Mid Life Crisis.

Wow, David Brooks is on a roll lately.

If he weren't so gosh-darned straight, we might clicheshly wonder exactly what he's been smoking...

Young American men are not exactly famous for being in touch with their emotions. But Harold sensed that he was a social animal, not a laboring animal or a rational animal, and one day he went on a blind date with the woman — let’s call her Erica [blogger note: Erica it is. We can always get her to improve that name as needed. Maybe Sarah, say?] — who would someday be his wife. Given the stakes, we might pause over this incident, to show in slightly more detail how the inner processes of the mind interact with the conscious ones.

Harold and Erica got their first glimpse of each other in front of a Barnes & Noble. They smiled broadly as they approached, and a deep, primeval process kicked in. Harold liked what he saw, from the waist-to-hip ratio to the clear skin, all indicative of health and fertility. He enjoyed the smile that spread across Erica’s face, and unconsciously noted that the end of her eyebrows dipped down. The orbicularis-oculi muscle, which controls this part of the eyebrow, cannot be consciously controlled, so, when the tip of the eyebrow dips, that means the smile is genuine, not fake.

Erica was impressed by him: women everywhere tend to prefer men who have symmetrical features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than they are. But she was more guarded and slower to trust than Harold was. That’s in part because, while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues discernible at a glance, Pleistocene women faced a more vexing problem. Human babies require years to become self-sufficient, and a single woman in that environment could not gather enough calories to provide for a family. She was compelled to choose a man not only for insemination but for continued support. That’s why men leap into bed more quickly than women. Various research teams have conducted a simple study. They hire a woman to go up to college men and ask them to sleep with her. More than half the men say yes. Then they have a man approach college women with the same offer. Virtually zero per cent say yes.
...

The server came to their table and took their orders. The restaurant seemed to specialize in hard-to-eat salads. Erica, anticipating this, chose an appetizer that could be easily forked and a main dish that didn’t require cutlery expertise. But Harold went for a salad, composed of splayed green tentacles that could not be shoved into his mouth without brushing salad dressing on both of his cheeks. None of it mattered, because Harold and Erica clicked. Most emotional communication is nonverbal. Gestures are a language that we use not only to express our feelings but to constitute them. By making a gesture, people help produce an internal state. Harold and Erica licked their lips, leaned forward in their chairs, glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and performed all the other tricks of unconscious choreography that people do while flirting. Erica did the head cant women do to signal romantic interest, a slight tilt of the head that exposes the neck. Then, there was the hair flip: she raised her arms to adjust her hair and heaved her chest into view. She would have been appalled if she had seen herself in a mirror at that moment.

Wow. And this, under the guise of intelligent "this is the social animal we are" study.

Speak for yourself, David. Really.
And then there's today's column:

In this century, economic competition between countries is less like the competition between armies or sports teams (with hermetically sealed units bashing or racing against each other). It’s more like the competition between elite universities, who vie for prestige in a networked search for knowledge. It’s less: “We will crush you with our efficiency and might.” It’s more: “We have the best talent and the best values, so if you want to make the most of your own capacities, you’ll come join us.”

The new sort of competition is all about charisma. It’s about gathering talent in one spot (in the information economy, geography matters more than ever because people are most creative when they collaborate face to face). This concentration of talent then attracts more talent, which creates more collaboration, which multiplies everybody’s skills, which attracts more talent and so on.

The nation with the most diverse creative hot spots will dominate the century.

If this is the nature of competitiveness, what is the role for government? Well, government will be a bit like the administration of a university. A university president is nominally the head of the institutions. He or she lives in the big house. But everybody knows a university president is a powerful stagehand.

The professors, the researchers, the tutors, the coaches and the students are the real guts of a university. They handle the substance of what gets done. The administrators play vital but secondary roles. They build the settings. They raise money. They recruit and do marketing. They help students who are stumbling.

The administrators couldn’t possibly understand or control the work in the physics or history departments. They just try to gather talent, set guidelines and create an atmosphere where brilliance can happen.

So it is with government in an innovation economy.
...
Finally, the government has to work aggressively to reduce the human capital inequalities that open up in an innovation economy. That means early and constant interventions so everybody has a chance to participate.

Clearly, this one was written and banked well before the reports of how American undergrads are being disserved by their university educations.

The line that killed me, though, is this:

It’s about gathering talent in one spot (in the information economy, geography matters more than ever because people are most creative when they collaborate face to face). This concentration of talent then attracts more talent, which creates more collaboration, which multiplies everybody’s skills, which attracts more talent and so on.

Right-o.
Because surely nobody has thought about how "outside" voices -- those on the blogs outside the WaPo and NYT newsrooms, say -- are influencing what we write and read daily.

Nope, if you ain't there, your voice isn't being heard and considered in the national conversation. It's an army of davids that the Goliaths need not fear. It's an Invisible Man living within his modest means, pursuing his needs and dreams independently; why should Brooks consider those creatures?
Scary stuff indeed! But does he read his own work?
Consider this bit, on "overconfidence":

Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo gave questionnaires to more than two thousand executives in order to measure how much they knew about their industries. Managers in the advertising industry gave answers that they were ninety-per-cent confident were correct. In fact, their answers were wrong sixty-one per cent of the time. People in the computer industry gave answers they thought had a ninety-five per cent chance of being right; in fact, eighty per cent of them were wrong. Ninety-nine per cent of the respondents overestimated their success.

Leave the kids alone, DB. They don't need your helpful tips, or scientific analysis, on how to live and lead their own lives.

Buy a little red sports car instead, and blast a lil Prince. That'll cure ya:

I guess I should have known
by the way you parked your car -- sideways!
that it wouldn't last
...
Little Red Corvette
Baby, you're much too fast (yes you are)
Little Red Corvette
You need to find a love that's gonna last...

Same "message" Brooks was going for, just not so prejudiced ("boys do this; girls like this"). And waaaaayy cooler. (You got to teach Harold some cool if he's not going to bore that lady in the years to come. The wallet bulge fails to impress the chicas after time, I've heard they found that out in some lady study. No really -- look it up.)