A Scorecard on Conventional Wisdom

NY Times ^ | March 9, 2008 | MARK LEIBOVICH

[neverdem]

Soothsaying

Washington

RHETORICAL pop quiz:

¶Who was more dead, Hillary Rodham Clinton a week ago or John McCain six months ago?

¶Whose nomination was more inevitable, Mrs. Clinton’s six months ago or Barack Obama’s two weeks ago?

Both questions are of course moot — if not ridiculous in retrospect (as fleeting as Rudy’s front-runner status or the media swoon over Fred Thompson).

Yet they inspire a proclamation that might actually be true: The accuracy rate of “conventional wisdom” in this presidential election has plummeted to new lows.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term “conventional wisdom” in “The Affluent Society,” his 1958 book. He was describing expectations commonly ascribed to an omniscient “public sentiment.” In that time, a small, powerful class of broadcasters, columnists, thinkers and political leaders trafficked in such assumptions, often faulty (e.g., “a Catholic will never become president”).

Today, new swarms of self-styled pundits can formulate conventional wisdom, or merely advance it, in any number of forums — e-mail, cable, blogs, talk radio. Conventional wisdom now just seems to bubble up, fatherless, with minimal brain work or reflection behind it. Its life cycle — the creation, debunking and subsequent hand-wringing of “old” conventional wisdom — has been radically compressed.

“The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events,” Mr. Galbraith wrote, and never has the march of events trampled so harshly upon conventional wisdom as it has in this election.

Granted, some conventional wisdom does prove true, and seems rightly indisputable at its conception. Former Senator Mike Gravel, for instance, was given no chance of becoming the Democratic nominee — a palm tree’s chance in Alaska, if you will — and sure enough, it’s not looking good for President Gravel these days, wherever he is...

[blackd77]

Seems to me we ought to examine very closely the reasons for statements such as these, and the biases and motivations of those who make them. This of course does not mean a quick, summary dismissal of the flawed reasoning behind those same statements, to separate one’s own “correct reasoning” from the errant reasoning of last week.

If we *collectively* learned from our collective mistakes in reasoning, we would be pretty well perfect in that regard by now.