The Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles about Decision Making [?!] and Perception?

 As we read the NYT—aka the Walter Duranty Papers[1]-- we must always be prepared to hear about grand visions and new progressive leftist theories and to be serenely cued-in by informed slants on the political activities of our times. Problems or any sort must always be solved by government, as we are relentlessly instructed, in order to fulfill the grand social designs of the left. Such comments and conclusions are tautologically supplied daily by the New York Times and today, unexpectedly, we are treated to a theoretical essay on ‘decision making’ by the Chief Babbler David Brooks[2]  and conservative ‘token’ who pretends at objective journalism at the Old Gray Lady. Let us see what we are offered by the new discussion on ‘decision making:’

“Roughly speaking, there are four steps to every decision. First, you perceive a situation. Then you think of possible courses of action. Then you calculate which course is in your best interest. Then you take the action.”[3]-- The Behavioral Revolution By David Brooks  October 27, 2008 [Emphasis is mine in all quotes.]This link references all quotes in this essay unless otherwise stated.

  Trite. A bit rough for those who analyze, but let us proceed.

 “Over the past few centuries, public policy analysts have assumed that step three [your best interest. Ed.]  is the most important. Economic models and entire social science disciplines are premised on the assumption that people are mostly engaged in rationally calculating and maximizing their self-interest.”

 Are we missing some political history  on demagoguery here?

 It is clear in politics that the use of fear, racism, intimidation, threats and the offer of money or power for your political support are well-known and accepted method, cronyism, outright bribes with tax monies and such strongly influence the decisions of voters and other victims. Nobody ever thought that voters are making independent and calculated choices based on the ‘facts.’ This is lunacy.  When was the last full moon?

 Off we go!

 “So perhaps this will be the moment [because of the looming depression and mass unemployment world-wide. Ed.]when we alter our view of decision-making. Perhaps this will be the moment when we shift our focus from step three, rational calculation, to step one, perception.”

 Well, so far we have watch Brooks snarl the definitions of decision making in the political arena and have learned that these decisions must be based on perception, whatever that might be. Did Brooks realize that ‘politics’ is defined as decision-making in Wikipedia?[4]

 There must be some exciting new adventures in semantics or asymmetric reasoning waiting for us! Eagerly we wait:

 “My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.”

 To support this mélange of clichés, jungle temple rubbings and echoes from Allen Ginzberg, Brooks cites some ‘economists”: Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, John Bargh  Dan Ariely and Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

 “Taleb[5] believes that our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face. His writing is idiosyncratic, but he does touch on many of the perceptual biases that distort our thinking: our tendency to see data that confirm our prejudices more vividly than data that contradict them; our tendency to overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities; our tendency to spin concurring facts into a single causal narrative; our tendency to applaud our own supposed skill in circumstances when we’ve actually benefited from dumb luck.”

 Gee, didn’t Immanuel Kant cover this ground a while back? I think the Democratic party benefits from dumb voters. The Republicans certainly do.

 “The rationalists felt that truth emerged in the mind and was then seen to be reflected in the world around.  The empiricists took the opposite view and felt that truth dwelt in the world around but could be observed and extracted by the mind.  Kant suggested that the mind already held fixed ways of looking at things and that the observed world was fitted into these fixed ways.”—Section on Immanuel Kant in THE GREATEST THINKERS by Edward de Bono, a NYT best seller 1976.[6]

 Now, we see the overload lights blinking on the Babble Meter:

 “If you start thinking about our faulty decision-making, the first thing you realize is that markets are not perfectly efficient, people are not always good guardians of their own self-interest and there might be limited circumstances when government could usefully slant the decision-making architecture (see “Nudge” by Thaler and Cass Sunstein for proposals). But the second thing you realize is that government officials are probably going to be even worse perceivers of reality than private business types. Their information feedback mechanism is more limited, and, being deeply politicized, they’re even more likely to filter inconvenient facts.”

 Now, that is stunning. We rarely see triple-reverse circular logic in the raw.

 We have to dig deep to find what Our Babbler is babbling about. Somebody got lost here. Brooks submissively produces the mandated word government in his little propaganda piece for the Times, but seems to have garbled the predetermined conclusion by implying that the decisions by  government officials may be worse than guessing and random decision making.

 Gee, that was a tough one. I think The Babbler should have submitted his rough draft to Paul Krugman who would have corrected most of his spurious thinking here.  Several weeks of political reeducation courses are indicated as a condition for continuing employment in this newspaper. To think that government is not the solution to all problems, particularly economic, is heresy.

 Government decisions, choices for individuals in finance and investing are chaos processes and we all need to recognize that.  Nobody knows how to invest with certainty and no government has been successful in engineering a suitable society outside of fiction. Read Animal Farm, get some dice and vote out leftists if your vote has any value. The Fountain of Youth has not been discovered yet, we can prove, as nobody seems to escape death. Where is my astrologer?

 Wow! That was deep.

 My conclusion:

 “The ultimate goal of liberalism is to gnaw away at the wealth of others[7] using the tactical mechanisms of rodents and certain diseases like leprosy or cancer and ‘redistribute the wealth’ so as to achieve ‘equality.’ But, as the author George Orwell of Animal Farm[8] wrote: “All pigs are equal but some pigs are more equal than others…”  The Liberal Pigs now define who is equal and just how they are more equal. They now sit in judgment of how your wealth must be spent.” [9]- The Great Tax Rip-off: The Pigs Shovel Your Tax Money into the Great Liberal Latrine by rycK-

 rycK

 Comments: ryckki@gmail.com