Twin New York Times articles identify the tendency of the public to fall for lies being made more brazenly by political candidates than ever before in the area of politics, and the ability of investors, collectively, to fall for stock valuations far out of line with economic reality due to dubious pitches about the future from billionaires, on the other hand, as a major source of our nation's woes.
Both ring true. We are a nation of suckers. People not in the habit of critical thinking and skeptical analysis of what they are told and promised have been targeted for misinformation and have fallen for it.
And, if that is the source of the problem with our mass institutions, than the solution needs to be to improve quality control by myriad means in our information distribution system. This is not self-correcting, because when suckers make bad collective decisions, either politically, or economically, we all pay a price for that.
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