 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burris. Joining us today is Jason Brennan. He's the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Associate Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He's the author of many books, including Political Philosophy and Introduction published by Libertarianism.org. His newest is Against Democracy from Princeton University Press. Welcome back to Free Thoughts. Thanks for having me again. So, Trevor and I have often joked that a lot of our guests, we could ask them at some point in the interview, why do you hate America? But I think that given your new book and given the response to it, we can actually get away with it here. So, Jason Brennan, why do you hate America? Well, two reasons. The main reason is because Slayer is less popular than Katy Perry. But the other reason is because they deserve it and they have it coming. So I want you to imagine a kingdom ruled by an evil king called King Carl the Incompetent. And he means well and he wants to help everybody, but he's utterly negligent in his responsibilities. He doesn't think about what he's doing. He passes laws at whim and random. And as a result, his subjects have to suffer through all sorts of bad policies and bad ideas, even though he really means well. I think if you go to that kingdom, the subjects will sit around at the pub and kind of guiltily toast to the death of the king. Well, I'm also ruled by King Carl the Incompetent, but my king has 310 million heads rather than just one. And just as you can resent King Carl, I can resent my fellow American voters. And it's the problem here is the bad voters. I mean, are you just against all voters or is it the good voters or is it the bad voters? I'm against the bad voters. Not the good voters. It's just the bad voters greatly outnumber the good voters. And when we look at how people vote, a very small number of people are well informed about politics and they think and process information in a rational way. A large percentage of people have no clue what's going on at all and for them their votes are almost random. And then a big middle segment, they are heavily biased, rabid, I call them hooligans when it comes to politics. And I have to suffer with their choices. So in addition to hooligans, you have your hobbits and Vulcans breakdown of voters. What do you mean by each of those groups and then how does it play into the further analysis? Yeah. So I think it's a helpful kind of categorizing, way of categorizing how voters vote and how people behave when it comes to politics. So if you think about the hobbits from the Lords of the Rings books, they don't really care much about the outside world. They don't want to go on big adventures. They just want to sit home and smoke their pipe and eat their second breakfasts. So the political analog of that, which would be roughly about half of the American population would be a person who doesn't care much about politics, doesn't have any real fixed or set ideology. If you ask them for their opinion, they'll come up with something on the spot, but it'll change 10 minutes later. They don't care much about politics and they don't participate much. And then a hooligan, if you think about hooligans in soccer hooligans, they're people who care a lot about the sport and they know a lot about the sport too. But they also, when they get information, they're really biased. So if you ask football fans in New England whether Tom Brady was guilty, they correctly say that he wasn't. And if you ask everybody else in the country who cares about football, they incorrectly say that he was. Or if you're watching a baseball game and there's a throw to the home plate, the Red Sox fans will say, of course he's safe and the Yankees fans will say, of course he's out. So we see the same information, but we process it in a way that benefits our side. So the political analog would be, which is roughly about half of Americans, would be someone who is really interested in politics, but they're super biased. They only look for information that confirms their own views. They regard people on the other side as evil and stupid and unworthy of consideration. They're nasty and divisive and polarizing and they don't really think about politics in a rational way. And finally, if you think about Vulcans from Star Trek, they're dispassionate, rational. They are not loyal to their beliefs. They give up their beliefs readily when the evidence calls for it. The reason I use that category is that very few people are Vulcans, pretty much me and no one else actually. I knew you'd say that. Right. Pretty much me and no one else, but in a sense, a lot of democratic theory and a lot of views about why democracy is supposed to be good is written as if we were Vulcans or could turn into them. And very few people are, and very few people who engage in politics are likely to become one. So is this really, is this really against, you went for Against Democracy is the title of your book. It sounds like it's Against Bad Voters. Well I am actually arguing against a view I call democratic triumphalism. So democratic triumphalism holds that democracy deserves three cheers. Cheer number one is participating in politics makes us better people and we should do more of it. My response is, empirically speaking, no it doesn't. No it makes us worse. Cheer number two is your political participation is good for you and my response is, no it really isn't. It doesn't really do much for you. The final claim is that democracy is the most just and best system. And what I'm trying to convince people of in this book is that that probably isn't true. It's true that in general democracies perform better than non-democracies, that going from monarchies to democracy was a good move. But democracies I'm trying to argue are not intrinsically just. You are not owed the right to vote as a matter of justice. Rather I think the value that a democracy has is the kind of value that a hammer has. It's just a purely instrumental value. It's the only reason to have a democracy is because it turns out, the only reason to put up with democracy is if it turns out no other political system performs better. And in the same way that if no one would insist on using a hammer if a wrench works better, if it turns out that another alternative political system works better than democracy then we should be feel free to replace our system with that. On the justice side of it though, like yes, we want a governing system that works and produces results that we find appealing and valuable. But isn't there a strong argument that like, look, if you're going to be ruled, if you're going to have people holding power over you, you're going to have a state, then justice demands that you have a say in how it operates, that you have a say in what it does to you. Yeah. You know, I find that kind of appealing, but the thing is you don't get a say in democracy really. And the system that I have as an alternative, which I call epistocracy, you might not get a say either. So, I think here there's a nice story by the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick called The Tale of the Slave. And he says, imagine that you're a slave who's owned by a kind of cruel master and then he has you, he goes through a series of steps in which you go from like this master becomes nicer and nicer, he sets up a set of rules, he lets you live outside the manner, but he can still control your life. And then when he dies, he decides to leave you like your life to the other 10,000 slaves he owned. And so the 10,000 slaves collectively own all the slaves, including you. And then they make decisions. And then eventually they say, you know, they ask you for your opinion, they find it kind of useful. So eventually they decide whenever we're split 5,000 to 5,000, we'll let your vote carry the day. And then at the end, they just decide to throw your vote in with everybody else. And Nozick's point here isn't that you're a slave in a modern democracy that would be like absurdly hyperbolic, but his point is that your right to vote doesn't really get you much. If you're, here's the way of putting it, like if you're Jewish in 1932 in Germany and the fourth federal election, you might as well vote for the Nazis or stay home. It has no effect. So your right to vote isn't really a say, whereas the philosopher Ben Sander says, when we're thinking about political power in a democracy, each of us gets so little that fighting over equal rights is not like fighting over equal sizes of a cake, but fighting over crumbs. But isn't this, does this theory then change based on the size of the democratic polity? So if you're living in a 100-person town, does this have a scalability issue to it in terms of how effectual your vote is? And if that's true, how does that color just be against democracy or against even 10 people voting to go to lunch? I think the argument that it's important that you have a right to vote because it gives you a say or some degree of autonomous control works better when you're talking about small democracies of a couple hundred people where your vote might actually have a chance of counting for something. So my point here is just that in any modern nation state, your individual right to vote is not giving you power. And by the way, that's not a bug of democracy. That's the whole point of democracy. It's not supposed to empower individuals. It's supposed to empower the collective. In a democracy, the majority of the moment is the thing that rules. It's not the individual. Well, that's something I want to actually push back on because you, it's a weird use of the word empower. I mean, well, it's a literal use of the word. It's not weird, but it's literal. So you write in one section of the book, you said, when suffragists succeeded in getting women that right to vote, they empowered women as a group. But for the most part, they didn't empower any individual, any individual woman, except for a tiny minority that won political office. Now, that's interesting. I feel like that's just a miscommunication that when people say we empowered women, they're saying it kind of symbolically. They're saying that they have political power now, but they think they're saying it symbolically, that it's now important that women have a voice in the political process. And it's not really important that any individual woman is not that powerful in democracy, but they were definitely disempowered symbolically and literally when they couldn't vote at all. And so it was very important that they got the right to vote. And it's more of a metaphorical empowerment than literal. That might be the case. And I think one of the things we're supposed to do as philosophers is take these speeches and claims that people make, these high-sounding, high-faluting ideas, and ask, what are you actually saying? So Elizabeth Cady Stanton says, women without the right to vote, they're mere petitioners to the government. And I say, and then she's, when we get them the right to vote, they stop being mere petitioners. And I think it's true that women as a group now have significant power. They are no longer mere petitioners. But at the same time, any individual woman remains a mere petitioner in a democracy or another system. And then if she says, well, that's not what I really mean. I'm like, great. Well, now we can clarify. What are you actually getting at? I think the thing that you're, that you're getting at is sort of the symbolic value of having the right to vote. So the Nazis in like, keep using Nazi examples, but they work, the Nazis made Jews where the star of David as wave expressing in public that they are inferior to everybody else. In modern democracies, we use the right to vote as the equivalent, sort of the opposite. It's a signal that you are a full, equal member of the National Club. It's our way of publicly expressing that you're valuable and you count. So my question that I ask in Chapter 5 of the book is, well, should we do that? Do we have to think that way? Is that actually a good way of thinking about the right to vote? Is it, is it built into the fabric of the universe that the right to vote is an expression of your fundamental value into society? Or is it possible that we could instead think of the right to vote as being like a plumber's license? The U.S. government denies me the right to engage in plumbing. If I were to, if you give me a hundred bucks to fix your pipes, I'm doing something illegal apparently, but I don't think that in virtue of being denied a plumber's license that I'm somehow signaled to be an inferior member or second-class member of society. Why can't we think of the right to vote that way? But don't we talk about, I mean, this is so back when you blog at Bleeding Heart Libertarians and when Bleeding Heart Libertarians first launched one of the arguments that was made a lot on it and particularly by Matt Zolinsky was that things like occupational licensing and other regulatory barriers weren't just making people poorer by limiting their options, but we're disrespecting them in an important way, that these rights, that these economic rights are as meaningful and this is the knock against say Rawls's list of the central rights is they seem to exclude these extremely meaningful economic rights and choices to author one's life and so it would seem that from the one side the libertarian argument is saying you can't be a plumber is judging you as second-class or is taking away an important liberty. So it seems odd to be using that then as an argument also that it's not. Yeah, I mean, that's what Matt said. That's not what I said. Yes, but it's a common sort of argument against these very limitations. Yeah, so I think, I don't think anyone thinks that because you lack a plumbing license that you're seeing a second class, they don't regard that as a knock on your status and you can say that even if you think plumbing licenses are a bad idea. So I would get rid of occupational licensure for the reasons that most of your listeners would think I would. It doesn't work very well. It isn't a front, et cetera, et cetera. But it's also worth noting that these kinds of rights are different. So I think when you think about civil liberties or economic liberties with these such as the right to free speech or the right to choose your own religion or choose whether or not to have children or choose whom you have sex with or whom you marry or what job you have. These are things that are meant to give you a sphere of autonomous control over yourself where you have a significant degree of unilateral decision-making that affects you and it affects other people but only in a kind of secondary sense. The right to vote is different and I think a lot of people even on the other side agree with that. To have the right to vote or to run to office is about not empowering you to make decisions for yourself but empowering you to be among a group of people which will then make decisions for everybody and impose these decisions a monopolistic way through violence on everyone. So that's, you know, when I give you the right to vote, then if the government gives you the right to vote then to some degree you're reconciled to the government because you have a say over the government. But at the same time when we give you the right to vote then suddenly I go, hey, why does that dude get a right to impose laws upon me? Like, what justifies that? So that's, I think, a lot different from all these other rights. Would you call it more of a privilege then? Like, we treat driver's license this way. We'd say, you know, your parent, your parent, my dad is when I'm 16 and through him the state say, you know, we're going to empower, we're going to give you the privilege of having a multiple-ton piece of steel that goes 70 miles per hour that endangers other people and we're going to make sure you don't do that. And we'll take it away if you misuse it. If you like a DUI, we're going to take it away because it's dangerous to other people in a way that may be plumbing, is it? So that makes it a privilege. Would you sign on to that idea? Yeah, I guess in effect that's what I'm arguing for in the last third of the book is that we should experiment with apportioning political power according to competence to use that power. And so in the same way that like, I think a juror, a defendant in a trial is entitled to a fair trial by a competent jury that will decide the case competently. And if the jury acts incompetently, that he's entitled to a new trial, it's a bad trial, it shouldn't be enforced. I think in the same way I as a citizen or all of us as citizens are entitled to competent government. Every single government decision ought to be made by a competent body in a competent way. And if it's not, then it lacks legitimacy and authority. And for that reason, you might think it's... There's reasons to maybe disempower people who are going to misuse their power who aren't going to use it competently. So here, again, it's not about individual... It's not really worried about individuals because your individual incompetence won't really matter and your individual incompetence won't really matter, mine won't matter, but rather the process as a whole. So I want to think of the right to vote. How should we allocate that in terms of which way of allocating it leads to the most competent, the best outcomes, the best, most competent process? And that might mean that some people don't get right to vote. It might mean that some people get extra rights. It might mean that we do some other kind of convoluted system. But I don't think that anyone has any inherent right to participate in politics in the sense of voting. So this question of competence gives us an opportunity to jump back because I think we've gotten ahead a bit in the argument and have been talking about the ways to solve the problems of democracy without necessarily yet going through what those problems are. So in what ways is democracy as it's practiced now with universal or close enough to it suffrage incompetent? Because we have on the one hand there's the argument like there's a wisdom of crowds argument that yes these people are like people are ignorant often rationally so they have incorrect ideas about policy but it all comes out in the wash. Yeah. So when you look at voter behavior it's clear that most people have very low levels of information. It's clear that many of them have misinformation on even basic questions such as who the president is or what's the unemployment rate and things like that. They get a large percentage of people get those questions wrong. They get wrong who's in office what the trends are. They don't know much about the social sciences which you would need to know in order to be a good voter. You need it's not enough to know what a candidate wants to do. You need to have some knowledge of what's likely to happen if they do that. So if Trump says let's get rid of immigrants and Hillary says let's let more in. You need to know some economics to know which one of those proposals will actually help more and voters don't know that. The problem isn't just that voters are ignorant because ignorance by itself wouldn't be a matter so they're misinformed and they make systematic mistakes and information changes the policies that they would prefer. So they're these wisdom of crowd type arguments to try to say it's okay it all washes out and they're all based on these a priori mathematical theorems which are fine in terms of the math but the question is does it actually say anything about the real world and I think it probably doesn't. So there's this thing called the miracle of aggregation which says vote ignorance doesn't matter because voters will vote randomly and so all the ignorant voters will cancel each other out and the smart voters will decide the day. Empirically it turns out they don't actually vote randomly. They have all sorts of biases and so that is just not true that the theorem doesn't hold. There's something called the Hong-Page theorem which says if people are sufficiently sophisticated in their mental models of the world and they come together to try to solve a problem together where they agree on what the problem is and what would count as a solution then as long as they have diverse models that's as good as making people smarter and that again the mathematics of that is fine but when you actually look at the real world democracy which you can say is most people don't have a sophisticated model they have systematic errors they all make the same mistakes so there isn't actually diversity they're not actually trying to solve the problem together they don't agree on what counts as a solution so it ends up being just this mathematical curiosity that isn't actually telling us much about real world democracy. But is this an argument against so most of these critiques sound very much directed at things like referendum on the ballot where the people are voting specifically on whether policy A is adopted or not but that's not how most of democracy works in this country instead people aren't really voting on policy they're voting on a candidate who represents a bundle of policies and beliefs and temperaments and attitudes and if your ultimate solution to the problems of democracy is you call epistocracy right so rule of the knowers isn't that basically what we get because the American people say I'm gonna pick candidate A or candidate B and then once candidate A or B gets into office they are making decisions informed by a whole bunch of experts they've got advisors Congress is a very select slice of America who arguably no matter what you think of congressmen they know more about politics than the average American and so those are the people who are actually then making the decisions. Yeah I think that's right to an extent and unlike a lot of people who get upset about this I say yay you know so Martin Gillins came up with a book saying that the median voter theorem isn't strictly speaking true and higher income voters who oh by the way happen to be higher information voters have much more influence and there's a lot of political science showing that bureaucracies and other politicians have significant independence from what voters want and I think that's a good thing I think that's why democracy overperforms the policies we have are significantly better than they would be if we simply did what the median voter wants. So in a sense the structure of the argument is almost like this the first third of the book is meant to show you that politics makes you dumb and mean the second third is meant to show that there's no such inherent right to vote it goes through all these arguments about why democracy is inherently just and I just try to take them all down and the last third is to get you to be an instrumentalist about democracy and you'll either do one of two things you'll either go voting doesn't matter at all elections don't matter at all in which case you're not with me but you're also not against me you should just be like yeah whatever system works better that's fine because I've already taken down a reason to prefer democracy or you think voting still does matter in which case you should be in favor of experimenting with apostocracy so the thing is though like it's true that voters don't completely decide things by themselves but it is still the case that a lot of policies that get implemented that the candidates platforms and in general what politicians tend to do is strongly correlated with what voters want and what voters want is strongly correlated with what they know and if they're misinformed they want the wrong things so I mean I suppose four years ago I'd waved a magic wand and I made everyone in the United States have the knowledge that you get like they're all able to pass Econ 101 perfectly they're all able to pass Poli Sci 101 History 101 and they can answer every single question on the American National Election Studies quiz of basic knowledge perfectly there's no way we'd have Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton we'd have much better candidates pushing much better policies so the candidates that make it on the ballot are themselves a product of who the voters are the Econ 101 thing strikes me as interesting because if we're trying to come up with criteria that would make someone a voter in your system who had to have the privilege to vote we could talk about many tests that could do this and there's a lot of people out there who are not totally stupid who think that Econ 101 they kind of people use the word neoliberal all the time is a bunch of neoliberal fabrications and it's not really something you need to know about the world and they're not stupid I mean in the basic sense and so if we said you have to take Econ 101 to become a voter they would be very resistant to that and any sort of qualification about what it would take to be a voter would be kind of like a discussion about what should kids learn in school like music or art or do they need more history or they need this kind of econ and like those people should be voters so how are we gonna that seems to be almost an intractable problem because even the idea of the people who are allowed to vote is wrapped up in this idea of citizenship and like the kind of people we want in our society and therefore and how will we decide that line because we couldn't vote on it or it seems to be kind of weird that we couldn't vote on what the line is about who could vote and so how do we implement this system? Yeah, so it's true that if you said you're not allowed to say have the right to vote unless you pass Econ 101 or if you pass Econ 101 you get an extra right to vote that's gonna be really contentious because there are a lot of people that just want to reject economics because it's not flat or into their ideology I mean if I could I wouldn't let people with English PhDs vote like oh you're having a PhD in English you probably are crazy and they would probably say if you have a red Shakespeare then you shouldn't vote well maybe not now So in this case there is a truth which is you should know Econ 101 but let's just say that that's contentious for the sake of argument there are more mild things that we can do you can take basic political knowledge the kind that you can Google very quickly and the kinds of stuff that's gonna clearly be relevant things like so the American National Election Studies surveys they ask the sort of stuff who is the vice president which party controlled Congress last year is the unemployment rate going up or down can you estimate it within five percentage points can you estimate roughly how much money is spent on the following things so this really basic stuff that is seen as non contentious it's non ideological it turns out empirically and it's been this way for 60 years and it's true in the other countries not just in the US your ability to answer those questions determines what your policy preferences are very strongly even when you control for the effect of demographic factors like the fact that you're male or rich or female or poor or whatever and also interestingly it turns out that the people who if we were to wave a magic wand and make it so the American public could score perfectly on that it looks like that they would start to have the same kinds of views that economists have and when we wave a magic wand and make it so they don't score they get all the answers wrong they have the kinds of views that like Bernie Sanders has but how much of that is because they have they don't know that stuff because there isn't an incentive to know that stuff so the reason like if that you know who the president is and who your congressman is and that you happen to know economics is probably just a sign of having generally a higher level of education but those it's one thing it takes a lot of effort to learn econ 101 it's a large body of knowledge but knowing those simple trivia questions on the survey doesn't and so wouldn't that correlation disappear if we said in order to vote which a lot of people think even if they don't exercise it they think they ought to have the right to do it you just need to learn these three dozen facts that lots of people are going to learn those three dozen facts and we're going to see a decoupling of the actual knowledge I think you're right that people people probably would learn the facts just to get the right to vote and so there would be more of a decoupling but so again I'm just looking for a better hammer I'm not looking for a perfect hammer so I think you would improve things at least somewhat and if it would improve it somewhat I'm open to it I think what we're asking for here is not what's the best possible system but you know we've got this thing that works pretty well is their way to make it even better that said you know people don't take their votes very seriously a lot of people don't exercise it it's hard to take a quiz your vote doesn't count for very much you don't get much use out of it so I think a lot of people would just be like I'm not going to bother learn that or they might study a little bit and they come in and they don't get it it's not valuable to you in the way that like a license to drive is or people really try hard to pass that it's not valuable to you in the way that like the SATs are where it's really important you get a good SAT score so they don't have as much incentive to game it as they do with these other things there are several points throughout the book where there's I can imagine you make uncomfortable arguments that would seem too late say maybe on a university campus require trigger warnings or something in the sense that so you you talk about the the demographics of people with political knowledge and you are quite open and saying look like if we quiz people on political knowledge and either privilege the votes of people who had it or excluded the votes of people who didn't it would mean keeping from voting a lot of black people and a lot of women and that you know white men and wealthy people are the people who ought to be voting or ought to have their votes privileged and so there's there's kind of tinges of like so is this a racist or sexist position could it be read that way and then when you're talking about these you know that there's costs involved in learning this stuff well there's also like wealth correlates highly with knowledge so should we is this should we return to poll taxes would that be a way to solve this which also sounds kind of scary yeah so there are these correlations and it's worth noting that you know really the thing that most predicts political knowledge like there's a highest effect on whether you know something is simply interest do you find politics interesting that dominates over things like IQ and education and race and richness and wealth and other stuff so it's really interest is the thing that matters most but that said we have we have 60 years of data and it's clear that on a quiz of basic political knowledge a middle-aged high-income white male will score 2.5 to 3 times higher than a low-income young black woman like that's clearly the case so if you had a voting knowledge test it's going to be the case that certain demographic groups are going to do better than others and they're going to have more power and oh hey it happens to be the groups that are already advantaged so you know I put that in the book and I said this is an objection to the view this is this is a real correlation I'm not making it up how troubling is that so if you're the view that like having the right to vote is a signal that you're an equal member of society then you're going to think this is infuriating but I have a whole chapter called politics is not a poem which is trying to disabuse you of that view in fact I'm here to throw stones not to apologize so my view is if you think that the right to vote is a signal that you are an equal member like it's important that we use the right to vote as proving that you're a good member of society that we care about it's because you subscribe to a morally yucky view of the symbolism of democracy and politics and I'm trying to convince people that in that chapter that said what about the worry that maybe people just run run like white people run things for their own benefit so here we have to think a little bit more carefully about how people vote one interesting finding is that people don't vote selfishly they vote altruistically for what they perceive to be the national interest rather than their own interests and empirically it looks like they'll continue to do that as long as they have like less than one in a hundred chance of being decisive so many any of the policies that I propose are going to be ones where the chances of you being decisive are so low that you're not going to bother vote selfishly so the question here isn't whether they're voting for white interests or black interests it's whether the thing that they think is helping everybody actually helps so then we can look at disadvantage groups who can say if you're if you're a low information voter and your disadvantage you might know what you need you might think I need a job or I need like better opportunities I need less crime you know the outcomes that you need but to then know what policy instruments are likely to achieve those outcomes or which candidate is likely to push for those policies that would achieve those outcomes requires tremendous social scientific knowledge plus knowledge of basic facts about who's what which the test itself is showing they don't actually have so be like you're like I know my kid is sick but I have no idea what to do about it like whom to vote like which where do I bring my kid to a plumber to make him better do I bring him to a doctor I don't even know that's effectively what the position of the voters are I tend to think that the disparity we're seeing in knowledge here is a result of systemic racism it doesn't mean that the policy thing that I'm advocating is the self-racist is just that it will have racial disparities because of other racism and what I argue in the book is we should actually fix the problem not not the thing I'm talking about the thing like giving everyone equal right to vote doesn't fix the problem it hasn't fixed the problem so you're saying racial disparities in the input in the votes but not in the outputs is what you're saying hopefully if they do better policies yeah so why why is it that say blacks in the U.S. are lower income why is it that they're less educated well I mean it's a long time because of an hour talking about that but has to do with a wide range of policies about housing about property rights about licensing about how public education is allocated and so on and so I say fix that stuff that's actually the problem and giving them the right to vote isn't going to fix it hasn't it hasn't really made any impact at all actually so in the same way like if you have a license to be a medical doctor it's true that medical black medical doctors are blacks are underrepresented among medical doctors they're only about 3% of medical doctors but they're about 15% of the population so you might then say well we should just make like make everyone a doctor or you might say well the problem here isn't the medical license process itself it's about stuff that comes before that and that's the stuff that we should fix so I almost think like the well we'll give everyone right to vote that'll fix the problem is like facile and excuses people from dealing with the actual issue the studies on selfish versus altruistic voting I see those come up a fair amount and I've always been curious about how those studies are conducted because I can imagine that you ask people whether like would they vote for something that's explicitly in their self-interest or do they prefer to vote for the general good and they will always they'll say the general good but what counts as the general good is an epistemic question and it feels like a lot of people tend to just conflate their own interests not intentionally but like you you really only know you and your immediate group and so you kind of think like it's the like what's good for general motors is what's good for America or the the Trump voters who think you know what's in the best interest of America is to shut down trade to bring back rust belt manufacturing jobs and so we would have these rich white people who would say yeah I'm voting for everyone's good but would really end up looking like is what's going to promote their interest even if unintentionally yeah so going to summarize this research is to say when people started studying do voters vote selfishly they expected the answer to be yes and because they expected the answer to be yes every time they got a no answer they don't like a bunch of new literature came out trying to test it a different way so it's almost like there are hundreds of papers trying to test this they tested hundreds of different ways and they get the same result so yeah if you just ask people if you ask people how do you vote everyone says I vote altruistically and if you ask them how other people vote they say they vote their pocket books but we know that in surveys even anonymous surveys people suffer from social social desirability bias they answer the survey in the way they think sounds good rather than what's true so political scientists aren't resting on that they might be instead might do things like put them in experimental situations where there's real money at stake and there's a kind of collective action problem where you can either behave in a selfish way that screws over other people or a way that kind of helps everybody and they can see they can very experimentally the chances of you being decisive and they can watch you switch from being selfish to altruistic and happens around like one in a hundred chance of being decisive or they can do things like look at people's political ideology and see if it correlates with things that are kind of obviously in their self interest so you know young and old people don't have much difference in their attitudes towards social security even the old people are receiving it right now and young people are being taxed to provide it men and women don't have very significant attitudes and their attitudes towards abortion rights in fact sometimes when you do polls you find that men are more in favor of it than women which is why when I see women who say you shouldn't be allowed to vote like talk about this unless you have a uterus I'm like well you might actually get the opposite result if we did that know what you want welfare attitudes towards welfare are quite complex but really high income people and really low income people don't have very different attitudes you know high income people are more likely to vote Democrat than they are to vote Republican so the relationship between if you think of Republicans as being for the rich while the relationship between income and and voting one way or the other is kind of a U shape really low income really high income people vote Democrat in middle income people tend to vote in between so we don't even find correlations that seem to track what you would independently call self interest and there's again hundreds of studies trying to test this hundreds of different ways and they just come out now it's a really weak predictor some people might be listening and thinking that basically you've created an argument that Libertarian policies are substantively right I'm a characterizer here. Yeah. People at least free trade open immigration schools like this are substantively correct people don't vote enough for these which means they shouldn't have the right to vote and that because they're hurting people by not putting in place more Libertarian policies so they just sort of be this roundabout way of getting Libertarian but and up on top of being probably offended by that because they disagree substantively with those being the best policies they might say well look even if they are wrong policies like if Bernie Sanders policies are wrong it's it is at least okay for a small group people as a to us a hundred percent of people all vote to have socialism and all of them consent like they all want that for themselves the people have spoken and they want socialism they don't really care that's the kind of trade off they want to make they prefer more into their two more open they prefer more security to more dynamism that's what they want to vote for and they should have the right to do that so what what is your response to like even even a small hundred percent group voting for policies that you say hurt them but they want yeah I I'm not a paternalist so if if you're listening right now and after and you say after I'm done listening I plan to light myself on fire like I will let you do that like I'm all I'm cool with that that would be pretty metal yeah that would be pretty brutal that would be more your kind of metal than my kind of metal yeah that's right yeah your kind of metals more like chilling out and looking at like spinning lights yeah so I'm okay with that but in a democracy in a political system we're not talking about people choosing for themselves we're talking about collectives a small percent of people choosing for everybody else imposing these decisions through violence we shouldn't go through the whole consent argument here but if you if you look in the book or if you look at one of my previous interviews we talk about is there any meaningful sense in which you consent to government and it's clear that you don't so we're talking about a collective imposing its will upon everybody else and not just the people not just the minority voters not just children and others who can't vote but also foreigners who are affected by these policies but who don't get a say it's we're choosing for everyone and that's why it becomes a matter of justice and I think you you could have a view that's like justice is just whatever democracy says and if you really believe that then you have to believe the following if democracy decides to legalize child rape child rape is okay and that's super implausible like if you're willing to bite that bullet I'm happy to watch you bite it but I don't I don't think you're willing to say that so instead almost everyone's going to say no there are substantive constraints on what democracies can do and then you you're back in my court we can start saying well how are they making these decisions so that's it like you asked about like if I pushing for libertarian politics and up front in the book I'm like I'm not when I say things like better inform people favor free trade and less informed people don't yeah I happen to favor free trade to because I took economics and I'm not an English professor but I'm not relying on that I'm just saying like it turns out that people with high information have systematically different preferences and people with low information even when you correct for the effect of demographics and it turns out the American public behaves as if it were a low information voter I would say the same thing if the policies came out differently I'm not arguing that we should have libertarian politics I'm so I'm basically saying to you if you're a social Democrat you should instead be a social epistocrat if you're a conservative American constitutionalist Republican you should be a conservative American constitutionalist epistocratic Republican if you're a libertarian anarchist then you should say that democracy still stinks but it's epistocracy would be better even if anarchy would be even better than that so there's a sense in which this is not a libertarian or a non-libertarian thing that said I was writing about this the other day on my blog and I was wondering why is it that libertarians are writing a lot about Democratic ignorance and the problems of democracy in a way that others aren't and I think this is the explanation a sort of sociological account most people on the right and the left regard democracy as sort of sacred inherently just as having a kind of majesty to it and politics as a kind of majesty so for them they have this emotional draw towards democracy and towards political participation and I think libertarians they they look at democracy and they think it's like a hammer they're just like I don't I don't have a bias one way or the other like I don't have any inherent my personally don't have any inherent emotional pull towards epistocracy or towards democracy for me asking which one's better is like asking like which brand of coffee tastes better it's just like I've just it's like well whatever the answer is that's fine and I think it's there's this one way in which I think libertarians might be somewhat liberated from a bias that and that's why they might be more open-minded about these things than your average philosopher I'm trying to figure out though how why should a social Democrat or or a Bernie Sanders person for example believe in epistocracy because if it is the case that smart people disagree with them generally on what the policy should be then and their substantive view of what is a just world is just is most people disagree with them but but they basically just think that because I need more time to convince them and all this stuff then why should they why should they agree with this I'm trying why should a social Democrat who the epistopic class completely disagrees with them why should they be more pointedly I mean the entire argument of the Trumpkins is the elites disagree with them and so but we're right yeah well I don't personally I don't expect them to actually change their minds the whole book I mean part three of the book in part to the book or the second third chapter all about how people don't change their minds even with like completely disconfirming evidence like I can when it comes to politics I can I can show you definitively that you're wrong and the normal reaction to that is that you become more convinced you're right so I don't actually expect them to change their minds but in a sense I'm giving them a procedural argument I'm showing them how democracy incentivizes people to behave in certain bad ways these ways don't get washed out it leads to systematic problems and you can say all this without taking a stance on like particular policies and then in the final third of the book I start defending something I call the competence principle so my argument is that we're entitled to competent government and I use this analogy I've brought up before of it's not ideological you're saying it's just competent I think yeah I'm just like with a kind of I not ideological sense of competence so we think about a jury trial like let's say you're defendant you're getting tried and a third of the jury just flips a coin and a third of the jury decides to find you guilty because they think you're a lizard person or they believe in some bizarre conspiracy theory and another third decides to find you guilty because they just have utterly bizarre beliefs about the world or whatever or because they just don't like you're the color of your hair we would think that when they find you guilty they've done something wrong they've misbehaved they've mistreated you in some way they are either you the defendant or maybe us the rest of the American public whom they're representing better behavior and it's an unjust decision because of their lack of competence so what if a president did the same thing like you're the president and you have to decide like what to do today and you're like well I'm gonna flip a dice up came out number 18 that corresponds to go to war okay now to pick a country throw dart Russia didn't Reagan use a Reagan he's like someone reading horoscopes I think different times so yeah I don't know that if that's true but if they did that was real scum she had a strawler you're coming she had a strawler yeah I was like we had a mini documentary that came out today or yesterday that oh wow talks about it yeah great well you know she was the first lady I guess but if Reagan were doing that I'd be like yeah bad behavior Ronnie that was that's your your this deplorable you owed us better behavior we when you go to a doctor you expect the doctor to know your symptoms to prost think about your symptoms in a scientific way to make a decision on your behalf to consult the scientific evidence not to just say open up a can of tomato soup pour it out and see what the letters spell out and use that but voters are kind of like they're kind of like the people I'm talking about that are misbehaving so what I'm saying is regardless of your ideology you should think that that is bad behavior and what politicians and voters and others owe to the people they governed is competence and what counts as competence here I mean luckily the American public sets the bar so low for me that like even a really mild theory of what competence is they're not going to they're not going to pass it it's knowing the relevant facts and thinking about the facts in light of like background social scientific knowledge that if I ask just just for that they don't meet that's but it seems like you're so you're really actually seemingly against force or illegitimate for I feel like that that fundamentally because the doctor who does that the alphabet soup thing you said I mean there are people who go to doctors who have practices that are not much I mean homeopathic you know faith healers whatever that have practices that are not much better than that yeah and we let them yeah we think that's okay it seems to be the difference the problem you really don't like is you owe competence when force is involved to others who did not consent actively consent yeah to it so it's not just because like we don't even actually necessarily own ourselves competence we just owe competence to people when some sort of seemingly justifiable force is being employed so maybe your analogy which it's basically it's like the doctor that I'm going to make you go to a different level of competence than me going to a doctor which I can use a witch doctor or someone who reads the auguries of birds or whatever I want so it's the force problem here that you're really against and how people choose how to use force yeah that's right so with the jury example what what makes this work for the jury why most everyone who I ask agrees that yeah the jury owes it to you to this or at least to the people that they're representing to decide competently in good faith it's because the decision is high stakes it can greatly affect a person's life liberty and happiness it can deprive of them of those things and the decision will be enforced involuntarily through violence and threats of violence so high stakes involuntary decisions that can that can affect people's life liberty and property and then you're asking they say if you agree without it comes to what a jury jury owes the defendant and or the American people that it's representing well those same features apply to most governmental decisions not all of them so if we were choosing what the national anthem would be this so-called competence principle that it fend I don't think it applies to that we can just whatever we pick is fine doesn't really matter if we're if we're making decisions that don't have any real impact that's we you're not owed competence but I think in involuntary high stakes decisions which many political decisions are then the people making those decisions have to be competent and act in good faith so the the question now I think obviously isn't I and I think probably you've been asked this before there's a lot of you've done a lot of just discussing this book anyway why do you leave any amount of democracy it's purely instrumental it's about so if it's epistocracy it seems like allowing any amount of democracy is putting a little too much air and we should just have one really really smart guy yeah who knows all these things or at least a panel of technocrats yeah something like that yeah so in principle because I'm trying to get to you people who read this to be quite instrumentalist about about politics so I personally would say that if making you dictator happen to lead to like come up whatever the correct theory of justice is just outcomes if it turned out that making you dictator led to that then I would be happy with making you dictator you're going to have to listen to my metal though you can't listen to your metal anymore well so that's what we know it's not you in particular right no if it turns out like I think that the the taste for metal discredits the claim to epistocracy from yeah it very well may so I am in a sense willing to like say like whatever system happens to produce the most just outcomes is probably okay I'm not sure if there's any real system that's inherently unjust or inherently just but I don't for the person's the book I'm not taking that extreme claim I'm saying epistocracy versus democracy that it's self purely instrumental we should just ask which system turns out to produce the most just outcomes so here's some reasons for thinking it's not going to be a panel of technocrats so first when you use our technocracy are usually picturing a small body of experts who have a lot of education who get tremendous power in terms of the scope of what they do they're allowed to control your life and make decisions for you I'm not advocating any of that in fact a lot of Democrats advocate that a lot of like small D and big D Democrats they are in favor of technocracies they want the they want groups to like decide your life for you I'm not here talking about even the scope of government what's under the control of government I'm just talking about whatever whatever the rightful scope of government is who should be making those decisions so one reason not to make a small group of people is that if it's a very small number of people it's easier to buy them to engage in rent seeking it's easier it's more likely that they'll use power for their own ends and for the ends of others and also this this thing the Hong page theorem which says that adding cognitive diversity to a collective decision making process can improve the process and make it smarter it's not completely wrong it's there's a lot of truth about that and so in an epistocracy for that reason we want voting power to be fairly widespread just not as widespread as a democracy so I I'm having a debate with a philosopher at Yale called Helen Landemore and she thinks the Hong page theorem says all heads are always better than just some of the heads and that's I think clearly not what the theorem says I think it's a misreading of it you can't get that out of it but it does say that sometimes it's better to have say many not as smart heads to just a few smart heads I think that's probably true so when I when I read something like the Hong page theorem I go this is a good reason for epistocracy to have say 10% of the American voting public voting rather than just 1% but I don't think it gets you to 100% or 60% or 80% most of the argument that we've been talking about today has been on this instrumental side of democracy in terms of the policies it produces so if you know letting everyone vote or requiring more people to vote has worse outputs on the policy end but a lot of the book is dedicated to also countering the argument about the effects that democracy has on not in the policies it creates but just in the very fact of participation yeah within it and so I wanted to ask a bit about that I mean you in chapter 9 you have a long quote from what sounds like a fascinating essay from political commentators Aaron Ross, Paul and Trevor Burris about the way that Democratic participation creates conflict but there is this counter argument that like no matter what the policies it produces, Democratic participation, deliberative democracy is ennobling that it creates more tolerance and respect for each other and you push back pretty strongly on that. Yeah that's right so in the beginning of the book I see myself having a conversation with John Stuart Mill from the 19th century who wrote on representative government and he had a bunch of hypotheses which he admitted were hypotheses and he hadn't really tested them and he couldn't really and one of his hypotheses was that getting people together to discuss politics would educate them and ennoble them it would educate them in the sense that it would make them learn a lot about the world and how it works it would motivate them to learn they would discover other people's points of view it'd be like a fish discovering that there's a world outside the ocean and it would ennoble them in the sense it would make them care more about each other to find consensus to try to work things out but these are empirical claims they are testable empirical claims so since then we've had a large body of experimental work and also observe just work observing behavior and I kind of summarize all of that stuff in chapter three and it's a in general empirically it looks like deliberation causes polarization in general it looks like participating in politics makes you a mean person it makes it so that if you decide to engage in politics you're likely to be tribalistic and hateful towards the people with whom you disagree in general it looks like it doesn't make you smarter the kind of victories deliberation gets are the sorts of things where you could have just written down some information a piece of paper and given it to them ahead of time it actually makes people dig in their heels they're more likely to when they talk to people whom they disagree the normal effect is well those people are stupid and I must be even righter than I thought even it they're not so they're all these weird biases and bad effects and the response from delivery of Democrats to this empirical literature has been I think pretty weak because what they often do is they say oh you don't understand you see deliberate democracy the claim is that if people deliberate according to the following criteria then these good things will happen and what your empirical work showed is that when we put them together in a room they don't follow those criteria and bad things happen so I'm saying if A then B and you're showing me not A and not B that's not that doesn't disconfirm my view and logically speaking they're right but I think it's a weak victory so the metaphor I use in the book and elsewhere is college fraternities and I was in a frat but college fraternities in general behave really badly in general empirically they're they're drunken rate factories they lower students grades etc etc that's how it works out but if you look at their mission statements they have very noble ideals about you know SAE wants to create the perfect gentleman and Sigma Nu wants to have people lead the life of love and honor and they have these wonderful ideals and they have guidelines about how fraternities are supposed to be run and then they say if the men and the fraternities behave this way then this is what we expect to happen and the empirical work says they don't behave that way and those good things don't happen so then imagine somebody said oh I'm doing ideal fraternity theory I'm talking about the ideal of a college fraternity you might be like yeah you're right I guess if they did it the right way it would be great but I'm talking about actual college fraternities and actual college fraternities in general stink like not mine the one I was at but I was at a very nerdy school where had a kind of a different result so similarly if the liberal democrats respond by going oh no you don't understand I'm doing ideal theory which is their response I have quotes in the book showing that he's like yeah okay fine I agree I'm willing to say ideal deliberation would be a wonderful thing but in the actual world engaging in politics makes us worse people if someone has gotten this far in both this episode who's maybe very angry and or feeling very upset about what you're saying and maybe not able to refute everything you've said that I bet that person maybe doesn't exist they probably turned off after 10 minutes but if they've gotten this far and they're like they might be thinking why did this guy even do this and why why did this guy even write a book about how democracy this is this seems to be at the very least to be making the problem worse and destructive to the kind of participation because democracy can be better they would definitely say that and they're all for it being better and the democracy fetishes are just all about civic participation and civic voting and all these things and like what you're going to get out of this book is like we're not going to go and take away half the federal government and get rid of all these things and we're not going to get that at the very at the very best we're going to get a bunch of people who just like well I guess I'm not going to vote anymore and then it's going to get a big prop people who should be voting and it's going to be a big problem so you just wrote a book that is either offensive or destructive and that's the best you can do how do you respond to that? Yeah, see I think they're the bad guys like I'm here to throw stones I'm not here to apologize like I'm without sin and I'm here to throw the first stone so I'm I'm trying to do two things with the all the stuff I've been running about democracy and even some my other work one thing is many people have the view that political participation is sort of elevated to be in politics is to be better I have a quote from Albert Herberon saying how what we do in democracy is we have take the majesty that we used to give to kings and we give it to everybody and I'm here to desacralize politics say it's nothing special so in fact if you read some my earlier books I have a very populist view of civic virtue where I think being a stay-at-home mom being an auto mechanic should be elevated and that political participation should be lowered keep in mind that's a very unselfish thing for me to say because what basically all my colleagues are doing is like the good citizen is a person like me but I don't want to be an egalitarian so I'm just going to pretend everyone is as smart as I am what I'm saying is like no I'm actually better at a few things than other people and it's not a big deal what you do is just as good or better so I'm actually the only populist out there everyone else has like a weird quasi-elitism that they're not owning up to secondly this book and the last book about markets limits what they're meant to do is kill symbolic reasons for like how to put it there are things that we could do that would make our lives better but people aren't willing to do them because they think it expresses the wrong thing so they'll say things like we shouldn't have markets and kidneys because yeah that'll save lives that'll save a hundred thousand lives if we have a market in kidneys but man that just expresses the wrong thing it's ugly what it said that market says is eugh and I'm here to wage war against these symbolic arguments and that's effective what they're doing in democracy it's like yeah bestocracy would work better we have a less less unjust war we'd have better welfare policies we'd have like better policies towards pollution we'd have better mortgage policies government would work better we'd be happier and healthier and lead better lives but it says the wrong thing so I don't want to do it I'm like no I don't want you to think that way Thank you for listening If you enjoyed today's show please take a moment to rate us on iTunes Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel To learn more find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org