The bastards are probably right

Tim Harford is one of the more attractive of the new economists who want to explain everything we do - and I mean everything: his new book is entitled The Logic of Life, which doesn't leave much over for the innumerate to study but death.

There is a moment in one of Raymond Chandler's books, where the hero, pondering another lost love through the bottom of a whisky glass, mutters that, "The French have a word for it. The bastards always do."

Nowadays, he would have to slur at his screen that the economists had found an explanation of why it had to happen. The bastards always do. Since the success of Freakonomics, they have taken over from the evolutionary psychologists as the grand explainers of the bleeding obvious.

Economists will tell you that racism flourishes; that people act against their own best interests; that short-term gratification is

bad for long-term goals; that men and women tend to want different things. And then they tell us that all this is new and startling and certainly proved.

Popular economics and evolutionary psychology both explain the world by stories. They like to have numbers too, but it's the stories we remember, which frustrates economists but helps their books sell.

The modern economists are not exactly Panglossian; perhaps their patron is Dr Panmatt: instead of telling us that everything is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds, they tend to bring news that everything is pretty bloody ghastly, but this is still the best of all possible worlds, and here are the figures to prove it.

The most frustrating thing in all this is that the bastards are probably right. People will tell you that economics is crushing the human spirit but if it works, who cares about the human spirit? Perhaps the metaphysical is just a delusion we have about ourselves - for sound economic reasons, of course.