Economist Arnold Kling writes:

The Conventional Wisdom among well-educated liberals in 1968 included the following:

• * Anti-Communism was a greater menace than Communism.
• * The planet could not possibly support the population increases that would take place by the end of the twentieth century.
• * Conservatives stood in the way of progress for minorities.
• * Government programs were the best way to lift people out of poverty.
• * What underdeveloped countries needed were large capital investments, financed by foreign aid from the rich countries.
• * Inflation was a cost-push phenomenon, requiring government intervention in wage and price setting.

The degree of confidence in these beliefs was so strong that liberals in 1968 came to the overriding conclusion that:

• * Anyone who is not a liberal must be incorrigibly stupid

Given the state of knowledge in 1968, I can understand why an intelligent person might have believed in the Conventional Wisdom at that time. However, since 1968, considerable evidence has accumulated that challenges the Conventional Wisdom. In some cases, the evidence turned out to be so overwhelming that beliefs were quietly discarded from the Conventional Wisdom.

A rational response to this record of powerful evidence against the Conventional Wisdom might be to reconsider one’s views, as I have done. Instead, it seems to me that liberals have become more close-minded and more dogmatic.

In 1968, liberals thought that that Communism could work reasonably well for some countries. The Soviet Union was thought to be ahead of us in engineering. Many liberal intellectuals considered Communism a viable option for achieving development in the Third World. A reader of Noam Chomsky’s article in the August 13, 1970 New York Review of Books would have thought that North Vietnam’s regime, while not perfect, was closer to the ideal than any other existing government. Anti-Communism, on the other hand, was seen by the Conventional Wisdom as only a pretext for misbegotten wars and hysterical blacklists of Hollywood screenwriters.

Since 1968, we have seen:

• * a mass exodus from Communist Vietnam (the boat people)
• * a large exodus from Cuba (the Mariel boat lift)
• * the collapse of Soviet Communism, revealing that the system did much broader and deeper damage than most people realized
• * an unmistakably large gap between North Korea and South Korea in terms of material well-being and personal freedom

In 1968, the Conventional Wisdom was that we would see mass starvation in another decade or two. It was still the conventional wisdom a dozen years later, when Julian Simon wrote a contrarian book arguing that population was The Ultimate Resource. Among economists, Simon’s views have gained adherents, and almost no economist believes that food scarcity is a material threat (although politically-induced famines are still possible).

In 1968, the Conventional Wisdom was that we would see mass starvation in another decade or two. It was still the conventional wisdom a dozen years later, when Julian Simon wrote a contrarian book arguing that population was The Ultimate Resource. Among economists, Simon’s views have gained adherents, and almost no economist believes that food scarcity is a material threat (although politically-induced famines are still possible).

In 1968, we were just a few years removed from the passage of Civil Rights legislation that ended Jim Crow segregation in the South. Conservatives had opposed the Civil Rights movement, and were caught on the wrong side of history.

Rather than declare victory, the Civil Rights movement declared perpetual war. Meanwhile, policies that might really help minorities, such as school vouchers to release them from the obligation to attend failed public schools, have become anathema to liberals.

Another perpetual war that began in the 1960’s was the War on Poverty. The programs that were enacted in the name of this war had little effect. Nonetheless, poverty had been greatly reduced over the past forty years, thanks to economic growth and the escalation of income.

Arguably, government welfare programs served only to corrupt the poor. In the case of foreign aid, a consensus is in fact emerging that aid serves to entrench corrupt governments. Instead, the keys to prosperity are institutional more than material.

The full article can be found here.

Update: Mungowit’s End has more.