According to a YouGov poll, 40% of Britons have not read or listened to a single book in 2024. In the USA, recreational reading has fallen by 40% over the last two decades, and worldwide, children’s reading rates have plummeted. Recently, the OECD published a report suggesting that in most developed countries literacy rates are “declining or stagnating”. As James Marriott expertly argues, a reversal to pre-literate thought represents a paradigm shift in political economy, as the engine behind the liberalisation of knowledge, the greatest bulwark against spiritual and material poverty, is being left to rust.
Big tech apologists, whose financial motivations are hardly discrete, dismiss this argument as fatalistic. They point towards what intellectual progress owes to digitalisation. Sure, the giants’ shoulders have never been higher or more accessible to so many people, especially in the countless fields of study pioneered during the digital age. This argument, however, misses the point: fewer people are willing to succumb to the mental strain and effort necessary to climb onto those shoulders.
The average person is not to blame for choosing to spend hours online watching AI-generated dog content instead of reading Voltaire. The digital age painfully reminds us of our arboreal ancestry, as the basic abilities of focus, patience and ambition are slowly eroded by the comfortable amnesia induced by instant gratification (yes, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both dropped out of college, but not to attach themselves to dopamine drip feeds instead). F.R. Leavis was prescient (and a lot more eloquent) in his assessment of our relationship with the digital world: “electronic entertainment demands surrender, under hypnotic receptivity, to the cheapest emotional appeals.”
This “hypnotic receptivity” ruins the foundations of our democracy, a system reliant on a critical, well-informed citizenry capable of discerning right from wrong, truth from lies and sensible ideas from zealous hyperbole. Efficient markets, too, are reliant on well-informed participants, and baulk at the erratic, extremist governments brought to power by our eroding critical faculties. Higher risk premiums due to bloated and corrupt public sectors increase the costs of capital, impeding crucial, productive investment to which we owe much of our economic prosperity. Increasingly extremist election campaigns, polls and results across the EU paint a dire picture of this phenomenon.
The unprecedented success of European populism in recent years owes itself to credulous voters being bombarded with virulent hogwash on social media platforms. The 2024 presidential elections in Romania are a particularly striking example: in the weeks leading up to the first round, a previously unheard-of far-right candidate, Călin Georgescu, went viral on TikTok with an aggressive anti-European, anti-democratic, and pro-Russian agenda. Vowing to forcefully nationalise all natural resource enterprises and exalting Romania’s fascist Iron Guard movement, Georgescu won the first round, with 23% of the vote.
A nation whose wounds from the kleptocratic, extractive and repressive communist regime are still fresh, chose a return to mystical, personality-cult authoritarianism, rejecting further European integration. Since joining the EU, Romania’s real GDP per capita rose by 134%, reaching 78% of the EU average in 2024. This highlights the economic gains that come from stronger institutions and closer integration with the European market. Yet the rapid spread of misinformation allowed Georgescu, openly hostile to those institutions, to gain electoral support. The importance of protecting political and economic institutions from autocrats cannot be overstated. Johnson, Robinson and Acemoglu’s Nobel Prize-winning theory of inclusive institutions complements neoclassical growth models by providing a political explanation for differences in efficient capital accumulation. They argue that periods of prosperity under authoritarian rule, even in advanced economies such as China’s state capitalism or the Trump administration, are destined to be short-lived as they rob the private sector of incentives to compete and innovate.
The unprecedented potency of misinformation ushered in by the digital age brings economically subversive forces closer to power than ever before, threatening the long-term stability of the liberal socioeconomic order. From the Renaissance to the scientific revolution, the democratisation of knowledge and power has made human life an exponentially more dignified experience. In the name of socioeconomic advancement, it is our duty to reclaim this dignity from the jaws of the digital age.