Reference no: EM133607466

Question: Identify what you believe to be the author's chosen carefully, you may want to read it several times before writing your essay. In your writing, please identify what you believe to be the author's position and respond to that position in some way. In your response, consider evidence from the passage, from your personal experience and observation

The link between climate and vaccine denial is clear. In both cases you have a scientific consensus based on models and statistical analysis. But the evidence supporting that consensus isn't staring people in the face every day. You say the planet is warming? Hah! It snowed this morning! You say that vaccination protects against Covid? Well, I know unvaccinated people who are doing fine, and I've heard (misleading) stories about people who had cardiac arrests after their shots.

To value the scientific consensus, in other words, you have to have some respect for the whole enterprise of research and understand how scientists reach the conclusions they do. This doesn't mean that the experts are always right and never change their minds. They aren't, and they do.

So where does cryptocurrency come in? Underlying the whole crypto phenomenon is the belief by some tech types that they can invent a better monetary system than the one we currently have, all without talking to any monetary experts or learning any monetary history. Indeed, there's a widespread belief that the generations-old system of fiat money issued by governments is a Ponzi scheme that will collapse into hyperinflation any day now. Hence, for example, Jack Dorsey's 2021 declaration that "hyperinflation will change everything. It's happening."

But economics nonetheless is, as John Maynard Keynes wrote, "a technical and difficult subject" - one on which you shouldn't make pronouncements without studying quite a lot of theory and history - although "no one will believe it." Certainly people who think they understand climate better than climatologists and vaccines better than epidemiologists are also likely to think they understand money better than economists and to believe in each case that experts telling them that the world doesn't work the way they think it does are engaged in some kind of hoax or conspiracy.

Anti-vax agitation and crypto enthusiasm are both aspects of a broader rise of know-nothingism, one whose greatest strength lies in an intellectually inbred community of very wealthy men.