David Brooks: prediction

Transcript context

…Your difference with Milton Friedman, again, not on specific issues such as the New Deal, but conceptually, how is it that you think differently from how Milton did? Friedman — his great gift — and I think this is a libertarian gift — is that once you get inside their logical system, within their assumptive models, there’s no arguing with them. It all fits together. I don’t believe in assumptive models. I’m much less rational. I think human beings are much less rational than needed. I think they obviously respond to incentives in some ways, but often respond to incentives in no rational way. I’m, again, being more neoconservative than conservative, or more whatever you want to call it, a Humean. I really do believe that David Hume’s famous sentence that reason is and ought to follow the passions — I believe that’s true, that our passions are wiser than our reasonable mind, and that our emotions, when well trained, are much more supple and much more responsible for the way we think. Again, I may be caricaturing, but the rational school of economics thought, well, you see the world, that simple process of looking, and then weigh costs and benefits about the world, and then you make a decision about the world, I don’t believe that’s the way thinking works. I think the act of perception is 90 percent of what you think, that whether we’re seeing a moral act, or seeing a good on a supermarket shelf, or seeing another human being, we’re making quick aesthetic judgements that will determine all the downstream thought processes, and that’s why so many neuroscientists are phenomenologists now, because perception is most of what the mind does. On your last podcast, you had a conductor. Yes. David Robertson.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.