TYLER COWEN: Is too much news bad for you?
'On just about every topic, it is possible to get access to virtually every possible point of view, usually at zero marginal cost'
As problematic as “fake news” is, and as dangerous as the label can be, maybe “true news” is equally corrosive. The contemporary world is giving us more reality and more truth than we can comfortably handle — and that, as much as the lack of a common enemy since the end of the Cold War, may explain the decline of the liberal world order thatI lamented in a recent column. Fake news, after all, has been with us for a long time, whether in the form of overly optimistic dispatches from the Vietnam War or reports of Paul McCartney’s death. And that’s not counting the under- or unreported stories we now know to be true, on such things as Kennedy’s affairs, Johnson’s corruption or Reagan’s dementia.
Back then, you couldn’t even Google the right answer — yet somehow we coped. What we did have, at least in America and most of the West, was a relatively well-centered culture, rich in the humanities, which gave people perspective and a series of unifying national “myths.” Even if America...
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