Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Somebody over at the Economist thinks — or rather hopes — that contrarianism is dead:

The first time I ever encountered an argument that I would now clearly recognise as “contrarian” was in elementary school, during Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, when I first heard someone argue the supply-side case that lowering taxes would raise government revenues. Another early encounter I recall was my father describing a social scientist interviewed on NPR who’d argued that the main effect of minimum-wage laws was to raise the unemployment level for poor urban youth.

….Here’s the thing: as history progresses, things change. And societies try to adapt to those changes. Experts come up with solutions to the problems the societies face. Those solutions often entail discomfiting established interest groups. And the solutions the experts come up with almost always entail some degree of perverse counterreaction, some kinds of problems or inefficiencies or whatever. It can be very interesting to focus on those counterreactions; it can generate fascinating, eye-grabbing journalism.

But in the overwhelming majority of cases, the counterreactions aren’t as big as the first-order effects of the solutions. The minimum wage may price a few people out of the labour market, but it mostly raises low-income people’s wages. Raising marginal income taxes does slightly lower rich people’s incentives to generate income, but it mostly raises government revenue. In other words, the little contrarian thing is almost never anywhere near as important as the big first-order thing it rides on. And as journalism has come increasingly to focus on contrarianism, it has become less and less adept at actually describing the world.

I guess I agree but I’d put things slightly differently.  Contrarianism is genuinely useful, and I’d hate to see it go away.  Conventional wisdom, whether it’s mine or someone else’s, deserves pushback.

The problem with modern contrarianism is that it’s lazy.  Too often, it’s the sole focus of a piece, and it’s the focus for reasons purely of entertainment or ideology.  Which is too bad, because the kind of journalism that’s most useful is the kind that explains both first order things and counterreactions and doesn’t pander to readers’ desires to pretend that the world is simpler than it really is.  After all, counterreactions may usually be less important than first-order effects, but they’re still worth investigating.  Some tax cuts really don’t raise as much revenue as you’d think.  Raising the minimum wage really can have perverse effects in specific slices of the economy.  If you’re genuinely interested in knowing how the world works, you want to know this.

And that’s what seems to be missing in an awful lot of modern journalism: the desire to genuinely try to puzzle out how things work.  Instead, we get writing so dedicated to either ideology or entertainment that it’s satisfied to cherry pick contrarian arguments and leave it at that; or else mainstream he-said-she-said journalism that’s so determined not to take a stand that it enlightens no one.

But the world is a complicated place.  It just is.  There are first order effects, counterreactions to first order effects, and counterreactions to counterreactions.  And there are whole big chunks of the world that stand entirely aside even from that.  If you want to explain what’s really going on, you need to take in all of this, and you need to take all of it seriously on its own merits, and then you need to try to make sense of it all.  You can’t just ignore or brush aside everything that would inconveniently make your narrative a little messier or harder to understand.  (I’m looking at you, Malcolm Gladwell.)  You have to respect your readers enough to assume they’ll stick around even when the ride gets a little bumpy.

Sadly, less and less journalism aspires to that today.  To my dismay, fewer and fewer books aspire to it either.  It makes the world a shallower, less interesting thing.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate