 Well, good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today, and welcome to the Cato Institute. My name is Will Wilkinson. I'm a policy analyst here at the Institute and managing editor of Cato Unbound, our monthly online magazine of ideas. We're here to discuss Brian Kaplan's new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. You'll be able to find the book conveniently for purchase in the lobby, and Brian will graciously sign your copy if you so desire. Now, Brian's book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, has emerged as one of the most important works of the current season, receiving reviews in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The New Yorker, among other prominent and prestigious publications. Why all of this lavish attention on what might otherwise seem like a somewhat abstract work of political economy? Well, to give it my shot, I think there's about three reasons, maybe more. Brian will hazard his own guesses, I'm sure. First, it's just because it's a truly important book. This is a first-rate contribution to political economy in the public choice tradition of Anthony Downs, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullick. Second, because it is lucidly written and forcefully argued, and it's a real pleasure to read. Third and not least, if you are one of those people for whom democracy inspires a kind of religious reverence, then Brian's argument may sound like dangerous blasphemy. I think that has provoked quite a bit of comment. But dangerous blasphemers need not be crazed visionaries. They can also be happy rationalists, which makes them even harder to dismiss. As Lewis Menand notes in his New Yorker review, Brian seems to blithely plow through democratic pieties. Quote, Kaplan is the sort of economist, are there other kinds? There must be. Who engages with the views of non-economists in the way a bulldozer would engage with a picket fence if a bulldozer could express glee? Well, if you know Brian, as I have the good fortune to, the image of a happy bulldozer is in fact delightfully apt, I think. As Brian notes in his book, the conversation about the merits and demerits of democracy is often cut short by would-be wits wielding a famous Winston Churchill quotation. Churchill is supposed to have said, and I quote, democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Now I'm sure we can all largely agree on that, and I doubt that there are any of us here who really long to be ruled by a king or would really like to see where a series of five-year plans would get us or would like to give good old-fashioned blood and soil fascism a real try. We like democracy just fine. But Churchill's Bon Moe shouldn't cut the conversation short since democracy is a very, very general idea and can be implemented in very many different ways with dramatically different consequences. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that mammals make the best pets. But if you're shopping for your seven-year-old daughter, you shouldn't be indifferent between a kitten and a badger. To concede that democracy is the best thing going doesn't tell us what kind of democracy we want. For example, it doesn't tell us what the scope of democratic decision-making should be. Should we vote for a national toothpaste? If we have representatives, what should be the domain of things that they get to vote about? Gladly, the American Constitution says that Congress can't vote to rescind our rights to free speech or to bear arms. And whether or not we have to quarter troops is apparently beyond the democratic pale. The desirable scope of democratic decision-making depends on a lot of things. And one of the most important things is the quality of democratic decisions. If voters don't know what they're doing and support policies and politicians for silly, arbitrary, or purely emotional reasons, we may end up with policies that make us all worse off, that produce results that none of us really wanted. It may be, in that case, best to limit the scope of democratic choice to make room for the free reign of other mechanisms, such as the market, less likely to run rough shot over our freedoms and more likely to produce good results. The myth of rational, the rational voter is, in my opinion, one of the most persuasive arguments that I've ever read, for relying less on government and more on markets. So I am delighted that Brian Kaplan is here today at Cato to lay out the contours of his argument and to tell us about his book. So let me introduce Brian properly to you. Here is Brian Kaplan, who is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and an adjunct scholar here at the Cato Institute. He's published in a number of prominent academic journals, including the American Economic Review, Public Choice, The Journal of Law and Economics, and more. He received his BS in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and his PhD from Princeton University. After Brian's remarks, we'll have comments from Scott Keter of the Pew Research Foundation. And I will introduce him properly just before his comments. For now, help me to welcome Brian Kaplan. Thank you very much, Will. Now, when looking at my book, you might initially think that I'm not saying anything that everybody doesn't already know. The view that voters know extremely little about politics and economics is actually standard in political science. Scott Keter has a very good book on the subject, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters, which reviews an entire literature about producing the consensus that actually voters know very little about politics and economics. However, there are also very many people in social science who will add, yes, it's true that the voters don't know very much about these subjects, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't make any difference in the end, which seems like a very strange thing to say. If you were to say that your brain surgeon doesn't know anything about brain surgery, but it doesn't matter, you'd say, what do you mean? How could it possibly not matter that your brain surgeon doesn't know anything about the brain? And yet there is an answer, which is internally consistent that has been offered, and the answer is known as the miracle of aggregation. The idea here is that as long as voters' errors are completely random, as long as there's no pattern in the errors, as long as people basically make a mistake by flipping a coin. As long as that is how it works, then basic statistics tells us that their errors will tend to cancel out. As long as there's a reasonably large number of voters, and as long as their errors look like the flip of a coin, then in the end, you're just going to get a result that averages out, and the average opinion is going to make a lot of sense, even though individuals actually seem to know very little. And now, incidentally, while social scientists often talk about the miracle of aggregation, a popular audience is much more likely to know this argument as the wisdom of crowds argument from James Sirwiki, or this is really an application of the wisdom of crowds. But again, the idea in the book is exactly the same one that I'm telling you, saying that it is a statistical rule that random errors will balance out. And therefore, it's quite possible for a group where individuals don't seem to know very much to act as if it knew a great deal. So according to the miracle of aggregation, it's possible for a highly uninformed electorate to act as if it were fully informed. For example, you could take a question like free trade versus protection. Well, as long as for every person who underestimates the benefits of free trade, there's another person who overestimates the benefits, then the actual average view is going to be correct. And the fact that people don't seem to know very much, or the fact that if you were to go and chat with people while they're standing in line to vote, and you talk to 99 people and 99 of them seem to not know what's going on, well really what matters is that 100th person who winds up swaying the outcome. Now the interesting thing about the miracle of aggregation is it basically gives people a way to believe in the facts and democracy at the same time. Just like walking and chewing gum at the same time, the miracle of aggregation allows a person to first admit the facts, which are very hard to deny that the typical American does not know a great deal about politics, does not know a great deal about economics, and yet it gives them a story for why that doesn't matter. It gives them a story for why you can say you can expect a group of people, most of whom know little or nothing, to actually yield an outcome that is about as good as you could hope for. So it's really quite an argument. I often refer to this as an alchemist's recipe. So you take 99 parts lead, one part gold, mix it around, and then you pour it out, and it's gold in the end, which seems like magic. But miracle of aggregation is not magic. It is a valid argument in the logical sense, namely that the conclusion does fall from the premises. There's just one problem. Is this premise actually correct? Is the premise that all errors are random and completely unpredictable actually true? Well, this is where I like to bring up the old saying, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. If it seems too good to be true to say that a democracy where virtually no one knows what they're doing can still produce perfectly good results, or in fact can produce results that are as good as if everyone knew exactly what they were doing, that seems like a very, very, very strong argument, and it's the kind of thing where you might want to exert some skepticism and poke around to the roots of the story, just like if you're watching late night TV and you see something about how you too can get rich in real estate. You should probably be careful about that, because it is you don't need any education, no money down, nothing. That's really true than why isn't everyone doing it? Because their families have deterred them. I don't think so. It seems more likely that this plan might work under some very rare circumstances, but probably actually is not all that it's cracked up to be. If it seems too good to be true, then it probably is. So this key assumption behind the miracle aggregation is that voter errors are random rather than systematic, and what evidence is there empirically to actually support this assumption? Turns out there's very little. Most of the time when people appeal to this assumption, they just will make an argument by analogy. They'll say, well, look, if you're flipping coins, then it's all going to balance out, and therefore the same thing is going to happen in politics. So that's not a very convincing argument. I'd like to actually have some evidence. It seems in particular like this is an important enough issue that you don't want to just say I'm going to sit in my room and think about what makes sense. To me, you might want to actually go to the numbers and see whether what makes sense to you actually really does make sense. Now, when you turn to public opinion data, it turns out that you don't have to look very hard. Large systematic errors are the rule, not the exception. You can find large systematic errors in almost any area, politics or economics, almost any politically interesting area, and you can find them through a number of different methods, all of which basically point to the same conclusion. Now, there are several different approaches. The one that is least controversial is simply comparing public opinion to actual hard numbers. So for example, if you're looking at public opinion about the budget, well, on the one hand, we can ask people, what do you think, how much money do you think we spend on foreign aid? Then we can go over to the actual numbers in the budget and find out how much we really do spend on foreign aid, and then we can see whether the average answer to the public is correct. As you may guess, it is not, it is off by many, many times. In fact, there was a very interesting 1995 survey, turned out that foreign aid was the most, when people were asked to name the two largest components of the budget, foreign aid was the most frequently named, even though it's about 1% of the budget. And on the other hand, social security was way down the list, when it actually is the largest component of the budget. And so that is one approach. There are some others, however, the main problem with the purely quantitative approach is there's a lot of interesting questions that are too ambiguous to do that. There isn't any official manual where you can flip it open and see what is the correct answer to the question, what trade policy maximizes national well-being. This isn't to say that there's not a correct answer to it, but it's too ambiguous to simply put into the statistical abstract of the United States. So what can you do in this case? There's a couple of different approaches. The one that I rely on though is comparison between laymen and experts. So what I do is I rely upon the assumption which many people may find unpleasantly elitist, but note I'm only saying presumption, I'm not saying a fact, saying a presumption, that when experts and laymen disagree, the experts are right and the public is wrong. Again, I'm not saying this is always true or absolutely true or necessarily true, I'm just saying it is a reasonable starting point and if someone objects to a specific application of the starting point, I'd like to hear some specific reasons why they don't like it because in general, if you hear an argument between any two people, say about what's wrong with their car. Right, if there's one guy who knows a lot about cars and he says there's a problem, you don't know a lot about cars and you think something else, who does smart money bet on? Smart money bets on the person who actually studied the subject extensively. All right, so my main approach then is to use this presumption that when laymen and experts disagree, the experts are right and the laymen are wrong. Now my main focus is beliefs about economics. Why economics? Well, two big reasons. First of all, economics is so intertwined with modern policy that almost every question in politics is now in part an economics question. So economics is extremely important to modern policy and in fact, if you take a look at what people say is what the issues people say are the most important ones to them, economics has historically almost always been at the top of the list. Since 9-11, terrorism foreign policy has sometimes supplanted economics, but also if you count borderline cases like as welfare policy or environmental policy as that economics, then the case for economics being the number one issue or issue that people care about is very strong, right? So that's one reason is just that economics is ubiquitous in modern policy. Second of all though is there's an interesting pattern historically which is that economists have spent several centuries complaining about the public's economic literacy. Economists have spent several centuries saying I can't believe the public really thinks these things. I try and try to explain why they're in error but they just don't listen, right? Or they complain, my students show up and you won't believe the kind of nonsense they believe and here's what I'm trying to teach them out of. So economists have had these complaints for a very long time. So at least suggests that this is an area to start looking for maybe with some important systematic errors that exist. Again, maybe it won't be so but at least it's a natural starting point. All right, now my strategy in the book in large part is to use a survey called the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy originally done by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 1996. This is the only survey out there that deliberately asked exactly the same questions about how the economy works to economists and to non-economists. So you're able to actually get an apples to apples comparison as you weren't able to get from previous surveys. All right, and at first pass if you take a look at the results do the average beliefs of economists in the public line up? Do on average do they agree? And the answer is absolutely not. They very radically disagree. They see the world almost in two completely different pictures. There are so there are these large belief gaps between economists and non-economists and furthermore the gaps are basically in the directions that economists would have expected all along. So in other words all the complaining that economists have been doing for a couple centuries come out very nicely in the data. You can actually see the numbers back up what economists have been saying based upon their first-hand experience. So perhaps not too surprising but on the other hand some people question economists' social intelligence so. So it turns out at least that when students have been saying that they're concerned that imports are destroying our country that economists have correctly heard them that this is actually their concern. Right now there are four main patterns of belief gaps that I discussed in the book just to go over them very quickly. The probably the biggest one of all or the overarching one is what I call anti-market bias. This is a strong tendency on the part of the public to underestimate the social benefits of the market mechanism basically to look at intentions instead of outcomes. So non-economists when they're trying to figure out is the system going to be good for society ask what do the people who are doing this want? Are they selfless and socially concerned or are they greedy and selfish? Right now economists have spent a very long time saying you know what that really doesn't matter it's quite possible that a person could be selfish and greedy and still lead to very socially beneficial outcomes. How so? Well suppose the way to get rich is to make the customer happy. In fact that is a very common circumstance. If someone says here's my business plan I figured out I'm gonna get rich and in step one make the customer hate me. Not a very good business plan in general. Again you might try it if you're going to do a scam you'll set up a shop for one day cheat everyone out of their money and run away. There are a few stories like this on the Sopranos but this is obviously the exception not the rule. If someone said that my business plan is to make sure that every customer walks away unhappy you would say you know I think that maybe being in business is not for you. That's not actually how it really works. So anti-market bias tendency to underestimate the social benefits of the market mechanism very common and also closely related to this is the public's failure to appreciate the importance of competition in making pleasing the customer in the self-interest of business. So there is a very common view among the public that prices are set in back hotel rooms by five guys smoking cigars and this is a view that is extremely widespread although often people will exempt their own industry. Well my own industry is very competitive of course but all the other ones that I don't actually have any knowledge of I'm sure that prices there are not set competitively. So again this is a story that economists have found very implausible when you consider especially how many people would have to be involved in this conspiracy and what are the possibilities of new entry and so on. So anti-market bias is the early overarching one where economists and the public have long disagreed. Second one, one where even people who have some appreciation of the market mechanism will often fly off the handle is what I call anti-market bias or excuse me anti-foreign bias. Generally people get especially outraged and worried when foreigners enter the picture. So it's one thing to say that there can be mutually beneficial trade between two Americans but to say there can be mutually beneficial trade between Americans and Chinese and that's crazy talk. There is a widespread perception among the public that when foreigners are involved that something bad is going to happen and here again economists have spent many centuries saying no actually the basic principle that trade benefits both sides remains true and furthermore there is actually a very interesting economic point which said economic principle called the law of comparative advantage which says that even when one country is more productive in every way than its trading partner mutually beneficial trade is still possible. Classes example, suppose that you have a guy who is the world's best brain surgeon and the world's fastest typist. Does it make sense for him to hire a secretary? Obviously it does because if he hires someone to do his typing then even though that person will not be as good at typing the world's best brain surgeon will then be able to focus on his brain surgery. Similarly if the U.S. is more productive than Mexico in both manufacturing and agriculture this means that if the U.S. is even more better in manufacturing than agriculture the U.S. can specialize in manufacturing and basically outsource agriculture to Mexico leading to an increase in the world's output. So just because foreigners are involved does not mean you should expect bad outcomes quite the contrary. Make work bias, tendency to judge the performance of an economy by employment rather than production. Again a very common view, if you go back to what the economy looked like 100 years ago in terms of employment people were doing much better than they are today. There was no problem, people were working very large numbers of hours, 100 years ago. There's barely a free moment in the day. So by that standard you might say they were better off than we are today. However there's one way in which people 100 years ago are much worse off than we are today. And that is stuff. We have a lot of stuff that they don't have. We have free time, we have all these amazing products. We have iPhone, so on things they couldn't even imagine and how is this possible in large part because we didn't try to save jobs 100 years ago. We decided to let the machine put farmers out of business so they could go and do something else instead. And what were those other things that people were going to do instead? Someone asked you that at the time you'd have to say, I don't know. You certainly weren't gonna say the iPhone is what they're going to do 100 years ago. All you could say is well they're gonna do something I don't know what it is, which sounds like a cop out but no it's actually a very sensible admission of the fact that you don't know what's gonna happen but you do know that the valuable labor is going to be put to good use if markets are allowed to work. And last quick pattern to mention what I call pessimistic bias. It's basically a tendency to see the world going to hell in a hand basket to think that things are bad right now, they've been getting worse and they're gonna get even worse in the future. It's the kind of thing that's a very common view among non-economists and economists will say that is really pretty strange view. You just compare what things were like in 1980 to what they're like today. Can't you see the improvements? Can't you see them? Right now, at this point I'm old enough to that I actually can say I've seen the improvements and I am shocked that anyone disputes it. And so, but again, of course my shock is precisely what's partly motivated the book. All right now, coming back to this question of couldn't the experts be the ones who are biased? I only said it's a presumption that when laymen and experts disagree, the experts right, the laymen are wrong. I don't wanna be dogmatic about it. I don't wanna say that experts have the truth, you must listen, you will do what you're told. I think that there are some experts out there that I have some questions about myself. But what I would like to ask for is, look, if you think that the experts are biased and that the presumption is wrong, at least tell me why. Give me a story. And here there are actually two big stories about why economists cannot be trusted. The first story is known as self-serving bias. This basically says, look, economists are rich, a lot of them have tenure, although not all economists. Some of them are hanging on by thread. But, economists are rich, they've got tenure, they have all these great lives. Of course they think everything's fine. Of course they think markets work. It's easy to think that markets work when you're an economist because markets are working for you. And so the complaint then is the economist imagine that what is good for them is good to the country. Well, that's one story that's been told. Another story that's often been told is what I call ideological bias. Story that economists are just a bunch of right-wing ideologs and they have basically made people who do not agree with them so uncomfortable in the economics profession that they don't wanna join. All right, another story. And again, this is one where if you hang out at George Mason University, you might say, there's a kernel of truth in this. But, yes, it turns out that neither of these stories actually can stand up against the data because here's the problem. Once you give a specific explanation of what's wrong with economists, then we can get the numbers and we can test it. And the server that I have does actually have these numbers that has measures of income, measures of job security, measures of income growth, measures of party, measures of party identity, measures of ideology, and many other variables. So if you were to go and do some standard statistical procedure, which if you saw Steve Levitt on The Daily Show back when he was first promoting Freakonomics, Levitt asked him, how is it that you sort out the relative effects of different things on crime? And Levitt said, well, use multiple regression analysis. And John Stewart says, that's one of my favorite kinds of analysis. So, yes, well, it's one of my favorite kinds of analysis too, and that is basically what I did in the book and in some previous papers is say, look, let's go and just try to do an apples to apples comparison, let's use statistics to simulate what would the typical economists think if you made him drive a taxi cab? Would he change his mind? Or alternately, what would the typical taxi cab driver think if you went and sent him to Econ grad school, but didn't let him, but forced him to continue being a taxi cab driver, right? Turns out that there'd be very little change in the economist's beliefs if you did this. In fact, and basically what's going on is that economists who are rich and have a lot of job security still very deeply disagree with non-economists who are rich and have a lot of job security. So compare the typical economist to Bill Gates. You should expect statistically that actually Gates will still think things that are very different from what most economists think, right? Even though Gates also lives a very pleasant lifestyle, even more pleasant than some economists from what I've heard. Nevertheless, his pleasant lifestyle has not been enough to turn people like him, again, possibly Bill Gates does think like an economist, I don't know, but people like Bill Gates, as a rule, do not think especially like an economist, centrally controlling for all these self-serving variables at most shears off about 20% of the belief gap and even that's probably an overstatement. Now when you go over to ideological bias, if you know anything about the facts, you will immediately realize the story cannot possibly work. Why is that? Because the typical economist is a moderate Democrat. The typical economist is a moderate Democrat. He's a moderate Democrat who thinks that supply and demand is from his prices, that downsizing is good for the economy, that free trade is good for the economy, and so on. So in fact, when you go and add statistical controls for party and ideology, the gap gets bigger because you have liberal democratic economists holding views that are completely bizarre for the typical liberal Democrats. And a way that I like to think about this is if you were to go and implement all political reforms where the Cato Institute and the typical liberal Democrat can agree on, you would have more reform than you've gotten in 30 years. It would be an amazing change because there's so many things that the Cato advocates that while not acceptable to the typical American, make perfect sense to the typical economist, including the typical liberal democratic economist will say, you know, I'm a liberal Democrat, but that doesn't mean that I'm not an economist, and these ideas simply make sense. All right. Now, last question that I want to address here is one that concerns me quite a bit in the book, which is why is the people would be rational some of the time and irrational other times? So what I've noticed is people who have a very poor grasp of economics, not only they have a poor grasp, but have an angry poor grasp. People who have never studied this subject have strong opinions anyway, and if you, with your many years in the field, offer however politely some criticism of their views, will lash out at you, get very upset. All right, so what exactly is going on here? Why is the people who in their ordinary lives are perfectly reasonable, hold down a job, maybe even extremely successful in their jobs, still will not listen to reason when it comes to a subject like this? And again, not to say that I am the voice of reason, but won't even engage in the very minimal acts of intellectual discipline of taking a deep breath, calming down, at least trying to listen to what someone else has to say. All right, so what's going on here? An answer that I pursue at length of the book is say, I think we should think about irrationality as being a good like any other. And why would you want the good of irrationality? Well, the nice thing about irrationality is it allows you to protect your views from criticism. If there's some views that are important to you that give meaning to your life, and you don't want to stop believing them because you want your life to have meaning, well, it's very dangerous to be constantly open to logical facts, it's basically every day you are risking your beliefs. Every day you're risking your worldview, you're risking being stripped of all your illusions. On the other hand, if logical facts mean nothing to you, if you were irrational about a subject, you're safe. You're safe. No one can change your mind if you are completely close to logical facts. Right, so you might want to be close to those in order to make sure that you don't have to change your mind in order to make sure the views that give meaning to your lives actually stay with you. All right, so the story that I tell then is that when an individual pays little price for rationality, and politics is a prime example, you could have completely crazy views and vote on the basis of them and what's going to happen to you personally as a result. Probably nothing. If a lot of other people share your views then something bad will happen to you but it would have happened anyway. So, yes, key thing to keep in mind, right? So when an individual pays a very small price for rationality as in politics, he's going to consume more and actually he will do what economists call satiating. This is like when you're at an all you can eat buffet and you eat and eat and eat until you're so full that you don't want to eat another bite. Similarly in politics, since a rationality is basically free for the individual, you can believe something that is as crazy as you want until you go to a point where the view is so crazy where you say, I don't want anything crazier than that. All right, that's enough. I believe the things are as I want and that's enough. So my bottom line then is that far from being inconsistent with economic theory, economists should have actually been expecting a lot of people to be quite irrational about politics. This is the kind of thing that if we really had been on the ball we would have predicted it rather than trying to get around the obvious facts that people often don't seem to be thinking very clearly about these subjects, right? So on these issues where the marginal cost of being wrong is zero, then people are likely to hold some very strange views, even if the social consequences are extremely high. Thank you, Brian, for that whirlwind tour. Because much of Brian's work depends on analyzing and sifting through public opinion analysis. We thought it would be fitting to have one of America's leading experts on the measurement of public opinion come and comment on his book. So today, commenting on the myth of the rational voter, we have Scott Keter, who is Director of Survey Research at the Pew Research Center here in Washington, D.C. His published work includes books on political participation in civic engagement, religion and politics, public opinion in American elections, along with articles and book chapters on survey methodology, political communications, and healthcare topics. Keter has taught at George Mason University, Rutgers, Virginia Commonwealth, and since 1980, he has been an election night analyst of exit polls for NBC News and has served as standards chair for the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Help me give a warm welcome to Scott Keter. Thank you, thank you, Will. And thank you all for the invitation to participate today. I first met Brian during my time at George Mason University and went out to lunch with him. I was quickly impressed with his free-ranging mind, a sense of humor, tremendous intellectual curiosity, and the speed with which he speaks as well. All of those things are on lavish display in the book as well as here in his remarks. I suppose that the format for this kind of event requires that I would be a critic and I'll try to fulfill expectations, but I have to tell you it takes some work and I also have mixed feelings about it. There is really a lot to like in this book. I found myself in agreement with a great deal of it and impressed with a lot of it even when I didn't necessarily agree with it. I don't like the implication that he carefully avoids making at least two explicit in there about democracy and the way a good democracy might function or even whether democracy is the right system at all, but I'm not sure how seriously to take these implications and that might be an interesting subject for questions from the audience for him as we turn to that part of the program. Since my substantive criticism is going to have to be rather muted or at least fairly selective, let me begin with just some ad hominem attacks on him which maybe is the best that I can do. Cheap shots that are personal rather than substantive if you will. For example, what is it about that terrible wallpaper that you have on your website, Brian? Has anybody told you how hard it makes it to read the text on there? They have said that, but you haven't changed it because it's the same paper I think that's been on there since I knew you back at GMU. Consider it a friendly suggestion and if any of you go on his website which is a fabulous website, by the way, it's so interesting and very much reflects the kind of thinking and humor that Brian brings to his work, then I think you'll agree with me and you can send him an email message about the distracting quality of the wallpaper. You know, much of these ad hominems have got to be motivated just by pure jealousy. The level of attention paid to this book seems very unseemly for a serious academic product and for those of us who've published scholarly books in this area, my book that Brian mentioned was published in 1996, you know, I just think there's a lot of resentment among people like me towards Brian for getting so much attention for his work. I mean, reviews in The Economist, Louis Manon, The New York Times, The New Yorker and more and more to come, I am sure. I also considered it a comment that actually did occur to me as I'm reading it and I'm thinking, you know, this reminds me of the Da Vinci Code. There's a lot of hooey in here, but boy, am I learning a lot as I'm reading it, so. All right, well, I'll stop because I can't think of any more good jokes anyway. This book is really a difficulty for the critic to find something to hang on to and a pleasure for the reader for this reason. Brian has written this book like a master chess player. He has anticipated what you're going to say about the next argument that he makes and then he's anticipated the argument after that and the one after that. He's really thinking three or four steps ahead of you and has done a very good job of weaving the counter arguments and the evidence right into the argument and that takes a fair amount of skill because it's already a fairly complicated argument that he's laying out and so pausing it or at least weaving into it the likely anticipated problems that readers are going to have could slow it down, but if you've read it, you know what I'm talking about. It really breezes along. It makes some very sophisticated arguments in a snappy fashion, maybe not quite as snappy as his presentation, but very efficiently, but at the same time sort of keeps the critic wondering, well, what is it that I could say or what is it that really undermines this because I don't like the way it feels or whatever, but I can't think of the right kind of evidence to bring to bear on it. So in any event, if you haven't read it, you know, I highly recommend it for that reason alone, but as I say, it makes my job more difficult. Brian's basic thesis regarding the levels of knowledge of the public is certainly consistent with my own work on the subject and work that I've done since writing the book with Michael Deli-Carpini back in 1996. And over at the Pew Research Center, we've continued to do work on this, essentially testing the public in terms of its knowledge of politics and public affairs. Most recently, we did a poll in the spring that was really devoted almost exclusively to that and for those of you who are interested in having a little bit of fun, try going to pewresearch.org and look at the little section on where do you fit. There's a thinker sitting on the pedestal and looking and what you do if you click on that is you get a chance to take a small version of the quiz and see how you compare with the national sample across 10 questions or so and we've had tremendous interest in that. Even during the surveys, we found that people were really having fun with it even if they didn't know the answers and I appeared on C-SPAN one morning and they had talked about the survey and they put some of the questions up on the screen and then when callers called in, they asked them the questions on the air and then the callers would say, hit me again, give me another one. So people liked the idea of taking the quiz but we've learned quite a lot about what the public knows and the portrait that Brian paints in the book is generally speaking an accurate one compared with the work that I've done and the work that we're continuing to do which is to say in the words of Philip Converse, eminent political scientist from the University of Michigan, you know, one of the most well-established truths in the social sciences and in political science in particular is that the mean level of public knowledge about politics is very low and the variance is very high. So, you know, typically you can find relatively small percentages of people that know facts that those of us who live inside the Beltway or think about politics a lot would consider to be somewhat second nature but you also find that there is a tremendous variability in knowledge in that the public is actually made up of a number of different strata in terms of knowledgeability on any given type of topic. In other words, it's not correct to say the public is ill-informed. It's correct to say that a significant segment to the public is ill-informed but there are a lot of people that are quite knowledgeable. For example, people who vote for the most part are considerably more knowledgeable than those who don't and if you narrow it down even more than that to let's say people who vote in off-year elections or just to, you know, any other sort of arbitrary segment to the public that's about a quarter or a third, you actually have people who are very knowledgeable. It's also the case that knowledge tends to vary across topical areas. In particular, we found in the poll that the Pew Research Center did this spring that the poll focused not on civics knowledge and how a bill becomes law and that type of thing but on questions in the news, what's going on in politics today and the area where people showed the most impressive levels of knowledge were exactly the areas where you would expect they were on questions having to do with the war in Iraq. People knew about the surge, they knew the size of the surge and significant numbers, minorities, but still significant numbers, could name the Sunnis as the other branch of Islam that was involved in the inter sort of civil war, however you wanna call it, within Iraq. And so a fair amount of fairly specialized knowledge is known to a significant number of people, especially if it relates to topics that are very important to people and that it's getting a lot of attention, which a point which I will come back to is offer a few gentle criticisms of the book or at least points for you to consider as you're reading it. So he's not done any disservice to those of us who study political knowledge and describes the findings of others work very honestly and I think takes off from points that have been well established in political science to make a very interesting argument. But I do see a few difficulties here that again, he's anticipated many of them and he's spoken to them, but I think they're worth mentioning nonetheless. One of the most obvious ones and that has been pointed out by some of the people who've reviewed his book is what I would call the domain problem. It's understandable that an economist would privilege economic knowledge and economic principles as sort of central to good governance, but it's not so obvious that people who are experts in other fields would necessarily privilege economic knowledge and so when one thinks about giving power to a council of economic advisors as opposed to voters or in some way making economic knowledge more of a criterion for what a good citizen is, I think that there are potential objections from not just experts in other fields, but from all of us who consider other aspects of life even while related to economics to be important. One of the examples that has come to mind in my discussions with other people about the work is healthcare. Now, there's obviously a connection between economics and healthcare and the degree to which markets would be the appropriate way to solve the American healthcare problem, but you would have, I think, a fairly large consensus among many health system experts in this country that there are very serious market failures with respect to the healthcare system in the US and that a market solution in and of itself unfettered or in some other form to what we currently are facing with healthcare in this country wouldn't necessarily be the best. I certainly think that many economists or health economists that I know don't see that. Many of them favor single payer systems that would have markets within them but are essentially not the kind of market system that we think of. And so I'm not endorsing one policy or another, I'm just saying that I think that the premise here is a very controversial one and one that needs further defense than it necessarily gets in the book. Foreign policy is another one. Now, Brian does do a good job in terms of treating some aspects of foreign policy, the questions especially having to do with international trade, the anti-foreign bias that he identifies but that's not the only kinds of questions relating to foreign policy and not all questions really relate to economics. And we certainly have seen many problems in the foreign policy world the past few years that I don't think are likely to have any sort of solution from the kind of substitution that he's talking about. A second area is what I would call the expert agreement problem. Again, he's anticipated this, but I think that you can't get around the fact that there is significant disagreement among experts even within the economics field. I mean, it's an old joke about the degree of dissensus and the kinds of different recommendations that you get among economists. Yes, you have I think a consensus that markets are good, but as he points out, economists have done a great job of detailing the degree to which markets fail and market failures are a serious problem have to be dealt with. So in other words, once you get past some of the very basic principles, you just don't find much consensus among economists on a lot of the very questions that seem to be motivating what he's doing here. I mean, even in the 1996 survey of economists and the public, you find disagreement among economists even among the basic facts of the matter. I mean, for example, there was a question in the poll are most of the new jobs being created these days good paying or low paying? Now, most of the public thinks they're low paying, 70%, 79% say that. That could very well be an incorrect assumption, but what do the economists say? 39% say they're well paying, 32% say they're low paying, and 22% say neither are mixed. Well, there's no consensus on the basic facts among economic professionals. Same thing in terms of whether family incomes are going up or faster or slower than inflation basically or the cost of living. No consensus among the economists. No consensus among the economists on the question of whether tax cuts are good or bad for the economy. And then on the question of whether regulation is to blame for the reason the economy might not be doing better than it is, more people in the public think that that's true than thought so among the economists sample. Now, none of this is fatal. It's just my point is that there is less of an economic consensus out there among experts than probably would be necessary to fully want to buy the argument that he's making. Let me make a final point about what I would call the static problem. There's an assumption that is not ever stated explicitly here that the public really, because of the irrationality of many of its views, is resistant to learning or to accepting the truth when it's made available to them. And while it's hard to find lots of examples on this, I think that there's a sense from the book that the public has greater, let's say, anti-trade biases than it does. I mean, keep in mind that on the question of NAFTA, after Bill Clinton and Al Gore worked very hard in the early 1990s to sell NAFTA, he never got a gigantic consensus among the public, but he got pluralities or small majorities favoring NAFTA at that time. And that was partly a result of things like Al Gore and Ross Perot debating some of the issues on television. So we have evidence of the fact that the public actually can be brought around to better points of view from someone's perspective or less inaccurate points of view. And I think that related to that is the question of whether ultimately encouraging more people to vote is a good thing. There's certainly the implication from this work or one could draw the implication from this work that it's not a good thing for everybody to vote because there are a lot of people who are so uninformed or misinformed that it does the system harm. But I think that one should also recognize the fact that when people do vote, they get additional incentives to become more informed. We find that people who are brought into this system, especially young people who are encouraged to go vote, find that over time, having done it, they get more interested and they're able to inform themselves in ways that make them better voters or more rational voters in the future. All of this is simply to say that one has to search pretty hard to find things to disagree with Brian about, at least in his diagnosis of the problem. I think there are some problems as I've outlined here, but I can guarantee you that if you will not, you will read this book and you will not think that you've read a book by an economist, except in a few pages there where you have a few curves. Instead, I think you'll find a very lively and very informative tale about our current policy process and some of the problems with it. And I encourage you to read it and make up your own mind. If Brian would like a couple minutes to respond, say three minutes. Sure, sounds very good. Get us going into the larger discussion with the audience. Yes, so some very great comments from Scott. It makes me think that I should have worked harder on him to make him give me very detailed comments before I sent the book into Princeton. So on this question of the main, I did make an effort to indicate that I'm focusing on economics because it's what I know because it seems important and because economists have been talking about economic literacy for a long time. I don't mean to say that other experts don't have some important things to contribute. I go over a couple examples of the book like toxicologists versus the public. Turns out that whereas toxicologists believe that dosage is important, many, many non-toxicologists think that any infinitesimal amount of a dangerous substance will kill you for sure. So, and there are many other disagreements of this kind between toxicologists and the public. I don't talk much about foreign policy in the book but I do have an op-ed that I've been shopping around on this topic. There's some very interesting work in public opinion on the rally around the flag effect. This is this tendency for wars to suddenly become popular once they're declared. And if you think about the incentives that that gives to politicians, they're not pretty. And then there's a further pattern in public opinion to become disillusioned with wars after they start, even though they are lasting and doing about as well as they should have expected all along. So that also can lead to some bad incentives for politicians to first jump the gun, go in, then people get disappointed and then maybe leave things much worse than they were. So what I actually say in the book is I would be overjoyed if experts in other fields would go and apply my argument to their fields and tell us what experts in their field know and what the public really needs to learn. I saw that would be a great joy to me if that happened and if you want to do any work on this please send me your working papers or your manuscripts, I'd love to see it. Now Scott did make a very interesting point which I don't think I adequately emphasize in the book which is sometimes these disagreements between the public and economists are the sort where almost all economists think one thing and the public doesn't know what it thinks or the public is divided. But he's right, there's also a number of questions where economists are divided and the public has one answer that they believe. I still say this should be disturbing. If brain surgeons disagree about what you've got and some guy who doesn't know anything you definitely need to have your brain taken out. You should be very worried about that guy. The experts don't agree. You seem to think that you've got all the answer for sure. I don't think we should be listening to you. I think it's time to wait and see if the experts can agree we shouldn't just jump the gun because there's one guy who hasn't studied the subject who thinks he's got the answer. But there's a great point from Scott. I didn't emphasize enough in the book and I should have although I say it's still a serious problem. The last point just to chime in on NAFTA. Yeah, this is a very interesting example of politics working better than you'd expect given public opinion. So you go and take a look at public opinion. Actually, there was very, very careful pulling done during that entire year. Essentially, more people favored NAFTA than opposed it for the first time two weeks after NAFTA was passed. And then support eroded again. But it was true that by a very big public relations campaign Clinton was temporarily able to make more people support NAFTA than opposed it. But I would still say this is not any great grounds for optimism on the part of the public because remember, how long did NAFTA have to be? 1,000 pages long. So how much work is it to actually get free trade when a real free trade treaty would just be a sentence? There's now free trade between the US and Mexico. And also worth pointing out, there's still a very long way to go. Even if we had 1,000 page treaty for every remaining country where we still have high tariff barriers with, that would be a lot of 1,000 page treaties. And so this reminds me of one of the main comments that the reviewer in the Wall Street Journal had saying, look, very few bad things happened in recent years. And I was thinking, well, very few things have happened in recent years. Right now, basically the status quo is very hard to change in the US, so you know about gridlock. And therefore it's not so surprising if no new bad things happen because new things generally don't happen. So the key thing to keep in mind is to understanding the levels. Why is policy basically the way that it is? It may be that we're able to get some improvement reform. And of course, one of the main reasons why I wrote the book is because I'd like to try to slightly increase the chance of improvement reform. You know, I think you know, step one of getting some improvement reform is convincing people that they might be wrong. Thank you. Well, now we will open the discussion up to you, the members of the audience. A few guidelines for your questions. We have microphones that wander the floor. Please wait for the microphone to come to you. Please identify yourself and your organization if you have an affiliation. And please do try to limit your remarks to a question and not a soliloquy. All right, so we have a hand right here, this gentleman right here in the first row. As you agree that the main purpose of democracy is not to make good policy, but to ensure the peaceful transition of power between interests. I mean, I say in most western countries, there isn't much of an issue of civil war breaking out either way. There isn't, that's not a serious concern, I'd say that picking policy is at least one of the very important things that's going on. I mean, maybe you're thinking that policies are gonna be the same regardless of who's in charge. I'd say that's probably not so, or better way of thinking about it is that a public opinion change policy would change. There is a reason why competing politicians tend to agree so much, which is that they're both competing for the median voter or for the swing voter. So naturally they're trying to go and tell the swing voter what he wants to hear, but if that swing voter were to change his mind, then what politicians are saying would be likely to change. Now I mean, one thing that you might be getting at, so I'm not sure, is that really what politicians try to do is just to stay in office and the way they do that isn't by implementing particular policies but just by trying to get peace and prosperity. I think this is one of the reasons why things are not a lot worse. So if politicians were to actually do exactly what public opinion says they should do, it would be a disaster and everyone would hate the politician who did it. See the case of Gray Davis. So what I would say though is while policy is, well to some extent voters do vote just on peace and prosperity and that does help make the system work better. Still, peace and prosperity brought about with extremely unpopular policies is generally still not going to lead to re-election. If you could cut the crime rate in half by legalizing drugs, would a politician who did that be seen as a hero or as the biggest monster of the modern era? I have a feeling it would be the second although I wish it were the first. Coming down here, please wait for the mic. My name is Glenn Corral and I'm an old turkey but in any case though I do, I am active as a poll worker in Louisville, Kentucky and deep concern over the low percentage of registered voters who actually vote. And of course to me it's not just a right to vote but it's a responsibility to vote. And my questions are these. One, how can we get more registered voters in fact to vote? And two, how can we help them be more knowledgeable about the issues that differ between say two candidates in each of the levels whether it's local, state or federal so that they can therefore be more responsible in their voting? You wanna take that first, Scott? Let me address the first part. We have observed in this country over the last 30 years a stagnation in the voter turnout rate. It's not a decline as many people have said. There actually is factoring out some of the ups and downs like the spike in 2004 and in 1992. There has actually been no change. This is discouraging however, given the fact that things that predict voting such as educational levels have been rising steadily since the 1970s. It seems that the best arguments for why this stagnation has occurred even as other factors proliferation of news media and rising the levels of formal education, why that hasn't helped raise the level of voting has to do with the decline in mobilization of voters. The one group in which we have seen a decline is among young people. In 2004 presented an interesting experiment, if you will in whether mobilization of voters could really make a difference. In 2004 we saw the biggest percentage increase in voter turnout among young people that we have seen in this modern period that I'm talking about basically since the 1970s. And I would argue that is largely because not only did you have an exciting election in which everybody agreed a lot was at stake but you also had massive efforts on the part of both political organizations and nonprofit organizations to mobilize young people. I would argue that what's happened over this period of time is that there has been a decline in the various institutions, labor unions and others, that actually engage in mobilization. And what has happened is that you have gotten progressively a more elite group of people voting. Now the elite group has grown because of the growth in formal education but it has increasingly left people who are not college educated and are not affluent behind because they're not being asked to turn out in the culture. So my quick answer to the question would be we need to find other ways to mobilize people. We need to find other institutions that will ask people to vote. And part of it is the political parties and the candidates themselves. The targeting of voters has become so efficient and so carefully done in terms of making sure that you only mobilize the people who are in agreement with you that the electorate can be narrowed to people that are dependable and mobilized leaving the rest of the people out. So it's a continuation of a trend that has a lot of different sources. Brian, is low turnout even a bad thing according to your thesis? No. This is where you're gonna see that I am an economist and not a political scientist. My claim in the book is actually that low voter turnout is a blessing in disguise. The one of the two key things that predicts turnout is actually higher education and higher educated people generally have more sensible views about policy. So I think part of the reason why policy is not worse is that we are, is the people who know less about what makes sense are less likely to actually influence policy. Now on the question of could we take more efforts in order to educate voters more? Well, this is where I'll be an economist and say if you have two different ways of doing the same thing and one is much cheaper than the other you should do the cheaper one. So if you could either encourage people who don't know what they're doing to not vote or at least not encourage them to vote or you could have a massive public education campaign to raise the level of awareness of everyone up to the level of PhD. If there are even such resources in the universe I think it's better to just encourage people to be lazy, say, you know, if you don't really know what's going on it would actually be the more responsible thing not to participate. Greg Mankey on his blog posted an op-ed which was the one column that he ever wrote for a magazine and I don't remember the magazine but it was the one column he ever wrote where they turned it down. He said, sorry, we're not running this column, Greg. And it was this column where he said if you were an uninformed voter it would be a service to all of us if perhaps you would just stay home. And I think this is a point while shocking there's deep wisdom in it. I did describe this book as provocative on the back cover. I believe this gentleman here has had his hand up and then after that this woman in the black down here if you want to. It's Britain at the University of Georgia from the University of Georgia. The trend in the U.S. and the other democracies has been to more and more insulation from the voter. Less decided by the House and more by the Federal Reserve, the FCC, SEC, FDA, the longer terms, the base closing commission and the federal judiciary and the civil service which are lifetime tenure. The consequence is that we have more and more government power and also more and more higher living standards and well-being and so on. Are you proposing that we should have more government, more insulation from the voter by means of more government power of longer termed entities or that we should devolve the power outside the government to the private sector? Right, yes. First choice, yes, is when possible, leave more things to the market. So absolutely that is my first choice and there's a lot of cases where it could work very easily with minimal effort. In other cases where that's not going to happen, then I at least think we should be open to the possibility that experts would do a better job. Take the case of the Federal Reserve. I think at least it does a much better job than it would if they were popularly elected. I think we would have significantly higher inflation and unemployment would probably be about the same. So I think we should at least be open to the idea that experts do actually do things better. So again, that is not my first choice, but it's something as a second best, it's worth considering. This woman right here. Hello, my name's Julia Abrams. I'm here as a member of the public. I wonder if you could comment a little bit about the special interests theory because your argument to the extent that I understand it seems very compelling, but before I was acquainted with your argument, the story that people usually tell about problems is that there are special interests who care a lot and most other people don't care very much, so the special interests dominate a policy decision. Yeah, that is a great question. This is one of the questions that actually made me write the book because whenever I was around other economists, they would always say things like, you know why we have social security, don't you? No, we have it because old people vote so much. Right now there's a special interest. And I say, hmm, that's an interesting theory. Let's go and take a look at the data. Turns out that social security is overwhelmingly popular in all age levels and in fact, it's slightly less popular among the elderly, believe it or not. Yes, the elderly overwhelmingly support it. The young overwhelmingly support it by a little more. And this pattern can be repeated for virtually every kind of major special interest policy that you can think about. Farm subsidies very widely blamed on the farmers. The farmers are the ones who will force these policies down our throat. If you go and look at public opinion, turns out that you have about 80% support for farm subsidies in farm and non-farm states alike. And then why do people want farm subsidies? Well, one of the arguments that appeals most to the general public is we need farm subsidies in order to ensure that we have food. I do not kid you. 60% of Americans will say that we need farm subsidies to make sure that the groceries have food in them, even though of course, almost none of the items in the grocery store are subsidized. It's only a handful of those items are subsidized and they appear to be, they were there the last time I checked, but yeah. So I actually had an op-ed on this in the Wall Street Journal and just going over how economists tend to blame special interests, but in general these policies of special interests who are getting are popular, which perhaps explains why politicians hold a big press conference when they impose a steel tariff rather than saying let's keep this quiet because they know people will like them more for imposing the steel tariff, not less. Of course, I found it interesting that you referred to the entire public as a special interest when talking about social security. I know, just the elderly. All right, let's look for one back here in the pink shirt right there. Is that salmon? My name is Karen Bentley and I'm with a group called The Polling Company and my question is for Dr. Kaplan. You talked about voters' key issues and with regards to public opinion data and what you defined as technically non-economic issues like Iraq and the war on terror, do you think that deep down those issues are economic issues and have you done any analysis on economist outlook, on Iraq versus the public and particularly on domestic economic security? That's a very good question. Informally, I've noticed that at least for a while economists tend to be hawkish, which I am not. I think a lot of it comes from a misapplication of the idea of incentives matter, saying look incentives matter so therefore we should strike the fear of God and everyone else on earth and then they will do what we want. And yes, but they also might hate you for it and then things might not work out as well as you're expecting. I would like to see a lot more done on informed policy and applying what I've done in this book. The main things that I've seen like I said are this work on the rally around the flag effect that is your great book by John Mueller on overblown on how people overestimate the risks of terrorism. So I think the argument that I'm making in the book really does go through for a lot of other issues. I think we are putting way too much effort into fighting terrorism, which is statistically a small problem again, just to offend the people that I haven't offended so far, I'll now offend them. So, but yes, I mean, I'd like more to be done. I'd like to have more answers to your questions, but so far I don't, but I hope to get them. Did you have a? No. All right. Bill Niskan in the Cato Institute. Professor Kaplan, you attribute the irrational policies of democracies to irrational voters. Now, how do you explain the substantial difference in economic policies among democracies, both over time and at any given time among governments? Yeah, that's a very good question. This is something where I don't have the data, but I'll tell you my belief. I'll tell you my guess. I believe that levels of rationality vary from country to country in time to time. I believe that the level of economic irrationality in France is greater than in the U.S., and that is why they make it very difficult to fire someone, even though the long run consequence of this is almost any economist will tell you is to make employers very reluctant to hire. And similarly, I think it varies over time. I think economic irrationality in the 1930s was much worse in the U.S. than it is today. And when you go and read the history of the 1930s and see what people would say, it's horrifying. It's horrifying to see what people would say, although actually the statement that sticks in my mind the most is perhaps the most horrifying is what Herbert Hoover said in 1932, and I think the nominating convention, when unemployment was 25%, he said, yes, it's true that unemployment is 25%, but let it not be forgotten that there's also good news. Our wages are now the highest in the world. Never considering that perhaps the 25% unemployment rate could be related to the 25% rise in real wages during the first three years of the Great Depression. And he got thunderous applause, so when I hear that, I'm like, gee, I don't think things would be that bad today, so I think the things actually were worse at previous times. In case you don't have any evidence for your... The data is not good, the data is not good. Again, I will say that we have a lot of anecdotal evidence, and there are surveys saying that things like support for labor market regulation of a European kind is much more common in Europe than it is here, so I think that's clear. But again, if someone would like to give me the money to go and do the international version of the survey, I would love to accept the money and do it. And if someone wants, can someone configure, can someone invent a time machine where we can go back and ask people their views back in the 30s? I'd really like to do that. But again, and I don't mean to be flippant, if you have some idea of how we could actually measure public opinion back then, I'd like to get it, but you work with what you've got. I'd like to actually ask you a follow-up question on that, that your theory depends on the idea that rationality is a good, like many others, and people will be more or less rational, depending on the cost of being rational. If we've seen a change over time since the 30s where there's a difference in the US as opposed to, say, France, what is explaining those differences in costs such that people now are more likely to exercise rationality economically in terms of economic policy than before? Yes, my best answer is slightly circular, although it's not entirely circular. So I don't have time to go over the game theory of coordination games, but basically the main cost of having certain views is often just that other people won't like you if you have them. So if you live in a country where most people have pretty reasonable views and you don't, there's gonna be social pressure on you to change your mind. On the other hand, if you live in a country where irrational views are extremely popular, there's social pressure on you to be irrational. So in terms of why any particular individual living in a country tends to have views of one kind or another, I will give the answer, which is not entirely circular, which is people think that because other people around them think that. It may seem circular, but it's not actually. However, the deeper question of, yeah, but why do a lot of people in that country think that? That, I just have to appeal to history, differences in culture. If someone has a better story, I'd like to hear it, but I don't have one. All right, let's go with this gentleman right here, how does he end up? And this guy in the black after that. I am Carl Johnston from George Mason. Hi, Carl. More of our students. I was hoping you would address yourself a little bit more at a piece of Scott's commentary, which was about healthcare. And he pointed out, and my experience in the field also defines this, that the consensus among healthcare experts, the people that you would have running things is more along the lines of non-market solutions to healthcare problems and towards single-payer systems and so forth. And I'm just wondering if, A, you think, perhaps that indicates that maybe they're right, or B, was Hillary Clinton correct in her approach, at least, when she took a bunch of experts and walked them off into a back room and had them cook up a plan that pretty much bombed when it came out in 1994? Yes, very, very, very, very, very fair question. So just to take the easiest one, does the fact that most healthcare experts think something, make me think that they might be right? Yes, yes it does. It's something that I think you have to take seriously. When people have studied a subject for a long time, have a view, at least you've got to take a deep breath and say, all right, let's hear what they have to say. I don't think it's, I think it is unwise to dismiss a consensus like that without further study. What I would say is, I would hypothesize that a lot of the disagreement or a lot of the views of healthcare specialists comes in substantial part down to ideology, right? Where I suspect, although I'm not as confident, but I suspect that you really will see a very strong liberal democratic overrepresentation among healthcare experts. And if you were to look at healthcare experts who are politically non-aligned, I think that you would see a much more circumspect view of things. So I think that's part of the story. There is this question of domain, so healthcare experts, what exactly are they experts about? They may be experts about, for example, the health benefits of various procedures. They may in fact not be experts about the most efficient way to allocate. And in fact, what you will see among many healthcare experts is they just don't like cost benefit analysis. So in that case I'd say, well, it's not that they're not experts, but they're experts about something more narrow than all healthcare. And so that's something that I would add. This fellow here, and then we'll go into the back for a couple of questions. Hi, my name is Ryan from GMU. I got probably more of an academic question. You compared Kepler's book to that of Downs, Tullock in Buchanan, and I was wondering how the orthodox PCers, the public choicers, have viewed your idea of irrationality as opposed to rational ignorance. And it's, of course, it hasn't been enough time, but what have you gotten feedback in? Well, actually there has been enough time because I've been haranguing people for 10 years. So I'd say in terms of the actual data, there's not much disagreement. A lot of it is much more philosophical about, what does it really mean to be ignorant? What does it really mean to be irrational? I would say that probably the main source of disagreement comes from the fact that it's very hard for people in public choice to abandon this view that voters are selfish and vote selfishly, which again, one thing that I've learned from political scientists like Scott is the data is overwhelmingly against the selfish voter voting hypothesis. In fact, it is very hard to predict someone's political views based upon their objective self-interest. And this is an idea that's very hard to talk people out of. But, you know, personally, they've been great, and of course they gave me tenure, so that's something. I had a, can I exercise speakers prerogative and ask you a question? Brian, I'm curious what you make of something that gets remarked upon a lot by people in my business now, which is the fact that you still have a third to 40% of the US public believing that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9-11 attacks. Is this the supply side of irrationality that you write about in a book? Is this something, apart from whether it's true or not or whether it is a problem for our foreign policy, what's the source of it and how do you, what sense do you make of it in your framework? Right, so 40% of people thinking that, or 40% of Americans thinking that Saddam was behind the World Trade Center attacks. Well, this is not the kind of belief that someone forms in a vacuum, right? This is not something that you have a gut feeling about when you're five. So I'd say that the supply side was important, in terms of spreading this message. However, there's what I call joint causation here. Right now, people would not have been promoting this idea if people would have thrown tomatoes at them or said, you're gonna say stuff like that, I'm not gonna, I don't trust you anymore. So I think basically what's going on here is you have an interaction between people who are extremely, who are very credulous. People who have some people that they want to believe and basically ascribe some kind of infallibility to them or at least some unreasonable level of trust, combined with people who would want to go and sell the story in order to cover themselves. So I think, this is a case where I think there is an important interaction. You can go and blame, say, conservative radio. But again, it wouldn't be on conservative radio if people didn't like what they were hearing. So I think there's complex interaction, although ultimately, if people were more reasonable about this, there wouldn't be much market for the supply side to be spreading it, so. And a number of hands up in the back there. This gentleman in the white with a red tie. Law school. Brian, I want to press you a little further on the issue of which experts to believe in which not to. Seems to me, if you're talking about the principles of physics, I want a bunch of expert physicists that can rely on not public opinion. On the other hand, if it comes to the question of how to interpret the commerce clause, I would take 10 people just reading it over 10 constitutional law professors, of which I am one. And I think if you survey constitutional law professors, you get nothing other than the personal political preferences of social law professors. Economic strikes be somewhere in between physicists and law professors with quasi-scientific basis, shall we say, and some ability to test thesis. So do you have some theory as to when it's appropriate to rely on experts and when experts are gonna be no better and sometimes worse than just public opinion itself will be? Oh yeah, thank you very much for that question, David. So, step one is I would actually go and apply the same challenges to other fields that have been applied to economists, namely self-serving bias and ideological bias. Is it in fact the case the law professor actually, could it be that his incoming tenure wind up making him inclined to these views? That's not so plausible, but ideological bias on the other hand, very plausible for law professors. Law professors, as we know, are an extremely liberal democratic group. And it would be more interesting to me to see what does a politically independent, ideologically neutral law professor think about the commerce clause rather than typical law professor. So I'd say, let's start by just applying this ideological bias test. I think it would actually explain away a lot of law professors' apparent views about the commerce clause. So I'd say that is step one is just saying, look, I only said presumption. I didn't say I really believed them. So let's go and apply the test, see how well they wind up doing. I think that would wind up diminishing the difference by quite a bit. So, and then the second thing is, again, it's only presumption. If you go into the field and study it for a while and you start to think, it really does seem like this is a big cult. Well, in that case, again, maybe you're wrong, but at least it's something you consider. Do you see cult-like properties in the field? Economists have also of course been accused of being a cult, but here I will go and point out, gee, you can do extremely well in this cult while spitting in the face of the cult. So it's not that much of a cult. There was the piece in the New York Times last week about iconoclastic economists who have questioned the free market fundamentalism. Well, yeah, well, these guys are some of the most prominent economists in the field. They've won the Clark Prize and so on. So it doesn't look like much of a cult on that end to me. Any more questions? Gentlemen in the back there. Is it possible for a layman or non-economist to devote rationally? I mean, since one party has their economists and the other party is their economist, how can a layperson decide which is the correct economist and what the actual consensus of economists is if they don't know the literature, if they don't have time to put into the finding out? I'd say one good heuristic is to find out what the economists from both parties agree on. So the stuff that they disagree on, there's some serious questions there. The stuff where they actually are able to agree. Again, this takes a little bit more work, but also the stuff where politicians distance themselves from their advisors. As again, the case of Greg Mankiw and Mitt Romney on immigration, that's a good, that's again, that's a sign. This is something where an economist was willing to stick his neck out and say something different from what the guy that he's supposed to be supporting said. So that again, seems like a good reason to think that he's actually would be professionally embarrassed to go along with the guy that he's working for. So again, now again, the simplest heuristic of all and one that I think would actually improve the world a lot is just for people who cannot, who don't have the time to figure something out to be agnostic. If you don't have the time to figure out the arguments about free trade versus protection, stop having an opinion. And if all the people who had not studied the subject stopped having an opinion, then Lou Dobbs would go away. And politicians would then be appealing to two groups of people. People who have no opinion about free trade and therefore it doesn't matter, what they say doesn't matter and people who know something about it and then politicians would say free trade. All right, let's make this one right here the last question. Thank you. Hi, my name is Tim Shioji, I'm from Georgetown University. My question's about something called light in public. The survey seems to suggest that the more education you receive, the more you tend to agree to economists. Kind of curious about that because from my personal experience, it seems like the kind of education you receive has a great effect on your economic views. For example, I have a lot of friends that have multiple degrees, but they all suffer from all four of the biases that you talk about. So I'm wondering that's why that's not reflecting data or maybe it just happened around kinds of friends. Yes, that is a great question and there are two basic answers to that. One of them is if you think that well-educated people still have some appallingly economically illiterate views, you ought to see what other people look like. Right, so if you think that your friends who went to college ought to know better, they probably do know better compared to someone who dropped out of high school. Right, so that's one step. Now the other thing is that the highly educated people who hang around universities such as college professors are not a representative sample. In general, if you are highly educated and extremely anti-market, you're likely to hang around universities. And so the professors are a self-selected group of highly educated people. If you go and do a broader sample of just highly educated people in general, you'll see that there's a lot of people who in fact most people who are well-educated are relatively pro-market, but they're not the ones who stay in universities and educate our kids. Except for George Mason. And a few other places. All right, well, I want to thank Brian and Scott for a stimulating conversation. Thank you.