[TheOtherHobbes]

There's been a fundamental failure to teach basic intellectual literacy in the UK since the 1970s.

Issues have been reduced to opinions - often argued dishonestly, at the expense of basic facts - which in turn have been reduced to emotions.

It's one thing to think about how an issue affects you personally. It's something else entirely to utterly fail to understand that your hot-button feelings about one or two issues can have huge consequences.

Culture works through connections that increase the degrees of freedom of the system as a whole, not through individual moods and biases.

You can't run a 21st century economy without understanding this, and being able to make pragmatic choices based on it.