# Posted 12:34 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

BASEBALL AND POLITICAL SCIENCE: The next book I'm going to read is Michael Lewis' Moneyball. It is the story of how the Oakland A's have managed to win more games than anyone else while spending less and less on players' salaries. But really it's a book about capitalism.

For a good review of the book, head over to TNR. According to Cass Sunstein & Richard Thaler, the remarkable success of A's manager Billy Beane demonstrates how unconventional thinking can expose and exploit massive inefficiencies in an open marketplace.

This is not a new idea for Lewis, however, who first made a name for himself with Liar's Poker, an inside account of Salomon Brothers' meteoric rise and fall reflected the damaging conventional wisdom and inbred culture of the bond-trading world. (I happen to be reading Liar's Poker right now and recommend it highly.)

Thus, to my mind, what really stands out about Moneyball is how its hero, Billy Beane, drew most of his ideas from the work of an obscure statistician by the name of Bill James.

Now, for some of us, James is not obscure. As an intellectual and inept eleven-year old, I thought of James as a godsend. Here's was someone who insisted that brains matter far more in baseball than raw talent. (Not that the kids at summer camp would stop laughing at my incompetence on the baseball diamond, but at least I could feel a little bit better about myself.)

In hindsight, it seems pretty self-evident that the relationship between myself and the jocks strongly resembles the current relationship between political scientists and policymakers. Like James, the professors blast the policymakers for subscribing to primitive myths that prevent them from doing their job as best they can. Like jocks, the policymakers laugh at the pointy-headed intellectuals who think they know how to draft good laws and negotiate with foreign governments.

The difference between James and the political scientists is that James' ideas are now proven to work. Meanwhile, political scientists continue to produce veritable avalanches of useless statistics that resemble pseudo-science more than anything else. Of course, what motivates political scientists (some might even admit it) is that one day, a man like Billy Beane will become President or Secretary of State or National Security Adviser and decide to put their ideas to work, finally vindicating all those years of hard academic labor.

My guess is that political scientists who read Moneyball will find it a source of renewed faith in their profession. That, however, is wrong the lesson to draw from it.

The starting point for a political analysis of Moneyball is recognition of the fact that baseball is an inherently amoral activity. As Leo Durocher said, "Nice guys finish last." Ty Cobb was selfish and cruel individual, but also perhaps the best hitter of all time. Unsurprisingly, the Detroit Tigers' management decided that Cobb's ethical deficiencies didn't reduce his value as player.

In contrast, politics is an inherently ethical enterprise. Of course, after watching politicians in actions, you may conclude that politics is an inherently unethical enterprise. But that is exactly the point. We judge politicians from a moral perspective, regardless of whether we are praising or condemning them.

Unfortunately, political scientists seem to believe that they can grapple with the most profound political challenges without approaching them from an ethical perspective. After all, the mission of modern political science is to produce objective analyses of political events from which one can derive rational policy recommendations.

Yet in the absence of values, there is no such thing as rational politics. Rationality is a means to an end. Only values can define the merits of one end as opposed to another.

In theory, there could still be room for a rational science for politics if professors recognized that their mission was to identify the most effective set of means to a given end. However, this will only be possible if political scientists recognize that political actors are fundamentall moral actors.

The great flaw of modern political science is its desire to imitate microeconomists (and share in their prestige) by developing theorems that explain and predict the behavior of rational actors. Of course, that is exactly the wrong way to go about things. It is only when political scientists recognize that ideas and values are what drive politicians and voters that they will begin to produce something worthy of the name "science". (1) opinions -- Add your opinion