My Retrospective on my Posts About Scott Adams

Scott Adams has died. This blog post is a retroperspective of my posts concerning him.

I consider Adams as my entrepot into the world of persausion. My four (4) posts involving Adams are:

1. Joan Williams: What So Many People Don't Get About the U.S. Working Class
2. James Taylor: Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis
3. Scott Adams: President Trump Earns the Highest Presidential Approval Level of All Time
4. Robert Shiller: Economics and the human instinct for storytelling

In 2016, I said that Adams was in agreement with Joan Williams' analysis of why the US working class flocked to Trump in 2016. Adams and Williams both agree that Trump gave the white working class especially a story that they could aspire to. I think this analysis still stands today ten years later.

In 2017, I said that the cognitive dissonance was on the behalf of the climate skeptics, not on behalf of climate scientists as Adams asserted:

In other words, the more strongly professionals identify with the petroleum industry, the more likely they are to be climate change skeptics. And the more strongly they identify with their profession, the more strongly they accept the consensus of climate science researchers. Thus, the cognitive dissonance appears to happen with the skeptics.

Emphasis Mine

My analysis seems to have stood the test of time with recent papers supporting it. Perplexity AI provided the following examples:

“Climate‑Proofing Management Research” (Academy of Management Perspectives, 2022) includes Lefsrud & Meyer as a core reference in arguing that management and organization studies must take climate change seriously and understand how framing shapes corporate and professional responses.

Aranda et al. (2021, European Management Review) on integrating critical discourse analysis with structural topic modeling cite the paper as a key exemplar of discursive analysis of climate‑change debates in professional communities.

Back in 2018, I wrote:

It is interesting to see Adams describe the petite-bourgeoisie as being happy with Trump. This reliance on the support of the petite-bourgeoisie means that Trump has to be tolerant of that class's fascist undercurrents.

Emphasis Mine

Although Trump is not actively promoting Fascism, he seems indifferent to any such currents swirling around his administration.

Also, in 2018, I said that Shiller and Adams would agree that the Trump narrative is driving the performance of the US economy. Today, there seems to be a disconnect between what Trump is saying and what US consumers are experiencing.

Overall, I think Adams contributed to the public discourse by bringing the tools of persausion to the attention of the public.

AI Disclosure

Research was done using Perplexity AI.

Image was generated by Gemini AI.