Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us.

• Author: Munger, Michael C.

Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us

By Russ Roberts

New York: Portfolio/Penguin

Pp. 284. $27 hardcover

I got to "interview" Russ Roberts about this book in a "Sadie Hawkins Day" kind of podcast, where the guest gets to ask the questions and the host gives the answers. That podcast, "EconTalk," has at least 50,000 regular listeners, and more than 120,000 listeners for some of its episodes. In my interview, I asked a question that many people have asked me, about Russ. Pretending to be "young Russ" (c. 1992), I asked, "Do you remember exactly when you stopped being an economist?"

The reason people want to ask this is that Russ's personal journey (that sounds all "New Age," but in this case it's accurate) started with the strait-laced orthodoxy of a Chicago School student of Gary Becker and has now delivered Wild Problems, a book that 1992 Russ would have derided as a cynical ploy to earn extra money writing a self-help book, because those sell better than economic theory books.

One can see the difficulty of the problem here: Roberts never actually defines "wild problems," even though that's the name of the book. The closest he comes is to define "tame problems": those choices where evidence, knowledge, and "the relentless applications of science, engineering, and rational thought leads to steady progress" (p. 3). Wild problems are, then, problems that are not tame, meaning that the application of formulaic rationality, or the accumulation of data, is not only not helpful but is likely to be misleading. "A wild problem [is] a fork in the road of life where knowing which is the right one isn't obvious [and] where the path we choose defines who we are and who we might become" (p. 2).

There are quite a few examples that clarify the difference between tame problems and wild problems, and in many cases the wild problem is either just more fundamental or temporally antecedent. For example, suppose I got into two different graduate programs, Stanford and Chicago. The wild problem is "Which graduate program should I attend?" The tame problem would be "Given that I decided to go to____________, how will I get there safely and quickly?"

It's tempting to say the wild problem is harder (whatever that even means), but that's not true. I could decide the wild problem with a coin flip, "Heads, Stanford; tails, Chicago!" Roberts quotes (p. 43) the physicist/poet Piet Hein, who observed that using a coin helps you know what you hope. If the coin comes up tails, and you are disappointed, you really wanted to go to Stanford. (For the text of the poem, see https://allpoetry.com/A-Psychological-Tip.)

Once you have decided on Chicago (or Stanford) then the problem of getting there is actually pretty hard, and you can flip a coin all you want, and it still won't pack your...