"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." - Abraham Lincoln
As politicians are aware, to get votes, you need to fool the people. I have only recently come to the realization that you CAN fool most of the people most of the time, and that is what is needed to create a democracy which enriches the top 0.1% at the expense of the bottom 90%. See my post on WEA Pedagogy Blog for empirical evidence -- counter-arguments most welcome.
Deception & Democracy: Convicing the Masses to Help the Rich
http://weapedagogy.wordpress.com/2014/12/06/deception-and-democracy-convincing-the-masses-to-help-the-rich/
Asad, as you are well aware this is a fraught question. The only way to approach it is in purely cold scientific terms, perhaps unrelated to any specific domain (such as economics, as you do here.)
I had always wondered about Lincoln's assertion here, on the basis of this simple fact: The world hosts different religions , some of which are simply incompatible in their dogmas/tenets/etc. We can easily take an example of 2 different contemporarily existing religions, A and B, which are 1- totally incompatible and mutually exclusive, and 2- which respectively have had, and have, millions and millions of followers going back over centuries.
The arithmetically possibly correct scenarios are as follows: either 1- A is correct and B is wrong, or 2- A is wrong or B is right, or 3- both A and B are wrong. The one impossible scenario is that both A and B are correct, although millions of people respectively spend their whole lives estimating that either A or B is fully correct.
The above seems to demonstrate, neutrally and mathematically, that it is possible to fool millions of people all the time (on important and even existential issues to boot....)
Or am I missing something?
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