You’ve heard of Keynesian economics. You might have heard of B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism.
Combine the two in an “unholy” alliance, according to Max Borders, and you get “Skeynesianism”:
Skinner thought you could tweak people into ideal behaviors. The mind, brain and the genes could simply be cut away in his methodology. To perfect people would be to stimulate them in the appropriate ways. But that required lobotomizing them in a way. The baby that Skinner threw out with the bathwater — cognitive neuroscience — has come a long way since Skinner orphaned it. And, though Skinner has been pretty thoroughly discredited by contemporary science since Beyond Freedom and Dignity, strands of his thinking have re-emerged in the work of some behavioral economists.
Where Skinner discarded the mind, brain and genes at the local level, Keynesian turned individuals and their behavior into aggregates and abstractions at the macro level. Sophisticated mathematical models were enough, it seemed, to limn the important aspects of a deterministic economy. Generally, it doesn?t matter if that economy is made up of thinking, feeling, acting individuals with different predispositions. Circumstances of time and place — individual actions and local knowledge – are not important from the perspective of expert policymakers.
Skeynesian takes the worst of these two dead traditions. And it’s thriving. To qualify for appointment in academy or government these days, you have to be willing both to lobotomize and to abstract people.
