★★★★☆ I have a new hammer -- lookit all these nails!

Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification

Timur Kuran

There's a genre of nonfiction I call "New Hammer". It's when the writer has a new idea that he/she thinks explains all kinds of old puzzles, and proceeds to apply that new idea to everything in sight. Some of these are great (e.g. Plagues and Peoples), some are not so good (The Innovator's Dilemma). This one, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification by Timur Kuran, is not the best of the bunch, but is nonetheless pretty good. Some of the stories Kuran has to tell surprised me, and changed the way I think about certain problems.

Kuran's central idea is deceptively simple -- people lie. What's more, they lie systematically. If you go around Russia asking Russians, "Do you support Vladimir Putin?", the answers will be close to 100% "Yes". It's the only safe answer. But in at least some proportion of cases, it is a lie. And, crucially, we don't know what that proportion is. This goes some way to explain why dictatorships sometimes collapse suddenly, seemingly without warning.

Kuran argues that systematic lies about what people really think explain a lot of otherwise puzzling observations about societies and the way they change. As is typical of the "New Hammer" genre, he pushes the applicability of the idea a bit beyond what the data can sustain. Still, I enjoyed it and found it more informative and challenging than I expected to.

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