What doesn’t bore us to death can make us wiser

What sort of response do the words “Institute for Fiscal Studies” evoke in you? Do you think: “Ooh, interesting! I wonder what those guys have got to say!”? If so, I reckon you’re unusual. My reaction is closer to Homer Simpson’s when The Boring World of Niels Bohr comes on TV. I become almost frightened at the prospect of the forthcoming guilt-infused stultification.

The name is remarkably unremarkable. Never have two nouns and an adjective run each other so close in a competition to be least interesting. It’s hard to think of any replacement for “Institute”, “Fiscal” or “Studies” that wouldn’t slightly jazz up the organisation’s image. I’d give honourable mention to strong contenders such as “Management”, “Chartered”, “Committee” and “Actuarial”, but I really don’t think they could make it sound any more dull. The most interesting word in its name is “for”.

All of which made me suspect the blandness to be some sort of cover and that it’s actually incredibly right- or leftwing, or extremist-Christian, or madly Islamophobic, or anti-MMR, or totally obsessed with astrology. Maybe I’m thinking of the Institute of Economic Affairs, which both wants to privatise the NHS and has received money from tobacco giants (so it’s keen to monetise both ends of the coughing process). But those guys have made the schoolboy error of putting the word “affairs” in the name, which catches the tedium-weary eye like a Timmy Mallett jacket that got mixed up with John Major’s dry-cleaning. Assuming the hope was to sound uninteresting and respectable to draw attention away from all the malevolent lobbying, its name selection represents a serious market failure.

But it turns out that the Institute for Fiscal Studies is not the featureless tarmac that conceals a Bond villain’s underground poisoned-chocolate factory. It describes its aim as to “advance education for the benefit of the public by promoting on a nonpolitical basis the study and discussion of and the exchange and dissemination of information and knowledge concerning national economic…” Wake up! Come on, this is important!

So it seems that it’s important – though not malicious or secretive – and says important things about important things, and it’s probably important that we should take notice of them. Which means there are three options: feel bored by all the boring important things; feel guilty for ignoring the boring important things; or (my preferred option) a bit of both.

Now, you may say that you don’t actually find the prospect of a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies remotely tedious on any level – but, if so, that’s because you are lying, possibly even to yourself. You may also be uncomfortable with the concept of something important ever being boring; in general, that’s taboo in our society. We pretend that important things can’t be dull – and that bored schoolchildren are the fault of lazy teachers rather than the whole dreary nature of reality – in the same way that we pretend nasty things can’t be cool.

Well, it’s got to stop. If we’re ever going to get post post-truth, we have to sling out all that bullshit. Smoking is cool and carcinogenic – as the Institute of Economic Affairs probably wouldn’t say. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies might if we could just keep our eyes open long enough to hear it. Not that we hear with our eyes. I don’t think. Though somebody once told me that taste is mainly smell, so maybe hearing is mainly sight. I could look it up if I were interested enough, but I’m not, which is certainly not the same as saying it’s unimportant.

Do you know what’s sometimes cool? Dying young! Cf Lennon vs McCartney. Doesn’t make it good, though. Cool is not a synonym for good and neither is interesting for important. And what the Institute for Fiscal Studies says about the election is important. So here we go: maybe try splashing some cold water on your face or running on the spot as you read.

Related: IFS manifesto verdict: neither Tories nor Labour have credible spending plan

It says that neither Labour nor the Tories are offering credible spending plans in their manifestos. Terrific. That was no help. We’ve all stayed awake for no reason (as the nation will be saying at 5am on 13 December). What are we supposed to conclude from that other than that the Lib Dems are even stupider than we thought? Their manifesto came out of the analysis as comparatively realistic. Talk about bringing a knife to a gunfight. As if the electoral system didn’t disadvantage them enough, they’re putting costed spending proposals up against alluring fictions. If they’re going to win this, they’ll have to rely very heavily on Jo Swinson’s charisma.

Obviously they’re not going to win this. It’s fortunate for us that the Lib Dems are fighting such a lacklustre campaign because we can tell ourselves that’s why they’re failing, rather than the less palatable truth that we are now a people that lack the attention span for their boring policies. The middle ground: the slightly more, but not dramatically more, redistributive taxation, proportional representation, 80% renewable energy by 2030, more teachers. Seriously, more teachers?! That’s what they’re going with! Just because that would be sensible? Get with the programme, guys: it’s more police and more nurses that people want to hear about! Public servants who rough people up and public servants who then patch them up. Teachers? No one gives a shit!

Reform through moderation and compromise is extremely unfashionable and despised by both Labour and the Tories, to the extent that the Lib Dems have been reduced to attempting to counterfeit the vacuous clarity of the political poles: they won’t do a deal with either Johnson or Corbyn (when, in reality, their best hope would be to get a chance to), they’d cancel Brexit without a second referendum, even though that smacks of democratic betrayal. Those are misjudgments in my view, but that’s not why they’ll get nowhere. They’d get nowhere whatever they did. They’ve got as much chance as the opposition to Putin.

If we don’t accept that important things can be boring, it means we think boring things can’t be important. So we mistake the eye-catching for the insightful, the passionate for the wise. Mistaking clarity for righteousness, we ignore the Institute for Fiscal Studies because we’re sick of experts. Charlatans make the simplistic and extreme seem morally superior to the thoughtful and complicated.

David Mitchell’s new book, Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy, is published by Faber (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020 3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15.