>>Female Presenter: Hi everyone. Thank you
for coming to today's @Google talk. I'm very excited to introduce David Brooks. You all
know him as an Op Ed columnist for the New York Times and the author of "Bobos in Paradise." And David has also served as a Senior Editor
for the Weekly Standard, a Contributing Editor for Newsweek and Atlantic Monthly as well.
And is a frequent commentator on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. So, without further
ado, I wanna invite up here David Brooks. [applause] >>David Brooks: Thank you. It's a little odd
to be here. I grew up about a half mile from here, maybe longer, on 14th Street in Stuyvesant
Town--what I call Singapore on 14th Street, 'cause of all the rules. Not allowed to bring
baby carriages into the playground and other odd rules in Stuyvesant Town. But it was a few blocks from here and a generation
ago. I grew up in the 60s. I went to Grace Church School on 10th and Broadway. When I
was in 4th Grade, the Weathermen blew themselves up in the block next door, if you remember
the Weathermen, the 60s radical group. My parents were somewhat Left Wing. My father
was teaching at NYU. They took me to a be-in 1965, where hippies would go just to "be"
in Central Park. And they threw their--. They set a garbage can on fire and they threw their
wallets into it to demonstrate their liberation from money and material things. And I was five and I saw a five dollar bill
on fire, so I ran up and grabbed the money and ran away with it. [laughter] And that was my first step over to the Right
in my life. So, it was definitely a different era to move from. I got paddled in third grade
for writing "Julie Nixon is a Nazi" on the board. I was so Left Wing at that point. And so now, to go from the Weathermen to Google
is in some ways a big change, and some ways not a change at all, actually. My first book
was more or less about that. So anyway, this book starts with a political problem I had.
And I'll just talk about it briefly. A problem I had in covering policy, really for the last
20 years, which was when I took my current job, I was given a good piece of advice, which
was to interview three politicians every day. And I don't always meet that quota, but I
often do. I spend a lot of time around politicians. And I learned that they're all emotional freaks
of one sort or another. They have what I call "logorrhea dementia," which is they talk so
much it drives themselves insane. And when you meet them, they invade your personal
space. They stand way too close. They rub the back of your head. They give you the full
man hug. Thing, I had dinner with a Republican Senator who kept his hand on my thigh the
whole meal, squeezing it for emphasis when he wanted to make a point. [laughter] And so what they have is just incredible social
skills. A story I tell about Bill Clinton, which you'll call name-dropping, but I call
reporting, I'm walking out of a hotel lobby in Boston. Clinton comes out of the elevator. He sees
me. He starts praising me for a column I'd written praising him, which he thought was
particularly brilliant. [laughter] And then I, a crowd gathers. They see Bill
Clinton in the hotel lobby. And he starts backing up, so he can welcome them all into
our conversation. And so within a few minutes, he's like 80 feet away from me, but just talking
to me, but just wanting to welcome the whole crowd. Mitt Romney, I was following him around in
New Hampshire the last Presidential cycle. And he was up in New Hampshire campaigning
with his five perfect sons, Bip, Chip, Rip, Sip, Dip, and Lip and Skip. And he goes into
a diner and he introduces himself to a family at the diner and asks, "What village in New
Hampshire are you from?" And they described the village and he describes
the home he owns in their village. And then he goes around. And he's leaving the diner
and he waves good-bye to everybody. Forty, fifty people. He's remember all their names.
He first names them. And so that's a level of social skills that is impressive. I was at the National Institute of Health
not long ago. And a neuroscientist showed me a video of a girl with William's Syndrome.
And William's Syndrome, from the outside, looks like reverse autism. And so, the girl
has no interest in the physical objects in the room. She just has interest in social encounters.
And so, she's in a room with a guy who had a little boy, who's 12 years old. And she
stands way too close to him and just wants to stare into his eyes to get those social
encounters. And he's juggling. He's trying to knock things over to get her interested
in the physical objects. But she just stands way too close and just
is looking at him. And I was looking at this video and I'm thinking this is every Senator
that I've ever covered. [laughter] So, these are the people I cover every day,
these socially very attuned creatures. And yet, when they do policy very often, all that
skill vanishes and they start thinking like CBO reports. And so I've covered a series of failures over
the course of my life, most of which derived from this really simple view of human nature.
So I spent four years covering Europe and the decline of the Soviet Union, the rise
of Russia. And we sent in teams of economists with our currency plans and privatization
plans, because we assumed that what Russia really needed after the Soviet Union was good
economic policy. But what Russia really lacked was social trust--the
inability to form associations and trust people. And as a result, everybody stole everything.
And that was something we didn't anticipate. In Iraq, we sent in the military, but our
leaders were oblivious to the cultural and psychological realities they would find in
Iraq. I once asked a senior official in the Bush
Administration, "Didn't you guys kind of get the culture in Iraq wrong?" And this person
said, "Well, I don't really believe in culture. I think if you change institutions, you'll
change the society." But so, cultures factored out because it can't be quantified. And then we had a financial system based on
the supposition that bankers were prudent, rational creatures who would respond in straight
forward ways to incentives and wouldn't do anything stupid en masse. That turns out not
to be true. And then the issue I care most about is school reform education. And I've covered a whole series of policy
reform since 1983. And most of them have had disappointing results because they treat students--.
Well basically, because they've skirted the core issue in education, which is the individual
relationship between a teacher and a student. People learn from people they love, but if
you talk about the word "love" at a Congressional hearing, they look at you like you're Oprah.
And so, this is an essential problem I face, which is that we have the most socially attuned
people on earth behaving and governing in ways which are socially illiterate. And so I thought about this problem and it
occurred to me that it was not only a problem in Washington, but it was a broader cultural
problem. That for centuries, at least since the French Enlightenment, we've inherited
a view that we're divided selves. We have reason over here. We have the emotions over here. And that they're
sort of a teeter-totter. They're at war with each other. When the reason, the emotions
are down and vice versa. And this has led to ways of studying human nature, which basically
borrow the methodologies of physics, emphasizing those things that can be quantified and modeled,
and ignoring and amputating all the rest. It's meant that culturally, we're really good
at talking about material things, but pretty bad at talking about emotions. When we raise
our kids, we're really good at talking about job skills and things like that, but really
bad at talking about the things that matter most, which are character. And so, we end up that when we raise our kids
in sort of the "Tiger Momization." She's the extreme form, but many of us practice this
form of child parenting that we ridicule but don't renounce, where we spend enormous amounts
of time focusing on the GPA and the SATs, things that barely lead to success. And in my neighborhood of Bethesda, Maryland,
and I know in this neighborhood, you get the--. If you go watch the kids coming out of school
at the third grade, they've got these 80-pound backpacks on their backs. If the wind blows
them over they're like beetles, stuck there on the ground. [laughter] And their moms, who I described in one of
my earlier books, who come pick them up. I call them Uber Moms who are highly successful
career women and have taken time off to make sure all their kids get into Harvard. And you can usually tell the Uber Moms 'cause
they actually weigh less than their own children. At the moment of conception, they're doing
little butt exercises, taking so many soy-based nutritional formulas during pregnancy. The
babies come out these gigantic, 13-pound, defensive linemen, plopping out there. And the Uber Moms are cutting the umbilical
cords themselves and flashing little Mandarin flashcards at the things to get them ready. [laughter] And then, of course, the kids go off to become
the junior workaholics of America. And then when they start talking about shopping, often
it ends up as consumption. And so we shop in places that make us feel better about ourselves
because that's the easiest way to feel moral. We shop at Ben and Jerry's ice cream--an ice
cream company with its own foreign policy. I joke in one of my books that Ben and Jerry's
should make a pacifist toothpaste. It doesn't kill germs. It just asks them to leave. That
would be a big seller. [laughter] Or else, in this neighborhood you have Whole
Foods across the street in the market, these progressive, enlightened stores where all
the cashiers look like they're on loan from Amnesty International. And they've got these morally upstanding snacks,
'cause it's not pretzel and potato chips. They're these seaweed-based snacks. What we
buy in my household, it's called Veggie Booty with Kale, which is for kids who come and
say, "Mom, Mom. I want a snack that will help prevent colon rectal cancer." [laughter] And so, this is the lifestyle we have, which
is where the policy world is not as deep as it should be. The way we raise our kids ignore
some of the most elemental factors. And when we talk about morality, we're stuck in a world
that philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre described where he said that "we have words for virtue
and courage and honor, but we no longer have a system to understand how these things all
fit together." And he said image we use words like gravity,
neutron, electron, but no real theory of physics to how all these things fit together. And
he said that's the moral world we live in. I think there's a lot of truth to that. So
I'm stuck here both trying to analyze the culture and the policy with these problems,
with this vacuum or this amputation of things what's most important. And while I'm thinking about these problems
in my normal world, I see a group of researchers who are coming up with answers to some of
these problems about what deepest in our nature. And the interesting thing to me was not in
the places where you would expect to look for it in the world of philosophy, theology,
the people who usually tell us most about ourselves. It's over the past 30 years, among people
who've studied the human mind among neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, behavioral economics,
psychology, sociologists. And in all these fields, there's tremendous excitement and
really a much more aggressive and assertive interest in who we are and describing who
we are. And so it occurred to me, over the past 30
years, we've had this really stream of advance. And though they speak in a language of science
and use fMRI machines and high technologies, really the vision they give us of ourselves
is a much more humanistic vision than one would imagine. It's the world being described by neuroscientists
is not a cold, deterministic world. It's a very humanistic world. And really, if you
take all these many different fields that are looking into the human mind, they tend
to revolve around three key insights. The first of which is that while the conscious
mind writes the autobiography of our species, most of our thinking is unconscious. One way to think about this what a guy named
Tim Wilson, in the University of Virginia, says the human mind can take in about 40 million
pieces of information a minute, of which it can be consciously aware of about 40. And
so, advanced amounts of thinking are unconscious--the processes that are happening below awareness. And some of these are odd. These processes,
one of my favorite experiments, somewhat controversial, is that people named Dennis are disproportionately
likely to become dentists. People named Lawrence are disproportionately likely to become lawyers. Because unconsciously, we have a slight bias
toward things that are familiar, which is why my daughter is named President of the
United States Brooks. [laughter] Another oddity--I think it was Dan Ariely
who's now at Duke, found that when you eat alone, you eat this much. When you eat with
one other person, you eat, on average, 35% more. Six or more other people, you eat, on average,
78% more. And you're really not aware of this, that these are some of the ways you're biased
by unconscious processes. And then the second thing about the unconscious is in some ways
the unconscious processes--of which there are many--are really dumb. They're really bad at math, for example. But
in some ways they're phenomenally smart. They're really good at pattern recognition. And so,
if you have a difficult problem with choosing a poster, choosing a piece of furniture, often
the best way to solve it, the researchers have found, is not to make a conscious list,
but to absorb the pattern. Distract yourself and then go with your intuition.
And so, one other tip I got from one of the scientists was if you have trouble making
up your mind between two things, tell yourself you'll settle it by a coin flip. But don't
go by whether the coin came up heads or tails. Go by your emotional reaction to the coin
flip. Are you happy or sad it came up the way it did? And that's your inner mind telling
you what it wanted all along. And so that's the first insight--the power of unconscious
paroxysm. The second insight is the centrality of emotion. Emotion is not separate from reason. Emotion
is the foundation from reason. A guy named Antonio Damasio, USC, studies people who have
had lesions in the parts of the brain that process emotion. And those people are not
super-smart, Mr. Spocks. They're super-dumb and basically incompetent at life because
what emotions are, they are an evaluation system. They tell you what you admire, what you don't
like, what you want, what you don't want. And if you can't make those value judgments,
you can't decide and your decision-making landscape is hopelessly flat. And so, emotion
has risen from the periphery of the study of the mind to the absolute center, as people
understand that emotion is central to all of our processes. Now, I'm a middle-aged guy. I'm not particularly--.
I wear a suit, even at Google. I'm not particularly comfortable talking about emotion. My wife
jokes that me writing a book about emotion is like Gandhi writing a book about gluttony.
It's not my natural thing. [laughter] I come from Washington, the most emotionally
avoidant city on the face of the earth. And I consider myself the most emotionally avoidant
person in the most emotionally avoidant city on the face of the earth. There's a brain scan story, which is apocryphal
but gets at the truth, where they took a bunch of middle-aged guys. They put them in an fMRI
machine. They had them watch a horror movie. And then they had them describe their feeling
toward their wives. And the brain scans were identical in both circumstances--just sheer
terror. And so, I sorta get that. [laughter] And yet, it is true that emotions are central
to how we think, to how we value. Emotions are central to what we remember. There are
some kids who are very bad, very low affects, low emotion in childhood. And as adults, they
barely remember their childhoods. And then emotion literally wires the fibers
of the brain together. There was a horrible orphanage in the 1940s out West, in the US,
where they decided the way to handle kids, the way to raise kids at a very early age,
infants, was to give them good health care, give them good food, but not handle them.
Keep them antiseptic, germ-free. And in this orphanage, the mortality rate
by age two was 38 percent. And so, they stopped naming the kids 'cause they were dying at
such high frequency. So without that emotional handling, the brain really does not wire itself
together. So that's the second insight. And the third insight is that we're not primarily
self-contained individuals. We're deeply interpenetrated, one to another. Some of you have probably
read about the theory of mirror neurons, which is that when we see each other do something,
we don't observe what we're doing. We reenact in our own brains what we see each
other doing. So when you see me pick up a cup of coffee, it looks in your brain as if
you yourself are picking up a cup of coffee. And if I pick it up to drink it, you encode
it one way. If I pick it up to throw it in the garbage, you encode it in a different
way. So you're not only observing what I'm doing,
you're reenacting the intention behind my action. And so, this is a way we're deeply
interpenetrated, one with another. And it's why emotional contagions can sweep through
a financial market, or sweep through the Middle East. And this deep interpenetration happens sometimes
visually. Very importantly, in ways we don't appreciate, happens through smell. People
who lose the sense of smell suffered greater emotional deterioration than people who lose
any of the other senses because so much of our signals come through smell in ways we're
not aware of. There was an experiment done in Germany, where
they took a bunch of people, put gauze pads under their arms, had some of them watch a
horror movie, some watch a comedy. And they had other people who were well paid smell
the gauze pads. And they said, "Which movie did this person watch?" And people can tell it way above average chance
which they watched. And women were a lot better. And so, these are the three foundational principles--the
power of the unconscious, the centrality of emotions, and the deep interpenetration of
minds. And when you add those three together, you get a different view of who we are. The French Enlightenment, René Descartes,
had a view that we're primarily rational creatures. But there was a separate enlightenment that
said the reason is weak, the sentiments are strong. And this was the British, or Scottish,
enlightenment David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke. And they said the sentiments are strong, what
we would call the emotions. And that gives us a different view of who we are. And I think
a different view, for example, of what it takes to really succeed in the world, a different
set of traits that really build human capital. And so, when we talk about human capital,
what it takes to succeed and achieve, we tend to talk about things like SAT scores, degrees,
years in schooling, things measured in IQ tests. And those things aren't important.
Twenty-five percent of the job variation at any company is explained by IQ. And so that is a significant thing. But 75%
of the job variation at any company is explained by other things, many, many other things.
And I actually saw a study a couple weeks ago--I'm sure you all read it--about Google
executives and what made a superior Google executive. And if I recall the study correctly, it was
not raw IQ. It was not the ability to write code. It was the ability to coach one on one,
which turned out to be the most important factor. And so, when we think about what makes
up human capital, what this research points to is not only the conscious abilities that
you can measure and count, like IQ, but a whole series of unconscious skills. And so, I'm just gonna list a couple of those
skills. One of them you might call "mind sight," which is the ability to enter other people's
minds and download the information they have there. The ability to permeate with another
person. This is something babies come with. So Alan Meltzoff, in 1979, a University of
Washington scientist, leaned over a baby who was 43 minutes old, wagged his tongue at the
baby and the baby wagged her tongue back. A baby that young has no sense of myself or
another person or what a face is or what a tongue is, but we're wired to mimic. And it's through that mimicry that we tend
to absorb information, tend to recreate a world. Now in this country, 55% of the babies
by 18 months have established a reliable mimicking relationship with Mom. And those kids have
a huge advantage when they get to school, even by 18 months, because not only do they
have a relationship with Mom, they have a model in their heads of how to build relationships. And so, scientists at the University of Minnesota
take a look at these, what they call attachment patterns at 18 months. And they can predict
with 77% accuracy who is gonna graduate from high school. Because if you can relate to
Teacher, you just have a big advantage in school. About 20% of the kids in this country have
what they call avoidant attachment patterns, which is to say they send out signals, but
nothing has come back to them. And so they have an imperfect model of how to build relationships.
In one of the books I read, one of the teachers described an avoidantly attached kid going
to class like a sailboat tacking in the wind, back and forth. Not wanting to get close to
teacher, but not really knowing how to do that. And these kids, avoidantly attached people,
by age 70, have much fewer friends because they just get less of a kick out of social
attachment. And they tend to do less well in work. And so this is a trait that we all
think about as very hard to measure, but some people have the ability, when you're sitting
with them, just to laser into you. And they're gonna take whatever you have.
The second trait is what you might call "equipoise," which is having the serenity and maturity
to monitor the biases and shortcomings in your own mind. And so, this, for example,
we all tend to be overconfident. Ninety-five percent of the professors in America
believe they have above average teaching skills. Time Magazine once asked Americans "Are you
in the top 1% of earners?" And 19% of Americans are in the top one percent of earners and
another 36% expect to be someday. Paul Schumacher and Edward Russo gave tests
to executives about their own industry. And then they asked them to evaluate their answers.
How confident were they they got the answers to the test correct? And so, people in the
advertising industry gave answers they felt were 90% correct. And they thought the answers were 90% correct.
In fact, they got 60% of the answers wrong. The most overconfident industry in the entire
country is the computer and software industry. People in the computer industry, in these
tests, thought they got 95% of the answers correct. In fact, they got 80% wrong. And that's because this overconfidence trait
is incredibly gender linked. [laughter] And so, men drown at twice the rate of women
because men have tremendous confidence in their swimming ability after they've been
drinking. And so, men are way more overconfident. But some people have the ability, what they
call meta-cognition, to look inside their own mind and correct for their own biases,
what I call "equipoise." And so, there's a whole series of traits, which are mental traits,
but which correlate relatively weakly with IQ, but are tremendously important--the ability
to regulate the strength of your conclusions to the strength of the evidence. The ability to be curious and open-minded.
The ability to be modest in the face of partial knowledge. The ability to build what you might
call "modesty boot straps" for yourself to remind you how little you know. Peter Drucker
had one when he said, "When you make a decision, write down your reasonings. Seal it in an
envelope for nine months. Open the envelope. And you'll find nine months
later that a third of your decisions are correct. A third were wrong. A third were in the middle.
But in almost all cases, your reasoning will be completely irrelevant." And so these sorts of modesty boot straps,
this meta-cognition, the ability to think about your own thinking, correct for your
own flaws is just a tremendously important skill, which correlates weakly to IQ and things
like that. The third trait is a Greek word called metis, which is the ability to detect
patterns in the environment. And so for example, my newspaper did a story
about soldiers in Iraq, who could look down a street and tell whether there was a land
mine, and IED, on the street. And when we asked them, "How do you know?" They couldn't
tell you. They just said, "I feel a coldness inside." And that's not something that comes instinctively.
It's something that comes from long practice and close observation. So an example of this,
because people with experience in the field, who have worked hard in the field to study
and observe something closely, see the landscape differently than other people. A good experiment that illustrated this was
they took chess Grand Masters and chess novices and gave them a five-second glimpse of the
chessboard. And then they said, "Memorize as much as you can on this board in five seconds."
The novices couldn't remember about four or five pieces on the board. The chess Grand Masters could easily remember
every piece on the board. And that's because they didn't see individual pieces. They saw
formations of pieces. And so, and then they rearranged the chess pieces so they were in
such a way that could never actually exist at a chess game. And the Grand Masters were no better than
anybody else. And it's through the power of close observation over time you learn to see
something differently and you get these pattern recognition skills. The fourth, I'll just
mention quickly, is sympathy. And if metis is the ability to look across
the physical landscape and detect patterns, sympathy is the ability to look across the
social landscape and detect patterns. And this is really useful if you wanna work in
groups. Most of us in companies--not newspaper columnists, unfortunately--but most people
work in groups. And that's because groups are much more efficient
than individuals. They think much better. And they work a lot harder. I just saw a study.
Somebody had the bright idea of measuring the swimming times at the last Summer Olympics.
They compared the swimmer's performance in their individual events to their performance
when they were part of a relay team. And as part of a relay team, they swum much
faster than they did individually. And the later they were in the relay team, the third
or fourth, the more they improved their times because they felt more essential to the team.
And so, groups think much better than individuals. Groups that think face-to-face do much, much
better than groups that communicate by electronics. University of Michigan did a study where they
took individuals--. Took a series of groups and gave them math tests. Some of them could
solve the tests in face-to-face meetings. Some of them had to communicate by email.
The groups that met face-to-face had 10 minutes to solve the problems. They did it easily.
The groups that communicated by email had 30 minutes and they failed. And so, face-to-face
communication is just a lot more effective. And the IQ of the group, the effectiveness
of the group, was not determined by the IQ of the individual members. It was determined
by how emotionally sensitive they were to one another--how often they took turns in
conversation and things like that. So that ability of sympathy is just tremendously important. And then the final thing I'll mention just
quickly is the ability to build character, to build a scaffold of restraints so you can
resist temptation and control your impulses. My favorite of experiments in all these fields
was done by a guy named Walter Mischel up here at Columbia. Probably all of you know this. It's called
the Marshmallow Experiment. But just quickly for those who don't, Mischel took a bunch
of four-year olds, put them in a room, put a marshmallow on the table in front of them
and said, "I'm gonna leave the room, come back in ten minutes. If you haven't eaten the marshmallow, I'll
give you two marshmallows." And he shows me videos of one of the little girls banging
her head on the table trying not to eat the marshmallow. [laughter] One day, Michelle was using an Oreo cookie.
The little kid picks up the Oreo, carefully opens the middle, carefully puts it back on
the table. And that kid is now a US Senator. [laughter] But the significance of the test is that 20
years later, the kids who could wait seven, eight, ten minutes have much higher college
completion rates and 30 years later, much higher incomes. The kids who could wait one minute or less
have much higher drug and alcohol addiction problems and much higher incarceration rates.
And that's because some kids grew up in homes where actions lead to consequences and they
learned to control their impulses. Some kids don't grow up in those homes. And
the kids, who could wait, didn't do it by staring at the marshmallow and saying, "I
will exercise iron willpower. I will not eat that marshmallow." They did it by distracting
themselves, by singing, by doing something else, pretending the marshmallow was a cloud. They had strategies. And so, the lesson is
if you wanna change your mind, you change your behavior first. As the folks at Alcoholics
Anonymous put it, "Fake it till you make it." And some people have the ability to instill
habits in themselves, which encourage really good--. That groove the mind in the right direction
and they develop good character. And so, these are some of the traits you could describe
which contribute actual to real-life fulfillment and achievement, which are not the conscious
traits, but are some of the traits being illuminated by this field of research. And so, over the course of the research, I
came across a paragraph which I think illustrates a lot of trends that I've been talking about.
And that's the importance of emotion, the interconnection between people, and the importance
of unconscious processes. And I'll just close by reading this paragraph,
which is something of a sad paragraph. It's a paragraph from a book by the name of Douglas
Hofstadter, who I hope some of you have heard of, who's a great mathematician. A cognitive
scientist, I guess he is who teaches at Indiana University. And Hofstadter wrote many fine books and he
was on sabbatical, if I recall the story correctly, in Italy with his two kids who were at that
point aged five and two. And his wife, Carol. And while he was there, Carol very suddenly
and very shockingly--I think she had a stroke or an aneurysm--and she died when her kids
were five and two. And Hofstadter kept a photograph of Carol
on the bureau of his bedroom. And he presumably saw this photograph many times during the
course of a day. But one particular time a couple months after his wife's death, he happened
to see the photograph with a special intensity, or poignancy. And he wrote this passage in his book, "I'm
a Strange Loop." So here's Hofstadter’s writing. [reads from book]
"I looked at her face. And I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes. And all
at once, I found myself saying, as tears flowed, 'That's me. That's me.' And those simple words
brought back many thoughts that I had had before about the fusion of our souls into
one, higher level entity, about the fact that the core of both our souls lay our identical
hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate
or distinct hopes, but were just one hope. One clear thing that defined us both, that
welded us into a unit. The kind of unit that I had but dimly imagined before being married
and having children. I realized that though Carol had died, that core piece of her had
not died at all, but that it had lived on, very determinately, in my brain." [ends passage] And so the Greeks used to say we suffer our
way to wisdom. And the wisdom Hofstadter suffered his way through this horrible experience was
that the loops that go through our mind are shared loops. And some of them come from the
people near and dear to us right away. Some of the loops in our mind come from education.
Some of them come decades ago from culture. Some come from family. Some come from our
civilization. Some come from religion. Some come from our distant ancestors in the form
of genes. But all these loops really permeate our minds
in ways that connect us to one another and make us more bounded as individuals, more
part of a collective. And in a less tragic way, I think the policy failures of the last
few years suffered toward the wisdom that if we have policy, that really doesn’t take
into account the full depth of human nature--all these unconscious processes. If we have moral discussions that ignore our
moral sentiments and our moral intuitions. And if we have child rearing techniques, which
don't emphasize the things that are down there, that really are the foundation of character,
then we'll be insufficient in all these things. And finally, the good news is that the last
30 years have really seen tremendous advances in understanding what's going on down there.
And when Freud came up with his conception of the unconscious, it had very pervasive
effects on culture. I think now we're developing a new view of consciousness of the unconscious,
of who we are, written about by many books and in many articles. And I think it's gonna have a tremendously
positive influence on our culture and maybe even eventually on the world of policy. That
might happen. So, thank you very much. [applause] There's time for questions or anything, if
anybody has--. [pause] You first. >>FEMALE #1: I have a question about something
you said in the beginning about the conversation about education and how the avoidance of emotional
inputs is pervasive. How do we change that? How do we get that to be part of the conversation
where Congress doesn't want to talk about kids connecting to the teachers? >>David Brooks: Well, it's--. I think, I would
say this research has permeated the field of education more than any other. Because
people in the field are more comfortable talking about this stuff. And so, I think what's happened
is you've had a whole series of models which have explicitly exploited this research. So for example, the Marshmallow Experiment
was the foundation for a series of schools called KIPP Schools, which are around and
which really work on exactly the skills that are below awareness. So when you walk into
a KIPP school, the kids are taught to look people in the eye, to nod in agreement, to
walk down the hallway. Their graduation year is not the year they're
gonna graduate from high school. It's four years hence, when they're expected to graduate
from college. And so, their expectations are expanded. And so those models really take--.
They emphasize tests and accountability and that stuff. But they also work to create a counter culture.
The difficulty politically--and Harlem Children's Zone is the perfect example of this--which
is not just a school, but an entire counter-environment really creating a pervasive environment, because
the fundamental effect is we don't know what causes poverty and these things. But you just gotta try everything. If you
have an emergent system that is poverty, you have to have a counter-emergent system. The
political problem is that these institutions which take advantage of this research are
incredibly paternalistic and very no holds barred about that. And so the question becomes, do we want government
getting involved in families and really replacing the culture of families? And we all take a
step back from that. Nonetheless, I think given when you're faced with especially the
generational cycles of poverty, it's worth taking that risk to have a series of paternalistic
human capital policies starting with nurse-family partnerships to coach moms to become better
moms, early childhood education, much better Head Start, KIPP Academies, after school,
mentoring, even in college, mentoring programs, coaching programs, a whole stream of policies
that pay attention to this to complement the testing in math and reading. And so, I think it's happening. And I had
an email just finally from a friend of mine who worked in the Clinton Administration.
He came up here to work in the school system. And he said, "I've never been as optimistic
as I am about education reform. I've never been as pessimistic about government." And that's about how I feel. But I think a
lot of good stuff is happening in education on that. >>MALE #1: It's hard to know how many of our
social instincts are innate, and how many are learned. But I was wondering given a world
where people tend to relate through Facebook rather than face-to-face contact, do you see
a new set of social instincts emerging? Or, do you think that somehow the whole Facebook-style
of interaction will fail because of innate social instincts? >>David Brooks: Yeah. Well, some things are
innate. Some of the famous examples are men-like women with a zero point seven waist-to-hip
ratio. Men, in all times--. Or, women in all times and all places like guys who are taller
than them, though I did see a study. Somebody did a study of, I think match.com,
where they found that a guy who's 5'6" can get as many online date offers as a guy who's
6', so long as he makes $172,000 t a year or more. [laughter] That's the price of--. So if you're short,
work hard. [laughter] As for Facebook, there's advanced body of
research on this now. And my honest appraisal of it is that it's indeterminate. The way
I look at it, the question is does Facebook replace normal, face-to-face friendship, or
does it supplement it? And I think the body of research so far is
that it supplements it. But I think the one of the studies I saw recently, I think probably
have the best answer, which is, it's not Facebook. It's what you bring to Facebook. And so, most
of the people who do it, use Facebook as a way to organize and deepen their normal contacts. But there's a minority of people who use it
basically as solace for their own loneliness. And so, it's not so much the technology that
is determining how it's used, whether it's just drawing networks, it's what people bring
to the technology. And my own--. I have an optimistic take because if there
is an upsurge in social dislocation, or social dysfunction among say, people under 30, I
don't see the evidence for it. If you look at social indicators for people under 30,
their all heading in the right direction. Teenage pregnancy rates are dropping. Teenage suicide is dropping. Teenage violence
is dropping. Marriage rates are increasing. Divorce rates are dropping. All these positive
social indicators for people under 35. And so, if the technology is destroying their
lives, there's no evidence for that. So I take the more optimistic view, but there
is some negative results about the Facebook, too. >>MALE #2: Thank you. >>MALE #3: You gave two examples at the beginning
about the Mandarin cards and then the marshmallows, where you seem to imply that it came from
the environment at home. It's exactly the kind of things where, based
on twin studies Judith Rich Harris would say. >>David Brooks: Right. >>MALE #3: You can't say that. Can you comment
on that? >>David Brooks: Yeah. This is a great debate
which I can't do justice to. She, Judith Rich Harris and many other people, Steven Pinker,
my friend Larry Summers, believe, look at twin studies and they essentially say parenting
barely matters, that some of it is genes, that some of it is peer, but very little of
it is parenting. I have two problems with this. First, there
is a gigantic--. I cited attachment studies. And this is where they look at the attachment
patterns through life and see how the kids turned out. And there are now--. There is
just a mountain of attachment studies done all over the world. And these are very rigorous studies which
correlate parental and child relationships to outcomes. And it shows that parents actually
do matter. And so, I look at attachment research which stands in direct contradiction to the
twin study research. And that says that the parental attachment matters. The second thing is that one of the problems
I have with the Rich Harris work, is a lot of it is based on categories that I don't
think exist in real life. And so for example, when she's--. She says that two kids who are
in the same family have a shared environment. Yet, if I'm driving--I have three kids-- if
I'm driving with my three kids, I have very different conversations with each of them,
depending on what they bring to the table. We have different relationships. And so I
don't know what she means when she says that there's a shared environment in the home. I don't think there's any such thing as a
shared environment. And then the final thing to be said is a lot of people believe parents
don't matter. I have never seen anybody actually act that way. And so if you show me a parent
that says, "Hey, I don't matter. I'll let my kid run wild. I won't make them eat their, wait to eat dessert.
They can go to bed whenever the hell they want." When I see somebody actually acting
that way and it turns out for the best, then I'll believe it. So I'm an arch skeptic of
this view that the parents don't matter. But there are a lot of scientists and a lot of
people that look at the data who take the other point of view. So, it's not a settled
thing. >>MALE #4: So, some of the things you brought
up are how we're not really as rational as we like to think we are, and that we--. That
relationships are very important. I'm wondering what your thoughts on how that should inform
health care policy. So, something that various people, including
you, have talked about is the need to move towards a more incentive-based system, where
you're making economic decisions based on prizes. And actually Google gave us this option
where we could take a very high deductible health care policy and they could give us
a lump of money in a spending account. So, for the first thousand dollars, you'd
have to be making very economic decisions. But I think about myself. I didn't accept
that because for me, health care is a lot of trust in relationship. It's my wife saying,
"Hey, you better go. There's something wrong with you. You better go have that looked at." And me
trusting my doctor and me knowing that I really can't make the--. I don't know how to make
these cost-benefit trade-offs because as well-educated as I am, I don't understand. I'm not a doctor
and I don't know these things. >>David Brooks: Right. No, that's a very good
question. So I think this is essentially the fundamental question around politics right
now. And the core of all my political belief is this phrase epistemological modesty, the
idea that the world is phenomenally complicated and it's very hard to know. And that's certainly true of health care.
One little study I saw, this is tangential, but they took a bunch of doctors. They presented
them with the symptoms from the same patient, separately. They gave some of the doctors
a bag of candy, Halloween candy. And some, no bag. The doctors who had a bag
of candy diagnosed a kidney ailment much more accurately than the no candied people. And
so, we all don't know much, even doctors. But nonetheless, we have to make decisions
in the world. And the decisions we have to make right now
are decision that will reduce health care inflation. And so the question is who makes
those decisions? Now, people like me, and this I'm not a Libertarian, but I follow Hayek,
who said, "I would rather have the decentralized, dynamic decision-making process of the market
make those decisions as people choose their insurance options from a regulated batch of
insurance options." Other people, like the President, say, "No,
I'd rather have a board of experts in the Department of Health and Human Services."
He calls the board IPAP. There would be a board. And they would make the decisions about
how to ration care. And so, I am, from my perspective of epistemological
modesty, I would say the technical experts trying to make decisions about 17% of the
US economy are probably gonna be even worse than a dynamic market system. But believe
me, there are plenty of people who take the other side, who think that the market hasn't
worked in health care and you need a central body of experts. But one way or the other, somebody has to
make those decisions. And the correct answer could be there would be a mixture. There are
some decisions, some sorts of health care decisions, that individuals are better making
and some sorts that a group of centralized experts are better at making. But my bias is still to lean toward a decentralized
system, just because I think it's more dynamic. I think it corrects mistakes more dynamically
than a group of experts sitting at HHS. But Paul Krugman would disagree. And Barack Obama
would, too. >>MALE #5: Another question that sort of touches
on the politics, maybe on that. But if we could stay off the politics and more on the
social animal aspect of it, I've been profoundly confused by the recent debate over things
like The Ryan Plan. What polls indicate that people over 65 support
it tremendously, even though it would appear to increase their costs. We've got situations
where everybody talks about it being a deficit reduction plan, yet it has tremendous tax
reductions as well. So, it's like if you really care about deficit--. It's great to have cuts, but why in God's
name are you cutting taxes, too? From a rational point of view, it seems there are a lot of
arguments. And I'm sure, I don't want to argue the politics of it, but from the point of
view of a lot of people who seem to be supporting it, it seems actually to be going against
what they think is important, or it goes against their interests. It seems to me that it's unlikely that people,
that the large portions of the population--. And I can understand the debate between Keynes
and Hayek and all the rest, even if they do watch rap videos. [laughter] >>David Brooks: If everybody hasn't seen that
video, I highly recommend it, though. >>MALE #5: Yeah, yeah. Can you talk about,
in your experience, this social aspect of the political process, independent from the
rational aspect of it because I think we often are in situations where it clearly is not
a purely rational argument that is convincing people, either because they don't have the
data or because they don't have the background to understand what the arguments are? So, how does what you've written apply to--?
Why the heck do people either support or unsupport these things? >>David Brooks: Yeah. Well, that's--. Lemme
address it this way. I've covered Obama and Ryan for a long time. I've spent a lot of
time with each of them. And I think they're very similar personalities. And if they ever
got together, they would like each other enormously and understand each other. But they've never actually got together. They've
never had lunch. Obama's never called Ryan up and said, "Let's have lunch." Even though
they're basically the two principal figures. And I hear them talk about each other. And
they're both completely misinformed about who the other is and what they believe. And yet, they're in a competitive business.
They're in a very tribal business. And there's just a cold wind that separates the two tribes.
And so I'm to the point in politics where if I hear a member of one party--even really
smart people like Ryan, Obama--talk about a member of the other, I know that everything
I'm about to hear is false. And I actually do interview both parties and
I know sort of what they think. So they're caught up. They're both very competitive people,
especially Obama. So they're caught up in the competitive juices of the fight. My view is that to get to some sort of fiscally
sustainable solution, we've got to have a budget that is affordable, that reduces debt,
but which allows the country to be dynamic to allow creative destruction, but also heal
some of the social inequalities. So we've gotta have a budget that solves three goals
which are in contention with each other. And therefore, we have to balance a whole
series of different things. We have to have some tax increases, some spending cuts. We've
gotta tax the affluent in order to support the young families. And so these are tremendously
complicated things. And my view is it's only gonna be solved when
both parties migrate toward what I think is the Simpson-Bowles plan. >>MALE #5: Yeah, but that's the policy. >>David Brooks: Right, but I'm getting to
that. >>MALE #5: OK. >>David Brooks: So when I look at each party,
I'm asking what social steps are they taking to get us toward Simpson-Bowles? And so, what
I liked about The Ryan Plan was he took the Republican Party a social step toward that
center, because he said A, it's not enough to focus on NPR and foreign aid. You've gotta
focus on the entitlements. And then you've gotta have something pretty
serious to reform entitlements. And that was a bold step. And Obama took a step in calling
for some general deficit reductions. The policy details of the plans don't matter. The question
is are they taking a series of steps that get you closer to where the solution is bound
to be? And so I think both of them are beginning
to gradually take those steps to get out of the World War I trenches. And so I think they're
moving socially in the right direction. It would just help enormously if they ever had
a conversation with one another. >>MALE #5: But you're saying the perceptions
of the people is essentially politics by tribe. The rational content of the policies isn't
important. It's rather which tribe you're in? >>David Brooks: Well, a tribe does determine
everything in Washington. I mean, that's--. And so the question is how do you manage the
two tribes to get them toward one overlapping solution? And some days I think it'll happen. Most days
I think it's completely impossible. We'll have a national bankruptcy. I'd say 90% of
the days I think that. But it is that--. The big shock to me coming to Washington is how
much everything is team-oriented. It's team. Politics is a team sport. And the teams don't
overlap anymore. >>FEMALE #2: I'd like you to talk more about
overconfidence. So, the thing that doesn't quite agree in my head is that while I agree
that we live in a world that is overconfident and we're not calibrated to what the reality
is and that most things fall on a normal distribution curve, but if you act in a way that is rational
and understanding what the probability of your actions are gonna be, people don't respond
really well to that. Like, say you're an engineer and you say,
"Well, I'm 70% sure that this bridge will continue to stay up for 30 years."[David Brooks
chuckles] And then the other engineer, whether or not he's right, says, "I'm 99%sure that
this bridge is going to last for 30 plus years, or forever or whatever." The one that says 70% , even if he's correct,
will not get that job because that's the world we live in. And if I tell my kids, "Yeah,
you're not--. Don't worry about your tests. It will fall under a normal distribution curve.
Some people do well. Some people don't." [David Brooks laughs] Like, Cs, which are supposed to be average,
are not considered average. Come home with a C, I'm sure like most everybody in this
room, they're parents probably would've beat them. Or maybe just mine. But--. [laughter] So, I have a problem with the overconfidence
thing. Like, I think that it's not really a socially attuned thing to be calibrated,
like have your confidence be calibrated. That it's really something that society wants you
to be overconfident. And that's positively received, even in politics.
If Barack Obama ever said something that made him seem like "I'm not confident," they'd
be like, "OK, why are you doing it, then?" >>David Brooks: OK. Well, I'd ask you to go
work at Lehman Brothers if you were so in favor of overconfidence. Just teasing. I think
the right answer is you should be mildly overconfident. And so, the people who have the most accurate
self-appraisals are people who are clinically depressed. People who are depressed are very
accurate about who they are and their skills. So you wanna be slightly overconfident, like
by 5%. [laughter] >>FEMALE #2: But how could our depressed people
end interacting with society? >>David Brooks: No, that's your point. But
you don't wanna be 50% overconfident. So, and this is, again, gender-linked. If you
ask guys what your IQ is, the male response will be--. They'll tell you a score that's
about 15 points higher than it really is. Women tend to be pretty accurate. >>FEMALE #2: Yeah. >>David Brooks: And so, you wanna be slightly
overconfident. I never would've started the book if I knew how hard it was gonna be. And
I certainly wouldn't have gone off on a book tour. I would've shot myself. And so you wanna--.
You don't wanna appreciate how difficult it is. Nonetheless, if you're building a bridge
and you think--. And you build a bridge that will bear 70% of the load you're supposed
to, you don't wanna say, “That's a fantastic bridge." And so, you do wanna build. I mean, you do
wanna build modesty boot straps for yourself. And so, slight overconfidence--. Well the
other thing, dual consciousness, and this is what I cover in politics, dual consciousness
is tremendously important. The best politicians, in public, they totally believe what they're
saying. But in private, they have an equally authentic
self which says, "That's 70% true." And so I think it's valuable to have those two selves.
And by the way, that's another theme of the research is that we don't have one self. We
have a whole variety of very authentic selves. And so that would be my fudged answer to you. >>Female Presenter: And I think we're out
of time. I know you have a couple more questions, but--. >>David Brooks: I've gotta run to something
else. >>Female Presenter: It's been a slow news
week, obviously. [laughter] >>David Brooks: I've got a little--. There's
a guy in Pakistan I've gotta bump off. [laughter] >>Female Presenter: So, thank you for joining
us today, David. It's been great having you. [applause]
