Jacques Barzun told us that modern society rejects anything that cannot be immediately understood. I think he was right. In my opinion, this intellectual tendency is at the root of many bad ideas in economics and politics: the best theories require a kind of extended propositional reasoning that modern society doesn’t value.
Two books chart and illustrate this trend well. (These are books I recommend often.) The first is Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. In terms of research, argumentation, and writing style it is among the best books I have read.
Amusing Ourselves to Death laments the death of the typographic age in favor of the visual age. In the typographic age, people were drawn to careful, well-reasoned argumentation. The typographic medium provided a model for public discourse. Think, for example, of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. People willingly sat and listened to two men speak for seven hours, even though neither candidate was running for presidential office at the time. People regarded these debates as part of their political education. Where could you find such an audience today?
Postman’s concern is that television’s influence is not contained to our entertainment choices. Rather, the way “television stages the world becomes a model for how the world is properly to be staged” (92). “[Television] has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience” (87). In a culture where imagery and sound bites rule our thinking and public discourse, it is no surprise that bad ideas abound.
Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson shows how nearsighted thinking leads to bad economic ideas. He argues that most economic fallacies are born of “the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that will be not only on that special group on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences” (16,17). He then proceeds to demonstrate how this happens with a collection of essays on topics such as rent control, tariffs, and minimum wage. Hazlitt is a good writer and the book is written for a popular audience, so it doesn’t feel anything like an economics text.
When I attend conferences like AIPES, I often think of Hazlitt and Postman. I often hear ideas from my peers that seem alarmingly shortsighted. When applied on a national level, this kind of thinking leads developing countries to construct defensive economic policies (for example limiting foreign trade), which actually hamper their growth. I know am also susceptible to promoting facile answers, particularly in areas like foreign policy.
Forgive me for presuming to recommend books, but if these ideas interest you, it might be worth picking up Hazlitt or Postman.