Alex Tabarrok, over at Marginal Revolution, had a good post on February 14 about how little people know about how things work. He quoted from an essay by Charles Mann, who has a new series titled “How the System Works.”
Here’s a quote from Mann, a quote that Alex didn’t use but that I like:
At the rehearsal dinner I began thinking about Thomas Jefferson’s ink. My wife and I were at a fancy destination wedding on a faraway island in the Pacific Northwest. Around us were musicians, catered food, a full bar, and chandeliers, all set against a superb ocean sunset. Not for the first time, I was thinking about how amazing it is that relatively ordinary middle-class Americans could afford such events — on special occasions, at least.
My wife and I were at a tableful of smart, well-educated twenty-somethings — friends of the bride and groom. The wedding, with all its hope and aspiration, had put them in mind of the future. As young people should, they wanted to help make that future bright. There was so much to do! They wanted the hungry to be fed, the thirsty to have water, the poor to have light, the sick to be well.
But when I mentioned how remarkable it was that a hundred-plus people could parachute into a remote, unfamiliar place and eat a gourmet meal untroubled by fears for their health and comfort, they were surprised. The heroic systems required to bring all the elements of their dinner to these tables by the sea were invisible to them. Despite their fine education, they knew little about the mechanisms of today’s food, water, energy, and public-health systems. They wanted a better world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.
Both the part that Alex quoted and the part that I quote above reminded me of a troubling conversation at Washington University in St. Louis between Douglass North and his Ph.D. students.
In the fall of 1994, I was on leave at Wash U, where I was with Murray Weidenbaum’s Center for the Study of American Business. Nobel Prize winner Doug North was on the faculty and so I decided to sit in on a class he was teaching.
One day in class, he mentioned some U.S. mortality statistics. I don’t remember many details but he was talking about how during some period in the late 19th or early 20th century, the U.S. mortality rate had risen somewhat. (No, it wasn’t the Spanish flu; it happened before World War I.) Doug asked the students if they had any thoughts about why. One student, who was one of the brightest in class, suggested that it was due to the introduction of canned food. His hypothesis was that that somehow made food more dangerous. I was stunned; if anything, canning had to make food safer. Think of the fact that food would have spoiled if not canned and so you were taking a bigger chance of food poisoning before canning. I looked around and saw some of the students nodding in agreement with this student.
I was a non-paying guest in the class and so I didn’t feel right challenging the student. But Doug did, and made the point that I made above. I was hoping to see the lightbulb go on in a number of students’ eyes, but I didn’t. I think they had picked up an anti-technology, those-were-the-good-old-days attitude.
Ever since, I’ve seen many, many instances in which people show the same kind of ignorance that Charles Mann writes about.
I remember thinking that, just as Leonard Read came up with the idea of “I, Pencil,” someone could write something similar titled “I, Can.”
P.S. One reason I enjoyed teaching U.S. military officers is that hey were way more grounded in reality than those Wash U Ph.D. students.
