How do you build a meaningful career? All you need to do is listen to advice from a celebrity CEO, and you can skip the hard work and frustration that comes with building a meaningful career. How do we solve climate change? No need to make real sacrifices. If we praise Elon Musk enough, he’ll take us to Mars once Earth becomes uninhabitable.
At least that's what some of the content we read tells us.
A desire for simple answers to hard questions is nothing new. The term “path of least resistance” is part of our vocabulary for reason—but simplicity has never been easier to find.
I don’t even have to enter in the passcode on my phone to find an article promising wealth without real work. The News Alert feature on my iPhone will do it for me, sending me articles like “3 Stocks With Promising, Amazon-Like Growth Potential”—as though Warren Buffet became the Warren Buffet by reading tips accessible to literally millions of other people.
But when Steve Jobs emphasized simplicity in design, he was talking about phones and computers, not solving big economic and political problems.
Collectively, we’ve grown an insatiable appetite for simplicity. We’ve become the societal version of a person who only eats processed food: We know it’s bad for us, we know it’s killing us, yet anything that isn’t simple sugar doesn’t taste as good.
This addiction to simple sugar has changed the way we approach political and economic problems.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the election with a campaign slogan that promised to “Make America Great Again.” Research by Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute showed that Reagan typically used an 11th grade vocabulary in speeches—higher than any other politician the Institute measured, including Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln. Though he never claimed to be an intellectual, Reagan used relatively complex (at least for a politician) language to talk about simple ideas.
Things have changed: Donald Trump’s use of a 7th grade vocabulary is the lowest of any politician the Institute scored.
Does that mean Donald Trump is dumber than the other candidates and Presidents included in the research? I have no idea. I know intelligent people who have a relatively limited vocabulary, and, conversely, people who mistake big words for big intellects.
What it may mean is that since Reagan’s day we’ve increasingly embraced the idea that difficult problems have easy answers. Politically, that creates a cycle where politicians are rewarded for making simple promises, only to be replaced by candidates making even simpler promises (using even simpler language) when they can’t fulfill those promises.
Our aversion to complexity isn’t just harming our political systems.
By two measurements—the stock market and the unemployment rate—the economy is doing better than it ever has.
