Conventional wisdom (course content)

Conventional wisdom, here, means knowledge that is popular (familiar or, even, taken for granted) but incorrect.

Funny and harmless: If you swallow your gum, it stays in your stomach for seven years.

More insidiously: Poor people are lazy, and that’s why they’re poor; most welfare recipients are black women with many children who can afford Cadillacs with their welfare funds.

What at first appears positive but turns out to be socially detrimental (exclusionary and more) and its own form of racism: Asians are smart (this is called a model minority construct; also: the model minority myth).

Previously: If women bathe while menstruating, they risk bleeding to death; everybody needs a tonsillectomy; different racial groups have different IQs…

Here’s how economist John Kenneth Galbraith explained conventional wisdom:

“As just noted, economic and social behaviour are complex and mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding. This is a prime manifestation of vested interest. For a vested interest in understanding is more preciously guarded than any other treasure. It is why men react, not infrequently with something akin to religious passion, to the defence of what they have so laboriously learned. Familiarity may breed contempt in some areas of human behaviour, but in the field of social ideas it is the touchstone of acceptability.

Because familiarity is such an important test of acceptability, the acceptable ideas have great stability. They are highly predictable. It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasized this predictability. I shall refer to those ideas henceforth as the conventional wisdom” (from The Affluent Society 1958).