Tyler Cowen has had a new catch phrase for a while: “Context is that which is scarce.” He recently gave some thoughts on what it means.

I’d like to point out that E. D. Hirsch has been talking about this for some 40 years. His book cultural literacy is all about how important context is and how it is becoming scarce, at least it is becoming scarce in the minds of the younger generations.

This maxim is maybe Tyler Cowen’s way of telling people to stop with the “critical thinking” nonsense and actually learn the relevant context for understanding.

In the early days of the internet, people were very excited about the information revolution allowing everyone to learn so much more. However, as Tyler Cowen has pointed out, in a lot of places on the internet context is very scarce making it so that you don’t actually learn so much as just bump into “new ideas” that you often are in no position to grapple with, until you figure out the context which can be very hard to do.

This just emphasizes how important it is that we teach children with a curriculum that is very focused on the common context that matters. Common context allows for better more meaningful conversations because you actually understand each other and because you can spend less time explaining the context thus easing cognitive load!

Conversations with Tyler is a great podcast because he doesn’t give much if any context. Tyler Cowen has said, ”But if this is a podcast that people need context for, and I strongly suspect that it is, I think that’s what we need more of. If fewer people listen, I’m not going to say great, but I don’t want to explain everything from scratch. The first question, I think, ought to be jumping right in.”

If you don’t have enough context, you can’t just jump into productive conversation, deeper learning, etc. You need to know the rote facts and you need to know the facts that other people know so that you can each reference them.

For some time I’ve felt that art, literature, conversations, etc are not as great as they could be because we are lacking common contexts. (Maybe I'm actually less in tune to contemporary contexts though.) I believe that these common contexts were much more common in the past and that this made society, in some ways, more vibrant, and it made people able to communicate more effectively and on a higher level.

Again, E. D. Hirsch, has been arguing something along the lines of "context is that which is scarce" for the last 40 years.

It would be great to hear him on a podcast like Conversations with Tyler to talk about this idea. He's pretty old these days, but maybe he'd be up for it!