Is Your Parent's Ruining Everything Else?

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The most surprising thing in this whole bookand there ere a lot of surprises, i'd never intended for this book to be. I didn't thinkht this was going to be like a selling point, some sort of marketing trick where i would tell people i wrote a book about how minds change. And i changed my mind about how minds changing by writing a book abouthow minds like changed like this. It's one of the greatest books i ever wreat you're going to loneand you're goingto love it. You're goin to love it. They goin like it was, all right, i guess yes, that's a lot of reacton. Problem is we

To the Founding Fathers it was free libraries. To the 19th century rationalist philosophers it was a system of public schools. Today it's access to the internet. Since its beginnings, Americans have believed that if facts and information were available to all, a democratic utopia would prevail. But missing from these well-intentioned efforts, says author and journalist David McRaney, is the awareness that people's opinions are unrelated to their knowledge and intelligence. In fact, he explains, the better educated we become, the better we are at rationalizing what we already believe. Listen as the author of How Minds Change speaks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about why it's so hard to change someone's mind, the best way to make it happen (if you absolutely must), and why teens are hard-wired not to take good advice from older people even if they are actually wiser.