Fail! Have you noticed that latest internet meme? What’s a meme you ask?  A meme is a phrase used to describe a catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet, much like an esoteric inside joke.

“Fail” has become the latest cool word. Remember the great 180 negater… “not!”? As in, “You are so hot. Not!” Now it’s “fail”.

Fail is anything stupid, illogical, ill-conceived, broken, in error, malfunctioning, in bad taste,  lame, or just plain lacking in sufficient cool, especially when it’s good and snarky, is of a sexual nature and is wrapped in a blanket of irony.

Whole websites have sprung up just to document “fail”. Try out shipmentoffail.com or failblog.org to sample some “fail”. The Darwin Awards is actually the mother of all “fail” websites although it predates the alchemy of turning “fail” into a pseudo-noun.

BTW, the opposite of “fail” is “win” but “win” is a rare and grudgingly bestowed moniker and frankly it’s not much fun. Fact is, there’s a hell of a lot more “fail” going on in the world than “win” and we have more fun with “fail” as long as it’s not our own.

According to author Paul Ormerod, that’s the way of world and there’s nothing we can do about it. Jumping to the Paul’s punchline:

“Things fail because of the inherent incertainties involved in any complex system. Despite our best intentions, outcomes often do not match desired effects. It is impossible to get around this simple fact, and no amount of intelligent analysis will change the situation.”

When “fail” emerged out of the popular cultural ooze I’m sure it wasn’t because of Paul Ormerod or his assessment of how the world works but that’s in keeping with Paul’s point about unpredictable complex systems.

I suppose you could reduce Paul’s articulate bottom line into the ever popular “shit happens”. When it does (and it will), you got “fail”. And you can’t stop it.

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David N. Welton writes in squeezedbooks.com about Paul Ormerod’s book “Why Most Things Fail – Evolution, Extinctions & Economics”

Key Points

• Failure is all around us – species, companies, brands and government policies fail. To understand success, “we must first understand the pervasive existence of failure”.

• “Individual behavior is not fixed, like a screw or cog in a machine is, but evolves in response to the behavior of others. Control and prediction of the system as a whole is simply not possible.”

• The world is complex, and in continuous evolution. People are, in turn, part of complex and constantly changing networks, and their ability to understand this environment is inherently limited. This is why things fail.

• Decentralized, “market like” systems may not deliver a perfect outcome, but they are the most likely to deliver a satisfactory outcome, compared with a centrally controlled model.

• “Innovation, evolution, and competition” are the hallmarks of a successful system.

Big Doesn’t Ensure Survival – Big or Small, Most Eventually Die – Nearly 100 years ago, the first true multinational corporations appeared in an age of corporate expansion that could be termed the “Edwardian Explosion”. Nearly all of those companies, many of which were just as large as the giants of today, are now gone. They failed despite having had millions or billions of dollars at their disposal, and management willing to innovate and respond to a changing world and markets. Of the 100 largest industrial companies in 1912, by 1995, 29 had gone bankrupt, 48 disappeared (mergers, acquisitions and so on), and 52 survived, but only 19 remained in the top 100. Once you discount the large number of small companies that fail in their first few years, the average lifespan for small companies is similar to that of large firms – and most of them eventually fail.

Failure Is Persistent – There Is No Equilibrium – Most modern economics deals with “how to succeed”, “the correct strategy”, and so on, and looks very little at the persistence of failure, despite its pervasiveness. Economics prefers to deal with an idealized “state of equilibrium”, and to look at periods of change as a temporary pause between returns to the natural order of things. However, change is all around us, and is much more of a constant than any sort of equilibrium. For instance, economics textbooks often quickly cover the price of a product in relationship to the demand curve, as if it were easy for a company to determine the demand for their product at given prices. It isn’t, as the large market research and advertising sectors attest. Were it easier, firms wouldn’t need to spend such large sums of money attempting to determine what will sell and what won’t (and still end up wrong quite often). It isn’t easy for most firms to gauge production prices for complex products, even though the process is under their control, let alone gather accurate information about something so “basic” as the demand curve.

Predicting Complex Systems With Many Variables Is Nearly Impossible – After looking at companies and their failures, and the difficulties of economics in dealing with the most basic aspects of a firm’s functioning, we look at government policies. Governments in nearly all western nations continue to grow. Government spending as a percentage of the economy was lower during the most socialist government Britain has ever had, in the 1950s, than under Mrs Thatcher in the 1980ies. Despite the public sector growing to be over twice as large in the post war years, the unemployment rate – the primary cause of poverty – was virtually unaffected. Higher spending on education as a means to increase social mobility has had similar results. Spending has increased, however, social mobility has not. By looking at the Gini Coefficient (a measure of the equitable distribution of wealth, where a higher number means more inequality, and 0 means complete equality) over time in the US, we see that, during the 20th century, it has changed – both increasing and decreasing, but in a fluid and dynamic way, with irregular fluctuations. When looking at the world as a whole, the Gini coefficient decreased for the first time in the history of capitalism, with the economic success of Asia lifting millions of people out of poverty. Various theories describing inequality have been proposed, from Marx to the mainstream general equilibrium theory, yet none convincingly explains the ebb and flow of inequality over time – either between citizens of one country, or between countries. The evidence points to this inequality moving in irregular, unpredictable ways. One of the main reasons why it is difficult to create a theory that successfully matches the evidence is that inequality in any society is the result of millions of interactions. There are so many interacting variables that predicting the outcome of the system is nearly impossible.

Small Things Can Alter Outcome of Big Things Unpredictably – Uncertainty Rules – Segregation – be it racial, or along class lines as in Britain – is another area that social reformers have attempted to tackle over the years, but in some ways, with little success. Despite many efforts over the years, racial segregation remains very prominent in the US. Economists such as Gary Becker have examined the issue through the lense of their field, which has as one of its principal tenets the law that agents respond to incentives. Given economics’ view of agents as rational, segregation can continue only if the people involved desire this outcome. However, the evidence suggests that people generally do not have widespread, strong racial preferences. This apparent discrepancy – weak racial preferences at an individual level coupled with relatively stronger effects at a systemwide level – are explained in theoretical work by Thomas Schelling that shows how small, local preferences can cause larger effects on the overall system. Furthermore, the precise outcome of the type of experiment he performed is impossible to predict from the inputs to the system. Uncertainty rules.

Consequences of Our Acting In Our Own Interests Can’t Be Reliably Predicted -The “laws of supply and demand” are taught as basic economics, but things in reality really aren’t that simple. Once again, there are many variables. For instance, a crop might be expensive one year due to a poor harvest, then cheaper than expected the next year, because farmers plant a lot of the crop commanding a high price following the bad year. The third year, farmers may plant less of the crop due to the low prices in the ‘good harvest’ year, sending prices up again as less of the crop is brought to market. In this way, prices might never reach a classic “supply and demand” equilibrium, but move around it. Game theory is a branch of study that proposes solutions to difficult problems inherent in the interaction between people. However, it too fails to be of much use for a large number of practical situations. Game theory techniques require clear and distinct rules, but in real life, these are often lacking. People, either acting alone or in groups act in their own interests, with the purpose of obtaining specific goals, yet it seems that it is “difficult or impossible to predict the consequences of decisions in any meaningful sense”.

We Act “Rationally” On Imperfect Information In The Face of Massive Uncertainty – When comparing humans and their actions and interactions with evolution in the biological sense, one of the chief differences is that people act consciously in response to their environment, whereas animals clearly cannot guide their own evolution. Even so, people face massive uncertainty, something that standard economics doesn’t take into account, working instead with rational agents with nearly perfect information about decisions they must make. This is fine in certain circumstances in order to have a clearer view of a specific problem. “Bounded rationality”, where agents do not have access to all information increases the relevance of economic theory. In reality, “maximizing” (obtaining the absolute best result) is difficult or impossible compared to “satisficing” (obtaining a good enough result). In games such as chess, where it is impossible even for computers to calculate every move, grandmasters often make the most reasonable move, avoiding obvious traps, rather than trying (unsuccessfully) to determine the best possible move in light of all possible moves that the opponent might make.

The World Has Far More Complex Rules Than Chess (and we don’t know them all) – If potential chess moves are difficult to predict, where the rules are relatively simple, and known, think of the difficulties involved in determining an accurate view of the present, let alone charting a course for the future, for the head of a company, or government. The Hotelling location model is described as a long, continuous beach (1000 meters, say), with two ice cream vendors who both want to maximize the customers who will go to their respective establishments. Clearly, placing their shops in the middle is the best choice. Go clear to one end, and you risk losing many of your customers to the other vendor who places their shop in the middle. This model can be an effective way of describing markets, or even the political spectrum. Go too far to one extreme, and you will get no votes from the other end, nor the centrists, who will all vote for the more moderate candidate. It’s pretty easy to see this logic with only two ice cream shops (political parties/companies/agents of some kind), but even increasing the number to 5 yields a vastly more complicated problem because the solution depends entirely where your rivals place themselves. And that depends, in turn, on your own placement. And so it goes. Individual agents aren’t totally powerless – by thinking about the problem, and analyzing it, perhaps we can gain some slight advantage.

In Reality, We Are Forced To Bet Wisely On Coin Tosses – Evolution is random. Genes do not mutate of their own accord, and species do not choose how to evolve. The fittest individuals and species only evolve over long periods of time thanks to random mutations and natural selection. On the other hand, in the “perfect world” of classic economics, agents know everything and thus are able to choose the absolute best option. This would make comparing the two difficult, but for the sake of argument, we can imagine two players betting on coin tosses. There is no real way to tell whether either of the players is really a better performer, or just lucky. Individuals and firms must lie somewhere on this continuum, between pure randomness and omniscient decision makers. There is strong evidence that the truth is closer to random actors, that, however, do glean some advantages in terms of information from time to time, and thus are more likely to survive as the ‘fittest’ of their generation.

Bad News! – Thinking/Planning Businesses Become Extinct Just Like Slugs and Ferns – Like economists, biologists often look at the survival of the ‘fittest’, rather than extinction. An interesting finding regarding success is that a particular gene’s likelyhood of “invading” a population (becoming present in all or most individuals over time) is very low. Extinctions, like we saw earlier with company failures, happen at irregular intervals – many at once, then fewer, then many again, but without an entirely predictable pattern. The frequency of species extinction, does, however, fit a power law curve, meaning that the frequency with which we see a given number of extinctions decreases according to the square of the size. Interestingly, the failure rates of firms fit the same pattern – almost as if they were just as random as extinction amongst species that are, unlike firms, completely unable to plan their own futures.

Conventional economic theory points to external shocks as the ultimate cause for business cycles, because, as previously discussed, the economy “ought to” tend towards an equilibrium. When modeled with simple rules, however, it is possible to demonstrate complex emergent behavior with regards to extinction events, with endogenous causes internal to the system, rather than external causes (asteroids, floods, climate change).

Things fail because of the inherent incertainties involved in any complex system. Despite our best intentions, outcomes often do not match desired effects. It is impossible to get around this simple fact, and no amount of intelligent analysis will change the situation.

We are not completely helpless in the face of the Iron Law of Failure, however. Sometimes failure is even beneficial, for instance when an old, fossilized firm fails and a newer, more dynamic one takes its place, or replaces its entire industry. Indeed, it is the dynamic of competition, innovation and experimentation that must be promoted.

[Note:  The bold captions used in most paragraphs above were added by me (Morten Sissener) and were not included in David Welton's original review. ]

By Rick Shenkman

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” — Thomas Jefferson

Just how stupid are we? Pretty stupid, it would seem, when we come across headlines like this: “Homer Simpson, Yes — 1st Amendment ‘Doh,’ Survey Finds” (Associated Press 3/1/06).

“About 1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half of Americans can name at least two members of the fictional cartoon family, according to a survey.

“The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just 1 in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.”

But what does it mean exactly to say that American voters are stupid? About this there is unfortunately no consensus. Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who confessed not knowing how to define pornography, we are apt simply to throw up our hands in frustration and say: We know it when we see it. But unless we attempt a definition of some sort, we risk incoherence, dooming our investigation of stupidity from the outset. Stupidity cannot mean, as Humpty Dumpty would have it, whatever we say it means.

Five defining characteristics of stupidity, it seems to me, are readily apparent. First, is sheer ignorance: Ignorance of critical facts about important events in the news, and ignorance of how our government functions and who’s in charge. Second, is negligence: The disinclination to seek reliable sources of information about important news events. Third, is wooden-headedness, as the historian Barbara Tuchman defined it: The inclination to believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts. Fourth, is shortsightedness: The support of public policies that are mutually contradictory, or contrary to the country’s long-term interests. Fifth, and finally, is a broad category I call bone-headedness, for want of a better name: The susceptibility to meaningless phrases, stereotypes, irrational biases, and simplistic diagnoses and solutions that play on our hopes and fears.

American Ignorance

Taking up the first of our definitions of stupidity, how ignorant are we? Ask the political scientists and you will be told that there is damning, hard evidence pointing incontrovertibly to the conclusion that millions are embarrassingly ill-informed and that they do not care that they are. There is enough evidence that one could almost conclude — though admittedly this is a stretch — that we are living in an Age of Ignorance.

Surprised? My guess is most people would be. The general impression seems to be that we are living in an age in which people are particularly knowledgeable. Many students tell me that they are the most well-informed generation in history.

Why are we so deluded? The error can be traced to our mistaking unprecedented access to information with the actual consumption of it. Our access is indeed phenomenal. George Washington had to wait two weeks to discover that he had been elected president of the United States. That’s how long it took for the news to travel from New York, where the Electoral College votes were counted, to reach him at home in Mount Vernon, Virginia. Americans living in the interior regions had to wait even longer, some up to two months. Now we can watch developments as they occur halfway around the world in real time. It is little wonder then that students boast of their knowledge. Unlike their parents, who were forced to rely mainly on newspapers and the network news shows to find out what was happening in the world, they can flip on CNN and Fox or consult the Internet.

But in fact only a small percentage of people take advantage of the great new resources at hand. In 2005, the Pew Research Center surveyed the news habits of some 3,000 Americans age 18 and older. The researchers found that 59% on a regular basis get at least some news from local TV, 47% from national TV news shows, and just 23% from the Internet.

Anecdotal evidence suggested for years that Americans were not particularly well-informed. As foreign visitors long ago observed, Americans are vastly inferior in their knowledge of world geography compared with Europeans. (The old joke is that “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”) But it was never clear until the postwar period how ignorant Americans are. For it was only then that social scientists began measuring in a systematic manner what Americans actually know. The results were devastating.

The most comprehensive surveys, the National Election Studies (NES), were carried out by the University of Michigan beginning in the late 1940s. What these studies showed was that Americans fall into three categories with regard to their political knowledge. A tiny percentage know a lot about politics, up to 50%-60% know enough to answer very simple questions, and the rest know next to nothing.

Contrary to expectations, by many measures the surveys showed the level of ignorance remaining constant over time. In the 1990s, political scientists Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter concluded that there was statistically little difference between the knowledge of the parents of the Silent Generation of the 1950s, the parents of the Baby Boomers of the 1960s, and American parents today. (By some measures, Americans are dumber today than their parents of a generation ago.)

Some of the numbers are hard to fathom in a country in which for at least a century all children have been required by law to attend grade school or be home-schooled. Even if people do not closely follow the news, one would expect them to be able to answer basic civics questions, but only a small minority can.

In 1986, only 30% knew that Roe v. Wade was the Supreme Court decision that ruled abortion legal more than a decade earlier. In 1991, Americans were asked how long the term of a United States senator is. Just 25% correctly answered six years. How many senators are there? A poll a few years ago found that only 20% know that there are 100 senators, though the number has remained constant for the last half century (and is easy to remember). Encouragingly, today the number of Americans who can correctly identify and name the three branches of government is up to 40%.

Polls over the past three decades measuring Americans’ knowledge of history show similarly dismal results. What happened in 1066? Just 10% know it is the date of the Norman Conquest. Who said the “world must be made safe for democracy”? Just 14% know it was Woodrow Wilson. Which country dropped the nuclear bomb? Only 49% know it was their own country. Who was America’s greatest president? According to a Gallup poll in 2005, a majority answer that it was a president from the last half century: 20% said Reagan, 15% Bill Clinton, 12% John Kennedy, 5% George W. Bush. Only 14% picked Lincoln and only 5%, Washington.

And the worst president? For years Americans would include in the list Herbert Hoover. But no more. Most today do not know who Herbert Hoover was, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey in 2004. Just 43% could correctly identify him.

The only history questions a majority of Americans can answer correctly are the most basic ones. What happened at Pearl Harbor? A great majority know: 84%. What was the Holocaust? Nearly 70% know. (Thirty percent don’t?) But it comes as something of a shock that, in 1983, just 81% knew who Lee Harvey Oswald was and that, in 1985, only 81% could identify Martin Luther King, Jr.

What Voters Don’t Know

Who these poor souls were who didn’t know who Martin Luther King was we cannot be sure. Research suggests that they were probably impoverished (the poor tend to know less on the whole about politics and history than others) or simply unschooled, categories which usually overlap. But even Americans in the middle class who attend college exhibit profound ignorance. A report in 2007 published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute found that on average 14,000 randomly selected college students at 50 schools around the country scored under 55 (out of 100) on a test that measured their knowledge of basic American civics. Less than half knew that Yorktown was the last battle of the American Revolution. Surprisingly, seniors often tested lower than freshmen. (The explanation was apparently that many students by their senior year had forgotten what they learned in high school.)

The optimists point to surveys indicating that about half the country can describe some differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties. But if they do not know the difference between liberals and conservatives, as surveys indicate, how can they possibly say in any meaningful way how the parties differ? And if they do not know this, what else do they not know?

Plenty, it turns out. Even though they are awash in news, Americans generally do not seem to absorb what it is that they are reading and hearing and watching. Americans cannot even name the leaders of their own government. Sandra Day O’Connor was the first woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Fewer than half of Americans could tell you her name during the length of her entire tenure. William Rehnquist was chief justice of the Supreme Court. Just 40% of Americans ever knew his name (and only 30% could tell you that he was a conservative). Going into the First Gulf War, just 15% could identify Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense. In 2007, in the fifth year of the Iraq War, only 21% could name the secretary of defense, Robert Gates. Most Americans cannot name their own member of Congress or their senators.

If the problem were simply that Americans are bad at names, one would not have to worry too much. But they do not understand the mechanics of government either. Only 34% know that it is the Congress that declares war (which may explain why they are not alarmed when presidents take us into wars without explicit declarations of war from the legislature). Only 35% know that Congress can override a presidential veto. Some 49% think the president can suspend the Constitution. Some 60% believe that he can appoint judges to the federal courts without the approval of the Senate. Some 45% believe that revolutionary speech is punishable under the Constitution.

On the basis of their comprehensive approach, Delli Carpini and Keeter concluded that only 5% of Americans could correctly answer three-fourths of the questions asked about economics, only 11% of the questions about domestic issues, 14% of the questions about foreign affairs, and 10% of the questions about geography. The highest score? More Americans knew the correct answers to history questions than any other (which will come as a surprise to many history teachers). Still, only 25% knew the correct answers to three-quarters of the history questions, which were rudimentary.

In 2003, the Strategic Task Force on Education Abroad investigated Americans’ knowledge of world affairs. The task force concluded: “America’s ignorance of the outside world” is so great as to constitute a threat to national security.

Young and Ignorant — and Voting

At least, you may think to yourself, we are not getting any dumber. But by some measures we are. Young people by many measures know less today than young people forty years ago. And their news habits are worse. Newspaper reading went out in the sixties along with the Hula Hoop. Just 20% of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 read a daily paper. And that isn’t saying much. There’s no way of knowing what part of the paper they’re reading. It is likelier to encompass the comics and a quick glance at the front page than dense stories about Somalia or the budget.

They aren’t watching the cable news shows either. The average age of CNN’s audience is sixty. And they surely are not watching the network news shows, which attract mainly the Depends generation. Nor are they using the Internet in large numbers to surf for news. Only 11% say that they regularly click on news web pages. (Yes, many young people watch Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. A survey in 2007 by the Pew Research Center found that 54% of the viewers of The Daily Show score in the “high knowledge” news category — about the same as the viewers of the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News.)

Compared with Americans generally — and this isn’t saying much, given their low level of interest in the news — young people are the least informed of any age cohort save possibly for those confined to nursing homes. In fact, the young are so indifferent to newspapers that they single-handedly are responsible for the dismally low newspaper readership rates that are bandied about.

In earlier generations — in the 1950s, for example — young people read newspapers and digested the news at rates similar to those of the general population. Nothing indicates that the current generation of young people will suddenly begin following the news when they turn 35 or 40. Indeed, half a century of studies suggest that most people who do not pick up the news habit in their twenties probably never will.

Young people today find the news irrelevant. Bored by politics, students shun the rituals of civic life, voting in lower numbers than other Americans (though a small up-tick in civic participation showed up in recent surveys). U.S. Census data indicate that voters aged 18 to 24 turn out in low numbers. In 1972, when 18 year olds got the vote, 52% cast a ballot. In subsequent years, far fewer voted: in 1988, 40%; in 1992, 50%; in 1996, 35%; in 2000, 36%. In 2004, despite the most intense get-out-the-vote effort ever focused on young people, just 47% took the time to cast a ballot.

Since young people on the whole scarcely follow politics, one may want to consider whether we even want them to vote. Asked in 2000 to identify the presidential candidate who was the chief sponsor of Campaign Finance Reform — Sen. John McCain — just 4% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 could do so. As the primary season began in February, fewer than half in the same age group knew that George W. Bush was even a candidate. Only 12% knew that McCain was also a candidate even though he was said to be especially appealing to young people.

One news subject in recent history, 9/11, did attract the interest of the young. A poll by Pew at the end of 2001 found that 61% of adult Americans under age 30 said that they were following the story closely. But few found any other subjects in the news that year compelling. Anthrax attacks? Just 32% indicated it was important enough to follow. The economy? Again, just 32%. The capture of Kabul? Just 20%.

It would appear that young people today are doing very little reading of any kind. In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts, consulting a vast array of surveys, including the United States Census, found that just 43% of young people ages 18 to 24 read literature. In 1982, the number was 60%. A majority do not read either newspapers, fiction, poetry, or drama. Save for the possibility that they are reading the Bible or works of non-fiction, for which solid statistics are unavailable, it would appear that this generation is less well read than any other since statistics began to be kept.

The studies demonstrating that young people know less today than young people a generation ago do not get much publicity. What one hears about are the pioneer steps the young are taking politically. Headlines from the 2004 presidential election featured numerous stories about young people who were following the campaign on blogs, then a new phenomenon. Other stories focused on the help young Deaniacs gave Howard Dean by arranging to raise funds through innovative Internet appeals. Still other stories reported that the Deaniacs were networking all over the country through the Internet website meetup.com. One did not hear that we have raised another Silent Generation. But have we not? The statistics about young people today are fairly clear: As a group they do not vote in large numbers, most do not read newspapers, and most do not follow the news. (Barack Obama has recently inspired greater participation, but at this stage it is too early to tell if the effect will be lasting.)

The Issues? Who knows?

Millions every year are now spent on the effort to answer the question: What do the voters want? The honest answer would be that often they themselves do not really know because they do not know enough to say. Few, however, admit this.

In the election of 2004, one of the hot issues was gay marriage. But gauging public opinion on the subject was difficult. Asked in one national poll whether they supported a constitutional amendment allowing only marriages between a man and a woman, a majority said yes. But three questions later a majority also agreed that “defining marriage was not an important enough issue to be worth changing the Constitution.” The New York Times wryly summed up the results: Americans clearly favor amending the Constitution but not changing it.

Does it matter if people are ignorant? There are many subjects about which the ordinary voter need know nothing. The conscientious citizen has no obligation to plow through the federal budget, for example. One suspects there are not many politicians themselves who have bothered to do so. Nor do voters have an obligation to read the laws passed in their name. We do expect members of Congress to read the bills they are asked to vote on, but we know from experience that often they do not, having failed either to take the time to do so or having been denied the opportunity to do so by their leaders, who for one reason or another often rush bills through.

Reading the text of laws in any case is often unhelpful. The chairpersons in charge of drafting them often include provisions only a detective could untangle. The tax code is rife with clauses like this: The Congress hereby appropriates X dollars for the purchase of 500 widgets that measure 3 inches by 4 inches by 2 inches from any company incorporated on October 20, 1965 in Any City USA situated in block 10 of district 3.

Of course, only one company fits the description. Upon investigation it turns out to be owned by the chairperson’s biggest contributor. That is more than any citizens acting on their own could possibly divine. It is not essential that the voter know every which way in which the tax code is manipulated to benefit special interests. All that is required is that the voter know that rigging of the tax code in favor of certain interests is probably common. The media are perfectly capable of communicating this message. Voters are perfectly capable of absorbing it. Armed with this knowledge, the voter knows to be wary of claims that the tax code treats one and all alike with fairness.

There are however innumerable subjects about which a general knowledge is insufficient. In these cases ignorance of the details is more than a minor problem. An appalling ignorance of Social Security, to take one example, has left Americans unable to see how their money has been spent, whether the system is viable, and what measures are needed to shore it up.

How many know that the system is running a surplus? And that this surplus — some $150 billion a year — is actually quite substantial, even by Washington standards? And how many know that the system has been in surplus since 1983?

Few, of course. Ignorance of the facts has led to a fundamentally dishonest debate about Social Security.

During all the years the surpluses were building, the Democrats in Congress pretended the money was theirs to be spent, as if it were the same as all the other tax dollars collected by the government. And spend it they did, whenever they had the chance, with no hint that they were perhaps disbursing funds that actually should be held in reserve for later use. (Social Security taxes had been expressly raised in 1983 in order to build up the system’s funds when bankruptcy had loomed.) Not until the rest of the budget was in surplus (in 1999) did it suddenly occur to them that the money should be saved. And it appears that the only reason they felt compelled at this point to acknowledge that the money was needed for Social Security was because they wanted to blunt the Republicans’ call for tax cuts. The Social Security surplus could not both be used to pay for the large tax cuts Republicans wanted and for the future retirement benefits of aging Boomers.

The Republicans have been equally unctuous. While they have claimed that they are terribly worried about Social Security, they have been busy irresponsibly spending the system’s surplus on tax cuts, one cut after another. First Reagan used the surplus to hide the impact of his tax cuts and then George W. Bush used it to hide the impact of his cuts. Neither ever acknowledged that it was only the surplus in Social Security’s accounts that made it even plausible for them to cut taxes.

Take those Bush tax cuts. Bush claimed the cuts were made possible by several years of past surpluses and the prospect of even more years of surpluses. But subtracting from the federal budget the overflow funds generated by Social Security, the government ran a surplus in just two years during the period the national debt was declining, 1999 and 2000.

In the other years when the government ran a surplus, 1998 and 2001, it was because of Social Security and only because of Social Security. That is, the putative surpluses of 1998 and 2001, which President Bush cited in defense of his tax cuts, were in reality pure fiction. Without Social Security the government would have been in debt those two years. And yet in 2001 President Bush told the country tax cuts were not only needed, they were affordable because of our splendid surplus.

Today, conservatives argue that the Social Security Trust Fund is a fiction. They are correct. The money was spent. They helped spend it.

To this debate about Social Security — which, once one understands what has been happening, is actually quite absorbing — the public has largely been an indifferent spectator. A surprising 2001 Pew study found that just 19% of Americans understand that the United States ever ran a surplus at all, however defined, in the 1990s or 2000`s. And only 50% of Americans, according to an Annenberg study in 2004, understand that President Bush favors privatizing Social Security. Polls indicate that people are scared that the system is going bust, no doubt thanks in part to Bush’s gloom-and-doom prognostications. But they haven’t the faintest idea what going bust means. And in fact, the system can be kept going without fundamental change simply by raising the cap on taxed income and pushing back the retirement age a few years.

How much ignorance can a country stand? There have to be terrible consequences when it reaches a certain level. But what level? And with what consequences, exactly? The answers to these questions are unknowable. But can we doubt that if we persist on the path we are on that we shall, one day, perhaps not too far into the distant future, find out the answers?

Rick Shenkman, Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter, New York Times bestselling author, and associate professor of history at George Mason University, is the founder and editor of History News Network, a website that features articles by historians on current events. This essay is adapted from chapter two of his new book, Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter (Basic Books, 2008). His observations about the 2008 election can be followed on his blog, “How Stupid?” His recent appearance on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” can be viewed by clicking here.

Excerpted from Just How Stupid Are We?, by Rick Shenkman, by arrangement with Basic Books.

Copyright 2008 Rick Shenkman