The relationship between intelligence, education, knowledge, and good sense is far from straightforward. Bad and foolish—but allegedly sophisticated—ideas can beguile the educated, or important portions of the educated, for decades at a time. The Marxian labour theory of value was one such which held much of the European intelligentsia in thrall for a long time, despite its obvious untruth. They wanted it to be true, so for them it was true, and in the process, they often became learned in their own fundamental error. For them, the wish was father to the conviction.
My late friend, the eminent developmental economist, P.T. Bauer, used to lament that, notwithstanding the large increase in the numbers of educated people, the capacity for connected thought seemed to have declined catastrophically. In part, he said, this was because of hyper-specialisation: fundamental principles, such as that of the law of supply and demand, were forgotten in masses of mathematical formulae or highfalutin verbiage.
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in Law & Liberty