The Ghost in the Machine

Social science cannot capture what makes us human

Social science

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

Social science cannot capture what makes us human

Glenn C. Loury

Editors’ note: The following remarks were delivered by Professor Loury on the occasion of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS) Awards Luncheon in Washington, DC on October 19, 2022, where he was named John Kenneth Galbraith Fellow of the AAPSS.

We economists study markets, the behavior of consumers and firms, the art and science of buying and selling, the theory of rational choice. This is important work, to be sure. It is prudent to think carefully about incentives when creating social programs, for example. We should conceptualize and try to measure the costs and benefits of alternative policies. Doing this is a technical enterprise with respect to which the discipline of economics has considerable power. Even so, I do not find this analytical perspective, by itself, adequate to the task of social prescription. Indeed, the single-minded focus on benefits and costs that one associates with economic science can be a profoundly impoverished way of thinking about how we should live together in society.

Here is an example, drawn from recent discussions about racial profiling. The natural economics take on that problem goes as follows: When screening resources are limited, one detects an unobserved hazard most efficiently, as a statistical matter, by using all available information that correlates with the hazard. If dangerous actors are known to be drawn disproportionately from a group of people who look a certain way, then using that knowledge to design a screening process eases the monitoring problem. An economist sees immediately how such an analysis would go.

On the other hand, when we undertake to classify people categorically, and to treat them differently based on this categorization, we have done more than solve a resource allocation problem. We have also made a public statement about how we look upon and relate to one another. It seems to me, this expressive aspect of the policy (that is, whether to make such a statement) is often the whole ballgame. Determining how we relate to one another can be a more fundamental moral judgment than is an efficiency calculation. And yet, whereas the principles entailed by a cost-benefit calculation are easy to discern (“more is better than less”), to what principles can we look for guidance on the question of how to look upon those who are observably different from the rest of us? Does it make any sense at all to talk of the “benefits” and the “costs” of relating to one another in this way rather than that?

Because our value commitments (“What manner of people are we, and how then must we comport ourselves?”) can transcend our economic concerns (“How much do we have, and how might we get even more?”), we are (Thank God!) often moved to eschew what otherwise would seem to be the most efficient course of action. As a result, the cost-benefit calculus so prized by us economists is, in general, not sufficient to prescribe a course of action.

Now a critic will come along and say, channeling the spirit of the great Gary Becker, “Ah, but you have simply failed fully to account for all the costs and benefits; doing so allows one to include the value commitments within a cost-benefit framework.” I can understand this argument, but I think occasions will arise where, in the nature of the case, it is impossible in principle to do such a modified accounting. For we are talking here about the beliefs and the ideals we are prepared to affirm—matters that are incommensurate, it seems to me, with the costs and benefits that are an economist’s concern.

Consider the person who is tempted to steal but, in the end, decides not to do so. Contrast two distinct modes of reasoning supporting this decision. The person may calculate that to risk detection and punishment entails costs in excess of the benefits. Or the person may say to himself, with conviction, “I am not a thief.” The point I’m making is that an analyst ought not try to assimilate the second mode of reasoning to the first by introducing the fictitious notion of a “cost to thinking of oneself as a thief.” To do so is to compare apples to oranges by asking, in effect, “What is this person willing to pay for an unsullied self-concept?”

Social science can capture only a part of the human subject. Our methods project human beings onto those materialistic dimensions that we can then try to fathom. That is, as objects of scientific inquiry, human subjects must ultimately be treated as mechanisms. Yet, in so treating them, we social scientists leave out that which most makes a person human. We leave out the soul—what some derisively refer to as “the ghost in the machine.”

My fundamental conviction is that we human beings are not defined by our desires at a point in time. Indeed, I even deny that we are defined by our biological inheritance. “God is not finished with us when he deals us our genetic hand,” is how a poet might put it, and poetry has its place. I claim that, as spiritual creatures, the full extent of our humanity transcends that which can be glimpsed in the deterministic vision that an economist, a sociologist, or a psychologist provides.

If I am right, then it is crucial to grasp the implication that the behavior of freely choosing, socially situated, spiritually endowed human beings will in some essential way be indeterminate, unpredictable, and even mysterious. For when human agency is driven by what people understand to be meaningful—by what they believe in—then the inter-subjective processes of social interaction and mutual stimulation that generate and sustain patterns of belief in human communities become centrally important. But such processes of persuasion, conformity, conversion, myth construction and the like are open-ended and only weakly constrained by material conditions.

What we believe about the meaning of life powerfully shapes how we act in a given situation, but these beliefs themselves are not deducible as a necessary consequence of our situation. We can always agree to believe differently or more fervently, particularly if those with whom we are socially connected are undergoing a similar transformation. Thus, religious revivals and reformations can sweep through our ranks and change our collective view of the world virtually overnight. We can be moved to make enormous sacrifices on behalf of abstract goals. We are ever capable—as the Czech playwright-turned-politician Vaclav Havel has said so well—of “transcending the world of existences.” Put differently, that “ghost” doesn’t dwell within the human “machine.” Instead, it emerges from the intersubjective fervor of the crowd.

All of which is my way of suggesting that epistemic modesty is a indispensable virtue for those who would take up the vocation of social scientist.

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Glenn C. Loury is Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University, Paulson Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and 2022 John Kenneth Galbraith Fellow of The American Academy of Political and Social Science. As an academic economist, Professor Loury has published mainly in the areas of applied microeconomic theory, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of race and inequality. As a prominent social critic and public intellectual, writing mainly on the themes of racial inequality and social policy, Professor Loury has published over 200 essays and reviews in journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad. Professor Loury’s books include One by One, From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (The Free Press, 1995); The Anatomy of Racial Inequality  (Harvard University Press, 2002; reissued with a new preface in 2021); Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the US and the UK (ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Race, Incarceration and American Values (M.I.T. Press, 2008). His previous essays in the Journal of Free Black Thought include our inaugural post, “Wrestle Not Against Flesh and Blood” and “What’s at stake in the ‘Conversation about Race’ that I’ve been having with John McWhorter?” He writes and podcasts at his Substack, The Glenn Show. Follow him on Twitter.