Our thinking is formed by our reading and it’s not enough to only occasionally read serious work while mostly reading useless books, magazines, and newspapers. People don’t think the shallow reading harms them, but it does. FULL ARTICLE by Doug French
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/11622/change-your-mind/
Change Your Mind
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Thank you for alerting me to this book by Hazlitt. I look forward to the thoughts on thinking by someone who was so adept at identifying and communicating key ideas in economics.
While I agree with the message of this article,I would disagree with one of the books being touted, namely:A whole new mind by Daniel Pink.
The book is actually terrible from a factual point of view,and is economically naive.So called ‘Right brain’ jobs have been part of industry and pre industry forever. What do you think the whole advertising industry is based on?And everything from books,cars,shoes,coins,flooring,kitchen utensils,phones -everything, have had functional as well as artistic appeal to them.One has to simply look at the trends in mobile phones or laptops to see that they are evolving with improved technology(utility) as well as style.So contrary to Pink’s assertions,Right brain jobs have always been embedded in a product’s identity.
Having actually worked in various industries and following it’s various histories,I can say that what Pink is ‘predicting’ has been a reality for a long long time.
Thank you Doug for making me aware of this book by Hazlitt. The next time I place an order with the Mises bookstore I will include “Thinking As A Science.” I recently finished reading “The Foundations Of Morality” by Hazlitt and found out what a great economist/philosopher/writer Henry Hazlitl was. His works are close to being of the same magnitude as those of Mises and Rothbard. That is not in any way a negative statement but rather a complimentary statement towards Hazlitt.
I am addicted to mystery novels. The shallow reading has done its damage, and there is no redemption for me…
…We could start by dumping the left brain / right brain dichotomy which, like so many grandmotherly “just-so” tales, is of dubious utility at best:
http://www.rense.com/general2/rb.htm
Interesting article, but I’m not too sure if I agree with Mr. French’s assertion that right-brainers will be in more demand in the near future than they are in the present. From my experience at least, the market is flooded with liberal arts majors more so than it is with the science majors, and the first jobs to go tend to be those belonging to right-brainers. Furthermore, right-brainers deal with the infinite resource of ideas whereas left-brainers deal with finite resources of materials, making left-brainers generally more valuable in a world where resources are always being depleted and production methods always need improvements in efficiency.
Perhaps I’m wrong and Mr. French is right. Society can become comfortable enough with its finite resources to the point where it’ll value right-brainers more than their left counterparts, and it has happened before. Even more importantly, if right-brainers innovate at an impressive level then they could match or even surpass left-brainers in the near future when it comes to income and prestige.
The thing is, I don’t see that happening anytime soon with the market as it is. Additionally, people tend to see the obvious objective productive value from left-brainers much more so than the subtle yet real subjective productive value of right-brainers, especially if the right-brainers are philosophers like Mises, Bastiat, etc, who can link the subjective with the objective in a genius fashion. To this day they’re still underrated in my opinion.
Maybe I’m just being cynical, but civilization’s love-affair with left-brainers is far from over. The Industrial Revolution is still underway. The shining point for right-brainers in the near future will be with entertainment. In the far future, when people everywhere can afford to better educate themselves, it’ll be with the philosophies. Ironically, in order to reach that point we need the left-brainers to enable that kind of creativity to flourish. So in a sense, we right-brainers need not be jealous.
First of all, as an economist you should understand that employment is a lagging indicator.
Second, it important that people read and read anything that want to read. People should do crosswords and other mind puzzles. The point I am trying to make is that such activity is a form of exercise for the brain and needed to help you cope as you age.
Finally, in our current environment of fast information technology, those that will be successful will be those that can see a problem, access information, formulate a plan and act on it in a timely manner. If you over analyize it or hold off, you may miss the boat.
Give me someone that can think on their feet than anyone that can quote Plato.
I always enjoy and appreciate Doug French’s articles. Thank you, and please continue writing in your no-nonsense fashion.
to kray and others,
I think therefore I am… I believe that one must consider what Pink and French said..THE Industrial age of our society has for the most part left this country! It has been legislated,regulated or taxed out of the country… and as such so has the middle class worker. Therefore unless those of this shrinking class must move from a diamond formation to the hour glass formation,,,YOUR actions dictated by YOUR knowledge will dictate if you will be at the top or bottom of the hour glass formation..unless that large shrinking middle class its brain content to understand what our founding fathers did and those at the Mises institute know..that our direction will only worsen if the good finacial policy of good government are evoked by the masses not by gaining the knowledge only but by the practice of it as well…..
a great post, especially as everybody is in the midst of re-invention these days. Learning how to adapt is fundamentally an exercise in storytelling. Specifically, learning how to shift the stories in our head that guide our perceptions and actions. Same is true when it comes to managing your career and learning how to re-frame your story of identity.
I’ve written a storytelling manifesto for change-makers that expands on these concepts, including 15 axioms that can change how you see the world. Anybody can download it for free – http://www.believemethebook.com
Programming is a complex task requiring both left and right brained portions. Refactoring and hacking (not to be confused with cracking) especially need the ability for people to be creative. Because of this, I do not see programmers losing any prestige as time goes on. Still, I can see a race for cleaner and cleaner code will occur, which means less bugs for everybody.
This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life.
Why go to work for someone else? Why become an employee, thereby a burden on your employer for payroll taxes and withholding calculations? Why not run your own life, and your own business?
Why, exactly, are you filing “self employment” taxes? Too tied to the land? Unable to just walk away?
You know that you can’t give away everything and starve yourself. You’ve forced yourselves to live with undeserved, irrational guilt. Is it ever proper to help another man? No, if he demands it as his right or as a duty that you owe him. Yes, if it’s your own free choice based on your judgment of the value of that person and his struggle. This country wasn’t built by men who sought handouts. In its brilliant youth, this country showed the rest of the world what greatness was possible to Man and what happiness is possible on Earth.
Have to agree with el Tonno – the left brain right brain thing is simplistic at best, and downright misleading at worst. And its not a question of either or either – we all use both sides of our brains most of th etime. Some parts of the brain ( different parts working in unison and not all necessarily on one side) are devoted to dealing with novelty – new experiences and impressions not encountered before, and identifying patterns in such experiences, and formulating them into memories stored elsewhere in the brain to draw on later to inform responses to similar stimulii. Other parts ( also several bits working in unison) are geared towards ‘template’ responses to familiar patterns, drawing on memory – what has already been learnt. SO for any given task, a person dealing with it for the first time will be using a completely different collection of neurons from another person who is thoroughly familiar with the task.
Not surprisingly, as we age, the novelty-responsive parts of th ebrain tend to be most active, becauase the young person is dealing with much that is unfamiliar – everything’s new. And as we get older, the proportion of new experience declines relative to the aspects of life that are repeated or which oare variations on themes encountered before. and naturally the parts of the brain drawing on preveious learning and memory tend to dominate. But we still can’t do without the other parts. Cognitive decline coming with age mostly tends to affect the novelty-function parts of the brain first, and the problem lies not so much in not being able to remember, but in an impaired ability to lay down fresh memories. Hence the common experience of alzheimers patients not remembering what they had for breakfast, but recalling a picnic attended in 1948 with perfect clarity.
This model of brain function also goes some way to explain why many great scientists tend to do their greatest, most ground-breaking work before they turn 30 ( think Einstein, Richard Feynman, Newton, and almost all mathematicians) – when the creative juices of pure novelty and raw pattern-finding are still firing on all cylinders – and late-developers in these fields are rare, albeit not completely unknown. Conversely, the work of those thinkers in disciplines which entaill a broad synthesis from a large body of fact , history and and previous discovery, tend to improve as they get older.. (think Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von mises!).
This and more is all nicely explained in ‘the wisdom paradox’ , by Elkonhon Goldberg. Off-topic I know, but its still interesting.
I don’t know, seems awfully close to telling people what they should and should not read. That’s almost as bad as offering an Objectivist theory of the artistic process itself — or worse: trying to pass off some after-the-fact Objectivist analysis of an artistic process’ end product (a work of art) as being an analysis of the originating artistic process.
Shouldn’t there be something in this article about subjective valuation and “keep your nose out of my book” anti-authoritarianism? Or at least anti-snobbery? I mean, I know Hazlitt was buddies with Nock, but still, living in a world filled with Nock-knockoffs might not be so much of a pleasure for those of us who live for Playboy pictorials — I mean articles.
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