American Revealed Preferences, According to Markets

What do markets reveal about American cultural preferences and priorities? Revealed Preferences How can we know what people really think? It’s a hard problem. People will sometimes refuse to answer. Sometimes they’ll engage in varying degrees of lying, by telling you what they think you want to know or what will make them look good. This is one of the banes of political scientists designing polls, sociologists designing experiments, and psychologists pleading with therapy clients to be truthful. It takes a lot for a therapist to establish a safe, non-judgemental environment. There’s a line, attributed approximately to CS Lewis, in the 1993 movie Shadowlands (sentimental but watchable), about understanding literature: Aristotle said plot is character, forget psychology. Forget the inside of men’s heads, judge them by their actions. Now, I’m not much on Lewis personally, though I do know a Lewis scholar who is always an interesting listen. But I’ve always been fascinated by this idea,…