Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons from a New Science

Auguste Comte’s dream of creating a “social physics” is given a 21st-century revival in Pentland’s (Honest Signals) latest. Drawing on research from the last decade, Pentland, director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, argues that his mathematical social science can predict and shape the behavior of large groups, chiefly through quantifying “idea flow”—the way new ideas spread within and between social groups. This social-network-based view of the world is acquired through research on a grand scale, monitoring the behavior of whole neighborhoods or towns, thus allowing meaningful results to be drawn from gargantuan sample sizes. Information so acquired could, Pentland argues, allow for a “data-driven society,” fully responsive to the undulating needs of large groups of people. There is an enchantingly wonky appeal to Pentland’s ideas, despite the book’s limpid writing and poor analysis. His overarching goal—to get us all to think beyond “markets” and “classes” and adopt a community-centric view of society—deserves attention, along with his privacy and data-ownership plan. However, Pentland often presents his big ideas without specifics, and he devotes little attention to the way social inequality impacts his theory of idea flow. Agent: Max Brockman, Brockman Inc. (Feb.)