Back in February, Jim Manzi of The American Scene praised David Brooks for summarizing “most of what I write about. Here’s what Brooks said:

The correct position is the one held by self-loathing intellectuals, like Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Burke, James Madison, Michael Oakeshott and others. These were pointy heads who understood the limits of what pointy heads can know. The phrase for this outlook is epistemological modesty, which would make a fine vanity license plate.

The idea is that the world is too complex for us to know, and therefore policies should be designed that take account of our ignorance.

The first paragraph contains a wildly extreme claim hidden in a very boring one. The boring one is that it’s good to understand the limits of what we know, which is obvious given that in general, it’s good to understand things. It’s not helpful, to be helpful it would need to give us some idea of what those limits are. The wildly extreme claim does purport to do that: it says the limits of what we know make intellectuals loathsome. No evidence is given for that, and it can be passed off as a truism because it’s embedded in a truism, while at the same time it makes the truism look like something more.

Similarly, the last sentence lacks a quantifier: is the world too complex to know at all, or only too complex to know in its entirety? The first reading is false, the second is at best a thin insight: obviously we don’t know everything, though the connection to the world’s complexity isn’t quite so obvious.

In the specific case of the debate over the stimulus package, I agree with Brooks for very different reasons: I think our evidence positively supports thinking that it’s a bad idea. On the mid-level debate about policy principles, I sorta agree with Brooks for sorta similar reasons, reasons that have to do with how the world’s supply of knowledge is distributed. But I think I know quite a bit about that: I think I know that individual economic players know a lot that policy makers don’t, and that market-based solutions will make best use of the individual players’ knowledge. Indeed, my thinking on this issue owes a lot to such archetypal pointy-heads as Adam Smith, who I showed few signs of loathing himself.