Intro. (Recording date: September 5, 2024.)
Russ Roberts: Today is September 5th 2024, and my guest is economist and author Arnold Kling. His Substack is In My Tribe. This is Arnold’s 19th appearance on EconTalk. He was last here in December of 2022, talking about Twitter, FTX, and ChatGPT. And boy, that seems like a long time ago. Arnold, welcome back to EconTalk.
Arnold Kling: Hi. Thanks, Russ.
Russ Roberts: Our topic for today is misinformation. We’ll probably end up talking about disinformation as well. And, if we have time, we will return to Arnold’s essential book The Three Languages of Politics, which we’ve spoken about on this program a number of times.
One way to frame the discussion on misinformation is that a lot of people right now are frustrated that too many people believe things that aren’t true, and we need to fix that somehow. And, you recently wrote a brief essay at your Substack on this question, basically saying, ‘Not so fast.’ What are the issues and what’s your take on it?
Arnold Kling: I guess I think it’s better to think of this in terms of there not being a precise outcome of, ‘Here’s truth and we’re going to find it.’ Or, ‘Here’s truth and we’re going to articulate it.’ But, that there’s a process of searching for truth. And, in that process, lots of things that turn out to be wrong are going to be in the air and believed. And, the history of science is full of that. Anyone who is familiar with the history of science knows that what people believed in–let’s say, 1800–got superseded by what they believed in 1850, by what they believed in 1900, and so on.
So, to me, the right way to think about the pursuit of truth or sort of weeding out misinformation is it’s a process; and it’s a gradual process. And, part of that process is letting different ideas contest with one another. And so, I think that was, in some sense, what I was trying to say in that post.
Russ Roberts: I think it’s in Dickens, I can’t remember which novel and I can’t get the quote quite right, but it’s basically–and if anybody out there knows this quote, I would love to hear it. The quote was something like, ‘Half of what we believe isn’t true. The problem is we don’t know which half.’ And, that’s implausible to most of us, right? When we think about our own beliefs, we think, ‘Well, I’m willing to accept the possibility that something I believe isn’t true. But, of course, most of what I believe is true–almost all of it–and certainly important things.’ And, the idea that we might be wrong about many, many things, including important ones, makes us deeply uncomfortable. And so, we, I think, look for ways to improve that.
Arnold Kling: Yeah. There’s a quote, and I’m sorry I don’t remember who it’s from, but it’s: ‘Trust people who seek the truth. Don’t trust people who say they’ve found it.’
Russ Roberts: Wow.
Arnold Kling: So, the point is, people who claim to have found it are actually the most dangerous people. And, that’s in some sense why the fight against misinformation is a problem, because people who want to censor are in effect saying, ‘I have found truth, and I know that this belief here is not true. And, my finding is so powerful that I claim the right to censor this belief that I think is misinformation.’
So, this phrase, ‘Trust people who seek the truth. Don’t trust people who claim to have found it,’ would say, ‘Well, you really should not trust anyone to censor. You only trust people who are willing to have ideas be contested.’
Russ Roberts: And you frame this in your essay as a conflict between process and outcomes. The outcome being: certain things are deemed to be true or not true. The process is how we get there. And, I guess, not surprisingly for an economist, you are more of a process guy. I find myself in a similar position. We trust the process even though we know it’s flawed.
One of the challenges of having principles–versus, say, going on a case-by-case basis–is that sometimes it looks like there’s obviously a bad idea in this particular case to invoke your principles and live by them. And so, you want to violate them a little bit in this one case–because it’s so obviously wrong.
And, it’s really the same issue that comes up in economic policy: rules versus discretion. Rules seem like a good idea, but certainly discretion would be better because then when the rule doesn’t really apply, you can fix it. What’s wrong with that seductive power of discretion or of fixing a process or ignoring your principles? Why isn’t that a better policy than your process-oriented one?
Arnold Kling: Well, I think philosophically it’s always a tough case to make. In fact, philosophers, I think, would have difficulty making these distinctions between rules and discretion. I mean, there’s a whole body of work on utilitarianism–of rule-utilitarianism versus act-utilitarianism, and can you really distinguish them?
And I think, similarly, if you really struggled hard, you thought carefully, you might have a hard time making this process/outcome distinction in a precise way.
But, what I do mean by it is that if you shut down the process of truth-seeking, which means allowing people–so, if you shut it down, you’re saying a certain set of beliefs, we’re just going to try to censor and block rather than let it compete and let people decide for themselves–that shutting down that process does not justify an outcome.
So, maybe a classic example of that, just to bring it more concrete, would be Holocaust denial. So, there are people out there who deny that the Holocaust took place; and there are a lot of people who are so angry about that Holocaust denial that they want to punish people for doing it. And, there have been famous cases of that.
Russ Roberts: I think it’s illegal in Europe in a way that it’s not in the United States.
Arnold Kling: Yeah. Certainly in the United Kingdom. I mean, isn’t that the David Irving–
Russ Roberts: Deborah Lipstadt case, I think. Yeah.
Arnold Kling: Yeah. And, despite being completely against Holocaust denial, I would absolutely defend to the death, so to speak, the right of the Holocaust denier to make their case. And, that’s again, because I value that process, even though I would abhor the particular outcome of people disbelieving the Holocaust.
Russ Roberts: So, you and I are big fans of competition in economics. We’re big fans of the power of trial-and-error, which is a particular process. And, the profit-and-loss system is a way to adjudicate what’s a good innovation versus a bad one. And, we both like that a lot.
One thing that gives me a little bit of pause–I’m not in favor of any kind of censorship. Like you, I would defend to the death, the right of people to say things that I think are stupid–even immoral or evil–as long as it’s just saying it rather than intimidating people with it or threatening to harm them. And yet, in this particular case, one might argue that the underlying feedback loops that make the process powerful, work in the economic example but not in the information example.
So, in the case of economic innovation–profit-and-loss or feedback loops that adjudicate between which projects will proceed and which will be terminated–you can lose money for a while, and you can even borrow money or continue to fund a project that’s a loser out of your own pocket, in hopes that it will turn around. But, eventually, a project that can’t cover its costs will eventually go out of business.
Is that true in the case of information? And, what I want to argue–at least to put on this coat for a minute–is that if people hold the beliefs they do about how the world works based not on their truthfulness but on how it makes them feel, because their identity–I’ll say our identity, because I think we all have this challenge–rely on this belief being true: Is it really true that the give and take and competition between good ideas and bad ideas, that the good will out, the way they do, in, say, the economic process? I’m becoming a little cynical about that in the social media world.
Arnold Kling: I agree that there isn’t this sort of obvious profit and loss. Sort of a weak claim you can make is that having a correspondence with the truth helps. Like, if you really deny that gravity exists and you jump out of the 14th story of a building, the truth will hit you.
But, there are certainly large realms of human thinking, beliefs, whatever, where you’re just not going to get punished for believing something that’s dogmatic or even perhaps false. An example of dogma that the logical empiricists would like to cite and say, that belief in God, that: Is that true? Is that untrue? You can’t really say. You can’t test it empirically. It isn’t sort of a logical proposition. So, people can hold onto a belief that’s not testable in any way, for kind of as long as they want to.
I guess the more interesting cases are things that sound like, in principle, testable. There either were millions of Jews killed in World War II in death camps, or not. That one, it seems strange to be on the denial side of something that seems so factually provable.
Russ Roberts: Well, I mean, that’s an interesting case, right? I’d say there’s dozens and dozens of things in your worldview and mine that are roughly of that character. And, why we think it’s ludicrous to believe, say, that the Holocaust didn’t happen or that the moon landing was staged–for example, that there’s some people believe that. If we had to make an ironclad case for our side of it, we can do it, we can make a strong case.
But, it’s interesting to me that most of us–and I’ve read many books on the Holocaust, so it’s not the greatest example. But let’s take the moon landing. I’ve read no books on the moon landing. I was 15 years old; I remember watching it on TV (television). Could have been a TV studio. TV in those days–there wasn’t AI (artificial intelligence) and Photoshop and editing of the kind we have now–but it’s a blurry picture, it’s a black and white TV, maybe, or even doesn’t matter. How do I really know that happened? And, part of the reason I, quote, “know that happened” is that people–I’d like to hear, why do you think you know that happened? It’s a little tricky. I’m pretty confident–
Arnold Kling: I have a saying that we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. And, I think part of that is you get a buildup of credibility. Right? So, if your parents are telling you things that are true, and they do for the most part, earlier in your life, and you trust them.
Russ Roberts: ‘Don’t touch the stove. It’s hot.’
Arnold Kling: Yeah. Yeah. Your teachers–and, your first teachers tend to tell you things that are true; and they can demonstrate them. They show you two plus two equals four by showing you blocks and putting them together. So, they show you things.
So, I think that’s it. And, I think there are enough people who’ve built up credibility with me, who believe that the moon landing happened, that that had happened.
I’ll give you another, just a weird example of–because it’s very much on my mind. We’ve had spikes in our water meter about once a year, where all of a sudden it’s showing thousands of gallons being used. And I caught one about a week ago where it said we used 16,000 gallons of water in a week–and it was actually a week where we were away from the house.
And, so I’m having this argument with the water company over it, and the water company says, ‘You have a leak.’ And I said, ‘Well, here are my reasons why I don’t think it’s a leak. Number one, it seemed to fix itself.’ Right? The following week, we were down to 100 gallons when we were out of town. And, there’s no water damage anywhere in the house. So, 16,000 gallons of water came out of a plumbing leak.
So, I’m trying to fight the misinformation coming from my water company telling me about it like–oh, and then the third thing is, ‘You have no evidence of a leak. You haven’t seen a leak. You’re just telling me I have a leak’ without–‘
Russ Roberts: Well, it’s a beautiful example.
Arnold Kling: Yeah. So, how do you settle something like this? I mean, what’s interesting is our water company is not only a monopoly, it’s a self-regulating monopoly–meaning they adjudicate any dispute with the customer.
Russ Roberts: Can we talk about this–
Arnold Kling: So, not a good process, as I would say. I mean, a process: there has to be some contestability, I think.
Russ Roberts: You’re facing a dogmatic opponent who has a religious belief in the accuracy of the meter, right?
Arnold Kling: No, they say, ‘Our meters absolutely track water going through them. We have absolute confidence in our meters.’ Yes.
Russ Roberts: So, your challenge would be to find evidence that the meter is not accurate. Their challenge would be to come–if this really became a more interesting case, they’d have to come to your house and identify the leak. And, you’d say, ‘Well, I don’t see one, maybe I’m self-interested. Maybe you’re lying.’ So, they could look. They don’t see a leak. They don’t see any water damage. And then, they would, of course say, ‘But, our meters never fail.’ And so, the burden of proof would shift to you. How big is the bill for a 16,000 gallon week?
Arnold Kling: Well, they bill quarterly, but when it shows up in the bill, it’ll probably be on the order of $1,000 or more.
Russ Roberts: Compared to a usual month or quarter of–
Arnold Kling: The usual quarter of, like, $150.
Russ Roberts: So, you have a strong incentive to find the truth here and to dispute the other side. If I were you–and now there’s a big payoff to being a guest on EconTalk, Arnold; this is really useful–I would get on Twitter and say, ‘Is anybody from Maryland experiencing spikes in their meter?’ It would be unusual that yours would be the only meter that malfunctions. It could be true.
Arnold Kling: Yeah. Well, the equivalent of Twitter locally is a local listserv that my wife is on. And, there are plenty of people with complaints about the water company; but they’re all trying to deal with it individually. There’s no collective group that’s saying, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have a self-regulating monopoly. Maybe that’s not really the best way to handle consumer disputes.’ But–
Russ Roberts: It’s fascinating.
Russ Roberts: Let’s come back to social media, and the process and censorship issue. A lot of people right now are very upset about mistruths, untruths. It’s really a rather extraordinary moment, because there’s a Department of Justice suit now that accuses some people of accepting money from Russia to spread untruths. We have people who, of course, pursue listeners and likes and other forms of well-being by having controversial people on their programs who say things that are untrue–including that Churchill was the chief villain of World War II, recently claimed on the Tucker Carlson show on X. Who knew? I always thought it was Hitler, but okay, different opinion.
And, as we opened with, this makes people uncomfortable. And, there has been some self-regulation by the platforms. Meta, famously–or Facebook–has some kind of Board or something that does this. Elon Musk is famous for at least claiming he’s, quote, “Anything goes, short of threats of violence.” What’s your take on this? Should we just let a thousand flowers bloom, or should there be some kind of standards? Musk has introduced Community Notes, which is an interesting–small–attempt to correct mistakes. People can make claims about inaccuracies in various tweets. But, what are your thoughts?
Arnold Kling: Yeah. I guess, I do prefer a sort of softer, more bottom-up approach to regulation. The problem is when you say, ‘These ideas should be censored,’ you’re really talking in the passive voice. In the active voice, you would say, ‘Person A should be entitled to censor person B.’ And, once you say it in the active voice, I think you can realize how problematic it would be. That is, you’re giving somebody power to suppress ideas as opposed to trying to give them the ability to make corrections or to put–there’s a catchphrase among free speech advocates, is that: ‘The answer to hate speech is more speech.’ And, I think that doesn’t sound very satisfying; but I think it’s the best you can do, is to just make sure that alternative ideas can get out there and compete.
And, they may not win. Bad ideas may win and they may win with a large group of people. The old story: You can fool some of the people some of the time, or all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time. And, you just have to hope that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Russ Roberts: I think, for me, the issue I have with censorship is–I think when I was younger I would have said what you said. I don’t mean to suggest that I’ve now become older and wiser than you, Arnold, which is certainly not true. And, I think both statements are false.
Arnold Kling: We’re the same age.
Russ Roberts: How old are you?
Russ Roberts: Yeah, I’m 69. I don’t turn 70 for a week and a half. So, you’re older.
Arnold Kling: You’ll hit a wall. Trust me, you’re going to hit a wall.
Russ Roberts: So, but I think the argument is now–and let’s see if you think it’s a better argument, or at least to augment yours, or worse–it’s the same argument I would make about rent-seeking and giving regulatory power to anybody. We generally don’t think it’s a good idea to have an autocrat decide who wins and who loses in industrial policy, or what businesses should open or close. And, one of the reasons is because they’re not smart enough. But, the second reason is, is that if you have someone like that, they get corrupted. People start paying them money that has nothing to do with the core mission that they were put in place for.
And the idea that somehow there could be–I mean, it’s deeply appealing; it’s just deeply false, in my view–that you could have somebody who is so wise and such a truth seeker that that person would reliably rule: ‘You don’t need a Board and you don’t need Community Notes. You just need a really smart person.’ Somebody would even say, ‘AI can do this. We don’t need humans.’ And, all you need is for that person or entity to decide what’s true and false. And, false things would be erased and true things would be promoted.
So, for me, I don’t think those people exist. I think everyone’s corruptible. Everyone. And, it would be very dangerous to give someone that authority. I don’t think they would carry out their mission well. What do you think?
Arnold Kling: Yeah, I agree with that. You have two problems. Once you put it in active voice and say, ‘So-and-so is the censor,’ or, ‘This board is the censoring board,’ then they could be unwise and they also could be immoral. Immoral in the sense of, like you say, being corruptible, either acting in their own interests or being bribed to act in someone else’s interests.
Russ Roberts: What are your thoughts on COVID (COronaVIrus Disease) as an example of this? And, again, maybe it’s my bias, I think we made a lot of missteps in how we controlled the information about COVID. Not the disease itself: A lot of things were censored, literally sometimes by platforms under the influence of the government, sometimes probably on their own. And beliefs that were contrary to the mainstream or the elite or the expert views or the announced policies were generally suppressed. And, maybe it’s because some of those people are my friends–but, that seems like an extraordinary blunder that we made with respect to, say, school closings for small children, or many, many different aspects of COVID policy.
I also feel like I’m alone–with a few friends–in thinking that that was a terrible set of missteps. Why is it that the people who promulgated those restrictions have not announced that they messed up? That they were wrong? Do they think it’s not true, or do they just want to keep it quiet that they messed up? Or, maybe they didn’t mess up and I’m wrong?
Arnold Kling: Well, I think, part of the motive–so, you can have several motives for wanting to suppress a story. Let’s say, suppress the idea that the virus could have come from a lab leak.
Okay, you could have a motivation that you’re trying to tamp down what you think is a conspiracy theory. You genuinely think that that couldn’t have happened and you’re just trying to tamp down something that you say, ‘Oh, this is going to be very attractive to people because it puts a blame in a particular location, particular set of people,’ versus ‘It happened kind of spontaneously in this wet market.’ So, that might be a good motivation.
But you have potentially other motivations as, ‘We are scientists who like to get grant money to do something called gain-of-function research. Which we know sounds bad to people, but we really think that, you know, it’s worthwhile science, and for some of us, our incomes depend on it, so we care.’
And then the third motivation is just status: ‘We want to maintain the status of scientists. And the status of scientists will go down if this horrible pandemic can be blamed on scientists messing up.’
And I actually think that that third motive is a big driver. And, that that motive helps account for the unwillingness to admit a mistake. Because, I think that scientists don’t–that these professional scientists want to maintain their status as much as possible. They feel their status is threatened by these alternative stories.
And so they–the notion of, ‘We as scientists made a mistake,’–it’s a very difficult thing for them to do because it would lower their status.
Now, what I would say is that you’re actually lowering your status even more by not owning up to a mistake. But it’s not human nature: It goes a little bit against human nature to have people own up to mistakes.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. And, we talked about that, that episode with Megan McArdle. And, I would also mention–I don’t think we had an episode on it, but I’ve had Gary Greenberg on the show a few times, and he has a very powerful book called The Noble Lie, which I recommend, where he talks about how people self-suppress the truth. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not an organized cabal of people trying to maintain status or influence, but through what people convinced themselves that for good reasons they have to say something that isn’t true. An example would be not informing a patient that they’ve got a terminal illness. For example, in the past that was considered compassionate; now less so; but at the time that would be a noble lie. And, I think, in fact–
Arnold Kling: So, we tell noble lies to ourselves–
Russ Roberts: Absolutely. And, so, we tell noble lies to ourselves. It’s really an example of the bootlegger and Baptist problem. I’ve got a self-interested motive–long-time listeners, of course, know the bootlegger and Baptist problem–but the idea is that Baptists are against drinking on Sunday because it’s the Lord’s day, which is a laudable motive for some; and bootleggers are against sales of liquor on Sunday because they want to sell illegal liquor out of the back of their car. That’s not such an attractive motive. So, politicians mention the Baptists and then take money from the bootleggers.
And, of course, we do that as individuals. We have self-interested reasons for holding the views we do, and we have noble reasons. And, we often convince ourselves that the noble reasons are the reason we say what we do, when in fact it’s the self-interested ones.
So, this would be an example of that.
Arnold Kling: Just one related thing: You bring up Megan McArdle, and that made me think of–I’ve just read about a six-factor personality thing. People are familiar with maybe the five-factor personality model. And, the sixth factor that they have is something called an honesty-humility axis, or personality characteristic. Which is interesting is that it links those two together: the people who are most trustworthy to be honest, also have a lot of humility. And, I think that’s a very interesting thought.
I think the people who were sort of most involved in suppressing information about COVID probably were somewhat lacking in both the honesty and humility–were lacking in that linked trait. And so, they were just willing to lie in the first place and they don’t have the humility to then say, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’ And, Megan is someone who is, to me, very high in the honesty-humility trait, and you can just see that in her writing. She’s very undogmatic and often very humble. And so, that shows up there.
Russ Roberts: The episode with Megan McArdle is called “Megan McArdle on the Oedipus Trap,’ which is about the challenge of admitting mistakes. And, it was quite related to a lot of what we’re talking about.
Russ Roberts: I want to add one more thing to this issue about expertise and authorities in the aftermath of COVID, and I’m not going to name any names. But, I just wonder how, if you spent a long career in the halls of Congress as either an administrator or bureaucrat, a politician, that those traits of honesty and humility–the edges get rubbed off. Almost by definition you’re going to be less likely to admit error because it’s costly in the short run, and potentially the long run. There’s a certain game that’s played of survival, and if you want to rise in the ranks, you’ve got to have sharp elbows; and admitting you’re wrong is–you’d much rather try to convince people that the water meter just is infallible.
Arnold Kling: Yeah. Some of–
Russ Roberts: Go ahead.
Arnold Kling: Yeah. No, I think those are (?). I have a phrase: ‘You get what you select for in an organization.’ And, some organizations are just naturally going to select for people who are sort of low in this honesty-humility characteristic. And, that’s unfortunate.
Yeah. Maybe this is running a bit far afield, but I think in academia the selection process has slipped. I think it used to be very strong for people who were sort of open-minded, pursuing truth. And, I think that’s slipped. That, one way to think about it is: we have hierarchies, and a prestige hierarchy is generally a good thing. If I respect somebody because of what they know and what they can teach me, that’s a good thing.
The dominance hierarchy, where people can sort of threaten and use coercion or whatever power they have, is not such a good thing.
And I think somehow over the last 50 years, academics have switched somewhat from becoming a prestige hierarchy to a dominance hierarchy in various ways. And that sort of coincides with or causes what I think of as the deterioration in that world. And, maybe to some extent that’s happened in various bureaucracies that are related to academia, like–
Russ Roberts: Research–
Arnold Kling: NIH (National Institutes of Health) and stuff like that. That, there’s so much power available now in the funding of science, that you naturally select for people who really care about power.
Russ Roberts: Why do you think that’s happened to academic life? I’m worried you’re being a little bit romantic about past academics, but I think you’re correct. I have my own theory. I’ll let you go first. Why do you think that’s changed? If it has.
Arnold Kling: Yeah. I think, in part, just the amount of money that’s at kind of stake selects for people who are good at manipulating it. I mean, 50 years ago there was no development office at any university. Right? There was one person who, besides the president of the university, maybe, who was involved in fundraising. Now, it’s really like one of the most important offices in the whole university is the development office. And they’ve got all sorts of strategies and all sorts of employees and all sorts of projects going to bring money.
And, I think the process of getting grants from the government for research, similarly, is very–it used to be, and maybe I’m being romanticizing, but it was the professor who tried to fill out a grant proposal and tried to get a grant. Now, there’s all this overhead over them, and it’s a real industry of getting grants. So, I think that’s my first thought I could probably come up with (inaudible 00:37:57).
Russ Roberts: Well, I agree with part of that. The old joke–which doesn’t really make sense but it’s kind of funny–is: academic life is so petty because the stakes are so small. And, somewhere–
Arnold Kling: And they were smaller back then.
Russ Roberts: Oh, not just smaller, much smaller. When you have a world where the highest paid faculty member of a university makes 25%, 10%, 15% more than the lowest paid faculty member across departments or within a department, there’s really no point in trying too hard. And, to the extent you do try hard, it’s because you care about the subject and the work, and you’re passionate about it for its own sake.
That’s no longer true. Now, the stakes are quite large. Superstar faculty members make hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And, normally we would say, ‘Well, that would bring out the best people.’ We normally would say that high salaries attract high quality. But, you’re suggesting that isn’t happening here. Correct?
Arnold Kling: Yeah. Well, you get what you select for. And before, you were selecting for sort of the passionate intellectual, and now you’re selecting for the competitive, the sort of more ruthless intellectual. And it’s a different person.
Russ Roberts: Well, I would be even more cynical. I would say you select for people who can get lots of articles published in prestigious journals. And then, you would say, ‘Well, and that’s good, isn’t it?’ Except maybe that process is not so good at ferreting out truth–to come back to our main topic.
Russ Roberts: The episode we did with Adam Mastroianni on peer review–peer review has a great romance about it and is evidently not a very effective way of publishing things that are true. It’s a bad process.
Arnold Kling: Yeah. When you increase the value of what can be won by gaming the system, you increase the gaming of the system. So, ideally, you want people who are pursuing truth, open-minded, fair to other points of view. And the other type of people would be just focused on, ‘How can I game the system? How can I get those papers into those journals?’ And, we’ve created a situation where gaming the system is even necessary to sort of get on the tenure ladder; and then is also rewarded with, like you say, very big bucks near the top. So, we’ve really set it up so that the people who are most likely to survive in the academic environment are skilled at gaming the system.
Russ Roberts: Well, and some of them defraud the system, of course, which is fascinating, right? The amount of academic fraud–which I feel like in my youth was unheard of. I don’t know. It would be wildly weird that somebody would falsify their data. I mean, it would just be such a violation of the code. But, when there’s a lot of money at stake, violating the code gets more attractive. And, so, there’s a lot more fraud, which is weird.
Arnold Kling: Yeah. Although, in some ways, methods were not as good and sharp then. Right?
Russ Roberts: Yeah. That’s true.
Arnold Kling: People have taken a lot of the famous social psychology experiments of the 1950s and 1960s and debunked the methods by which they were done. Human nature was never perfect. We shouldn’t romanticize too much, like you say.
Russ Roberts: True. It’s true. (More to come, 42:10)
Russ Roberts: I want to shift gears. I want to turn to your extraordinary book, The Three Languages of Politics, which I think we’ve done at least two full episodes on it and we’ll put those up on the website of this episode. I think about your ideas in that book often. It came out, I think, in 2013–is that correct?
Arnold Kling: I put something online in 2013. It’s a very different environment in those days. We can talk about that. But go ahead.
Russ Roberts: Well, the book is–it’s relatively recent. But I think it had a–well, it had a profound effect on my–the way I look at the world. So, lay out the–briefly–the main idea: the three languages.
Arnold Kling: Okay. So, the simple story as I told it is, like: Let’s say there are three bad things in the world. That there’s oppression, barbarism, and government coercion. Let’s say they’re all bad things. Government coercion meaning that don’t want any people to do things against their will.
We would all say all those are all bad.
But then, we sort ourselves into political tribes and each tribe declares sort of ownership over what are the good versus bad things, and accuses the other tribes of being on the bad side.
So, the Conservative says, ‘We own the civilization-versus-barbarism framing. And, people who disagree with us, we will denounce as being on the side of barbarism.’
The Progressive will say, ‘In some sense we own the oppressor/oppressed framing, and we will demonize our enemies as being on the side of oppression.’
And, the Libertarians will say, ‘We’re on the liberty versus coercion framing, and we will denounce people who disagree with us as just wanting to have power and rule over us and see more people coerced. Their status or authoritarians.’
So, that’s one simple way of describing what I was writing then. And, then, I’m just putting a lot of emphasis on how this fits in with sort of tribalist thinking, and so on. Yeah, go ahead.
Russ Roberts: No, you go ahead.
Arnold Kling: So, I was thinking, I would say–let’s just say up until the Hamas attack on October 7th–I was thinking that that model was kind of deteriorating a little bit.
Russ Roberts: Hah–
Arnold Kling: And then, on October 7th, within weeks after that, you had one side–Progressives–sort of taking, surprisingly to me, anti-Israel, pro-Hamas stances, using I think the language of oppressor/oppressed, that regardless of what Hamas did on October 7th, Israel is inherently the oppressor and the Palestinians are the oppressed, and so we should take their side.
And then, conservatives immediately reacted with the civilization, which, ‘This is barbarism.’ They talked about this barbaric attack. And, a month or two ago when Netanyahu spoke to Congress, I don’t know if you watched that talk–
Russ Roberts: I did–
Arnold Kling: But within the first, I’d say, minute, he had used the civilization versus barbarism framing.
Russ Roberts: So, when the book came out in 2013–I just looked at my notes on the web–the first interview you and I did on it was 2013, right after it had come out. We revisited it in 2020.
Arnold Kling: By the way, it was not a physical book in 2015. It was just an online e-reader type thing.
Russ Roberts: And then, you revised it and it came out as a book. It came out as a book, it was revised, and we revisited it in 2020. And, I remember at the time–listeners can go back if they’re interested–challenging you that maybe it was, like you say, it was not deteriorating, but it didn’t seem to apply in the same way that it had. In the old days, 2013, I used to teach it, I’d say, ‘Let’s take immigration or police brutality.’ Police brutality: The progressive says, ‘The people are being beat up by the police–even if they’re criminals, they’re oppressed by a often racist or classist system. And, so, the victims of police brutality are often Black or poor and they’re oppressed, and we should side with them, not with the police.’
The conservative says, ‘If we let the police be beat up figuratively by critics, we’ll unleash barbarism; and we need to always preserve civilization.’ So, they tend to ignore police brutality or at least minimize it. And, I wrote an essay about the three blind spots of politics, because each side has trouble understanding, even accepting any of the other sides–which is silly. Each side has some truth to it.
And then the libertarian looks at it and says, ‘There’s too many laws against drugs and other things. These shouldn’t even be crimes. Police shouldn’t be involved.’
So, this story fit very well. But, what’s amazing to me–I want to say a couple things–one, everybody uses it now. I don’t know if it’s you or other people, but the oppressor/oppressed insight, which I thought was so deep when I first read it, is now everyone says, ‘Oh, of course.’ They literally think that way. They’re not described by the intellectual anthropologist Arnold Kling as focusing on the oppressor versus the oppressed. They say, ‘That’s the way I look at the world.’ In fact, that’s what woke ideology is, is seeing everything through that lens, as some people would say. So, it’s interesting to me that in a mere 11 years, your ideas, whether again it’s you or other people who had similar ideas, but it’s become so mainstream, it’s hardly novel. It’s not novel, and it’s just normal now. People just think it’s the way the world works.
The second thing is, is that the part that’s so strange about, for me, October 7th, is how this one issue, which is quite nuanced–should be somewhat nuanced. Israel and Palestinian interactions over the last 75 years is not nuanced. One of the insights, I think, of your framework is that everybody, once you have the glasses on, you only can see your own paradigm. And so, for supporters of Israel or supporters of the Palestinians, or–the idea of saying supporters of Hamas is so weird to me–but it’s become the way people look at the world. And, not just that: It’s the only issue.
If you had to pick the worst thing happening in the world, there are many things to choose from–but it’s for most people, this one, whether they’re Jewish, whether they’re Palestinian, no matter where they live, you have people in the halls of colleges this fall protesting and chanting about this one issue. It’s fascinating to me. It is an extraordinary thing. And so, I think, certainly the conservative/progressive part of it. For libertarians in this particular story, it’s more about: ‘Well, there shouldn’t be boundaries; national borders, anyway.’ I guess that’s the way they look at it. And so, ‘This whole thing would go away if we just got rid of those silly borders.’
But, for me, your book just totally gets this right. And, it’s why you can’t talk to your cousin or your neighbor, because your glasses are telling you one thing–everything you consume is telling you one thing–and your neighbor has got a different set of glasses on. And they’re orthogonal. That’s the other deep insight of your approach. It’s not so much that we disagree with each other that whether people are actually oppressed or whether this is really barbaric. It’s that I use this axis, you use this other one, and they don’t interact.
Arnold Kling: Yeah. It was originally a book about–the original puzzle of the book is, I look at all the content out there by pundits, by op-ed writers, by people on the Internet, and I ask myself, ‘Does this content–what’s its function? Does it persuade the other side? Does it try to change the minds of people on the other side? Does it try to change the minds of people on my own side?’ No. It looks like all it’s trying to do is to close the minds of the people on my own side. But, that is the function.
And this was true then, true now: just read everything and step back and think, ‘What is the impact of this particular piece of punditry, or this tweet, or whatever?’ And it is to close the minds with the people on your own side. I mean, that’s just a weird thing because you think, ‘Well, what should the purpose of all this writing and punditry be?’ And, if you just said in the abstract, ‘Well, what should be the purpose of writing op-eds and tweets, and so on?’ ‘Oh, you should be trying to change other people’s minds,’ or maybe trying to open up the minds of the people on your own side.
Russ Roberts: Or, find the truth, to come back to our opening conversation, right?
Russ Roberts: Of course, ‘I’m laying out a case that I think is true, and if you would just take an open look at it, you’d realize I’m right, you’re wrong, and change your mind. Okay?’
Arnold Kling: Yeah. So, the fact that it just serves that complete contrary purpose, it was a surprise.
And then, I just said, ‘Well, how do you manage to do that? How do you manage to talk past each other? How do you manage to even do punditry of that sort, where you’re closing the minds of people on your own side and not opening up the minds of people on the other side?’ And, so that gets to this what you call the orthogonality: that is, the incompatibility or the un-relatedness of these axes that, if you’re progressive, you can hear Netanyahu talk about civilization versus barbarism and it just blows right off you, because that’s not the framework that you use to look at the conflict.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. And, the other part I thought was profound about it is it explains intersectionality. So, if I know your view on one issue, I know your view on every issue, because you’re going to use that same lens. Right? You’re not going to go case by case, like we talked about earlier. You’re going to use your lens and everything is going to fit into that framework.
Now, why human beings find that comfortable is really interesting. I haven’t thought about that. Maybe you have.
Arnold Kling: Well, I think it makes it easier to maintain tribal alignment, because it would be very confusing to people if your tribe is with you on some things and against you on others. And, that kind of cognitive dissonance people try to avoid.
I’ve talked about the problem now for progressive Jews. We were talking to some people that we’ve known for–my wife has known them for 50 years; I’ve probably known them for 40–and they moved to Israel many years ago. So, they’re extremely progressive and obviously very Zionistic. And, I’m saying to the woman, ‘If you were in America, you would have real problem being progressive and Zionist at the same time. Just, in the current environment, that’s a very difficult thing to maintain.’
So, people try to avoid those kinds of conflicts however they can. And, so, sort of keeping everything within one lens, as you say, does that. It’s just only when something comes up that–like, in this woman’s case, on the one hand, she’s got her progressive tribal loyalties; on the other hand, she has these Zionist tribal loyalties. And, now she’s going to have to, hink through and work through nuances and come up with some way of resolving that.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I don’t want to do too many shows on Israel in this program, but maybe someday we’ll do a conversation on how the left and the right in Israel are so different from what it means to be on the left and the right, say, in America. It’s just almost a total reverse.
Russ Roberts: But, I want to say one other thing along with what you’re saying. A friend of mine–I was talking to him and we talked about some public figure–and he shook his head. This friend of mine is on the left. He said, about this guy, ‘Yeah, he’s really moved to the right recently.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, a lot of people have who are Jews, because they may have been sympathetic to the oppressor/oppressed story; but if they think they’re going to be killed by a rise in anti-Semitism or by enemies in our neighborhood here in Israel–when a man knows he’s going to be hung in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.’ You might talk about oppressor/oppressed. If you think your children’s lives are at risk, civilization versus barbarism suddenly becomes a more compelling axis than it was in the past. So, it’s not surprising that some people who were on the left–Jews on the left–became more likely to use the civilization/barbarism axis in recent months.
Russ Roberts: I’ll just conclude with a worry, trying to integrate our two topics today. I didn’t plan on them being related, but of course, they are. When I look at the rise in social media’s influence in our lives and this phenomenon you’re talking about that most of what people write is to close our minds on people who think like us, or to enrage them over what our opponents are arguing, I’m struck by the fact that the ability of people to do that–to feel good about their side, their axis, their lens–has just been put on steroids by social media.
So, if I was a politically-oriented person 25, 30, 40 years ago, I might have disparaged the people on the other side of the fence from me because they, quote, “don’t understand how the world works.” Or, “They’re horrible or heartless.” Whatever way you would see it. And now, every day I’m reminded of how–if I’m not careful–I’m reminded of how wrong and evil my opponents are.
I try to stay humble. It’s not easy. If your flow of information is constantly reinforcing your lens, you’re going to get more entrenched and feel stronger about it. And so, I see–you know, this election (the 2024 U.S. Presidential election) is going to be–it’s already pretty nasty. I think it’s going to get nastier in America, the Presidential election. But, I think the next one will be even worse–is my fear. What are your thoughts on that?
Arnold Kling: I probably could come up with many thoughts if I had more time, but what popped into my head as you were talking about is we ought to–I wish everyone could learn Buddhism. Because, this–so, detaching yourself–what I think of as part of Buddhist philosophy is kind of detaching yourself from your immediate desires. And, I think the only way to approach social media is to be able to detach yourself and say–not react to what this headline says, but: What is this headline trying to do to me? It’s trying to grab me. It’s trying to convince me that, you know, I’m under threat. That this is the most important election in history. That democracy is at stake. That the other side is going to shut me down forever.
The amount of material that comes across you in social media that is trying to grab you, is so large. And, I think you and I agree that a top-down approach won’t stop that grabbing. But somehow, if everybody could learn to be Buddhists and to, you know, sort of detach themselves from that and not be grabbed, that would be the better world.
I’m sure that will convince absolutely no one that I’ve got the solution.
Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Arnold Kling. Arnold, thanks for being part of EconTalk.
Arnold Kling: All right. Thanks, Russ.
