Wendy Gordon and the Casaubon delusion

At the AQR Trends Day in London today, Acacia Avenue co-founder Wendy Gordon explains how she sees parallels between herself and Edward Casaubon, a key character in the novel Middlemarch by George Eliot. Casaubon devotes his life to a futile search for an explanatory framework for the whole of mythology.

Gordon, meanwhile, has spent her career “trying to find a universal theory of human behaviour”.

“It would be so cool,” she says, “to have one model of thinking that explains all the various behaviours we come across.
“Human beings are wired to like patterns, we feel safe in frameworks. A big model gives you confidence and security and makes you feel good.”

But, she says: “I think I’d be seriously deluding myself to think there is a universal theory of everything.

“No one way of seeing the world can be absolutely true so there can never be a universal theory of human behaviour. I believe that we as qualitative practitioners have multiple and incomplete windows into the reality of human behaviour. We make a choice about which windows we want to look through.”