One Reason People Feel Entitled to their own Facts

It's not just opinions you have a right to anymore. You have a right to the facts of your choosing as well--that's the ethos of the age of "truthiness."

There's lots of reasons for this, many of them described here--but I just thought of another one.

I was reading the NY Post a few days ago (sigh) and I came across a piece by conservative columnist Thomas Sowell called "Myths of Rich and Poor." He was out to debunk the liberal "myth" that "real wages" have been going down in the last three decades. He did it by citing stats about all the cool commodities that "American households" have accumulated since the '70s, to the lasting improvement of their "net worth."

Now, you don't have to be Paul Krugman to spot the slight of hand on this one. Lord knows, I'm not even close, and I can spot it. "Real wages" go to individuals. "American households" now typically include more than one wage earner (women in the work force)--which they didn't 30 years ago.

So that's Sowell's shell game with those particular "facts."

But here's the issue. Do I really know that, say, Paul Krugman isn't doing the same thing, in subtler ways that I can't spot, in his columns? I do not, not really. I read him regularly and I take the facts he offers more or less at face value because, hey, I certainly can't run the numbers myself--I just don't have the time or the resources or the expertise--and, besides, I want to believe his facts, basically because we have the same enemies, and his facts always make them look bad. So I do believe them.

As things in the real world get more and more complicated and events happen faster and faster and information overload reaches tsunami proportions--people tend to treat facts the way the used to treat opinions. As a matter of choice.