Comment by friendly_chap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by friendly_chap | Hacker News Reader

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I often see the reasoning that the right is less educated as proof that they are the wrong unwashed masses.

What I do not see mentioned, that experts of propaganda clearly know that more educated people are more susceptible to propaganda.

For those who want sources for this, please refer to Jacques Ellul: Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.

This is my own wording (and like a poor one): for propaganda to work, the population must be educated. There is little room to inject your machinations to the simple and straightforward thought processes of less educated men.

Those who deal with more abstract and complex thought, the more educated, are easier to lead astray with minutiae.

For a contemporary example, just look at MMT and the mother of all bubbles forming right now. A simple man might say if you print more money, money will be worth less. He would be at a high level quite right. Even if he gets many details wrong. The more educated mind might be more inclined to try to understand QE, money velocity, money supply etc, to the point where in the end he is probably less wise than the simple man.

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

There is education and "education". I think the general understanding what it means to be educated (in this context) is that the people have been exposed different philosophical worldviews, from the left to right, and they can choose from these.

In this sense, middle-class is often uneducated, despite receiving education. For example, neoclassical economics was (and still is) often taught in economic schools at the expense of economic history and political economy, which are more colorful. How many basic economic textbooks talk about Cambridge Capital Controversy before using word "capital"?

> For a contemporary example, just look at MMT and the mother of all bubbles forming right now. A simple man might say if you print more money, money will be worth less. He would be at a high level quite right.

A simple man might think that MMT is the cause, but it is rather an explanation of these bubbles. In MMT, money are endogenous, and the bubble originates outside of the government control. The people who applied QE knew very well, that the neoclassical monetarist theory is no use, because they came from praxis (central banks). They were educated in the practice, not in theory, and it told them that theory is useless (and dangerous). Of course they could have used helicopter money than QE to banks with the same or even greater effect (as Steve Keen recommended), but it wasn't quite in their self-interest.

So the problem with "simple man" is that he assumes there are only two sides in the argument. The crisis of 2008 itself shows there are not - there was neoclassical monetarists and people believing in them, despite this being empirically wrong; then there was central bankers (and other politicians at the revolving door), who knew better, wanted to save the economy, but didn't care about the common man; and finally, there was a common man, who got into debt, because he was told so, and now was confused why banks are being saved and not him. So he opened economic textbook, found about Friedman and Hayek, and was like, ha, I knew you're doing something nefarious!

There's no shortage of very striking counter-examples to what you're saying in recent events. I think it's far more accurate to say that the educated can be led astray by complex ideas that are difficult to prove and the uneducated equally likely to be led astray by ideas that are laughably easy to disprove.

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