Can Counterintuitive Ideas Gain Widespread Acceptance?
Why Nuance Struggles in the Marketplace of Ideas
Picture this: you're at a dinner party, and the conversation turns to the hot-button issue of economic inequality. While you reach for another canapé, someone is waxing poetic about the evils of corporate greed and declares it the root of all inequality. Armed with a few choice soundbites from their favorite partisan news outlet, they paint a picture of rich corporations exploiting the poor to line their own pockets. They argue that the poor have few options left in such a rigged system. The only remedy is to eat the rich (hopefully metaphorically, but it didn’t sound like it).
Your mind immediately jumps to a study you read titled "Three Myths About US Economic Inequality and Social Mobility." The study claimed that "changes in the return to human capital caused by shifts in the supply and demand for educated and skilled labor have played a crucial role in the rise in income inequality since the 1970s—rising corporate concentration and employer market power (monopsony) do not appear to be a key culprit." Or, in plain English, the growing income gap in the modern economy is primarily due to the increased value placed on skills and education. As the demand for highly skilled workers has outpaced the supply, those with the right qualifications have seen their wages rise significantly, while those without have been left behind.
We could debate the merits of this paper. If wrong, it certainly wouldn’t be the first such economics paper. But I want to ask a different question: if it turns out that this research is the most rock-solid, 100% correct research ever done, could it ever become widely accepted by the general public? Or do the study’s findings lack that special something that propels ideas into the public consciousness?
Satisfying Narratives
People crave narratives they can viscerally connect with, stories populated by heroes and villains and clear moral choices. We're drawn to the drama of righteous struggle against malevolent forces. Blaming inequality on the greed of corporations or the ultra-wealthy taps into these satisfying archetypes. It frames the issue as a moral play of oppressors and the oppressed.
In contrast, the human capital explanation offers no such moralizing. There's no nefarious villain twirling their mustache, no heroic underdog to root for. It's a story of abstract market forces—the supply and demand for skills—shaping outcomes. It lacks emotional hooks that capture the imagination.
Moreover, the human capital story challenges the illusion of someone being in control, an illusion we find deeply comforting. We want to believe that someone is in charge and that the world unfolds according to a plan—even if it's a malevolent one. Humans have long yearned for animistic forces that shape the events we see, imbuing the world with meaning and purpose, whether for good or ill. We crave explanations that attribute the outcomes we observe to the intentions and actions of conscious agents, rather than the impersonal workings of complex systems. This theme has persisted from the earliest proto-religions to modern ideologies, reflecting our deep-seated desire to make sense of the world in terms of the moral qualities of the actors within it. We instinctively seek to attribute positive outcomes to good people and negative outcomes to bad ones, imposing a narrative of cosmic justice onto the inscrutable complexities of reality.
That's part of why conspiracy theories are so seductive. They assure us that someone is behind the curtain, pulling the strings, whether it's the Illuminati, shape-shifting lizards, or billionaire bogeymen such as George Soros or the Koch brothers. In a complex and chaotic world, even the idea of sinister control is perversely reassuring. And, as a bonus, adherents feel a sense of exclusivity—they’re on the inside; they know the real truth.
The idea that inequality emerges from the complex interplay of individual decisions in the labor market shatters that illusion. It tells us that we're adrift in a sea of billions of decentralized decision-makers, each acting in response to their own incentives and beliefs, buffeted by impersonal economic winds beyond any one person or group's control. That's an unsettling notion.
People want narratives that offer a sense of agency and a clear path forward, a way for them to make a difference, a role to play in the story. This is why the climate narrative has the crucial fourth part:
Every change in the climate is bad
New climate information shows it’s worse than we had realized
The Earth is in a crisis
But we can still act now to prevent it.
People want to be empowered. What’s more disempowering than the notion that inequality is caused by "changes in the return to human capital"? What are you going to do? Yell at a supply and demand curve? Rant against the economic returns to education on Twitter? Break into research labs and smash everything to bits?
So while the human capital explanation may be empirically sound, it fails the test of compelling storytelling. In a battle between a satisfying story and a complex reality, the story will win almost every time.
The failure of the human capital explanation to gain widespread traction, despite its empirical merits, reveals a deeper truth about how ideas spread and take hold in society. It's not just a matter of an idea's inherent quality or explanatory power. Rather, it's a reflection of the complex interplay between an idea and the ideological ecosystem it must navigate to survive. Ideas don't exist in a vacuum; they live in the space of ideologies. And the ideas that fit most comfortably into our pre-existing ideological frameworks have a distinct advantage.
The Role of Ideologies
In a world of overwhelming complexity, ideologies serve as cognitive crutches, offering ready-made frameworks to slot new information into. Your trusty ideology comes equipped with a stockpile of prepackaged answers, sparing you the effort of thinking too hard (which, let's be honest, it would prefer you didn't anyway). They’re the intellectual equivalent of instant ramen—just add water (or in this case, a headline), and voila! Instant opinion on any topic; no critical thinking required.
Ideologies simplify the world, smoothing over nuances and contradictions in favor of clear storylines. They don’t even have to be consistent or logical as long as they provide emotional resonance and tribal affiliation. Take the concept of human greed, for example. This fundamental human trait is frequently invoked to explain increases in gas prices as if avarice itself were a volatile commodity that waxes and wanes like the market. If greed truly drove oil prices up, wouldn't magnanimity be responsible when they fall?
The human capital explanation for inequality struggles to gain traction because it doesn't fit neatly into established ideological frameworks. For those on the left who see inequality as the result of corporate exploitation, a story about skills mismatch in the labor market is a hard pill to swallow. It lacks the moral clarity of a tale of greedy elites oppressing the masses.
But the human capital story doesn't easily slot into rightwing political narratives either. It's not a matter of immigrants stealing jobs or China taking advantage of us. The impersonal market forces of supply and demand don't make for a compelling villain for anyone.
Complexity alone isn't necessarily a death sentence for an idea, at least in certain contexts. The scientific community, although not perfect, is guided by norms of logic, empirical evidence, and falsifiability that allow intricate theories to flourish. These ideas can even gain mainstream acceptance. A prime example is Einstein's theories of relativity. Despite their complexity, these ideas have gained widespread acceptance among the public.
What’s going on here? It seems that people can accept these theories in the abstract, where they don’t have to grapple with their complexities. This primarily works when the concepts are far removed from everyday experiences and don't clash with preconceived notions.
However, people already have deep-seated intuitions about the nature of wealth and poverty. Our folk economics tends to be zero-sum and moralistic. We default to seeing wealth as a fixed pie, so more for some must mean less for others. The notion that shifts in the demand for skills could be the primary driver of inequality runs counter to these gut feelings.
While Einstein’s theories of relativity are counterintuitive, they are counterintuitive in a playful, mind-bending way, like a fun puzzle. They don’t challenge people’s deeply held convictions.
Moreover, engaging with the human capital story demands a level of economic literacy that most people simply don't have. It’s probably not clear to many people what "changes in the return to human capital” even means. If an idea requires significant cognitive effort to grasp, it's at a disadvantage in the ideological marketplace.
For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H.L. Mencken (paraphrased)
Conclusion
I’m still grappling with the same question that animated this entire essay: How can we, as a society, move beyond the siren song of simple narratives and embrace counterintuitive truths that are essential to societal progress?
There are real-world consequences to embracing narratives that do or do not align with reality. As Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler said, “Whether one is a conservative or a radical, a protectionist or a free trader, a cosmopolitan or a nationalist, a churchman or a heathen, it is useful to know the causes and consequences of economic phenomena.” Having an accurate understanding of how the world works is important for making informed decisions and avoiding unintended consequences.
But are we limited only to ideas that can be easily digested by the masses? Must we confine ourselves to the explanations found in only the opening chapters of an introductory economics textbook? My concern is that if we allow our feelings to perpetually dictate our reasoning, we risk forever remaining ignorant of the true nature of economic realities. An overreliance on moral intuitions will lead us astray, causing us to embrace narratives that, while emotionally satisfying, fail to accurately capture the complex dynamics at play.
Effective economic analysis demands, as British economist Alfred Marshall eloquently stated, "cool heads but warm hearts." It requires the ability to temporarily set aside our emotional responses and moral intuitions to objectively examine the evidence before us.
This is reminiscent of the approach that the skeptics and rationalist movements have tried to popularize. They take the best parts of the scientific method, economics, and cognitive science and try to apply them wherever they might fit. Could these methods ever be broadly used, or are they always going to occupy a nerdy niche in society? Perhaps we could somehow cultivate a society that is better at embracing evidence-based reasoning and resisting the allure of comforting illusions, but I don’t know how this would be done.
We seem left with two unsatisfying options: end with a platitude about improving education, as if no one had thought of that, or resign ourselves to a society where the masses never understand the fundamental drivers of the world around them. Neither conclusion satisfies.
The latter option is deeply troubling. It suggests that we may be stuck in a society where inequality continues to rise due to shifts in the return to human capital, while the populace clings to the belief that it's all due to corporate greed and the exploitation of the poor. In a democracy, where the masses hold the power of the vote, is our only choice to accept a future where large swaths of society hold grudges against each other based on fundamental misunderstandings that can never be corrected? As S.S. McClure, a pioneer of investigative journalism, once said (paraphrased), "The vitality of democracy depends on popular knowledge of complex questions." Failing to educate the public on these matters seems like a recipe for social unrest, misguided policies, and a dysfunctional democracy.
This is not a new dilemma. Over a century ago, French psychologist Gustave Le Bon penned the pessimistic outlook:
The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
And yet, there is another option, perhaps the most insidious of all: a world where the potential of good ideas is never realized because they are too complex, too counterintuitive, or too challenging to the status quo to gain widespread acceptance. In this world, we may not descend into overt conflict or collapse, but we will fail to ascend to the heights of understanding and progress that are within our reach.