Critical thought in painfully short supply

The rock band AC/DC has never felt the need to disclose the origin of its name or why it was selected. But "AC/DC" was once routinely attached to the many radios and household appliances that were wired to operate on either direct or indirect current. The term was used so much in advertising that it became part of our language.

The need to accommodate two kinds of electric power in households and businesses came about largely because of a dispute between two creative giants: Thomas Edison and Nicholas Tesla. Edison believed that direct current, DC, made more sense because it was less complicated. Tesla believed that alternating current, AC, was better because it allowed efficient, lower cost, electrical power transmission.

Edison eventually realized that Tesla was right, of course, but not before his company had installed huge amounts of generating and transmission equipment especially in the New York City area. And since electrical equipment doesn't wear out quickly, direct current was still in operation in the Big Apple long after the city and the rest of the country had standardized on alternating current. Consolidated Edison didn't cut off its last commercial DC customers more than 1,500 of them until the end of 2005.

Because New York City was the earliest mass market for consumer durables, production economics dictated that it was cost effective to manufacture radios and appliances to operate on either AC or DC rather than to make separate ones for each power source. The "AC/DC" label was here to stay, at least long enough to fuel some memorable rock concerts.

The dispute between Edison and Tesla was prolonged by their differences in what we now call critical thinking. They were both clearly geniuses, but Edison was more the practical inventor, largely self-schooled and not well prepared to evaluate the mathematical complexity involved in the theory behind alternating current. Because of his education in math and physics, Tesla was.

Critical thinking is becoming a significant workplace issue. A recent survey of human resource executives undertaken by the global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas asked the question: "What skills do entry level job-seekers lack the most?" As we might guess, 45 percent of those interviewed cited written communications. But over a quarter of the executives 27 percent said "critical thinking skills are where entry-level workers need the most preparation."

Critical thinking plays a role in what happened when Rob Oxoby published his wonderful parody of economics research. Oxoby is a professor of economics at the University of Calgary, and in May of this year, as a joke, he wrote a discussion paper entitled, "On the Efficiency of AC/DC: Bon Scott vs. Brian Johnson."

The paper was in the usual format of such papers, including the weighty language that indicated that it took itself far too seriously. But its premise, that the efficiency of the lead singers of the rock band, the late Bon Scott and his successor, Brian Johnson, could be measured by economics techniques using a classroom experiment, was so preposterous as to be funny.

Critical thinking being what it is today, not all readers realized that Oxoby's discussion paper was a precisely constructed parody. Its intent was to poke fun at today's often ridiculous efforts to make economics more palatable (and marketable) by extending its tenets into pop culture. And it was a wickedly comic lance aimed at those desperate-to-publish economists who draw inflated conclusions from classroom games.

A reader with even modest critical thinking skills might have realized the joke when Oxoby's paper concluded, "... Our analysis suggests that in terms of affecting efficient decision making among listeners, Brian Johnson was a better singer. Our analysis has direct implications for policy and organizational design: When policymakers or employers are engaging in negotiating ... and are interested in playing the music of AC/DC, they should choose from the band's Brian Johnson era discography."

It was ironic, and funny, that one of those caught up in the hoax was "Freakonomics" economist Steven Levitt, who has been very successful at alloying economics with pop culture and other everyday applications. But while Levitt did take the paper seriously, he is no dummy he recognized its ideas as bogus even if he didn't get the joke.

Exactly why critical thinking skills are in such decline isn't known, but we do know that they are important. Certainly we owe much of our current difficulties in Wall Street and the housing market to the near-absence of critical thinking by investors, lenders, and home buyers alike. As our economy becomes more complex and interdependent, critical thinking skills become, well, critical to our prosperity. It's time to stop fooling ourselves about this educational failure and fix it.



James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant. He also writes "Business 101" monthly for the Snohomish County Business Journal.