He Told Us So

People rarely change their minds. They stick to their positions and invariably interpret new evidence in ways that confirm their prior inklings. Not only does the gut usually win out over the mind, it enlists the mind in its victories: lab experiments suggest that the more knowledgeable people are about an issue, the less likely they are to update their beliefs when faced with conflicting evidence. They have more resources to draw on to convince themselves they were right all along. Which is why, when knowledgeable people do change their minds, it’s worth paying attention.

In his recent book, Dani Rodrik, an economics professor at Harvard, does just that, quietly shifting his view on a question that has been central to his career. Nearly twenty years ago, for a special millennium issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Rodrik was asked to predict how far global integration would go over the next century, and what form it might take. In...