Confronting Stupidity

George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, and Peter Ubel, a professor of business and public policy at Duke, have a short but telling piece in the New York Times about the efforts to implement behavioral economics into public policy to address various issues confronting the country.

Econ 101 notes the free market's fatal flaws in addressing society’s needs, from its lack of ethics (put your kidney up as collateral and we’ll reduce your interest rate), externalities (it’s worth it for Dupont to pollute everyone’s river), and what I consider to be its deepest and most fundamental flaw: the assumption of rational behavior.

This assumption has been amply refuted. People don’t behave rationally and are easily manipulated. They succumb to weakness, desire, and short term gratification at great long term expense. They don’t care how much sodium is in their Whopper and fries, or that enslaved children made their shoes, or that pharmaceutical companies influenced the drug they were prescribed for reasons of profit over medicine. They deny what it does to the planet to fill their gas tank.

Behavioral economics seeks to explain why consumers make irrational decisions, why they eat insane amounts of food, buy gas guzzling behemoths, rack up credit cards on unnecessary purchases, and don’t save for retirement. Behavioral economics is an early step in addressing what humanity has been in denial about throughout its history: stupidity. Yes, we know about it, see it everywhere, but it is not addressed seriously. It is not studied with academic rigor as the force on the planet that it is. It should be.

We understand the limited intellect that tries to understand and fails. Far less do we acknowledge let alone grasp the deliberate preference of ignorance, the refusal to learn, the rejection of both intelligence and education, exemplified by George W. Bush and distilled by "common sense" Sarah Palin. In denial, we find this behavior too horrible to face. We deny it, preferring to think that of course sound and informed minds will prevail, failing to recognize the dangers of allowing an evil and malignant few to exploit this sad aspect of reality.

The likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the Fox News demons have made it easier than ever to see the blatant manipulation and fleecing of the weak minded, serving the political equivalent of fast food: superficially appealing, fostering irresponsibility, and poisonous.

The imbecile always smiles. Tragically, what's hard to accept is that malignant forces have figured out how to manipulate the imbecile and like minded minions in order to get stupid elected. They got stupid into the White House, inflicting eight years of damage that will take decades to repair.