Why mattering less means more

There are reasons both political and scientific that the big and important issues don't get the attention you would expect

What could put home canning on a political agenda? It’s about evolution and opportunism. (Photo by Ray Shrewsberry on Unsplash)

For a while some years ago, if you had been where I was living at the time, you might have figured that what most mattered to a lot of American voters was a shortage of lids for canning jars. When I started work as a young aide to a Midwestern congressman back then, thit’s just about all people were talking about — canning lids! — when they encountered their federal representative.

Actually, what we heard in one county fair after another that hot summer in Indiana was that the supply shortage affected just the flat tin, which can’t be reused when you’re putting up produce. Plenty of people were suspicious that the jar makers had orchestrated the lid shortage to drive sales for the full glass-and-lid assembly, which surely yielded a higher profit margin than those cheap little lids.

Being a patriotic fellow, I had imagined doing my part on Capitol Hill to secure …