How Dramatic Reversals Take Place in Short Periods
I hear good things about “Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification” by Timur Kuran.
From Harvard Press:
How can societies experience such dramatic reversals [as the end of apartheid in South Africa, widespread smoking bans and Republican control of Congress] in such short periods? In his inventive and sometimes astonishing book, Timur Kuran offers an answer–one that bears not just on revolutionary movements, but also on feminism, conformity, cognitive dissonance, the moral majority, ‘outing’ homosexuals, rationality, hate speech codes, Gorbachev, hippies and the caste system (all of which make prominent appearances in these pages)…Much of the interest of Kuran’s book is owed to his insistence, unusual and refreshing among economists (of whom he is one), that people’s choices, and even their desires, are not given and fixed, but are a function of social and psychological conditions, above all pressures imposed by other people…Kuran’s book is a terrific success.