Life Is Complicated

Kevin Drum sticks his neck out:

Contrarianism is genuinely useful, and I'd hate to see it go away.  Conventional wisdom, whether it's mine or someone else's deserves pushback. The problem with modern contrarianism is that it's lazy.

Too often, it's the sole focus of a piece, and it's the focus for reasons purely of entertainment or ideology.  Which is too bad, because the kind of journalism that's most useful is the kind that explains both first order things and counterreactions and doesn't pander to readers' desires to pretend that the world is simpler than it really is.  After all, counterreactions may usually be less important than first-order effects, but they're still worth investigating.  Some tax cuts really don't raise as much revenue as you'd think.  Raising the minimum wage really can have perverse effects in specific slices of the economy.  If you're genuinely interested in knowing how the world works, you want to know this.