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Ideas Are Everything; Ideas Rule The World
Nothing else matters
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
The quote above is by the preeminent economist of the first half of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes. But I doubt very much that even he would appreciate the profundity of his words and I write this in all earnestness, given the extraordinarily seismic events with which he had to grapple and shape during his lifetime.
It was James Overton, after whom the term “ Overton window” was coined. The late right wing intellectual, who died in a plane crash in 2003, postulated that the window of acceptability of any idea can be moved over time.
Which essentially means that ideas which may be seen as extreme left or right wing, such as outlawing tax havens, building walls to push back migrants, bringing back capital punishments, closing mosques in France, paying reparations to descendants of the transatlantic slave trade and passing wide range legislation to tackle climate change could move from the fringes of political debate to mainstream…