The Survival Of Dumb Ideas

From the Cato Institute blog

On the National Interest‘s Skeptics blog, I discuss Steve Walt article in the latest Foreign Policy magazine: “Where Do Bad Ideas Come From?” Walt explains why discredited ideas about foreign policy survive despite all the study and debate we give to them in this country. He is really talking about failure in what John Stuart Mill calls the “marketplace of ideas“—the tendency of free speech to bring debate that promotes good ideas and demotes bad ones, driving public policy toward improvement.