how the work of the hand can inform the work of the mind,” writes Lewis Hyde in The New York Times. In one such example of the notion that “making is thinking,” Richard tells the story of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in the late 1920s, “designed and built a house in Vienna for his sister. This exercise included tearing out the drawing room ceiling and rebuilding it “three centimeters higher... to better satisfy his sense of proportion.” In the end, Ludwig said the building had “good manners” but lacked “primordial life” and “health.” Richard Sennett’s point is that building the house changed Ludwig’s philosophy “away from rigorous logic and toward a playful engagement with common speech, paradox and parable.” His assumption is that we all have abilities as “craftsmen” and that pursuing those abilities “enables people to govern themselves and so become good citizens.” In so doing, we can learn “how to negotiate between autonomy and authority (as one must in any workshop)” or “how to complete tasks using ‘minimum force’ (as do all chefs who must chop vegetables) …” Above all, he argues that thinking by doing “teaches us how to play, for it is in play that we find ‘the origin of the dialogue that the craftsman conducts with materials like clay and glass’.” The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, is alarmed because she thinks Americans have grown hostile to knowledge, reports Patricia Cohen in The New York Times. Susan’s problem isn’t just that Americans are “ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge…but that they also don’t think it matters.” Her evidence, in part, is a “2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of the 18- 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So, more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.” Susan “is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or ideology.” She criticizes “religious fundamentalism’s antipathy toward science” while also criticizing liberals at universities for pushing “pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat that trivialize college-level learning.” She also argues that people in other countries don’t have the same disdain for knowledge even though American pop culture crossed their borders long ago. But she admits that she, herself, has trouble living without television and says she expects that her book is in for a good bashing by those hostile folks, the anti-intellectuals.
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