On teaching toasters to tapdance

Beyond Economic Tribalism

May 5, 2012 

maha 

 

Krugman has another post up worth reading –

Consider what the different sides in economic debate have been predicting these past six or seven years. If you got your views from, say, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, you knew – knew – that there was no housing bubble, that America in 2008 wasn’t in recession, that budget deficits would send interest rates sky-high, that the Fed’s expansion of its balance sheet would produce huge inflation, that austerity policies would lead to economic expansion.
That’s quite a record. And yet I’m well aware that many people – including people with real money at stake – consider the WSJ a reliable source and people like, well, me flaky and unbelievable.

Krugman links to a commentary saying that people are more likely to accept a credible argument when some knowledgeable person in their “cultural community” accepts it. But that doesn’t go nearly far enough. The truth is that a large part of the public doesn’t understand the difference between “fact” and “opinion.” Put another way, the falsehood or veracity of something is not judged by actual data, results, or real-world experience, but by whether one believes that a thing is supposed to be true, or not. And the arbiter of suppositions is one’s adopted ideology.
You might remember awhile back I took on a rightie comment thread challenging the notion that Paul Krugman has been “wrong time and time again. The fascinating thing about this exercise was that the righties in the thread had absolutely no idea what I meant by “wrong.” What I meant — and which I explained several times — is show me something that Krugman predicted about the economy that turned out to be wrong. Show me when he said the economy would do X and it actually did Y.
And of course, they couldn’t do that. Instead, they simply linked to his columns (which I suspect they hadn’t read) without explaining why they were wrong, or dredged up the old story about his having worked as a consultant for Enron.
In their minds, Krugman is “wrong” because he says things that contradict what right-wing think tank economists say. The actual track record of the think tankers versus Krugman is irrelevant.
From time to time I’ve caught flak from people who think I should try harder to communicate with righties. The truth is that years ago I went through a phrase of really, really trying, being respectful and patient and polite and just presenting facts and reason. And after a long time I gave up, because I realized I might as well be trying to teach a toaster to tap dance.
There’s very little you can disucss with people who don’t understand what a “fact” is.
The Left is not immune from irrationality, of course. We have our “Obama is worse than Bush” and “The Democrats are just as bad” crowd. The difference is that the leftie-bots generally are not totally untethered from facts; they just cherry pick the facts that support what they want to believe and declare everything else irrelevant.
But righties refuse to acknowledge anything that might wander into the world of evidence-based objectivity. The only truth that matters is what their ideology tells them is supposed to be true, and the hell with reality.

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*Do* click her link to the original above so she gets some traffic out of this.  Please.