Growing up, one of the things I most looked forward to was picking up the Sunday Times after church, especially to read the regular columnists. I made it a habit after a debate with my father in which he concluded — perhaps with mild frustration — “it’s hard to argue with you if you haven’t read.” Indeed, I had strong opinions without much substantiation. Today’s yelling matches on social media reflect exactly that. The algorithms are perfectly designed to tap into the worst biases in our psyches. Unless we read robust material and cultivate curiosity, we’re susceptible to being undone by them. What I hope to achieve with this column is to distil some of the best available academic literature into digestible language that will help us all think and argue better. Why? Because we should be arguing with each other — respectfully, amiably and, most importantly, with skill and substance. We need proper debate, not screaming matches from across ever-deepening partisan lines. I feel honoured to have been given this slot in Business Day. I’ve been reading the paper for more than 20 years. I had my first letter published in 2007, beautifully titled (not by me) “Mango bitter fruit of monopoly”. The first opinion piece I can find is from 2014: “SA sitting pretty on potential platinum powerhouse”. Fellow columnist Anthony Butler, who taught and supervised me at the University of Cape Town (UCT) during my post-grad in public policy, wrote to me after that one, saying he had wondered when my letter-writing pathology would turn into something more substantial. With friends like these … On the subject of UCT: if you dislike what I have to say, you will largely have UCT to blame. Depending on how you count, I ended up spending about 17 years at the institution (intermittently). My letter-writing pathology was spawned by my undergraduate training in philosophy, politics and economics. It is hard to pinpoint the pivotal courses, but moral philosophy (David Benatar), game theory (Don Ross) and critical thinking in the quantitative sciences (Jacques Rossouw) were clearly among them. My poor children are now subject to the scrutiny those courses birthed in me. A couple of years ago my son told me his school was the best in the country. Though I believe it probably is one of the best, I shot back: “Do you have good data for that? What was the sample size? What methods did they use to arrive at that conclusion?” Don’t worry; we’re still very much on speaking terms. He is now a teenager, so of course he knows everything (to be fair, he does know more than I did when I was his age). But, like my own father did to me, I will be encouraging him to read the columnists. My letter-writing pathology eventually drove me to do a PhD in economics, expertly supervised by Prof Ross. Part of his mission was to turn me from a journalist into an academic. I can remember submitting one chapter — 25,000 words — and having him hand it back to me with red pen scrawled on the top of the first page: “Modelling for the sake of modelling instead of for illumination.” Back to the drawing board I went to find a more appropriate model for explaining socioeconomic and political outcomes in Angola and Nigeria, Africa’s two largest petro-states. On another occasion, he told me a chapter read as if it were a series of six opeds strewn together without coherent analysis. With friends like these … When I turned the thesis into a book, Don wrote the foreword. Economists typically ask, once all the fluff has been presented, “So what?” So, I tried to answer that upfront. To reiterate: the purpose of this column is really to help us make better sense of the world, focus on the things that really matter, and to have better arguments. Given that brevity has not been a strength, this is also a personal opportunity to practise succinctness without sacrificing substance. • Dr Harvey is MD of economic research consultancy Harvey Economics.Business Day