Conventional Wisdom In Galbraith's Freakonomics

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Galbraith sees conventional wisdom as “simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting-though not necessarily true” (Levitt and Dubner, 86). Conventional wisdom is used as a means to understanding the world and make one’s ideals seem reasonable. This conventional wisdom is used by experts, advertisers, police men, and your next door neighbor; how they use it differs depending on their own self-interests. In the book Freakonomics, the expert makes up his own statistics to make a large number of people aware of a problem. This population then takes the statistic as conventional wisdom and it spreads like wildfire. Advertisers do almost the same thing; they make the public aware of some problem (bad breath) and then the public picks up on it.

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