Conventional wisdom

This article examines how the conventional wisdoms of laissez-faire, supply-side economic policy discourse have constrained international policymaking, but also how the world economic crisis of 2008-09 led to greater discursive contestation that weakened the influence of this formerly-prevalent discourse. Now there is no single set of conventional wisdoms on economic strategy that is uncontested amongst international policy élites. I also examine the effects of ‘repoliticization’ as a political strategy and a tool of politics. Such a discursive strategy can be a highly effective tool for policy actors to achieve political goals.

This paper deals with the human preference for order and classification, and how those notions are tied to language and dialect. People consider some non-standard dialects of English--Southern, Midwestern, Cockney, etc.--to be indicative of a lack of intelligence.  Is this, in fact, the case?  Or does the evidence show something different?

O paper tem por objetivo aplicar a teoria da Sabedoria Convencional (Conventional Wisdom) do economista John Kenneth Galbraith na análise comportamental e decisória do Supremo Tribunal Federal. Pretendemos num primeiro momento traçar as principais contribuições da Economia Institucional nos últimos anos, com um panorama de algumas de suas principais ideias. Após a reconstrução da teoria econômica, faremos uma análise de como a Sabedoria Convencional é integrada na tomada de decisões das questões constitucionais e no comportamento institucional da Corte Constitucional brasileira. A tese que será desenvolvida é a de que o Supremo Tribunal Federal, apesar de ter locus constitucional como um fórum de razão pública e deliberação técnica, é ator político, e como tal, se legitima perante a sociedade e constrói sua reputação com assento na opinião pública. Por conta de uma demanda de aceitação social, veremos que o Supremo Tribunal Federal incorpora, em alguma medida, elementos da Sabedoria Convencional. Serão questionadas a medida de influência da Sabedoria Convencional para a construção reputacional perante suas audiências e se é desejável essa aproximação, dada sua capacidade institucional técnico-jurídica e contra majoritária face aos demais poderes.

The frequent reliance on conventional wisdom about potential threats by politicians, members of the intelligence community, and media outlets is made clear by the generally paucity of references to scientific findings concerning the spread, common features, or differences of both the reality of risk manifestations and the way human cognition represents risk perceptions. The reasons for this include the fact that political capital has long been garnered by exacerbating risk anxiety in potential voters, the intelligence community is traditionally conservative when inserting rigorous scientific knowledge into the “Essential Elements of Information” (EEI) and, until recently, there has been little scholarly attention given to the neuro-cognitive processing of potential threats. These factors, though not fundamentally profound, have had a massive impact on the clear tendency for applied discussions of threat assessments to be dominated by cum hoc ergo propter hoc statements. (Mort et al., 2010) This special issue, therefore, is an interdisciplinary treatment of the ecological triggers and specific cognitive capacities that constrain both the assessment of potential dangers and what measures are taken as well as identifying real implications for governance domains.