Member-only story
A Little Learning
Why our desire for simplicity is often misguided
The human brain craves simplicity. This is because an active brain can consume thirty percent of the body’s blood glucose and for most of our evolutionary history we needed that energy to power muscles to (i) escape from predators, and (ii) secure food supplies. So we are naturally predisposed to avoid thinking wherever possible. As simple ideas are far easier to cope with than complex ideas, we naturally gravitate to whatever is easiest to grasp.
Unfortunately, in our complex post-industrial world, this hardwired preference for the simple over the complicated very often leads us to poor decisions which in turn lead to poor outcomes. Today the triumph of populism is a direct consequence of our desire for simple answers to complex questions — no matter how abjectly inadequate those supposed answers obviously are.
But we don’t have to look far back in history to see many other examples of how our desire for simplicity has led us astray. This article is going to focus on the Great Political Trend that was dominant in many countries between 1980 and the end of the century: privatization.
For those too young to have lived through it themselves, the 1970s were pretty dire in Europe and in several other parts of the world. In the late nineteenth century and more or less until World War II…
