On Wisdom and Events

By John Kenneth Galbraith

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events. The conventional wisdom accommodates itself not to the world that it is meant to interpret but to the audience’s world view. Since the latter remains with the comfortable and the familiar, the conventional wisdom is always in danger of obsolescence.

This is not immediately fatal. The fatal blow to the conventional wisdom comes when these ideas fail signally to deal with some contingency to which obsolescence has made them palpably inapplicable.

This, sooner or later, must be the fate of ideas that have lost their relation to the world. At this stage, the irrelevance will often be dramatised by some individual, who will get the credit for overthrowing the conventional wisdom and for installing the new ideas.

In fact, he will have only crystallised in words what the events have made clear, although this function is not a minor one.… This sequence can be illustrated from scores of examples, ancient and modern. For decades prior to 1776, men had been catching the vision of the liberal state.

Traders and merchants in England, in the adjacent Low Countries and in the American colonies, had learnt that they were served best by a minimum of government restriction rather than, as in the conventional wisdom, by a maximum of government guidance and protection.… These views were finally crystallised by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, in the year of American independence.

From “The Affluent Society”