A simple test for developing taste

Metapreferences and the future of the economy

As the economy changes because of AI, taste is becoming increasingly important in all areas of activity. But taste is the sort of topic that gets people worked up and confused. Accusations of pretentiousness and snobbishness are made. People retreat into relativistic ideas they would be loath to use in other settings.

On a practical level, what is taste and how do we know it when we see it?

In short: taste is about metapreferences. Having taste is a question of revealed preferences.

Here’s a simple story to demonstrate. The other day, one of my Mercatus colleagues came to my office and told me he had been reading The Remains of the Day. He thought it was good—but, he had also just started Middlemarch. Remains of the Day was good, but Middlemarch was a whole new order of good.

My colleague doesn’t dispute that Remains of the Day is good, but he has seen, through comparison, just how good something else can be. Once that has been seen, there is no going back. This is how taste is developed.

In The Rhetoric of Economics, Deirdre McCloskey says that this is not simply a question of preferences, but of having preferences about preferences. Once you have seen the superiority—or, I should say, felt the superiority—of King Lear, then working through Shakespeare’s less appealing plays has much more value.

Analyzing a passage of I.A. Richards, McCloskey compares the development of taste to “revealed preference.” Richards says that those who begin by enjoying “bad poetry” but who then enjoy The Golden Treasury do not go back. Those people who are able to appreciate both prefer The Golden Treasury. McCloskey says that this is like a customer who can afford two products: the one they choose is their revealed preference.

This argument is not exclusive to The Golden Treasury, or even exclusive to literature and art. You can have metapreferences in any domain. Once you have enjoyed Indian food, you cannot think McDonald’s is better. Once you have understood Adam Smith, you won’t take so seriously many op-eds. Once you have worked in advertising, you ought to have good taste in landing pages.

When people are free to choose, liberals are fond of saying, they choose freedom. The same goes for taste, be it in Shakespeare or fountain pens or cheese. McCloskey gives the example of Milton Friedman’s argument against conscription—those who look into the issue seriously often go from being in favor of the draft to being against it: they rarely move the other way.

Some people who don’t like poetry will wave away this idea of taste because they don’t think poetry is superior to whatever else it is that they enjoy. This misses the point. Taste works within a domain. The Richards test works in all disciplines, including journalism and technology. Indeed, a lot of discourse about journalism and technology either implicitly relies on the Richards test (when the audience has the relevant context) or ought to rely on it (when the author lacks the relevant context).

Everyone has taste in something. It might be electronics or cars or mathematical papers. We are all involved in the business of ranking metapreferences. Once you realise that, you can get on with learning from those who have better taste than you. People who have good taste typically do so in narrow areas. An exceptional garden designer might be a musical philistine. “Taste is sensitivity to fit.” So if you want good taste, you might have to learn from someone who you think is wrong, or who thinks you are!

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John Pistelli

also wrote about taste this week:

Because we have to enact truth rather than just knowing it, because we sometimes even have to invent truth, we must be startled into truth anew every day, must experience it, lest we lose it, as if it were the most counterintuitive provocation ever uttered.⁵ As the man said, art exists to make the “stone stony.” For this reason, bad taste may actually be immoral.⁶

And on Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok quotes J.S. Mill on the question of learning from other people as a means of making civilizational progress. Mill:

It is hardly possible to overrate the value…of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar….Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.

One way to think about the history of progress is to see it as a large system of well-informed, aspirational people constantly improving their own and other people’s taste across all areas of the economy.