Friday January 02, 2009

SCIENCE FICTION. Erstwhile Conservative candidate for New York Mayor George Marlin has found a heretofore unrevealed agenda of the Obama Administration. He cites a New York Times article about behavioral economists interested in the "underlying consumer psychology" behind phenomena like the mortgage bubble. "In this year’s campaign, Mr. Obama signaled an interest in the field by surrounding himself with advisers who were quite sympathetic to [behavioral economics]," said the Times. "Of course, this was before the financial crisis became so serious that it overwhelmed everything else. Today, it’s reasonable to ask whether the Obama administration will still have time for behavioral economics."

Here's what Marlin makes of that:

It should come as no surprise that the 1970s radicals taking over the Federal Government in January are promoting this brand of economics because the hero of their youth was the leader of America’s behavioral revolution, B.F. Skinner. Skinner, who, in the early 1970s, made the cover of Time magazine and whose book Beyond Freedom and Dignity hit the Times bestseller list, proudly proclaimed to his adoring public, “We not only can control human behavior, we must!”

Marlin then goes on to detail the philosophical crimes of Skinner ("Accordingly, there is then no essential difference between modern 'objective' psychology and rodentology, or between man and rat") and warns that these as-yet unhired social scientists will put us all in Skinner boxes: "If behaviorists have their way, man will be dehumanized by the planning and redevelopment of the cultural, economic and social system by government overseers. What a scary intellectual basis for Washington’s forthcoming managerial revolution."

Dad29 boils it down for the folks in the cheap seats: "But now, ALL of us can be rodentologized under the Great Obama." (Later, in comments: "No, I don't claim that O has 'embraced' Skinner's theory of behavior modification. But practitioners bear watching.")

Let's hope that no prospective Obama economic advisors have been associated, either through thesis papers or book club memberships, with the work of H.G. Wells, or it will be suggested that he wants to feed us all growth serum.