Are stories too simple?

And we should keep in mind that the stories Tyler Cowen primarily means here are stories that have morals. It's not a problem that the Dick and Jane stories are too simple because no one older than eight ever drew a moral from them. Given their purpose, it is essential that stories like Dick and Jane or The Cat in the Hat be simple; their extreme simplicity is not a bug.

But, "we have to get tough" is too simple according to Cowen. Is it really? Cowen admits that we really did have to get tough with the Nazis. That's an interesting example because it wasn't simple at all to the people who actually lived that story. It took them years to figure it out and there is a credible argument to be made that millions of lives might have been saved if they hadn't taken so long to figure it out.

And aren't we capable of being pretty sophisticated about this? If I say, the story of North Korea shows that we have to get tough, can't you say, "No Jules, you misunderstand the story," and tell me a different version. Any story is capable of variations and I can vary a story to produce a different moral or to produce no moral at all. I can even substitute a new story, "No Jules you completely misunderstood what was happening; they weren't angry with one another they were falling in love."

And isn't this trick of substituting one story for another—that is to say one interporetation of events for another—only possible for people willing to believe that it is possible to tell a story that is true? If we seriously believed that we were always easily being duped by false stories, wouldn't that be like living in an economy where it was impossible to tell real money from counterfeit? Remember that Cowen himself doesn't see any alternative to stories.