What's wrong with blaming "information" for political chaos

David Perell's 13,000 word essay, "What the Hell is Going On?" presents a reassuring -- and contrarian -- view on how our current dysfunction in politics, media, and business has come to pass, drawing on orthodox economic theories about "information asymmetry" in a way that makes the whole thing seem like a kind of adjustment period between a middling old world and a fine new one.

I think Perell is wrong. His theory omits the most salient, obvious explanation for what's going on (the creation of an oligarchy that has diminished the efficacy of public institutions and introduced widespread corruption in every domain), in favor of rationalizations that let the wealthy and their enablers off the hook, converting a corrupt system with nameable human actors who have benefited from it and who spend lavishly to perpetuate it into a systemic problem that emerges from a historical moment in which everyone is blameless, prisoners of fate and history.

Perell's theory goes a little like this: once we had incomplete information and so we had to rely on rules of thumb to navigate the world. We trusted brands because we couldn't access realtime customer reviews to tell us whether a product was any good. We trusted universities because we couldn't access libraries and communities that let us train ourselves. We trusted political parties because the news media pushed a narrative that made it hard to find out when the parties were corrupt or ineffectual.

All of this is true, as is Perell's conclusion. Read the rest “What's wrong with blaming "information" for political chaos”