Paul Krugman is pissed off at conservatives for ignoring the plain and clear evidence regarding the economic catastrophe that started a year ago. He's not the only one; Michael Specter, writer for The New Yorker, has just published a whole book on the issue of American refutation of reason and evidence.

Is this new? Probably not. Ample social science and psychiatric and neuroscience literature supports a view of the human brain as caught between emotion-driven instinct and the so-called higher cognitive powers. There was very likely an evolutionary advantage for our ancestors to act on instinct rather than reason.

But we're not in the Serengeti anymore. It is not entirely consistent with a highly literate, wealthy, democratic nation that has one of the best education systems in the world.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” Krugman quotes Upton Sinclair. Indeed, the medical corollary to this is "if you are a hammer then everything looks like a nail." To a cardiologist every patient has a heart problem. All you have to do is look.

As any pithy adage, this says a hell of a lot. Fundamentally everything boils down to incentives. Incentives and nothing more. Those may be moral incentives, but most of the time incentives are simply materialistic, especially in our Faith-embracing but spiritually devoid consumerist culture.