The rise of literacy and the demise of network television does not mean that we care less about "big ideas" than in the past

LAST week in the New York Times, Neal Gabler argued

Ideas just aren't what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world.

As I see it, Mr Gabler's complaint is at bottom a lament about the rise of mass literacy and the decline of oligopoly mass media. When literacy was the privilege of a small educated elite, the typical book or periodical was relatively high-toned compared to the typical periodical or book in the age of universal literacy. That the "big ideas" which rivet the highly educated now make up smaller portion of all media content is a totally predictable consequence of the democratisation of education combined with the late-century proliferation of new forms of media and the wild proliferation of choice in the old media. As my colleague suggested yesterday, nostalgia for mid-century America is so often a veiled complaint about the loss of privilege that follows more or less definitionally from the progress of social equality. Mr Gabler's nostalgia for the age of the Mailer-Vidal beef is really no different.

Mr Gabler contends, "If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it's not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don't care as much about ideas as they did."

But who are "we"? The average college grad? The average college graduate today no doubt cares less about "big ideas" than did the average college graduate back when only the relatively rich and/or intellectual had access to a college education. But so what? I'd bet my entire future income that more people read and discussed Kant last year than in 1950, or that the size of the class of people who study and produce ideas for a living is now much larger than it was in 1950. It seems likely that intellectual specialisation and the division of labour have reduced the average "bigness" of the thoughts studied and produced by people in the ideas sector. Indeed, as an epistemological matter, breaking big problems into smaller problems and tackling them in a socially distributed way by means of a reliable, shared method of inquiry would tend to suggest that that the declining "size" of the average idea is correlated with increasing accuracy in distinguishing the true ideas from the false ones. In any case, I'll bet my immortal soul that more really big ideas, whatever that means, were studied, discussed, and produced in 2010 than in 1950. The number of people with the means, opportunity, and motive to care deeply about ideas is greater than ever.

A TED talk or a book-talk spot on "The Daily Show" may not have the audience or cultural centrality of a half-hour with Dick Cavett on ABC in 1970, but more people are consuming and discussing big ideas, old and new, than ever before. The difference is that the audience and the discussion has become fragmented and decentralised. That's certainly a loss for those in a position to benefit from centralisation. An essay in Harpers or Esquire no longer captures the same attention, or pay, as it once did. As a writer, I rather relish the thought of expensive ad space and big editorial budgets. But, then again, as the son of a cop who went to state schools and worked his way into the writing biz through blogging, I can hardly lament the rise of the internet. The fact that, say, The Economist will pay me to write at all and the fact that writers no longer get paid very much are effects of the same technological developments. But I digress.

I had meant to refute Mr Gabler by offering a really big political idea, but I got exercised by the way he misidentifies the implications of the changing place of big ideas in our increasingly fragmented culture. Anyhow, here's your big effing idea, courtesy of Michael Clemens, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development:

The gains from eliminating migration barriers dwarf—by an order of a magnitude or two—the gains from eliminating other types of barriers. For the elimination of trade policy barriers and capital flow barriers, the estimated gains amount to less than a few percent of world GDP. For labor mobility barriers, the estimated gains are often in the range of 50–150 percent of world GDP. In fact, existing estimates suggest that even small reductions in the barriers to labor mobility bring enormous gains.

To put it in a more humanistic dialect, policies that restrict free human movement and cooperation create a stupendous amount of preventable poverty and suffering. This knowledge establishes a powerful moral presumption in favour of wealthy countries easing open their borders and labour markets to people trapped inside poor, poorly-governed countries.

Maybe you disagree. Maybe you find silly the economist's models that show free migration increasing human well-being the equivalent of a doubling of world GDP. Maybe you think allowing huge numbers of poor foreigners into rich countries is not a way of making poor people richer, but a way of unraveling the sort of social fabric that makes wealth-producing institutions possible. And maybe you're wrong. This is a debate we must have, and it's not a debate over a small idea, even if it has become increasingly possible to live inside a bubble of narrowcast media and remain completely oblivious to personally uninteresting ideas. "Where did all these Somalians come from?" some of us may find ourselves asking one day. The idea that prevailed won't have been small simply because you never heard about it until your neighbourhood changed.

Oh, who am I kidding? We don't really need to have this debate. The Singularity's coming, you know.