In the Summer 2009 issue of the Independent Review, Arnold Kling reviews George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller’s new book Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Reading his review, one wonders how it is still possible for a serious scholar to make a case for more government intervention by simply documenting all the ways in which actual human behavior differs from the (strong) rationality postulates of classical economics. As Arnold Kling points out, and this must be getting quite tiresome, why assume that these same “animal spirits” do not inform and shape public policy as well? It is not hard to imagine a book that uses politics and government policies as illustrations of irrationality, conformity, and unfair decision making. As a matter of fact, current government responses to the financial crisis should provide a wealth of examples for numerous volumes about “politicians in panic.”

What might be more illuminating from a scholarly perspective is to investigate how different incentives and institutional environments produce lesser and greater diversions from the postulates of rational choice. A focused contribution to investigating these topics has been made by the economist Bryan Caplan, culminating in his excellent, and courageous, book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.

Of course, purists will rightly argue that the case of Akerlof and Shiller is dead on arrival because no prescriptive statements can be derived from their detailed descriptions of irrational behavior without accepting the authors’ own outlook, in their case expressed in the metaphor of society as a family in which the government behaves as the parents. The use of this metaphor sheds an interesting light on how some modern liberals view society as an extended family.