Good or bad ideas flourish
Ideas influence generations. They can be forces of good or bad. If the ideas are good or bad does not seem to influence how well they do. It seems those that prosper are those most clearly communicated.
I thought support for Marxism and its ideological heirs would have crashed and burned after the Berlin Wall in 1989. Today, the British Labour Party has a leader who speaks fondly of Marx on TV.
Ideas for flourish for many reasons. It seems that once they take hold in a policy elite community they will soon after become the dominant belief of most people.
Edith Efron (here) writes about how the ideas of Rachel Carson and Paul Erlich became widely established mainstream views. Efron argues that these views are wrong. However, she agrees that the views of Carson and Erlich became commonly held in the early 1970s amongst the policy elite and then soon after the dominant view of the public in western democracies. She argues that the industries who were implicated did nothing of substance to respond and hoped that things would just blow over.
The Ehrlichs’ have just published the “Population Bomb Revisited”. It got some good media pick up. They outline what they think they got right, got wrong and where they were off the mark. They come clean that they were wrong on not enough food to go around. They seem hopeful that the population growth from 3.5 billion to 6.7 billion is slowing down and could well be reversed. They have a section on the ‘birthrate solution’ and the ‘ death rate solution’.
The Erlichs do not mention the bet with the late Julian Simon (see here).
Copy Charles Darwin
I think one of the reasons ideas do well is if they are written so clearly. Charles Darwin’s ‘the Origins of Species’ is easy to read. With his clear words he helped overturn a few thousand years of belief. But, even to this day, some people think the earth is 10,000 years old.
Think tanks and any organizations looking to influence public policy. They produce a lot of words. A lot of the writing is dense. Maybe it is not the best ideas that always win but those that ideas are communicated clearly.