verging_on_random

Civilised discussion

November 18, 2006 on 7:39 am | In Uncategorized |

John Quiggin has a nice tribute to Milton Friedman on his site. He concludes:

He genuinely believed that economics was about making people’s lives better and that disagreements among economists were about means rather than ends and could ultimately be resolved by careful attention to the evidence.

Not a bad philosophy for all social institutions - their purpose is to make people’s lives better and disagreements about means should be resolved by examining the evidence. Unfortunately many people in English-speaking countries seem to regard society as an enormous, never-ending team contest, where one side is always wrong about practically everything. You can see this mentality at work in the absurd ‘left wing/right wing’, ‘East/West’ labels that some people insist on applying to everything from global warming to abortion to refugee policy. The other day I had a commenter on Tim Dunlop’s blog challenge me to stop citing academic literature and ‘go toe to toe with my own opinion’. This kind of attitude reflects a basic failure to understand the difference between opinion and evidence, which in turn leads to the slogan-based decision-making that we see so often not only in politics but also in business.

I hope that online discussion of issues through the exploding blogosphere will eat away at the mindless ‘us v them’ approach of partisan politics and talk-back radio and allow more civilised discussion based on ‘careful attention to the evidence’. But then in some ways I was always a hopeless romantic.