Echoes

When I was in law school, I was a bore at cocktail parties. I had few opinions on the great issues of the day. Why not? I was certainly opinionated—I couldn’t otherwise have survived in my father’s house—but law school was teaching me to learn all the facts before making up my mind. Easy enough in the legal cases we studied, almost impossible on subjects like economic policy and foreign affairs. So, no opinions.

That phase didn’t last. I have plenty of opinions now, but my legal training still makes me yearn for facts. When I was younger, Walter Cronkite told me what I needed to know, or at least all there was to know outside the C.I.A., and I believed him and formed my opinions based on his facts and my judgments about what would be good for society.

But Uncle Walter is long gone—I can still see him taking off his black-framed glasses and wiping away a tear as he told us President Kennedy was dead—and reliable facts are getting harder to identify in the torrent of digital news. It’s a paradox of our time: more information, less truth.

In self-defense against the barrage from unreliable sources, we tend, naturally, to rely on those we have come to trust over the years. Some trust sources that tell them what they want to hear. Some trust sources that have a track record of getting the facts right. Lately, the sources I have always relied upon, like The New York Times, have come under attack from those who are only interested in news that confirms their pre-existing beliefs.

So they have their sources, many and varied, and I read The New York Times and The Washington Post, both known for journalistic integrity and for getting the facts right. Do I feel superior? No, but I do feel informed.

Today, a friend and political sparing partner responded to a spoof I sent him about Paul Ryan’s concern for the poor with a suggestion that I make a resolution for 2018 to “spend more time outside the echo chamber.”

He no doubt meant it good-naturedly, but it irritated me because it's another example of the false-equivalency virus that's going around. I may be living in an echo chamber, but it's echoing the truth, or at least as close to the truth as I can feret out in this complicated and contradictory world.

I’m interested in economics, for instance, especially as it informs our choices on fiscal and monetary policy. I’ve read big-government advocates like Stiglitz and Krugman, but I’ve also read libertarian conservatives like Hayek and Friedman. It turns out, if you read the works of any of these brilliant thinkers fully, you can find plenty in each to agree with. It’s all a matter of balance. And the sad truth is, still, in economics we aren’t always sure what produces what result.

But we are pretty sure of a few things. Trickle-down has been largely discredited. And lower taxes aren’t likely to meaningfully increase GDP, not with taxes at current rates. This isn’t some wild-assed guess or article of liberal faith; it has been tried a few times and it hasn’t worked.

So when Paul Ryan, defending the current tax proposal, says lower taxes will boost the economy, what am I to think? This is what: he wants to lower taxes for his own reasons—to shrink government, for instance—and is trotting out old dogma that he almost certainly knows to be incorrect to try to convince us it’s a good idea. 

Plenty of people lie and get away with it. O.J. comes to mind. But that doesn’t mean I have to fall for it. And it doesn’t mean that just because I don’t, just because I go back to the studies that have disproved these theories in the past, that I am living in an echo chamber of mis-information. 

In fact, what I am doing is educating myself to be able to sort fact from fiction in the post-Uncle-Walter age. It takes more work than turning on The CBS Evening News every night, but it’s the only interesting and helpful way to consider problems and possible solutions.