Rational Choice with a Human Face

In 2003 an unusually forthcoming U.S. battalion commander told the New York Times how he would win Iraqi hearts and minds: “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”[1] To Roger Petersen, an MIT political scientist, this statement epitomizes the problem with Western military intervention–a problem his own colleagues have abetted (p. 5). U.S. political scientists, like the commander in Iraq and the West in general, assume human beings are narrowly rational, influenced overwhelmingly by material incentives, Petersen argues. In thrall to rational choice theory, they have blamed ethnic conflict on the machinations of a few people in society, usually politicians or criminals. The apotheosis of this approach came in 2005 when Edward Glaeser, the entrepreneurial economist, posited that hatred was peddled by power-seeking politicians and accepted by populations according to their “supply” and “demand” for it.[2]