One of the big differences between humans and other animals is that we can remember what other people tell us. Books and their electronic counterparts allow this memory to extend not just across personal contacts, but across history itself. But we get a lot of understanding from the stories told by our more immediate correspondents.
I just read Paul Krugman's speech on the state of economics and was reminded of this. Many people, including conservative economists, have a built-in bias towards certain ideas, but in the 1930s, the field of economics successfully repudiated them. The success of this venture was such that there were no major banking crises for 60 years. During that time, the conservatives found a narrative and strategy that fit their model, and starting in the late 70s, this began to get traction, to the point that by 1990, it was acceptable to snigger in professional conferences at the policies that had solved the depression and prevented financial panics for so long. What was it that had changed? The people who actually remembered the Great Depression as adults and professional economists had started to die off in large numbers.
As humans, we learn best by hearing anecdotes, told to us by trusted authorities. These could be grandparents, valued teachers or professors, etc. We can learn from dry, abstract writing, but it doesn't sink in as well if it doesn't connect to us in some personal way. Anecdotal learning, even if wrong, affects us more deeply. After about 1990, the economists who both remembered and understood the Great Depression were gone, and the new stories were about "The Great Moderation" and the failure of the Phillips Curve. The stories were wrong, but they stuck.
There's a similar lesson to be learned from "The former Yugoslavia". That region is made up of several ethnic groups and two major religions. For hundreds of years, there had been almost constant small scale fighting, but Marshal Tito managed to unite the factions--with support of the Allies during WWII and the Soviet Union afterwards. He was an authoritarian strongman and managed to suppress the strife that was boiling under the surface. When he died in 1980, it was still simmering, but most people had learned to ignore it--and many former blood rivals were friends, neighbors and had even intermarried. The peace lasted for almost a decade. But there were too many stories, told by grandparents to gullible youngsters, about how that person's grandfather killed your great uncle. Bad actors were able to exploit these hatreds, along with the economic pressures caused by a collapsing Soviet sphere of influence, to create a bad situation and attempted genocide. Had the Tito regime lasted for another 20 years, the hatreds would have all been forgotten and Milosovic would have garnered no support. The peace that's ensued from the NATO intervention seems to be lasting...we can hope that we'll get no more bad stories.
Thomas Kuhn pointed out that the way change happens is when somebody comes up with a good idea, it's often repudiated for quite a while. What eventually happens is that the old conservatives who were suppressing the good idea die off, and their anecdotes and influence dies with them, and the new idea suddenly gets traction, seemingly out of nowhere.
In the case of Economics, there's something a lot more sinister at work. The bad old ideas are being propped up not just by old conservatives, but new conservatives who have been getting tremendous funding to reject the new ideas. The conservatives know this works, so they're arguing that "socialists" have been funding academia to promote Keynesian ideas. Soros and Buffet (and Obama) are very, very far from socialists, and their contributions pale compared to how Koch and Scaife and others are funding Cato, AEI, the University of Chicago and more. Same story in Climate Science: the most prominent deniers are funded by these same sources. But they've been trying to sell the story (the Wall Street Journal seems to be their favorite publication) that the folks warning about Climate Change are only doing it because they think they'll get their latest research project funded. The dry data all support Keynes and Hansen. But it's easy to create anecdotes that tell a different story.
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