Marginal Revolution: My Conversation with David Brooks, 2025-Aug-21 from Tyler Cowen

David Brooks: 

I really do believe that David Hume’s famous sentence that reason is and ought to follow the passions — I believe that’s true, that our passions are wiser than our reasonable mind, and that our emotions, when well trained, are much more supple and much more responsible for the way we think. Again, I may be caricaturing, but the rational school of economics thought, well, you see the world, that simple process of looking, and then weigh costs and benefits about the world, and then you make a decision about the world, I don’t believe that’s the way thinking works.