Kahneman On Substituting Easy Questions for Uesful Questions

Daniel Kahneman died this week. He won a Noble Prize in Economics made remarkable by the fact that not only did he not have a degree in economics, but he never even took an economics class.
Here is a blog post from 2011 that I wrote about one of his key ideas – our tendency to substitute trivial questions for hard questions.

One of the great mysteries of life is how we get sucked into political arguments of no consequence. Can you burn a flag? Can he wear a dress? Can she say that?

Which questions, by contrast, have real consequence? Questions like Will this economic policy make more people rich? Will that economic policy make fewer people poor? Will this political policy give more people rights? Will this policy extend or shorten life expectancies?

I think I found the answer to why we waste so much time trying to sound smart talking about such stupid issues in Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

One concept Kahneman shares has to do with our tendency to substitute easy questions for hard ones. For me, this explains why so much airtime in politics is taken up with questions of little consequence.
Kahneman gives an example of an analyst who bought stock in Ford. Asked why, the analyst replied that he'd just been to a car show and left convinced that Ford "sure can make great cars." As Kahneman points out, the real question when buying stock is whether or not the stock is undervalued. But the analyst substituted that difficult question for the simpler question of whether Ford was making good cars. All of us, when faced with a difficult question, tend to substitute a simpler - albeit irrelevant - one.
It seems to me that the big question in politics should be, How do we improve quality of life for more people? That’s a big question and answering it is one that isn’t easy. It is a challenge to feel confident about one's ability to answer it.

By contrast, the little and largely irrelevant questions – silly questions best characterized by whether or not we should be able to burn the flag or use a bathroom that says Woman or Man – are ones for which we have clear answers as long as we have strong opinions. We don't need data. We don't need studies. Answering these questions leaves us feeling confident in our own judgment. Answering the big questions, by contrast, makes us feel uncertain. For most of us, we prefer feeling confident to feeling ignorant. The result? We choose questions because of how they make us feel rather than what their answers will do to improve the world.

And that’s a pity. Just think what we could do with all the attention paid to politics if it were focused on real, albeit difficult, questions. Questions that have the potential to make us more humble and the world better - rather than make us more smug and make the world no better.