Terrific talk by Jean Tirole last night on "The Common Good after Covid" sponsored by the IFS. It covered a lot of ground in an hour. Perhaps my favorite bit -- apropos the lamentable failure to appreciate the arrival of new scientific evidence by the general public -- was this quote from Swann's Way: "The facts do not penetrate the world where our beliefs live." If this seems too pithy for Proust you can google to find a more elaborated version:
“The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.”
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