What is there to be worried about? Why now? For one, public opinion has turned against people unwilling to question certainties. The fear this might engender is understandable: after all, most in idea-generating jobs — at universities, in research centres, in government, in the media — are surrounded by like-minded people. How to separate questionable assumptions from those that aren’t, when all assumptions are shared, and are held to be self-evidently true? Thus, absurdities: banks selling insurance against their own collapse; credit-rating agencies running evaluation programmes rating entire blocks in distressed neighbourhoods essentially as investment-grade assets.

But there have been crashes before. Why should reactions be different? One reason is that anger against echo chambers already existed. That, above all, was the reason for Barack Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton. Voters felt that those whose job it was to be right were wrong about Iraq, wrong about the aftermath, wrong about the reasons to go in. Clinton was one of them; Obama was not. Those unwilling to break the consensus were electorally unacceptable. And those in the American commentariat, both liberal and conservative, who had suspended disbelief in the run-up to the war, were forced to revisit their statements then — to apologise or gloss over or nuance their words. That hasn’t dissipated public anger completely, and those who suspended disbelief about the state of world finance are justifiably concerned that that anger will now turn on them.

So, if echo chambers are unacceptable, should we instead reward those willing to upend the conventional wisdom? That won’t help: contrarians have been thriving as well. From Jonah Goldberg to Arundhati Roy to Christopher Hitchens, conflict-driven news and analysis have used those who’re happy to disagree to create dramatic opposites in how events can be perceived. Academics privilege “surprising” results as well, which means that what gets published and discussed is frequently interesting — but not representative. Why isn’t this sustainable? Because academia is not focused on representative, big questions that will feed into a system where there are all sorts of little answers available — one study in Scotland saying smoking might not kill you, another in Hawaii about the power of prayer — that the less scrupulous pick and choose between them to create clashing narratives. Because big questions should sometimes not be about “right”, “wrong” or where an academic stands.

... contd.