Nick Cohen raises some deep paradoxes about our modern political culture. He notes, rightly, that public opinion is wrong on many points, and says:

Everyone from money-grubbing TV executives to seedy politicians hit their critics with a dictionary of ready-made insults when you try to take these cognitive biases on. You are "an elitist" and a "snob" who lives in an "ivory tower". You "don't get it," and think you "know better" than the common people.

The first paradox here is that as the academic evidence for the prevalence of cognitive biases has risen, so too has faith in public opinion.

The pre-Kahneman and Tversky world was one in which the "elite" was often dismissive of public opinion. Although Henry Ford might not have said "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses", the sentiment was widespread. Attitudes to pop music in the 1950s and 60s were often snobbish and dismissive. In the 70s, serious academics spoke of a crisis of democracy. Even George Orwell wrote of the "debauchery of taste". And the jibe at Jim Swanton - that he was too grand to ride in the same car as his chauffeur - could have applied to many others.
Today, though, such attitudes are rare. We are all democrats now - even though the evidence that the public is often wrong is now stronger than it was in the mid-20th century.

Which raises the second paradox. As equality of taste and opinion has increased since the 1960s and 1970s, so too has inequality of wealth and power. Faith in the opinion of the public doesn't extend to wanting to give them real power in the workplace. And whilst media executives and politicans affect to have the same opinions as ordinary people, they don't want the same incomes.

This brings me to paradox three. The decline in the elite's self-confidence is curiously partial. Whilst it doesn't believe that it has superior opinion than the public, it does believe that it has superior ability to manage and control large organizations. It's not obvious that this asymmetric confidence is grounded in evidence.