Ignorance and Stupidity: How Human Beings Perpetuate Widespread Economic Hardship

This book argues that widespread economic hardship in wealthy democracies is sustained not primarily by the deception of the public but by the public's demand to be deceived. Through three documented case studies of public spending — migrant services in New York City, homelessness expenditure in California, and welfare fraud in Minnesota — it traces a recurring structure in which a moral pretext secures consent for spending, the spending flows to producers whose support sustains the officials who direct it, and the underlying problem persists because its resolution would end the spending. The account is offered not as a theory of corruption but as an instance of a general mechanism: value-protective denial, the disposition to reject information that threatens beliefs on which one's self-conception depends. The book develops this mechanism into a broader claim about the relationship between self-deception and moral responsibility, defends the thesis that the capacity for understanding is universal rather than distributed by nature, and preempts the hereditarian objection to that claim by distinguishing capacity from the values and objectives that direct its development. It closes by grounding both the diagnosis and a proposed policy alternative in an objective moral standard derived from the structure of conscious experience.