How many times have you heard politicians and pundits calling for “common-sense reforms?” How many times have you heard friends decrying the “loss of common sense,” or expressing a feeling that “no one in Washington has any common sense?”
Philip K. Howard wrote a book a while back called The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America. It’s a catchy title, intuitively accurate, and good enough to land Howard an interview on “The Daily Show.” At first blush, yeah…no, hell yeah! I mean, lawyers suck, amirite? Whaddya call 1,000 lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean? A good start, ho ho ho! Hey, let’s tell more jokes like that down at T.G.I. Fridays, the first round of Sesame Jack (TM) Chicken Strips is on me!
Yep, when you don’t think too hard about it, the death of common sense sounds like a bad thing, downright un-American, really. But when you do think about it—not too hard, just a little hard—the death of the cult of common sense would be a welcome development. As Slate writer and Supreme Court-watcher Dahlia Lithwick puts it, “the one thing scarier than a bus full of lawyers is a bus without them.” If you were falsely accused of murder, I bet your opinion of lawyers might change for the better.
But how can this be? Common sense is a good thing, dontchaknow. It’s what keeps us from touching hot curling irons and walking in front of buses. Surely, Thunderclees, common sense must have some value! And indeed it does: common sense does a great job of informing solutions to commonplace problems. Is your bike chain a little sticky? Try some WD-40. Is there a draft sneaking under your front door? Toss an old blanket in front of it.
Unfortunately, most issues tackled by public policy are not commonplace problems; to put a fine point on it, if anyone can provide a simple, universally accepted, “common sense” solution to who should pay what fees for grazing livestock on federal lands, I will buy a hat of your choosing and eat it. The reality is that common sense is not only a poor guidepost for public policy, it’s sometimes completely counterproductive.
Let’s take a well-worn example, the Paradox of Thrift. So, pretend a recession happens, and suddenly, your small business has to tighten its belt a little bit, because both common sense and your bank say you have to. Great! Tighten away. Now, imagine that your best customer agrees with your assessment of the situation and also decides to cut back; imagine that your second-best customer, possessing a great deal of common sense, comes to the same conclusion. All your customers are feeling the same macroeconomic influences as you are, and since common sense dictates that you should spend less in a recession, all your customers follow common sense until your accounts receivable hits zero. Your government is also in thrall to the cult of common sense, and it reduces spending too, which means that it also cuts a contract it had with you. Now: are you still a fan of common sense?
“But, but,” the disciples of common sense sputter, “how could this be? Keynesian economics must be a fallacy, because I’m positive that common sense trumps all.” Oh really?
Let’s consider another scenario: you’ve just returned from the Ames Straw Poll where you consumed one-too-many fried sticks of butter. You feel a tightness in your chest, a sharp pain in your right arm, and then everything goes black until you wake up in a hospital bed. A doctor stands over you and speaks. Which of the following statements from the doctor would be more comforting to you?
- “Hi, I’m Dr. Jones. I studied cardiology at Johns Hopkins. I don’t have much common sense, but I know the cardiovascular system inside-out, backwards, upside-down, and on a pogo stick. You’re going to be fine.”
- “Hi, I’m Dr. Jones. I’ve never been to medical school, but I’ve got a shitload of common sense. You’re going to be fine.”
Anyone who says they’ll take common sense over brainy, ivory-tower book-smarts in that situation is either trying to win an argument, lying, or deeply insecure about their own educational achievement.
Let’s take a less drastic scenario: you turn on the shower, and something isn’t right. There’s no way the water level should be this high. You call a plumber, and when he arrives, he speaks. Which statement imbues you with more confidence about your plumber’s abilities?
- “Hi, I’m Jim, and my common sense tells me that this snakey-lookin’ thing is gonna help you out, probably. The important thing is that we focus on a solution that works.”
- “Hi, I’m Jim, and earlier today, I microwaved a fork. I know, I know, no common sense at all, but luckily, you didn’t call me to talk about microwave safety; you called me because your drain isn’t working, and I’ve been elbow-deep in plumbing for most of my adult life.”
See what the second Jim’s doing there? He doesn’t care if you think he’s some shining model of common sense because he’s secure enough in his own understanding of a specific field. He’s snaked enough drains to know that your common sense pales in comparison to his expertise.
Now, a final example. The world economy goes to shit thanks to a complex interplay of some very complicated statistical models, individual and corporate greed, and dogmatic deregulation. Which statement would you rather hear from a central banker?
- “Global markets continue to show significant volatility, and we will continue to take steps in the short- and medium-term to instill investor and consumer confidence. Though it may seem counter-intuitive, we will engage in deficit spending to spur employment by any means necessary, because the opportunity cost of allowing a prolonged output gap dwarfs the sticker price of expansionary fiscal and monetary policy.”
- “I might not have gone to college, but it seems to me that no one does anything with common sense anymore. I didn’t do great in school, but I’ve got plenty of common sense, and if we can all just get back to common sense, then this will sort itself out. I don’t know if common-sense-as-economic-policy has worked in the past—I’m just spitballin’ here!—but it seems like it would work really well; common sense dictates that common sense is the solution to all our problems, so I will continue to advocate for common-sense reforms to the economy.”
I think you see my point. Whenever I hear someone talk about the need for “common sense” anything in politics, I immediately dismiss them as panderers who know better or morons who don’t. “Common sense” alone will not save us; in fact, common sense alone will exacerbate some of our problems.
Do you find comfort in Ron Paul’s advocacy for a return to “sound money”? Makes a lot of common sense, if you’re completely unfamiliar with why we created the Federal Reserve in the first place.
Does your uncle sit you down at holiday gatherings, decry the loss of common sense, and then suggest that term limits will fix our problems? They sure might! Just like they did in California, where legislators are constrained by some of the strictest term limits in the country! Right, guys? Guys?
Does the idea of a flat tax make good, solid, common sense to you—we’re all equal citizens, so we should all pay equally for citizenry, right? Well, sure, as long as all citizens benefit equally from the government, that makes sense. And so long as you see an equivalency between a couple thousand dollars in welfare payments and the right to enforce your company’s contracts, then you won’t have any problem jumping through the intellectual hoops necessary to defend a flat tax. As long as you’re convinced that all men are indeed created equal, then yeah, flat tax away. And if you’re convinced that all men are created equal, Kurt Vonnegut has a short story that might interest you.
When was the last time you heard a doctor advocate a “common sense approach to mitigating the effects of Crohn’s disease”? When was the last time you heard an engineer lobby for “common sense in the field of plasma physics”? When was the last time you heard your mechanic say that you need to “use common sense when rebuilding your transmission”? I’ll bet never.
If you really know what you’re talking about, you don’t need to fall back on the gauzy feel-goodery of common sense. You’ve done the hard work necessary to attain expertise in your field, and there’s a damn good reason why no research institution offers a doctorate in common sense. So the next time anyone—friend, relative, elected representative—tells you about the need for common sense in government, force them to be specific. It’s really, really easy to say that we should do common sense things that work: “Common sense and policies that work? Boy howdy, sign me up!” It’s a lot harder to define what, if anything, is meant by that vapid phrase.
