What and Where to Read

I'll bookend another David Brooks quote with two Keynes quotes:

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones

But Brooks believes we should try to entrap ourselves with the old ideas:

. . . different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on . . .

But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.

The thing is, you can read books with terrible, unimportant ideas just like you can read terrible writing on the Internet (like this). Brooks isn't arguing for books so much as arguing for the cannon. But I don't read fiction because there are hardly any good ideas in fiction--you tend to get out only what you put in. That eliminates most of the cannon. The rest, which is mostly philosophy and religion, you can learn more efficiently through secondary sources. Reading Kant in translation or Berkeley directly is a horrible way to learn about the categorical imperative or subjective idealism. If you want to be smart don't read a lot of "great books," just siphon a ton of great ideas out of good textbooks and literature reviews. Then think hard about why most of those ideas are bad (e.g. this).

That said, Brooks might have a point when you consider libertarians. They tend to learn everything they know from a few Internet sources and don't know much economic theory. Indeed,

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Narcissism

In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an “important person.” Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes.

from an otherwise horrible column by David Brooks. He notes this with disdain, but I wonder if it's such a bad thing. What makes some people important and others not?

Assorted Links

1. Good analysis of Rand Paul.

2. Are the Republicans governed by extermists or corporations? There is some tension in these theses.

3. Big story only black people are allowed to speak the truth about. Perhaps that, not racism, is why it get too little press.

4. "the fastest-growing group . . . are men who self-identify as 'mostly straight' as opposed to labels like 'straight', 'gay', or 'bisexual." I don't know what to make of that.

5. Landsburg on psychiatry. I don't think this is fair. It would be like economists asking the public what should count as a recession or unemployment, or biologists asking what should count as life.

6. Cell phone banking in Haiti. I wish I knew more about M-PESA.

7. Is Chinese education as great as everyone thinks? No.

8. I haven't kept up with financial regulation but I liked this summary

9. "Horizontal" health care programs were all the rage a few year ago. Now a Gates Foundation study says they don't work. I'm a little skeptical of the methods based on this AP report. Easterly weighs in.

10. A high school in MA is forcing every student to buy a MacBook.

11. Maureen Dowd wrote a good column for the first time in her life.

12. Ezra Klein on the word "bailout"

13. "Good" professors are easy professors.

14. More debate on whether the Internet is good for you

Gradualism?

David Brooks writes a good column every couple weeks. He writes a lot more bad columns than good ones. But Tuesday we got treated to a great one.

Brooks is trying to defend his position on health care. For most of the past year he wrote a columns with the same thesis, but less articulate and directed solely at shaping views on health care reform. It's worth noting that on other topics, Brooks writes as an ally of the technocrats. He's, as far as I can tell, in favor of sweeping changes to teacher tenure, stomping out union power, and pushing technocratic value-added models to measure progress.

I am too. If I had to take sides, I'm more with Paine than Burke. But I've tempered a lot of on my sentiments over the years. I don't have strong views on foreign policy because foreign policy scholars are charlatans. Macroeconomists are much the same, aside from their black magic setting interest rates. I guess that is natural--anyone who has spent time reading econometric studies is going to walk away feeling social scientists know a lot less than everyone thinks. We don't understand the social organism--Brooks was right.

But there's a catch.

Neither did our predecessors. Some institutions evolved for reasons no one understood, but many were arbitrary, or based on the prejudices of the past. A lot of people use the argument "this is how it's always been" as an argument for intolerance and not having to think. People oppose gay marriage because it's different. They oppose legalizing some drugs (but not alcohol) because of tradition. Some want to teach everyone Latin or a liberal arts curriculum because thats what they did 50 years ago. Brooks is implicitly making a case for legitimizing the "this is how it's always been" argument in public discourse, when we really need to stomp it out. Lazy thinking is a bigger threat than the technocrat menace.