On the one hand, social scientists use scientific methods. On the other, there is a great deal in the social sciences (e.g. economics, psychology and sociology) that is not experimentally testable or falsifiable. The theories in those disciplines are not philosophically equivalent to, say, the theory of gravity or the theory of natural selection. If they were, then they’d be part of science tout court, not social science. Indeed, one could argue that there are aspects of our humanity that are too human for anything but the humanities to make sense of (and thank God for it).

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There are some social sciences that shade into the life sciences – a lot of psychology and anthropology, for instance. But even where there is no overlap, the extent to which social sciences rely on quantitative data merits a distinction from the humanities too.

Though careful measurement and statistical analysis can’t always be used to arrive at falsifiable theories in the proper scientific sense, quantitative methods can still deepen our understanding of a phenomenon. After all, that’s how biology, chemistry and physics got their start before they became fully-fledged sciences.

And yet numbers can be dangerous. They can confer an impression of objectivity where one isn’t warranted. Indeed, there’s no better way of convincing others (and yourself) of your own B.S.[1. Beloved science] than by expressing it in mathematical form.

This is especially true of one social science in particular – economics. Writing for Foreign Policy about the state of the discipline today, Fareed Zakaria begins by noting its elevated status:

“It has become first among equals in the social sciences and has dominated most policy agendas as well. Economists have been much sought after by businesses, governments, and society at large, their insights seen as useful in every sphere of life… At the root of all this influence is the notion that economics provides the most powerful lens through which to understand the modern world.”

Many leading businesses and political organisations not only employ economists, but also a ‘chief economist’. Rather fewer employ a chief psychologist, let alone a chief sociologist.

However, Zakaria says that the economists’ “hegemony is now over”.

Certainly, the standing of the discipline has never been the same since the global financial crisis at the end of the last decade:

“As Paul Krugman noted in a September 2009 essay in the New York Times Magazine, ‘Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy.’”

If the world’s astronomers had failed to predict a devastating asteroid strike, there’d be some very searching questions asked of the profession. Potentially, they’d have their excuses: ‘Our telescopes weren’t pointing in the right direction! We didn’t have enough resources! The politicians don’t listen to us!’ However, if it turned out that the astronomers did have all the equipment, resources and attention they needed, but still didn’t spot the asteroid because their own theories blinded them to the possibility, there’d be a deep crisis of confidence in the entire discipline.

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Which is what we’ve seen in the case of economics:

“In October 2008, Greenspan, a lifelong libertarian, admitted that ‘the whole intellectual edifice … collapsed in the summer of last year.’

“For Krugman, the reason was clear: Economists had mistaken ‘beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.’ …they’d fallen in love with the supposed rigor that derives from the assumption that markets function perfectly. But the world had turned out to be more complex and unpredictable than the equations.”

Is maths the explanation for what went wrong, then? Did the (literally) formulaic nature of modern economic theory stop economists from seeing the world as it really is?

Maybe, but what if the cause-and-effect runs in the other direction? What if the oversimplified view of human economic behaviour was constructed in order to mathematise it – i.e. maths not as the origin of the misconception, but its objective?

Zakaria says that economics “remains a vital discipline”, but that we also need the other social sciences to round out our view of humanity. I’m sure that’s right, yet any implicit faith that we place in these disciplines should be despite, not because of any numbers they throw at us.

Maths in the context of public policy is paradoxical – serving as both a curtain and a window. To those who don’t really get it (i.e. most of us), maths conceals the inner workings of an argument; but to those who can decipher the symbols and read the code, the mathematical structure of a theory makes plain its inner logic and underlying assumptions. Where words conceal, numbers reveal – but only to those who understand them.

So, yes, let’s have economics and all the social sciences contributing to public policy. But let’s also have the quantitative foundations of each discipline thoroughly inspected by mathematically-literate and independently-minded outsiders.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, we need you!

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Prevent aims to “confront [the] extremist ideology” at the heart of terrorism. It is based on the idea that “radicalisation is driven by an ideology which sanctions the use of violence” and it explicitly makes a causal link between ideology, extremist thought, and extremist actions. Ipso facto if you solve the problem of extremist ideology, be it jihadi or far-Right, you reduce the levels of terrorist violence.

The Government’s approach relies upon identifying people at risk of being radicalised and countering the narrative of extremism. Those at risk of radicalisation, or who already have been radicalised, are identified through state institutions, like schools and healthcare providers, who have a statutory duty to report those, often minors, who they think display extremist thought. Remember the young child infamously referred to Prevent for talking about eco-terrorism in class, or the four-year-old who was referred for talking about a ‘cucumber’, misheard by the teacher as ‘cooker-bomber’?

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Prevent has long had its critics. Charities – such as Amnesty – were concerned about human rights implications. Muslim groups – such as the Muslim Council of Britain – reported that Muslim communities felt targeted by the scheme. And scholars have questioned the efficacy of the radicalisation narrative: that ideology creates extremist thought which leads to extremist action, meaning people need ‘protecting’ from extremist ideology if they are at risk of being ‘radicalised’.

But there is a deeper, philosophical problem with Prevent. The language of the entire strategy – and the comments by Ben Wallace – reflect the implicit assumption that ideology is like a sickness that infects people and causes them to do wrong. In fact, the initial 2003 Prevent programme drew upon the policy work that the government had done to protect vulnerable young people from paedophiles. These assumptions still pervade the programme, as demonstrated by Wallace’s recent reference to “grooming and exploitation by terrorists”.

This approach sees ‘radicalisation’ as something that comes from without, rather than something that is sought from within.

But can a collection of ideas, an ideology, really cause someone to blow themselves up? The answer to this disarmingly simple question – and the broader question of the role of ideas in all types of violence propagation – lies in cognitive science. Violence, after all, is a behaviour, like any other social behaviour.

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By Douglas Murray

For sometime, psychologists and cognitive scientists have understood that decisions are made by the (faster) subconscious and emotional brain, rather than the (slower) conscious brain. The subconscious brain tends to work on evolutionarily-designed rules of thumb that get to the right answer most of the time (but not all of the time). The role of the conscious brain is to then justify those already-made decisions to other people – often rearranging ‘facts’ around the already-adopted position.

This is not obscure science: the initial ideas in this field led to a Nobel Prize for Daniel Kahneman, the brilliant psychologist who discovered them. And they have since revolutionised other fields such as economics, where they inspired the creation of behavioural economics, leading to other Nobel Prizes, notably for Richard Thaler in 2017. These ideas have also been applied elsewhere in the British government: the Behavioural Insights Team (previously the Nudge Unit) have driven improvements in social challenges ranging from organ donation through taxation to getting people back to work.

Applying this concept to violence, and specifically suicide terrorism, calls in to question the Government’s long-standing approach.

If correct, it means that violence must be caused by a subconscious, emotional decision that is later justified: that is, the ideology merely justifies a drive towards violence that already exists. This flies in the face of government narratives around radicalisation that treat ideology as a cause of violence. And it means that preventative action should be focusing less on the ideology, and more on the sub-conscious, emotional drives of those who might commit group violence.

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This sounds like an impossible task. But an increasing amount of evidence is identifying these emotional drives and highlighting the role of belonging in driving intergroup violence – including terrorism. That is, people are driven to commit these types of violent acts (as opposed to, say, murder or rape) in order to fulfill their evolutionary need to belong to a social group.

This understanding of the role of belonging should be considered alongside the facts that an overwhelming majority of those with extremist thoughts, far more than 99%, do not commit violent actions. What’s more, extremist thought, even were it adequately definable in a society that values free speech, is a very poor predictor of violent action. Defining extremism in this way lumps the supposed thinkers of extremism together with those targeted by the government for their criminal activity – actors of extremism.

This is why Prevent might be making things worse rather than better. By seeking to find and punish those who harbour extremist thought, the actions of the government cause people to question their place in British society, when they might not have done so before. In short, it creates or exacerbates a crisis of belonging, even where one might not have existed.

This is even recognised by senior officials working on the programme, who are privately very critical. A Home Office official working directly on Prevent told me that the best way to reduce terrorism was to fund local sports clubs and community centres – which foster belonging – rather than “criminalising an entire community”.

Terrorism reflects the world that we live in. Globalisation, and particularly immigration, has detached people from the groups they once belonged to: their families, their ethnicities, and their nations. The modern world can be a profoundly lonely place. If individuals feel that they don’t belong, they are more likely to reach out for extreme ideas that will fill that vacuum, offering them a sense of identity. Rather than making digs at Prevent’s critics, the Government should take the opportunity of an independent review to fix this fundamental flaw.

The Nobel committee last year controversially awarded this hallowed prize to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, who refused to comment for weeks, then snubbed the formal prize ceremony. This time, the Swedish Academy has played safe, opting instead for a widely admired novelist, albeit one whose works have been remade as blockbuster movies.

I’m equally pleased that the 2017 Nobel Prize in economics has gone to Professor Richard Thaler – the foremost practitioner of the relatively new field of ‘behavioral economics’. Unusually for an economist, Thaler likes to engage with the real and messy world of policy-making, openly chiding abstract theoretical modeling while admitting that entirely market-based analysis is flawed.

As such, Thaler and the ‘behavioral school’ combine a practical understanding of financial incentives with concrete findings from psychology, sociology and other related subjects. In sum, Thaler and his growing band of acolytes seek to make economics more human and, therefore, more realistic.

While Thaler is a worthy winner, the Nobel Prize in economics isn’t really a Nobel Prize. There are five of those – in physics, chemistry, medicine and peace, as well as literature. These have all been awarded since 1895, the year before the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist who famously made his fortune by inventing and selling dynamite.

It was only in 1969 that the Swedish Central Bank began dishing out a ‘Nobel’ medal each year for economics. It remains separate from the main prizes established in his will – and so it should. That’s because Nobel was a scientist – and economics, categorically, is no science.

Recent recipients of the economics Nobel have been rewarded for work that claims to have established ‘certainties’, made ‘findings’ and discovered ‘scientific relationships’ – all of which, when it comes to economics, is bunkum. Economics is, or at least should be, a study of human behaviour – above all, the allocation of scarce resources between competing ends. It requires the analysis of economic, commercial and financial life in all its human and institutional richness, or it is nothing. A solid grounding in theory and numeracy is essential but so, too, are broad dashes of politics, history, sociology and common sense.

We live in extremely tough times. Markets are volatile, trade wars are brewing and, as our societies age, we’re juggling with nasty demographic time bombs. The Western world is now so indebted that some large economies are creating money ex nihilo to buy up vast swaths of their own government bonds. And economic power is rapidly shifting east – a process that scares far more of our citizens than it inspires.

Yet academic economists, with a few honourable exceptions, have little to say about such uncomfortable realities. Those who do so are dubbed ‘controversial’ or ‘maverick’ – apparently doing little to improve their ‘Nobel’ chances. It is vital, though, that if economists are to retain any legitimacy with the broader public, that they engage with, and tackle, the pressing issues of our day – in a practical, hands-on manner.

Too often, the Nobel judges, those in control of the world’s premier economic prize, have chosen to anoint academic time-servers – theoretical economists who have barely engaged with the real world, writing only for a narrow audience and risking nothing. In Thaler, though, they have finally recognized an economist not only with the required academic credentials, but who has left his Ivory Tower to work for numerous governments and is also a best-selling author.

‘Can I call you the undismal scientist?’ I asked Thaler, in an extended interview in 2016.

‘Well, it’s better than what I’ve previously been called,’ the laid-back University of Chicago professor replied with a smile. ‘For ten years or so, my name was ‘that jerk’,’ Thaler told me, while chuckling. ‘But that was a promotion. Before that, I was ‘Who’s he?’

Much of the conversation I held with Thaler last year recounted the academic battles that shaped him. ‘You get your ideas straight when you argue with those whose views are most different from yours,’ he told me. Far from otherworldly, Thaler’s academic research has been adopted by governments across the globe.

Struggling with his doctorate in the early 1970s, he faced an economics discipline focused on mathematical models assuming people always behave rationally. He fought back, insisting that economics should open-up to other social sciences, acknowledging emotion, bias and whim.

Reflecting on a career that’s taken him from undergraduate studies in Ohio to Stanford and Cornell, Thaler says he found a ‘perhaps unlikely’ long-term home at the University of Chicago – a citadel of free-market economics, not a natural berth for a cross-disciplinary iconoclast. ‘I went with my eyes open, and it’s been great,’ Thaler told me. ‘What I’ve learnt at Chicago and elsewhere is that adding real people to economic theories isn’t only fun, it also improves the accuracy of your predictions’.

In 2008, Thaler co-authored “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness”, which highlights how individuals and organizations often make terrible choices – from education to personal finance and road safety. Thaler’s response is to come up with policies that work with human nature, nudging people towards acting in their best interests.

An international bestseller, ‘Nudge’ brought Thaler policy influence – particularly in the UK. After the Tories took office in 2010, he helped set-up and run the fabled Behavioral Insights Team in Downing Street – the ‘Nudge Unit’ – that continues to play a significant role in British policy-making.

Since 2012, many UK employees have been automatically enrolled into occupational pensions – a policy, lifted from ‘Nudge’, that recognizes inertia. Opt-out rates have been small, yielding 90% take-up. The UK tax authorities have also adopted Thaler’s findings, based on psychological experiments, by re-writing letters to late-payers telling them they’re ‘in a small minority who haven’t paid on time’. Payments rose, compared to the standard wording, by almost 10%.

The UK’s Nudge Unit has now been spun out from the Cabinet Office and partially privatized, while inspiring copycats institutions in Singapore, Australia and the US. Thaler’s broader aim is to encourage governments to nudge consumers towards better decisions using enhanced data. ‘We need what I call ‘choice engines’, where you go online, enter your national insurance number and get a list of everything you own and are entitled to in terms of pensions, mortgages and so on,’ he says.

Thaler criticizes Britain’s notoriously opaque consumer energy market – now at the top of the political agenda, with the Tories recently proposing a price cap. ‘There’s no reason it can’t be competitive, if firms were compelled to make all information available, in an intelligible, comparable form,’ he told me.

Thaler’s latest book – ‘Misbehaving – the making of behavioral economics’ – is part intellectual history, part novelized memoir. It’s packed with thoughtful and often funny writing, as the author tells of his struggle to bring academic economics back down to earth.

Having been heavily criticized for largely failing to prevent or even foresee the 2008 financial crisis, can the economics profession repair its reputation?. ‘Yes, it can – we’re still digging ourselves out of that financial crisis, but it was largely a behavioral phenomenon,’ he says.

‘We had real estate bubbles all over the place, and there was misbehaving at every level – how did that happen?’ Thaler asks. ‘While homeowners were refinancing their mortgages and buying cars and vacations, we had mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) containing such loans classified as triple-A by the ratings agencies – that was not rational behavior’.

I asked Thaler if we’ve faced up to the fraud that drove the banking collapse. ‘Only partly,’ he replies. ‘I want to see every bit of data about every mortgage in an MBS freely available’ he says. ‘And when it comes to the opacity of our banks, we need more disclosure’.

On the question of Europe, Thaler wanted the UK to stay in the EU – ‘divorces are always less amicable than you expect’, he says. But he is, at the same time, a vociferous critic of the single currency. ‘It was a lousy idea, and Britain was smart not to join,’ he says. ‘The idea you could trust some of the other governments involved to keep accurate fiscal accounts was always a bit preposterous – I mean, Berlusconi?’

The euro ‘came along at exactly the time it was no longer needed, because you could walk into any city with your ATM card or use a credit card,’ says Thaler. ‘We certainly don’t need the euro now, not least as people barely use cash,’ he argues. ‘One thing I would like to see is abandoning physical cash altogether – as it would aid fighting corruption, with everything on the books’.

As our conversation ended, I ask Thaler if the economic profession remains too remote, and distrusted. ‘We have a long way to go,’ he concedes. ‘I’m happy, though, many of the best and brightest young economists are very open to behavioral ideas’.

The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, according to the Nobel literature prize committee, ‘uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’. I’d say that Thaler, too, has highlighted, and then thumbed his nose at, the ‘illusory sense of connection with the world’ exhibited by much of the sheltered and rather snooty economics profession – and rightly so.

Listen to Liam Halligan talk to Professor Richard Thaler.