How The Market for Ideas Is Seen from an Economist’s Perspective
According to Richard Holden from UNSW, there is no shortage of offensive ideas in the world. He added that the main question is whether the free speech will see good ideas win out over bad ones. The suggestion that good ideas often triumph in “the marketplace for ideas” has been in existence since 1644 when John Milton wrote in his anti-censorship tract Areopagitica; “let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
However, it was perhaps the first explicitly stated by the United States Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, in 1919 in his dissent to a 7-2 ruling in the Abrams v United States case. It involved the first amendment right to freedom speech. Holmes wrote; the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas, that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.
According to Holden, as much as this question is old, it challenges us time and time again. Holden poses a question saying, is it more dangerous to stifle the expression of a seemingly risky idea or let it be freely expressed? He goes further to say that it is central to the controversy over the New York Times publishing done on June 3, an idea many saw as repugnant.
The suggestion was “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and deter lawbreakers” due to the increase of Black Lives Matter demonstrations and isolated outbreaks of looting and violence. It was advocated in an op-ed piece by Tom Cotton, the US senator from Arkansas.
James Bennet, the editorial page editor, resigned as part of the paper’s mea culpa. A champion of the “marketplace of ideas” can say that the New York Times did the right thing, or rather, nothing wrong. Therefore, what would an economist, whose job is to understand market behavior, say?
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