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The Curious Introvert
A weekly podcast covering societal taboos & cultural blind spots. Join host Meredith Hackwith Edwards as she deep dives with curiosity & nuance into philosophy, society & culture with expert guests.
Episodes frequently feature philosophers, researchers, historians & journalists.
The Curious Introvert
Ep. 355: Should We be Protected from Uninformed Voters? [REMASTERED]
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Should voters have to prove their competence? How do balance ethics & efficacy in the world of politics?
Dr. Jason Brennan is a Flanigan Family professor at Georgetown Business School who agrees that democracies outperform most historical alternatives, but suggests that some form of Epistocracy (meaning the rule of the knowledgeable) could be worth experimenting with. In other words, the more of an informed voter you are, the more weight your vote carries.
He covers why democracy may not be as bullet proof as we believe, what the practical applications of epistocracy could look like, education’s disappointing impact on informed voting & the right and wrong way to become a more informed voter.
This episode originally aired on April 15, 2024
If you liked this episode, you’ll also like episode 136: VIRTUE SIGNALING. CAN WE MAKE IT STOP? NACHOS & NARCISSISM
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3:05 What is epistocracy?
7:25 Is a "statistically informed" vote really informed?
8:52 When IQ tests get weaponized
11:00 Let citizens write the test
12:52 Why civic education backfires
13:37 The forgetting curve of civics class
15:47 Voting as a collective action problem
19:38 Do you have a duty to vote?
22:05 Reproductive rights and the bottle-in-the-ocean problem
23:45 Lottocracy: voting by lottery
25:50 Should we vote on issues, not parties?
26:41 Politics as tribal signaling
28:55 Your brain on politics
29:41 More parties, less tribalism
30:50 Duverger's Law and the two-party trap
34:28 How the electoral college shapes campaigns
36:09 Finding trustworthy information
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Growing up in Midwest America with veteran grandparents, it was impressed upon me that democracy was a divine gift, something that we should always be grateful for and never criticize. After all, it empowers the people to make informed votes that shape the way government serves the people. But how many of us are really informed voters? Is democracy the best way to shape society if most of us are treating it like a multiple choice test we didn't study for? My next guest is a Flanagan family professor at Georgetown Business School who agrees that democracies outperform most historical alternatives, but suggests that some form of epistocracy, meaning the rule of the knowledgeable, could be worth experimenting with. In other words, the more of an informed voter you are, the more weight your vote carries. Today he's gonna share the reasons he feels we can do better than democracy as we ask the question: should the votes of the uninformed voters count for less? Author, educator, political science philosopher, Dr. Jason Brennan. Thanks for being here.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_00So, like I said, I totally grew up indoctrinated in this idea that you just don't question democracy. So I'd love to kick it off with you sharing what you see as democracy's greatest systematic flaws.
SPEAKER_01Oh, well, I think we only have 45 minutes, but I'll try.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, do your best, do your best, or do your worst.
SPEAKER_01You know, I'm a philosopher and part of our job is to question what other people take for granted. So people say, Don't question that. That's what we question.
SPEAKER_00Which is why I love having you guys on the show, because it's like you're the perfect kind of guest.
SPEAKER_01Okay, someone thinks that. So the issue with democracy is, you know, the whole goal of a democracy is to make the government serve the interests and will of the people. But the main issue is that we don't really use our votes in an informed way or really for the purpose of politics much at all. And the reason is because it's a collective action problem. So I like to imagine, uh, imagine you're taking a final exam 15 weeks from now on, say, biology 101, and the professor says to you, I'm gonna average everyone's grades together. You're all going to get exactly the same grade no matter how much you study. And suppose you have a thousand people in this class. You'd probably expect the average grade to be an F. Not because people are stupid, but because the incentives are really perverse. Now imagine instead it's a final exam on American history and American government and criminal justice and economics and trade policy and all of these things all at once, and you're taking this exam with 210 million other people. How well do you think you'd do? Well, in fact, people don't do very well, and again, it's because of perverse incentives. So what ends up happening in a typical democracy is instead of using your vote in order to try to influence policy to promote your values, whatever they might be, people mostly engage in a kind of social signaling with one another. They try to prove that they're a committed member of their group, and that often involves like having extreme or silly positions for the purposes of sort of signaling how good you are to other people. So basically, democracy doesn't really work the way that we are taught that it works in middle school. And then once we realize that, we have to start asking, what do we do about it?
SPEAKER_00So as far as epistocracy is concerned, what are the practical applications for epistocracy in the system that we have now?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, I maybe the way of thinking about this is uh we sort of have recognized since we started studying political behavior back like 70 or so years ago that people are really badly misinformed, they're quite irrational. And now the question is, what do we do to try to extract wisdom from the crowd given that they're not really offering it to us? And there's all these different proposals, none of which have really been tried because there might be constitutional impediments or it's sort of hyfaluding or speculative. But what an epistocracy is, is any kind of system in which votes are given weight according to knowledge. So the problem is how do you implement that in a non-biased way?
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01Imagine you just said everyone who can pass a test is allowed to vote, and anyone who fails a test isn't. Well, any test you come up with, it's gonna have certain biases, like it'll be more educated people, though for to be frank, education has a very weak effect on how much people know. It's just education is correlated with other stuff that has a high effect. As an educator, I find that very disturbing, but just for what it's worth.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I was gonna say, wait a minute, doesn't this like implode your entire worldview as a professor?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. No, I mean I I mostly teach classes. Uh I literally have a class for freshmen where I spend the first three days explaining like why business school isn't really gonna do much for them and they should probably major in something else.
SPEAKER_00How are you still employed?
SPEAKER_01Tenure, tenure works for some people. Yeah. So literally like going from having a high school diploma to a bachelor's degree predicts you get about one to one and a half extra questions right on this battery of questions that the Pew polling company gives people every couple of years. It has almost no effect. Wow. However, it's correlated with other things like income and so on, which does predict information. So here's an idea then. What if on election day everyone gets to vote? But when they vote, they do three things. They first they tell us what it is they want. Whatever it is we're voting on, and I'm agnostic about what we should vote on, but whether it's voting for a president or voting on a referendum or whatever it is, you tell us what it is you want. The second thing is you tell us who you are, like what are your demographic factors. And we're gonna need this for some statistical stuff in a second. And the third thing is you answer a quiz of, say, 30 to 40 questions about politics, just really basic questions, like who's the vice president, uh, what's the unemployment rate, et cetera. Now, this quiz does not determine whether or not your vote counts. It doesn't even add weight to your particular vote. Instead, what happens is if we have these three things, who you are, what you know, and what you want, and we get this for everyone who votes, what we can do is statistically estimate what the public would have wanted if it were demographically identical, but fully informed. And the reason I like to implement this, at least try it, experiment with it on a small scale and relatively stable places like Denmark or a well-functioning state like my home state of New Hampshire, is this is the method that political scientists and economists have been using for really like three or four decades to figure out things like how does your income affect how you vote? How does your race affect how you vote? How does knowledge affect how you vote while controlling for all these other things? And so we can use this to basically pretend we had an informed public. Or the actual public is not well informed, but we can extract wisdom from the crowd this way. And the nice thing about it is at the end, no one gets excluded. And in a way, no one really has more votes than anyone else. It's not that you get 7.4 votes and I get 3.2 and she gets 1.0 and that person gets 29.9. It's not like that. It's just that we're basically simulating what would happen if the public were fully informed. You know, and then the interesting thing about this is this has been done, like this method, on all sorts of different data sets with different people by different political scientists and economists with different political biases. But interestingly, you tend to get similar results over and over again of what the enlightened public would want. And the enlightened public's view does not correspond to any major political party.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01I think that's heartening because imagine I imagine, like, you know, your typical listener and you're like, oh, you know what? The Academy is just a bunch of like shills for the Democratic Party, which is true, by the way. That's correct. And they just use this method and it turns on everyone to vote Democrat. You'd be like, I don't really believe it. But in fact, it's not what the method shows. It says they wouldn't really prefer what the Democrats like. They don't really like what the Republicans do. They just have a kind of more nuanced position that doesn't correspond to any particular political party. So I think that's heartening because it sort of shows that this isn't an inherently biased method, or it's not like the political scientists doing this or just trying to prove that they were right all along.
SPEAKER_00But is it informed? I mean, not that the public would be tricked in this particular example, but it's kind of like, is that really an informed vote if, you know, the people that are counting them have to interpret the information?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So one thing you want to do with this kind of method is make sure that any kind of statistical test is all done publicly. You know, you make the quiz public, you make all the data public, and you can just say, here's how many people voted this way, here's their information. And then any newspaper, any like blog, any anyone who has stats training could just check the results. Uh, it's not really that complicated. So it's true that the average person wouldn't be able to easily tell, but it is the kind of thing where if you just make it public, then Fox News and MSNBC and all these other groups can just say they'll have they have people on staff who can look at it and go, yeah, this is bullshit or this is real. Uh so basically it's like we don't have an enlightened public. We don't know a way of making the public informed.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01Pulp education doesn't work very well because of perverse incentives. Following thought leaders doesn't work well because of inverse incentives. What if we just had a way of statistically pretending we were informed? And that's the idea behind this.
SPEAKER_00That's really interesting. For some reason, it makes me think of David Attenborough, you know, the British narrator of the nature documentaries and where he's like looking into the terrarium of humans, going, This is what's happening in Earth today. And he's like figuring it out. Basically, I see David Attenborough as a demigod, which that really is revealing. I do have a question about how the test would be worded because I read a book called The Trials of Nina McCall. And in that, the author talks about a French psychologist was the one who made an IQ test back in the early 1900s. But later they realized that it favored wealthy members of French society. But the American educational system adopted it nonetheless, using it to identify so-called social delinquents. And then later in World War I, the army used it. And when the data revealed that the median scores showed that basically blacks and whites were testing the same, they changed the questions so that the blacks would score lower to confirm racial bias. And there was another version of all of this that was for women, so that they could deem them irrevocably mentally deficient, which permitted incarceration and removal of rights. So, like the how the wording is, I feel like is important. Who determines who in this, you know, hypothetical situation the questions on the test and then how those questions are worded?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I'm glad you're asking that because this is really a very fundamental problem with epistocracy and democracy, by the way.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So one of the interesting things that we know about with surveys, and if you're a marketing person, you know this, and you probably are using this for for evil ends, perhaps, is that you can ask people effectively the same question and get completely different answers based upon what words you use. You know, so for instance, if you say things like, there's this drug, and it people have a fatal disease, and this drug will cure exactly 80% of the people that have that disease. Is it a good drug? Everyone says yes. If you go, there's this drug that has an effect on this fatal disease, but 20% of the people who take it will nevertheless die. Is it good? They say, no, it's bad. I just said the same thing. It's exactly the same result both ways. The wording matters. And then one thing you learn in poly psy research and other things is like, well, what counts as the real way to ask the question? And the answer is we don't know. There isn't the real way. These are just synonyms and it's not really clear. And the people who write referenda and things like that in California, they know this. Uh, they go out of their way to make sure that when they write the question, they write it the way to get the response that they want, knowing that if they worded it ever so slightly differently, people would have a completely different response. So, my best solution to this, and I think it's an imperfect solution. I think we're we're just talking about imperfection here. We're not talking about ideals. Is, and this is going to sound paradoxical, who writes the test? Let democracy write the test. Right? What counts as an informed voter? Don't have someone like me write the questions, don't have the Democratic Party write the questions or the Republican Party, don't have professional bureaucrats in DC like my neighbors. Instead, get like 500 citizens, select them at random, almost in a kind of in a jury duty type system, pay them, say, $5,000 or $10,000, and fly them out to go somewhere for a weekend and say, you, the people, are tasked with coming up with what counts as an informed voter. We want you to come up with 30 to 40 questions that everyone who votes is going to answer and what you think counts as an informed voter, and then have them deliberate for a weekend and write the test together. Now there's some issues with that, but then you know it's not going to be perfect. But then they get to decide and they can put on whatever they want. It could be the price of average price of milk, it could be what counts as you know, who the vice president is, it could be certain things about recent laws. And people often think it's paradoxical when I recommend this idea because I I go on and on about how the people don't know the answers to these questions. But the funny thing is, people sort of know what questions they should know the answer to, even if they don't know the answers. It's almost like uh if you've ever been in a class and you have a final exam coming up, like in trigonometry or something, and you're like, oh, I know I'm supposed to know what a cosine is, but I don't actually know what a cosine is. That's kind of what happens with voters. If you ask them, like, what do you think would what what would count as an informed voter? They actually give you pretty smart questions. Oh, you should know this, you should know this, you should know this. Cool. Do you know that stuff? No. You know, for instance, like it seems like pretty reasonable. Do you which party controls Congress and what have they done? Most people come up with that. And if you ask voters that stuff they don't know.
SPEAKER_00You mentioned in your book that civic education tends to push people towards more of the extreme views as opposed to bringing them into a place of moderation. And when you're talking about letting democracy choose these questions, I'm thinking, well, gosh, shouldn't we like kind of get ready first? Like, shouldn't we be more educated? Shouldn't we enhance our public educational system to include more complete versions of history and government systems? But when I read that part of your book, I was so confused. So explain what you mean by that. And like, do we just accept our own ig ignorance and pray that we don't become like that movie idiocracy?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And this phase me to say it's an educator, but the reason everyone's like, I want to just educate people better. And it doesn't work. That's why. Uh and it doesn't work not because people are stupid, but because they're smart. And that's that's basically why it doesn't work because they're smart. So think of it like this I was a chemistry major for a long time, but I don't remember much about chemistry. Why? Because I don't use it anymore. I took four years of Spanish in high school and I was really good at it. I just went to Costa Rica two weeks ago and I struggled to get through, you know, 20 plus years after I finished high school, I allowed myself to forget it. I don't remember the phone number of like my best friend in high school anymore. Why not? I forgot all of this stuff. It's called rational ignorance. I don't need this information. It's not very useful to me, so I let it go away. So think about, regardless of how educated you are, though you went to high school or college or postgraduate school, think about how many tests you got good grades on back in the day that you would fail right now.
SPEAKER_00Oh, so many.
SPEAKER_01I do this with my freshmen at Georgetown. I will come in and tell them, like, I'll give them a quit set of quiz questions, five questions taken from level one, they're all honor students, but like level one sophomore year of high school type things. And I'll say, if you can get all five questions right, I'll give you $50 on the spot. The best anyone's ever done, and these are really gifted students who get like, you know, $1550 on the SAT and had 4.5 GPAs graduating, the best any of them have ever done is four out of five. Usually they get two out of five. They forget almost everything. And that's what happens with public education and civics education. We teach people most of what they need to know to vote well, and they forget almost all of it. In fact, on average, people only remember about one out of five bits of information they get in schooling. And it's not because they're stupid, it's because it's not useful to them.
SPEAKER_00Okay, but doesn't that ask why are we teaching it that way then? If it's if most of the stuff that we learn and we forget is inconsequential to our daily lives and to the betterment of society, why the fuck are we teaching those things in school?
SPEAKER_01That's a good question. Why are we? You know, you should uh you should invite on uh Brian Kaplan to talk about schooling. He wrote a really cool book called The Case Against Education and what's really going on with education.
SPEAKER_00Do you know do you have a personal invite? Is that is that an offer? Because I would like to have him on the show to discuss that very thing.
SPEAKER_01Oh, absolutely. If you tell him I ascend to you, he'll that he'll get a yes. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. It's we could spend all the whole time talking about why education works the way it does. But just focusing narrowly on the civics stuff, I'm the there is a genuine goal of making people better at civics. But the problem is you face perverse incentives because government is a collective action problem. It's like the climate or pollution or something. If if I get rid of my car, which frankly is kind of a gas guzzler sports car, and drive like, I don't know, a really environmentally friendly car, and I never take a trip again, I never fly anywhere ever again, and I turn my air conditioning down in the summer, it's really hot here in DC, from you know, whatever I have it on, to like a much higher temperature, so I'm using less energy, and I stop playing electric guitar and I play acoustic guitar instead. This will have no impact on climate change. It will not have effect pollution. My individual input is so minute that it doesn't matter. What matters is what we do, not what I do. Voting works out that way too. It's really important that the public be informed and that the public vote in a kind of intelligent way for people who will actually promote its values. But it doesn't matter if you vote that way or if I vote that way, right? Because our individual votes just make very little difference. So if I were to go, imagine that there's a party, the murder Jason Brennan party, and their goal is to get in power and to put me in a pain amplifier for 50 years and then flame my skin off and kill me.
SPEAKER_00That is incredibly specific. This is very insightful into your mind, by the way.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I like to use gruesome examples. Uh send a lot of metal, maybe that's why. So for them to come to power is an absolute disaster for me. But it doesn't follow that voting for them is a disaster. Or to give a nicer example, I once did the calculation out. I said, imagine it's the year 2008. I'm living in Massachusetts at the time, and candidate Obama calls me up and says, I can't I don't have an Obama impression, but Brendan, if if I win, I'm gonna pay you $10 million out of the US Treasury. Now, to be clear, he's not paying me $10 million to vote for him. He's just paying me $10 million if he wins. Well, you know, maybe I could be bought, maybe that would make me want it want him to win or something. But the thing is, the probability that my vote will break a tie is so low that if you discount that $10 million by the probability that I break a tie, the value of voting for him to me is lower than like the risk of voting, because I have a higher chance of dying in a car accident on the way to the voting booth than I do of breaking that tie, right? It just works out to be like the number on one model of the effectiveness of the voting, even though I get $10 million if he wins, my vote for him is worth to me $1.45 times 10. So then I get $2,645. Right. So it's just vanishingly small. So people don't know these exact numbers, but they do have a pretty good sense that their votes don't really matter. You know, it's like they all count, but they don't count for much. What matters is what we do, not what you do. Democracy is supposed to be like that. That's the whole point. If your vote mattered a lot, something's going wrong.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's an interesting point.
SPEAKER_01The whole point is to spread power out, not to concentrate it, right? So basically, this is the dilemma we get with any form of government. If you concentrate power in the hands of a small number of people, they tend to use that power intelligently, but for their self-interest.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01Let Vladimir Putin, right? Or my neighbors, like you know, the alphabet agencies, my neighbors, they're very good at running those agencies for their own benefit, right? Yeah. Because a lot of them have like real power. If you spread power out among the masses, they tend to be nicer. Like it no longer is in your self-interest to use power selfishly. Like, why bother? Your vote doesn't matter much. So they're very expressive and they do what they think is good for justice and so on, but they don't think very carefully about it. So the dilemma we have is concentrate power, you get smart but nasty. Spread power out, you get nice but dumb. Neither one of those is particularly good. They both have their downsides.
SPEAKER_00Well, hey there. Since you seem to be enjoying this episode so far, double check that you've hit the follow button on your podcast listening app and subscribe on YouTube. And to join my free private Facebook group, search MFR Curious Insiders on Facebook or click the link in the show notes. Okay, back to the show. So should we feel an obligation to vote? Is it really our civic duty then?
SPEAKER_01I don't think it is. I tend to think of more like you have a conditional duty. If you're going to vote, you should vote in an intelligent way. You should be informed. You should like really consider the complications of the questions that you're answering, you should consider the values that you're like, you know, be be a good voter. I would never never say like to borrow a phrase from Brian Kaplan who I mentioned before, we never say to people, it doesn't matter if you don't know anything about surgery, the important thing is that you make your cut. But we do say, it doesn't matter if you don't know anything about politics, the important thing is that you vote. Why? Why think that? Why not instead think that like if you're an uninformed voter, you're effectively polluting the system?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So people usually say something like this, well, you you have a civic duty to vote because politics depends upon people voting. Well, it depends upon people voting well. It doesn't really help well if you if you're voting badly. But frankly, there's lots of other things that we do to make the world a better place besides voting. If you're a full-time nurse, or frankly a full-time motorcycle mechanic, you're doing a lot more society by doing your work than you are by voting. Right. And I think we don't give enough credit to that. So I think a lot of our ideas of what it is to be a civically good citizen are written by professional political philosophers who obsess about politics all day. And they're like, what we do is really the best thing, and the rest of you suck compared to us. And I'm like, no, if you're volunteering, you know, working at your PTA at your school, reading to people on the side, working a productive job, like being a stay-at-home parent who raises your children who are going to be good members of society, I think these are all amazing contributions to the welfare of our country. And I think they count as instances of civic virtue. And so really when you look at the arguments that people give about why you ought to vote, most of them don't really specifically pick out voting. They just show voting as maybe one of many ways of discharging an underlying duty. Like so if someone says, fight injustice, cool, there's lots of ways of fighting injustice besides voting. Help the welfare of your fellow citizens, great. There's all sorts of ways of doing that besides voting. What's so special about voting? You know, people make an argument like this, they go, well, if nobody voted, it would be a disaster. That's true. Maybe, I don't know. If no one voted, it would be a disaster, so therefore you should vote. Well, you know what? If no one farmed, it would be an even bigger disaster. It doesn't follow that you should be a farmer. If no one were a medical doctor, that would be a disaster. It doesn't follow you should be a doctor. Which just follows that we need enough people doing it pretty well. You know, what's the optimal number? It's probably more than seven. Probably not everybody. Somewhere in between seven and three hundred million. You can narrow it down.
SPEAKER_00As as a woman, I mean, because I understand what you're saying. Like I I agree with the idea that voting is not like, you know, a shortcut for the things that we aren't happy with in society. But as a woman, I do feel like this. I'll be honest, it feels like a a like kind of a fear, like a threat feeling of like, well, God, if I, you know, we're getting some reversals here in society on our reproductive rights, you know, this this could this could impact me. For that reason, I'm kind of like, well, yeah, I do feel obligated to vote, even though I equally run into this issue of being myself an unformed voter.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, if you could unilaterally protect rights, like if your vote really going to be pivotal, that would be a big deal. But what if it isn't? You know, so I imagine uh just as an analogy, you turn on the TV and you hear Sarah McLaughlin singing, and you see some starving children, and you go, I really feel bad for those kids starving. Um, I really feel like I need to do something. That's like the mass starvation around the world is a real problem. And so then you take some food and you put it in a bottle and you throw it in the ocean with the hopes that it will wash across the sea and land in front of some starving kid, right? Or you throw it at the ground with the hopes that it will quantum tunnel through the earth and appear on the other side. Right? The the cause that you're concerned about is really high, but the action that you're undertaking to try to fix it, it's it's basically like throwing food away. Voting, unfortunately, is kind of like that on an individual scale. Like your probability of like the probability that you will personally protect women's reproductive rights through your voting, it's not zero, but it's not very high. It's kind of on par with the probability that like if you throw food in a bottle and put it in the ocean, it will wash up in front of somebody. So there's other things you can do that have a much higher chance of helping that cause and have like a bigger kind of bang for your buck. Now, again, it is important that we have enough people vote, but it doesn't necessarily mean everyone does. And actually for this reason, there are people who they don't like the epistocracy proposal, but they like maybe another idea of like how to modify democracy. Oftentimes this is called lautocracy, or there's some other words for it, sortition. It's what the Greeks used to do, and it has some flaws too, by the way. But uh, they would say things like, look, under our current kind of regime with voluntary voting, one of the problems we have is that it's disproportionate. So for instance, old people vote at much higher rates than like middle-aged or young people. So maybe for that reason, the politics tends to favor the prejudices and or interests of old people. It used to be the case that white people voted at a higher rate than black people, that doesn't appear to be true anymore. It used to be that men voted at a higher rate than women, that doesn't appear to be true anymore, but there are some other sort of demographic disparities. So what if instead of just having voluntary voting, everyone votes when they feel like it, and then we get these disparities where this group is overrepresented, this group is underrepresented, what if we instead had a lottery? Everyone is equally eligible to vote, but about a week before the election takes place or the referendum takes place, 20,000 people are selected to vote, and they and only they get to vote. We even pay them to vote. You get $2,000 or something like that. If we did that, a couple interesting things. One is the number of people who would vote would actually be more representative of the country as a whole than what we get under our current regime. Statistically speaking, 20,000 randomly selected people is a better poll than just letting anyone vote who wants to. We get less of a disparity in things like income and so on. And maybe they would take their votes more seriously because your vote matters more.
SPEAKER_00I was just gonna say, from a psychological standpoint, that's kind of like, you know, I've got the golden ticket, like there's a I uh oh my gosh, I got picked, and then you're getting paid, and you know, money is energy, so then you try to perform to the level of air quotes energy, aka money that you've received. So that's an interesting idea. Is there an idea floating around that we could vote on issues instead of parties so that the people would have more like direct and more clear-cut, you know, line of sight to what is the issue at hand instead of voting for individuals who supposedly represent our best interests?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, uh, you see something like that maybe in Switzerland, where there's a lot more voting on policies, but Switzerland's also kind of a weird place, and it's a lot of it voting on like local politics and not big national politics. Part of the complication that with that though is that most of us aren't using issues the way that we tend to think. You know, what we teach our kids in school, like my my you know, my younger son is learning in like middle school right now is that this is how democracy works. I have values, I learn how the world works, I form an ideology on the basis of that, I vote for the party that matches my ideology. Everyone does this as a result on election day. The will of, if not the people, at least a large segment of the population gets put in place. Probably isn't none of that's probably true. What tends to happen instead is we mostly use politics as a form of signaling. And so this is gonna sound controversial, but I think it's true. It's more likely that the typical Democrat is pro-choice because they are a Democrat than that they are a Democrat because they are pro-choice. Right? So it's typically people kind of look around and go, what do people like me do for voting? I want to make sure that people like me. So, you know, being from the Boston area when I was growing up, I would wear like a Red Sox t-shirt or a Patriots t-shirt. This is back when the Patriots sucked. They were they were good after I got to be, you know, they weren't good till I was 21. So I wear like a Patriots t-shirt or a Red Sox t-shirt, and people would go, Oh, you're one of us. I like you. I'm gonna be your friend. I'm gonna buy you a beer at the bar. I mean, I've literally had people like buy me drinks because of the sports stuff that I'm wearing.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01So it's a signaling thing. I'm showing I'm a loyal member of my community. Well, one other thing that people do is they show their loyal members of their community by sharing their politics. And so most people, it turns out, just end there. They just look around and go, Well, uh, I don't know, other Boston Irish Catholic people vote Democrat. I guess I'll vote Democrat too. Uh, some of those people go a little bit further and they find out what the Democratic Party stands for and they copy it. But then when the party changes, they change. This is actually some of our best evidence for this point. I'll give you some examples. Um, the Republican Party in 2016, uh, as of January, is nominally in in favor of free trade. Donald Trump becomes the presumptive nominee of the party. You interview and poll the exact same people that were polled and not just random people, the same people that were polled in January around May, and ask them, What do you think about free trade? They say that they're protectionist. Okay, maybe they changed their minds. So you ask them the question, why did you change your mind? And they say, What are you talking about? I've always thought this. They're not lying, they're just wrong. They're sincere, but they're wrong. And it's the same thing as like Jimmy down at the Lansdown pub next to Fenway Park. If you ask him about like a player, six months ago he thinks that guy's great, but when he leaves us to go play for the Yankees, he's gonna be like, uh, I always thought he was overrated. It's the same psychology.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, sour grapes. That's that's my grandmother called that sour grapes. When you're like, I didn't I didn't want to hang out with you anyway. But it's really that like primal mammal thing. I you in your book, you said the human brain was designed more for winning arguments and forming coalitions than seeking truth. And I was like, oh my God, that's so true. And this is what turns me and people like me away from politics. It feels like trying to look for rationale among bickering teenage girls. You know, it just doesn't seem possible. You also talked in your book about an MRI. It was like a study or something where people's brains were scanned by an MRI, and it showed that their perceptions changed in order to conform to the political group, like you just said. So wouldn't this be like evidence to support the idea that a system without teams, if you will, would be more supportive of critical thinking and thought freedom?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think I think you're right that teams are a bad thing. Parties are generally there, there's all these books arguing on behalf of why parties are good, and there are some things to be said for them, but generally speaking, I think parties are bad. It's probably not going to be the case that we can get rid of them because people are naturally gonna form groups and we don't, you know, we couldn't really pass a law saying no political parties. It's not clear that but what you could do is lower the impact of parties by having more.
SPEAKER_00So Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And so uh to kind of give an analogy that I like to use, the French philosopher and novelist Voltaire said he was he was visiting England back in the early 1700s, and he was shocked at how open-minded and liberal and tolerant it was for its time. He said, like, you know, people there, you go like around the London Stock Exchange, and like all these different Christian sects that in France hate each other are like getting along and they get along with Muslims and they get along with Jewish people, and like how do they do that? And he his idea was something like this when you have one major religion, it has a tendency to just it it wants to maintain its power, so it stifles all dissent and crushes everybody. When you've got two major religions, all they have to do is defeat the other side and then they get to be the dictator. So they fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. When you have 30, you just have to learn to live and let live. You have to get along with people. And so I think you have something like that going on in the US. Almost everyone is a Democrat or Republican. Yes, there are other parties, but they they don't matter for reasons we'll get into maybe in a second. And as a result, you just have to crush that other party, and then you win, you get to have power forever. But if we had 30 major political parties, you couldn't do the thing that people do. Like, I'm only going to be friends with people in my party, I'm only gonna work with people I agree with. You'd be stuck just having to live and let live with people that are different from you. And the reason we have two major parties is because of our voting system. We we use what's called first past the post-voting, which means whichever person gets the most votes wins. If there's 25 candidates and you get two votes and everyone else gets one, congratulations, you're the winner. This statistically predicts that you'll have two major parties. What tends to happen is if a third party rises up, it does so to replace one of the other parties. It's called Derverger's Law. It's a statistical artifact of our voting system. When this voting system was put into place, people did not know that that was there. Now, to be clear, the Republicans and Democrats do know about this. They're very well aware of it, and as a result, it's extremely unlikely you're going to find a mass movement among Democrats and Republicans to replace our system with a different voting system. But if you had, say, proportional voting or other kinds of voting systems, what you'd end up having is more parties. And as a result, you'd have to get along with people more. You'd you'd have more choices to look at. It'd be harder for you to just peg your identity to one party and do whatever they say. So, in in principle, you know how to solve it because we could copy a lot of what happens in Europe with like proportional voting systems, but it won't happen because the parties in power have a vested interest. They agree that changing our voting system is bad for them. They like, they don't like the other side, but they would rather have a duopoly than have real competition. So it's it's not likely to change, even though it could be it could be changed tomorrow. It's easy, but it won't.
SPEAKER_00I I am so intrigued by the cross-section of philosophy and social studies and psychology. Like I've always been interested in psychology and social studies, but philosophy, well, we didn't get it in school. So I guess I wouldn't know if I was interested in it, but it's just so interesting how you can't subtract human behavior from any issue. Like you have to consider that as a part of the equation, which leads me to my next question. How do you think histocracy or some of the other ideas you've thrown out today would lean in on our primal lizard brain? Oh my God, there's a threat. I must vote for this party, even though I don't agree with all of them, because if I don't, XYZ will happen and XYZ is bad. And you know, the debates are just a freaking joke, right? Like it's it's basically another version of reality TV. They might as well be desperate housewives. So how do you think that would change, or would it, if we had some form of avistocracy?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think you would improve it because at the end of the day, these parties are running candidates with the goal of getting power, right? They want to and they're going to run their campaigns based upon what it takes to win in the system that they have. So if you are running on an enlightened preference model, you know, you're trying to win this election, like who would the enlightened public want? You would have the parties running different types of advertisements, different candidates, different policies, and so on. So if people ask, like, well, you know, in 2016, who would have won an enlightened preference model, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? It's like, neither. They wouldn't have been the candidates, it would have been someone else. And frankly, this is not special to my proposal. It's true for really any kind of political change. The way parties campaign is endogenous to the way the system is run. You know, so this is why, for instance, um, people say things like in 2016, didn't Hillary Clinton win the uh popular vote and uh Trump lost? And like, no, she didn't, because there's no such thing as the popular vote. And it's not being nitpicky, it's actually a really important point. The Republican Party knows it's not going to win California, so it doesn't make sense for it to like campaign hard there to get people to turn out, even though there's a very large number of Republicans in California. And if you're a Republican in California, you know the party's not gonna, like the state's not gonna go your way. It doesn't make sense for you to bother vote. And then similar things happen in, say, Arkansas, if you're a Democrat, it doesn't make sense to bother vote. And so the turnout we get and the way that the campaign is run is based upon the fact that we have an electoral college. If we didn't have an electoral college, it would have been run differently. We might have different candidates, we might have run, we have different results. So this this is just a general point about changing politics. If what it takes, if you're trying to appeal to an enlightened voter, you're going to give different types of ads than if you're not. And by the way, I I just as an example of enlightenment not working, I remember uh I was in 2011, I was in Australia during their federal election and I was watching the advertisements that they were putting up. And I remember the Liberal Party had this interesting ad against the Green Party that went like this The Greens have a proposal for a policy. They might be right, but we don't really have enough evidence for it right now. We need to get more evidence. So for now, we should forbear from doing this and until we get the evidence comes in. And I remember thinking, that is the smartest political ad I've ever seen. Well, the liberals lost.
SPEAKER_00I was really hoping you were gonna do that in an Australian accent. I am very disappointed right now.
SPEAKER_01You know, I can do accents if I hear them first and they can keep doing them for a while.
SPEAKER_00But if I if I don't have a prompt, you mean my Midwestern accent isn't helping you at all?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, you're lucky you don't have a Boston accent anymore. I my have a twin brother, and he sounds exactly like Ted Kennedy. So somehow the fact that I'm comprehensible at all is is a blessing, I guess.
SPEAKER_00That is so interesting. Well, as we wrap up, I just have a couple more questions for you. And one of them is about what you talked about in your book, the fairness doctrine, which prior to 1987, the fairness doctrine meant that broadcast channels had to, had to present both sides of an argument when covering a topic presented to the general public. And then Reagan discontinued that in 87. So this question is about how do we even get accurate information, right? If someone wants to make smarter votes, how do they even gather that information, A, in an unbiased way, and B from sources that they can trust?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Great question. I mean, frankly, it's really hard to do that. And there's not like an easy path. One thing I would say though is focusing on the news is probably not the right way to do it because the news is giving you particular facts, and it's often, you know, it's taught by journalists, and journalists are not social scientists. So understanding the meaning of a fact requires a kind of deeper type of knowledge. So I'd really recommend people do is if you really want to be an informed voter, study political science, study economics, study history. Uh, there's a lot of bias there, but if the more of this you see, the more you can kind of start seeing, like, well, what might the biases be? How can I kind of overcome them? And you start getting some general theories to like peg these facts upon. And also, you know, one thing there's always this thing about testimony. If someone gives you a statement that's contrary to their interest, it's more likely to be true than if it's in on behalf of their interests. You know, so for people will say things like, for instance, the political psychology that I cite in the book, they're like, well, political psychologists, aren't they all like really left-wing and like, you know, basically shills for the Democratic Party? And it's like, yes, but interestingly, they are, that's true. But interestingly, when they do these studies on political psychology, they overwhelmingly find that Democratic voters are worse than Republican voters in all the things that they're measuring. That's against their self-interest. So it starts to give some credibility to what they're saying because they're not just pushing for their side in these studies. So if you can sometimes you can use these heuristics like that, you know, if a person, if a person says to you, here's my study, and the study implies you should give me money and power, you're like, I don't know about that. But if it's just the opposite, then uh then it starts being more plausible. But frankly, if you want to be an informed voter, you know, start reading economics. And after you get that, get some basic political science down. And then after you have those two things, then read history. Don't start with history. Do history next. Then you might have a real sense of how the world works. And then you can kind of like when people give you facts, you might be able to ask the right questions about the veracity of these facts or like what the impact of these facts is.
SPEAKER_00Hmm. This has been such a fun topic. I think that's the perfect segue to have you share about your new book. You have written like, what, 17 of them, but your newest one is more of a historical overview.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I just had a book come out called Democracy a Guided Tour. And it really is a history of ideas for people that don't care about history of ideas. Like me, I'm not I'm not a history of ideas kind of person. I care about arguments and evidence and data, but not not history of who said what per se. So what the book does is look at five major sets of values, things like stability, freedom, equality, the virtue of citizens, and the wisdom of the crowd and the quality of their decision making, and look at all the major historical arguments for and against democracy in the West over the past 2,500 years, going back to Plato and coming to yesterday, right? So it's sort of like a crash course and everything that you can be said for and against democracy. It doesn't take my stance, it doesn't take any particular stance, but if you wanted to really get a short, quick, accessible understanding of like everything to be said for and against it, like that's one place to go.
SPEAKER_00Well, thank you. This was fantastic, and I look forward to keeping in touch. Thank you again.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for listening. Since you've made it this far, I'd like to invite you to be a part of my private Facebook group. And there I post content that I don't share anywhere else. You can talk to me directly, and I even do occasional giveaways. Search MFR Curious Insiders on Facebook or click the link in the show notes. If you liked this episode, you'll also like the one about virtue signaling. That is episode 136. Stay tuned next week for a remastered favorite asking why so many people are completely unfazed by official UFO disclosure. Until then, keep it curious.