Books influence us in untold ways, and the ones that influence us the most are often read in childhood. Harvard University Press Senior Editor Julia Kirby is reminded of this on the anniversary of the birth of one of this country’s most celebrated economists.
This month would have brought Thomas Schelling’s one-hundredth birthday—and he got closer to seeing it than many mortals. The Nobel laureate economist died just five years ago, after a brilliant career as both a scholar and an advisor to US foreign policy strategists. What better day to dip into his classic work, The Strategy of Conflict, itself now sixty years old but still relevant and a lively read.
Schelling’s breakthrough contribution was his application of the then-novel framework of game theory to the realm of Cold War decision-making. He saw in the dynamics of geopolitics many situations where adversarial nations were in conflict but at the same time held interests in common—and where a zero-sum mentality would not yield the most effective moves. Today, as Russia’s massing of troops on its border with Ukraine has analysts guessing, and Joe Biden prepares for a probable summit with Vladimir Putin, Schelling’s Strategy of Conflict remains a useful model for parsing the possibilities.
For me, however, there’s another book that also comes to mind whenever Schelling’s name is mentioned. It’s certainly not an HUP book, or anything you would find on a syllabus, but Schelling made a habit of mentioning it. According to his wife, Alice Schelling, whenever he was asked about books that had influenced his own thinking, he responded without pause: Smoky the Cow Horse.
It sounds like a joke of an answer—most anyone would have expected him to name a work like Games and Decisions by Howard Raiffa and R. Duncan Luce—but Schelling really meant it. Will James’s 1926 book about a colt was just the kind of tear-jerking tale, offered in a tough cowboy twang, that could go straight to the eight-year-old Schelling’s heart and get him thinking. I’ve always recalled this fact not because it is whimsical but because it strikes me as truer than any other response I have heard to the question, “What book influenced you most?” Purely on logical grounds, the books one encounters earliest have the greatest potential for impact in the long term. Path dependency being what it is, early choices open up channels for further exploration in certain directions, while pushing alternative paths to the shadows. Way leads on to way, and one’s thinking and character are formed on the journey that follows.
Alice Schelling said her husband recalled reading Smoky as “the first time he understood empathy for other human beings.” It’s possible to imagine the path from that moment to his ability, first, to be an effective negotiator, and later to see averting nuclear crisis as a matter of imagining what your enemy might be thinking you were thinking.
Schelling’s youthful devotion to Smoky came to mind recently when I had the pleasure of editing Susan Engel’s wonderful book The Intellectual Lives of Children. The impetus for the book was Engel’s realization that, while over a century of work has gone into the study of cognitive development in children, the focus of that work has always had a major blind spot. It concerns itself with children’s acquisition of knowledge—the mastery of language, skills, and information needed to function in the world—but ignores the fact that children also generate ideas of their own. An important part of their cognitive development is learning what to do with those notions—how to explore them, how to refine them, how to communicate them—and this is intellectual work that we could be doing much more as adults to support.
In a book rich with stories, Engel even includes one of another economist, one of her colleagues at Williams College, whose innovative work also involves applying ideas from one discipline to another. Roger Bolton advanced the idea that a community’s economy gets a boost when its members have a “sense of place,” rooted in its geography. Engel’s interest is in Bolton’s boyhood memories of engineering complex water systems in the road outside his farmhouse, after a heavy rain had turned the dirt to deep mud. Clearly, reading books is not the only activity that hones a person’s ability to engage with ideas.
By the time HUP issued its 1980 paperback of The Strategy of Conflict, the book was a widely acclaimed classic, but Schelling in his preface to the new edition singled out one person’s reaction to it as especially gratifying. John Strachey, a British economist and parliamentarian who had also served his country as war minister, sought him out during a visit to Harvard to express “how much this book had done for his thinking” but did not mention any fine point of its reasoning. As Schelling recalls:
“I tried to guess which of my sophisticated ideas in which chapters had made so much difference to him. It turned out it wasn’t any particular idea in any particular chapter. Until he read this book, he had simply not comprehended that an inherently non-zero-sum conflict could exist. He had known that conflict could coexist with common interest but had thought, or taken for granted, that they were essentially separable, not aspects of an integral structure. A scholar concerned with monopoly capitalism and class struggle, nuclear strategy and alliance politics, working late in his career on arms control and peacemaking, had tumbled, in reading my book, to an idea so rudimentary that I hadn’t even known it wasn’t obvious.”
In that moment of Strachey confessing his debt in all “modesty and dignity,” I suspect Schelling realized that he had achieved something akin to Smoky the Cow Horse’s effect. Often, authors can’t imagine in what ways their work will cause readers to rethink things. But whether a reader is influenced early or late in life, the course alteration can be profound. As Schelling concluded his preface, “You never know what will come of writing a book.”
