Russ Roberts is having second thoughts about economics. In his new book, Wild Problems, he writes that though he was trained as a Chicago-school economist, with rational choice and utility maximization at the forefront of his thought, he has “come to believe that when it comes to the big decisions of life, those principles can lead us astray.”

Roberts, who was a professor of economics for many years, is perhaps best known as the host of the podcast EconTalk and owns the Twitter handle @EconTalker. Given that his career has been so successful and so defined by economics, it’s a bit jarring to hear he’s having second thoughts about the discipline.

But, in fact, Wild Problems fits into the tradition of economists critiquing economics, with the aim not to delegitimize it or denigrate it but to improve it.

Roberts defines “wild problems” in opposition to “tame problems.” The distinction is not hard vs. easy, but instead loosely defined and unpredictable vs. well defined and predictable. So landing on the moon, though very difficult, is a tame problem because it can be solved by “the relentless application of science, engineering, and rational thought,” he writes.

Wild problems are “a fork in the road of life where knowing which path is the right one isn’t obvious, where the pleasure and pain from choosing one path over another are ultimately hidden from us, where the path we choose defines who we are and who we might become.” Deciding whether to take a job with NASA during the Apollo program — knowing the stress and time away from home it might involve and not knowing that Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins would eventually pull it off — is a wild problem. Whether to get married or have children fits in this category as well.

As an example of the inadequacy of a rational framework to solve wild problems, Roberts points to a list that Charles Darwin made in his journal in 1838. Darwin was considering whether he should get married and decided to approach it “scientifically” by making what we’d now call a pro–con list.

But Roberts points out deficiencies in Darwin’s approach. Namely, Darwin, being single, does not know what it’s like to be married. Therefore, Roberts writes, “Darwin has managed to come up with a lot more minuses than pluses if he marries” and “a lot of the minuses are about lost time.” He was worried that he wouldn’t be able to become a great scientist if he got married, because having a wife would reduce the time he could spend on experiments.

Of course, we know what happened. Darwin got married and still wound up a great scientist. We know from Darwin’s journal that he eventually eschewed the pro–con approach and wrote “Marry — Marry — Marry Q.E.D.” at the bottom of his list. “It is hard not to wonder whether one of the greatest scientists of all time had flipped out and done something totally out of keeping with his professional life, a life where relentless conscientiousness and curiosity carried him to greatness,” Roberts writes.

With the rational approach discarded, Roberts looks at better ways to approach wild problems. In doing so, he is echoing critiques of rationalism and scientism in economics that have been around for as long as economics has been in existence.

Roberts has written before about Adam Smith’s book The Theory of Moral Sentiments and is well aware of the parallels between that work and what he is proposing as a better way to approach wild problems. Smith argued that humans are fundamentally social creatures, and that our desires and behavior cannot be reduced to selfish individualism. Roberts writes that getting over yourself is a better way to approach wild problems than obsessing over finding rational solutions, and argues for viewing yourself as a member of an ensemble cast rather than as a headliner. Seeing oneself in social context, rather than as the primary actor in life, helps give a more grounded perspective that can inform better decision-making.

That social context often manifests itself in the form of social institutions. We’re part of clubs and organizations that give us purpose and allow us to meet new people, which can change who we are and how we behave. In his 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics lecture, Douglass North critiqued the shortcomings of a strictly neoclassical approach to economic development, and proposed that institutions and time must be considered as vital factors in analysis.

Our interactions with others create new opportunities that we wouldn’t have come up with alone, and those new opportunities can lead to increased flourishing, Roberts writes. That point is very similar to many critiques of central planning. Economist Don Lavoie, in his 1985 book National Economic Planning, wrote that economic factors “are continually changing as an inherent by-product of production processes,” and so rational planning before the fact will miss opportunities that can arise only from the process of exchange.

In a comment from 1982, economist James Buchanan argued that “individuals do not act so as to maximize utilities described in independently existing functions.” Rather, they “do not know until they enter the process what their own choices will be” (emphasis in original). That’s very similar to Roberts’s encouragement to try lots of new experiences and to value optionality over certainty. If you don’t know how you’ll behave until you’re in a particular situation, you might be missing out on something great if you never give it a chance.

Economist Armen Alchian understood the value of giving it a go. In 1950, he wrote a paper called “Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory” in which he argued that firms don’t try to maximize their profits; instead, they merely seek to make profits through a process of trial and error and survive based on how well they perform that task. “What really counts is the various actions actually tried, for it is from these that ‘success’ is selected, not from some set of perfect actions,” he wrote.

Any economic discussion of the limits of knowledge would be incomplete without F. A. Hayek, whose 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is seminal on the topic. In another essay a year later, “The Meaning of Competition,” Hayek pointed out that “competition is essentially a process of the formation of opinion” and “creates the views people have about what is best and cheapest, and it is because of it that people know at least as much about possibilities and opportunities as they in fact do.”

On the other hand, you should protect yourself from situations that violate your basic moral beliefs. Roberts argues for “privileging your principles” by putting them “above the day-to-day costs and benefits.” We should do so by making rules for ourselves, he suggests, because, aside from being effective tools to simplify decision-making, “rules prevent us from fooling ourselves.”

That logic is very similar to the case for rules-based monetary policy, made in various forms by Milton Friedman, Ed Prescott, Finn Kydland, John Taylor, and numerous other economists. Monetary policy is a very dangerous thing to get wrong, and decision-makers face all kinds of bad incentives, from both political factors and lack of information, that make errors more likely. One solution is to take it out of their hands by using some monetary rule instead.

The economists mentioned above were all arguing against the mainstream economic views of their eras. They certainly don’t represent the views of a majority of economists. There are plenty of economists today who see economics as little more than applied mathematics, with functions to solve and constraints to maximize. There are also some economists who see economics as little more than a political project, with politicians to advise and policies to impose.

But the economists discussed here who criticized mainstream economics remained, fundamentally, economists. Near the end of his life, in a 2010 essay reflecting on the Chicago school of economics, Buchanan wrote, “It is indeed sobering to recognize how little our discipline — ‘economics’ or ‘political economy’ — has advanced beyond Adam Smith. His critique of the ‘man of system,’ who concentrates on end-states rather than the process through which these are generated, remains as appropriate in 2010 as it did in 1776.”

Wild Problems could be read as a skeptical look at economics as a whole, but it could just as easily be read as an endorsement of a certain type of economics in opposition to the mainstream. That type of economics, the type that critiques the man of system, is the type Roberts has propounded throughout his career. To the extent that Roberts is having second thoughts about economics in general, he’s being too hard on himself. To the extent that he’s critiquing rationalism and scientism, he’s adding a valuable and accessible contribution to a long line of works from economic thinkers who have raised similar concerns.