One thing I especially like about Jesse Norman's Adam Smith is his description of the social and intellectual climate in which Smith grew up. In doing so, he tells us that Smith's father - a "cultivated and intelligent man" - had a library of 80 books*. Somebody of equivalent prosperity and culture today would of course own many times more.

Fast forward 250ish years to our university days in the 70s, 80s and 90s. You probably had a friend who was a music fanatic: you might have been this man himself**. But he probably owned only around 100 albums. That's only a tiny fraction of the amount of music available to today's 20-year-olds.

We have, therefore, vastly greater access to books and music than previous generations did. Which poses the question: how has this changed our culture?

I'm not sure the issue here is simply one of greater cognitive diversity. As Jesse describes, Smith's contemporaries might have been acquainted with the works not just of orthodox Anglicans but of Rousseau, Hume and Voltaire too. That's pretty diverse. And until 1746, the strength of Jacobitism led Scotland close to civil war - and a civil war betokens a surfeit rather than deficit of diversity.

Instead, one effect is that we now read and listen more widely but less deeply. Well-read men in the 18^th and 19^th centuries would have re-read and even memorized large parts of the few books they did read, just as our generation played the few LPs we owned to death. Younger people today, I sense, no longer do this to the same degree.

This might help explain what looks like a paradox. The spread of multiple news sources has led to fears that we are becoming Balkanized. Lefties read and believe the Guardian, Canary and Novara; righties Breitbart and the Telegraph. The greater availability of music, however, has had the opposite effect. There are no longer fights between rival musical tribes as there were between punks and skins or mods and rockers***. Young people are less divided on musical lines, perhaps because the greater availability of music means that individual albums (the very word is quaint) mean less to them.

Which raises another change. Back in 1936 Walter Benjamin argued that works of art that are easily reproducible lose authenticity by being separated from their creator and from the space in which they are made; TV is less authentic than the theatre, a recording less so than a live performance. This lack of authenticity is perhaps accelerated if we do not invest so much of ourselves in the work by re-reading and re-listening so much.

People, however, crave authenticity and so seek it elsewhere. It might be that the popularity of live music and festivals, spread of tattoos and support for Jeremy Corbyn all reflect the same thing - an urge for authenticity that cannot be so easily found in art.

There might be another consequence - a diminution of shared understandings. Until quite late into the 20^th century, there was general agreement about what it meant for people to be educated. Today, this is less the case: yes, there is a "canon" in many disciplines, but there's disagreement about what this should be. It is possible for people knowledgeable about books and music to be unable to converse with each other because they've few readings and listenings in common.

One reason why there are such heated debates about the state of economics (or about Marxism) is that people have very different understandings of what these are, based upon different readings. Equally, I suspect that some misunderstandings of this blog are founded not just upon my own incoherence but upon readers not having my intellectual referents, such as Roemer, Elster and MacIntyre. The misunderstanding cuts both ways: I got an email in the day job last week which I couldn't make head or tail of despite coming from an intelligent man, because his frame of reference was so different from mine.

But here's the thing. Although we lack shared understandings, people want them. This leads to the emergence of Adler (pdf) superstars - individuals with no more talent than others but who become famous by luck or good marketing, and this fame then prove self-sustaining as everybody talks about them. Reality TV stars, as well as some authors and singers, fit this pattern. This is one way (of several) in which we see a retreat from meritocracy.

Now, I say all this even more tentatively than usual, based upon little understanding of yoof. Feel free to correct me or to expand. What I'm doing is more asking a question. We know that economic and technical change lead to cultural change. The question then is: how has the greater availability of books and music changed our culture?

* Smith's father died when Smith was two months old. Like very many great men, Smith was raised in a single-parent family.

** The sexist language is deliberate. This person was almost always male.

*** Another reason for this might lie in another change - the greater passivity of young people today, a development which has led (among other things) to the near-disappearance of good English central defenders.