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Contrarianism's end? Posted by: Economist.com Categories: Media
THE widespread debunking of the contrarian global-warming chapter in Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner's new book "Superfreakonomics" (by Joe Romm, by Brad Plumer, by Matthew Yglesias, by the Union of Concerned Scientists, by Paul Krugman, and by others too numerous to mention except that they include the main climate scientist cited by Messrs Levitt and Dubner themselves, Ken Caldeira) leads John Quiggin to wonder whether this might be the end of the line for contrarian journalism as such.
The main point, though, is that the fuss over the global cooling chapter in Levitt and Dubner’s new book is the first occasion, I think, where the refutation of specific errors has taken a back seat (partly because, in this case, it’s so easy) to an attack on contrarianism, as such. The general point is that contrarianism is a cheap way of allowing ideological hacks to think of themselves as fearless, independent thinkers, while never thinking (in fact reinforcing) the status quo. 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. And it's been my experience ever since that contrarian arguments tend to skew rightwards. This was certainly the case during the period when contrarianism began to replace authoritative long-form pieces as the privileged genre in magazine journalism. In the '70s and '80s, the kings of journalism were writers like David Halberstam, Janet Malcolm, John McPhee and Tom Wolfe, who combined atmosphere, analysis, and narrative sweep. In the late '80s and early '90s, Michael Kinsley, Andrew Sullivan, and to some extent Tina Brown began to shift the genre, and the preferred qualities turned towards the pithy, the surprising, and the pop. It'd be fascinating to write a history of the rise of contrarian journalism in the '90s, but my milestones would certainly include Katie Roiphe's "The Morning After" and... well, about half of everything that's ever appeared in Slate (including pretty much all of Mickey Kaus). By the time of Stephen Johnson's "Everything Bad Is Good For You", the formula was pretty clear.
Contrarianism generally lines up with the "perversity" column in Albert Hirschman's typology "The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy". 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.
There was a time when I encountered contrarian arguments like those made by Mr Levitt and Mr Dubner and thought, hm, that's really cool. In recent years, when I encounter such arguments, my tendency has been to think, yeah, that's probably a lot of hooey. If journalism is about to affect a turn away from contrarianism, it's none too soon.