Gregory Bateson’s [amazon_link id=”0226039056″ target=”_blank” ]Steps to An Ecology of Mind[/amazon_link] is tough going for a simple-minded economist, although there’s one insight that’s going to prove very useful for the Pro Bono Economics lecture I’m giving next month, The Economist As Outsider. I’m not yet ready to review the book, but meanwhile was very taken with this comment (in the ‘metalogue’ ‘Why Do Things have Outlines?’):

“It’s just the fact that animals are capable of seeing ahead and learning that makes them the only really unpredictable things in the world. To think that we try to make laws as though people were quite regular and predictable.”

[amazon_image id=”0226039056″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology[/amazon_image]

That seems obviously true, but clashes with another of my favourite insights, which also seems obviously true, from John Seely Brown and Paul Duiguid in [amazon_link id=”1578517087″ target=”_blank” ]The Social Life of Information[/amazon_link]; namely, that while everyone thinks computers are predictable and people are unpredictable, it’s actually the other way round.

[amazon_image id=”0875847625″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Social Life of Information[/amazon_image]