 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is Martin Gurry, author of the new book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Martin. Uh, hi. Maybe let's start with the big term you use throughout your book that you kind of identify as the change we're living through right now and that's the fifth wave. Can you tell us what that is? Well, the fifth wave of information is a decisive feature of our moment in time. Industrial age, institutions, and by that I mean anything from government to the daily newspapers are being battered, are finding their authority pretty fatally undermined by an unprecedented torrent of information emanating from ordinary people, amateurs, the public wielding digital platforms. I call it a wave because when scholars have measured the growth of information from the dawn of culture to today, the chart looks like a tsunami, looks like a tidal wave spiking out by the turn of the new century. The year 2001, for example, produced double the information of all of previous human history, the year 2002 double that and that's pretty much continued along. Now, I call it the fifth wave because there have been four previous great pulses or waves of information in the past. Each one of them sweeping across a social landscape and leaving everything pretty much altered. The first wave was obviously the invention of writing. The second one was the development of the alphabet. The third, possibly the most disruptive, was the printing press. The fourth into which I was born was the age of mass media, the industrialization of information. Each one of these waves pretty much entail a reordering of social, economic, and political life. My sense is that right now we stand at the brink of another potentially catastrophic reordering of society. You mean catastrophic in a negative sense or just in the level of change? Would this be as different as the printing press made life, do you think, as revolutionary as that? As you probably noticed from my book, I really shy away from making predictions. I was a government analyst and government analysts are basically your profits. You're being asked by the president, predict tomorrow to me. That works when tomorrow looks like yesterday, but when you have discontinuities, which is of course what the president wants to hear about, he doesn't want to be surprised, it does not work. So I'm not going to be in the profit business and say this is what's going to happen, but it seems to me that in the past when we have had these great big pulses, there have been reordering of pretty much from the ground level up of social life, economics, and politics. The printing press being of course the most obvious example of that. But I mean, you can go back to the invention of writing and you had kind of like a priestly, amendering cast that was necessary to handle early writing. And you can go back to the alphabet and you have the classical republics that couldn't have existed without an alphabet. Each change brought about a reordering. If that holds true, and I'm not saying that it will because I am not a prophet, but if that holds true, we are in for a very unprecedented reordering of pretty much every aspect of life. Can you give us some examples of how this is playing out right now in our daily lives? What around us are we seeing today that's part of this fifth wave besides just kind of more information being out there? The fundamental issue that I'm interested in has to do less with the surface changes than maybe you're asking about here, you know, how, for example, here we are talking on Skype. I can do that with video and I have done it. The people who can be in Switzerland, they can be in Lebanon, in Beirut, Lebanon. And we can speak directly face to face, literally. I can see their faces. For me that's always been important. I hated the telephone. I always felt left out all the important information, which was a person's face. So I could speak face to face and it's a very remarkable feeling. Google and algorithmic search, very remarkable. You have a question, out it comes. But my concern is at a deeper level, all these tools have allowed ordinary people, the public, to gather in basically communities of interest and that interest can be in pictures of cute kittens or it can be in the overthrow of the regime of Hosni Mubarak or the occupation of Wall Street to protest capitalism. And this public has now suddenly in command of what I call the commanding heights of information, the information sphere and can erupt into politics. It is no longer a passive audience. It is no longer somebody, a group of people who just stand there and support one elite group versus another elite group. It is itself a player for the first time in history and has been very disruptive. We can talk about the incidents, but from the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt to the indignados in Spain to the 10 people in Israel to the Tea Party and the occupiers in the U.S. These are the incidents that I am interested in that I discuss in the book. Now, as if you read the book, you'll note that it goes beyond politics. Every domain of human activity is challenged. The scientific establishment is being challenged on any number of fronts by people who believe in open science. Bloggers have challenged a lot of global warming, orthodoxy. There is a continual struggle between authority, domains of authority, elites that have been taught to believe that they own these domains, that they own this information because why? Well, because I spent gazillion years at the university getting these very painful degrees and then I spent all this time apprenticing in these institutions and now I am at the top and I own this information and suddenly a blogger is questioning what you say and oftentimes the blogger is right and you are wrong and there is I guess what I would call a failure of the institutions to make a case for themselves in front of this assault from the public. Well, it seems like obviously there are two different sides to this. One of them could be that I talked to my journalist friends, the kind of elite people you were mentioning and I think that they would argue and some of them do that the accuracy is a problem with some of these divergent viewpoints that are out there and probably is the case or maybe you disagree that old school journalism was possibly more accurate in general than this new kind of information sharing. I totally disagree. My area in the government, I worked with the DNI, eventually became the DNI open source center. I looked at the media throughout the world. The difference was when you put something out in the equivalent of the New York Times or Le Monde or El Mundo or whatever, you were a passive audience and you were told by the Walter Cronkites of the world that's the way it is or all the news has fit to print and you pretty much had to take it on face value because you had no alternative sources of information. Authority is basically a function of monopoly. The second that monopoly is lost, you have options, you have choices and there is a lot of, let's say, mediocre information, unanalytically sound information that comes out in what is called new media. It is equally the case with journalism, I think. This is a very strange contest between people who are probably correct in their assessment of the institutions which are failing in many ways, but who are not producing any kind of way in which they can be reformed. I'm trying to think how this is necessarily at a fundamental level different from what's come before versus we just happen to be using different technologies to do what we've always done because it certainly is not the case that there haven't been popular movements or people organizing around shared interests in the past. Or even upstart things like Thomas Paine Common Sense, which was an upstart. The Protestant Reformation where the elite opinion was shaken to its core and similarly with the elites, I think look at the way that people engage with information on the internet and it certainly is the case that people are expressing lots of opinions in a much more public way than they used to because it used to be prior to Facebook and Twitter and whatever else, you could talk to the people in your immediate vicinity but you couldn't broadcast this stuff to the world. But at the same time, the stuff that they're talking about, it doesn't feel like everyone's out there kind of generating new opinions and sharing them, it's that they're passing around links to the elites to a Paul Krugman article or a blog post from some popular blogger who may have gotten to be elite in a different way than in the past but is still an elite. So is there something really different going on here? You mentioned Thomas Paine. I actually think there are many similarities and I don't know whether they're just coincidental or there's actually some kind of causal link in there. But I actually think that there is greater similarity between the public of the 18th century that forged the American and French revolutions. The group of people who essentially call themselves a Republic of Letters and exchange information about primarily in the European countries who are very unsafe to talk politics about science and data and general geography, new discoveries and so forth in this country and maybe the English-speaking countries, a little bit more of political theory. That public was virtual. It was open to talent. It was not accredited. There were no universities that got you there. There were a lot more women involved in those than there were once the universities got involved. The difference between then and now was that that was an elite. That was a very small group of people. Today, if you just look at what happened in Spain with the indignados, one day you are President José Luis Sabatero of Spain writing a wave of popularity. The next day there are several hundred thousand in the street, people protesting not only just your policies, but the system on which you preside. Where did they come from? Who are they? That sort of self-assembly, that's Clay Scherke's term, the ability to self-assemble in gigantic numbers and to maintain a focus usually against, because these people usually lack any kind of coherent theory. You talk about the banding forth of opinions. This is not about new opinions. This is not about new ideologies. This is about the public being able to gather unprecedented numbers at the speed of light and be against. Essentially batter the status quo. It is a very unhappy public. It is that way from Egypt to Spain to the Tea Party and the occupiers here to Venezuela, to the Ukraine. You can go on to Thailand. It is all over the world. It's a public that demonstrates certain similar qualities, a similar temper, and comes from very similar demographics. These are not poor people, for example. These are not persecuted minorities. These tend to be university educated, tend to be fairly affluent, and yet they're very unhappy with the system that has made them this way. You write a lot about how there's a connection between authority and controlling this information, which I think is both in terms of elites, whether or not they're state or not. Walter Cronkite was not a state employee, but still an elite. Or the state itself. In your essay on Cato and Bown that you wrote in response to Virginia Postrell, you write, to a degree that has rarely acknowledged rulers, individuals, and institutions depend up for their survival on the authorizing magic of legitimacy rather than brute force. Legitimacy in turn resists on abstractions, divine right, or the sovereignty of the people. Persuasive images embody these legitimizing abstractions. Ideals of authority are given shape in reality and even grace, offering a lucid glimpse of what power ought to be but rarely is. And when I read that, it was hard for me not to think about coming into D.C. and seeing the majesty of D.C. buildings and everything and everything the government puts out to sort of convince us of its authority. Could you expand a little bit more about how this is going to undercut some of those things? Well, that I guess is the heart of the theme of my book. We tend to think in practical terms, we think of government as great big buildings staffed by tens of thousands of people. You think of authority. The first thing that comes to your mind is maybe a policeman or a soldier. But in fact, this gigantic edifice largely depends, and that is true in dictatorships, no less in democracies. Largely depends on the willingness of the majority of the people to accept its existence and to obey its commands. And what I think the conditions of the fifth wave have made possible is an ability to erode that legitimacy because every time the government makes a mistake today. And that happens all the time for various reasons we can get into. But before, in the old industrial age, when you made a mistake, you either, if you were a politician, you could be voted out and the system was not implicated or it got discreetly put aside and in the end people decided not to talk about it or they framed it in a way that was not corrosive. Today when the government makes a mistake, all these waves of the public that I have mentioned tend to dwell on it almost obsessively. In fact, government is made to be the sum of its failures. And that is very erosive of democracy and that has happened here and all the old democracies as well as in authoritarian countries. This erosion of legitimacy and authority, you talk about this erosion of the legitimacy and the authority of these big institutions or these elites, but is there a sense in which it's just an erosion of legitimacy and authority period such that this kind of public popping up and being able to get mad at things and dwelling on things undercuts the possibility of authority at all such that we kind of just smear everything out to the same level of truth value or lack of it, which doesn't necessarily seem like a good thing. Yeah. I don't think we're there, but I mean I think my concern is a figure I bring up in the book is the figure of the nihilist. The nihilist in my mind is the logical conclusion of the path that I was just describing of basically a public that is focused entirely on negation, on denial, on repudiation, on criticizing, without feeling incumbent upon itself to propose alternatives. And the nihilist very simply is the person who believes that the destruction of the status quo is a step forward, it's progress. You don't have to go up with an alternative. You can get hits and blimpses of that person today. And if you read some of the pronouncements and the proclamations and some of the demonstrations that have erupted around the world, you can get hits and signs. But we're not quite there yet, but my concern is that is the direction we're headed in. So as a concern though, because that's where I see some criticism here of the blogosphere that we are living in a world now where people have increasingly private facts, private knowledge, entirely private opinions about various things, whether they're David Ike, lizard people, believers, or vaccine skeptics, or the global warming sides, you mentioned that previously, they each think that the other side is completely insane. So does that make the populace sort of ungovernable on this, on some level, if there's nothing where they can meet in the middle? You know, I actually think as long as you have these communities of interest kind of rolling along with their little obsessions, whether they're governable or not, you can survive. My concern is much more that every once in a while you get some spark. And that's a pretty mysterious thing because of that spark. I don't think it's predictable, but it suddenly becomes a shared point of reference where a whole lot of these communities that you were just mentioning cohere into a group, and they're all angry at authority in a very united and very antagonistic way. And then suddenly there are 300,000 people in the streets of Madrid, or a terrorist square in Egypt, Boulevard in Tel Aviv, anywhere. And suddenly the government is presented with this problem of, you know, how do you deal with exercising authority, the will to command when basically the public is less and less willing to obey? Do you think this is an extension of 20th century sort of postmodern thought to something, or just a continuation of it, thinking about how different institutions, different writers in the 60s, for example, like Howard Zinn came in to say that the people's history of the United States was much worse than George Washington throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac and all these myths about how great these people were. And that's a lot of what the 60s radicals were doing. America's not as great. The myth, the narrative is wrong. And that's been a big progression of a lot of movies and literature maybe all of us being a little bit pessimistic after World War II or whatever you want to chalk it up to. And now we're just ramped that up on steroids and gave everyone a smart phone to figure out their own little narrative against the prevailing myth. Well, I mean, I'm a 1960s guy and I lived through a whole lot of that and there was a whole lot of crap being thrown around in those days. No question about it. But I think the situation is somewhat different than that. I think the situation is more that as long as you control the means of communication, which in the industrial age, the elites totally did. I mean, when I grew up I had literally I don't know how old are you guys and let me ask you that. In our early 30s. Mid 30s. Yesterday, yes. You guys have, oh, happy birthday. Thank you. You guys have no clue. I grew up with three channels in television and that was it. That was what there was. When Walter Cronkite told me that's the way it is for this particular day after having given me what, 25 minutes with three reports, mostly of pictures and the entire world had unrolled for those 24 hours and that was all there was. Those three reports, all I could do was turn to channels who gave me more or less the same thing only in a lot less magisterial way. As long as you have the control of the means of communications you can maintain your narratives that legitimize authority and that's true for government, it's true for even dictatorial governments, but of course it is true for democracy. The problem comes when you lose your monopoly of information when there's an alternative voice that says no, that's not the way it is. There's a very different world out there from the one that you are telling us and I think that progressively with the fifth wave under the conditions of the fifth wave of information more and more voices have been saying no, no, no and every once in a while these voices go here into a very large public of opposition that can self-assemble and can essentially overthrow established regimes and every narrative is a mixture of facts and you said myth but no, it's really speculation all right, so if you are Osama bin Laden way back when and you say well why has Islam declined well the decline is given, that's a fact he accepts that then he says well I think it's because we're not as faithful to Islam as we used to be, well that's speculation so you look at that and you say well he's right about the history part but the rest of it seems bizarre, why would it so if you're inside of a narrative a speculative part of it I guess you can call it a myth it's very easy to shoot down if you have a monopoly it doesn't happen if you have the fifth wave of information with the public basically commands the means of communication it not only happens but it happens ferociously the love of knocking down the other guy's narrative and as you, you know when I was a young man I always felt that the best way to learn about a religion was from another religion's point of view all the warts come out, right well I think that's what happens when you have this condition every narrative in the end is made to seem absurd and collapses under its own weight and that does seem very though in the postmodern vein at least being suspicious of narratives that are just sort of told to keep the powerful in power or keep some elite in the elite status that's the point of a narrative see I don't believe that though number one I really don't like terms like postmodernism partly because I don't understand them but mostly because they sort of are leaden with judgmentalisms and I actually think narratives are essential to human life that is the way we communicate information the most effectively like I said I studied this and it's actually demonstrable that if I start throwing numbers at you pretty soon your eyes are going to cross and you're going to stop listening to me but if I tell you once upon a time I got you, you're paying attention and I will put something equivalent to the numbers I wanted to give you and that once upon a time story and you'll get it okay and all the great civilizations all the great governments, the assistants of governments, all the great religions they depend on stories and I don't think that's necessarily when you look at yourself and you wake up in the morning you tell a story about yourself I'm this kind of a person right and you kind of aspire to the story that you tell yourself it's not necessarily something manipulative it can be but it's not necessarily it's necessary and in a world devoid of narratives I'm not sure what that would look like it would look like a world devoid of organization is that the world we're heading to though because you've described the publics like to knock down narratives that's what these groups seem to do and even if I don't participate in that knocking down if I see enough of it over and over and over again I'm going to start to become very skeptical about the next narrative that comes along yet at the same time and I think you're right narratives are an extremely central feature of human beings it's how we think about the world it's how we think about our lives so does this kind of explosion of information and decentralizing of authority the world then is moving in a direction that's not really compatible with us I think we're moving to a world that in which it's going to be very difficult to manage structures of command and control it's going to be very difficult to organize for example a democratic vote it's going to be very difficult to somehow come up with compromises between opposing points of view because all those things happen within shared narratives democracy has a large narrative itself the American narrative for example you're going to talk about a speculative or a mythical narrative talks about the fact that we're all equal well okay I'm a big baseball fan and I look at Bryce Harper and I go well I'm not equal to him the guy is a monster when it comes to hitting the baseball and that applies to every domain there are people who are very good but in America we say there's a moral aspect in which we are all equal and I fully believe that but if you're standing outside of that narrative it looks very foolish and I think compromises political compromises with democracies happen within these narratives and I think that's going to get progressively more difficult and not just compromises but even organizing a program reforming the system not changing anything moving in any direction it's going to become progressively more difficult because basically the nakedness of the emperor is always going to be very visible to the public it seems like you might therefore just be chalking up some of the last two years in Washington's stagnation type of issues as an inability to share a narrative because everyone's had their nerves destroyed and rebuilt but no one is sharing the same narrative well I mean it's kind of funny because I have noticed that President Obama likes the idea of narratives a lot I'm not sure he has a clue what he means by that but he talks that up a lot I actually think well you know I live in Washington and I worked in Washington my entire life and I God prevent me from trying to explain it okay but I actually think if you're going to try to come up with an analysis of the last few years and the level of inaction beyond the obvious fact that the politics are divided so equally that it's hard to get anything across one from one side to the other I think the fact that the president himself Barack Obama has taken a turn that is probably quite different from that of any other president that I'm aware of that is very consistent with the attitude of the public and we can talk about that a little bit if you want You think that he is merging with the narrative? Basically President Obama after his electoral defeat in 2010 went back to being what I consider to be his true voice between 2008 and 2010 he was sort of LBJ he was sort of FDR big programs to solve these big problems but the real Obama the one that existed before that was essentially a man who was against he was against the Iraq war he was against a democratic establishment that Hillary Clinton represented and of course he ran in 2008 in complete repudiation of the Bush legacy in 2010 he sort of resumed that voice where he became essentially accuser in chief he became somebody who felt that his job as an old community organizer was to point for example that people were trampling on women's rights or that our economic quality was declining and what presidents of the past have made these sort of charges that's usually in preface to and now this is why I intend to do about it here is my program to solve this issue and that's what never happens with this administration he is really a sectarian prophet he just wants to he seems to find his job in pointing attention being a voice for the wrongs that he sees in society versus that somebody who is an expert in policy or programs or even politics I don't think he's a particularly a a politician I wanted to shift gears a bit to the Arab Spring specifically because in the first part of your book you spend quite a lot of time talking about the uprisings throughout the Arab world and use them specifically the specifically Egypt to kind of show how a lot of these things play out how these the public can become very quickly organized around something how social media plays in you talk about the role of imagery of people who are broken these things and then how governments try to address this fifth wave change often very badly and only make things worse so I was hoping maybe you could tell us a bit of that story because I found it pretty interesting well basically if you move to Egypt to begin with you have began as a facebook event ok a young man he was 29 at the time called Wael Gonim set up a page a facebook page called We Are All Haled Saeed now Haled Saeed was he was a person he was an event and he was an image he was another young man who had been very brutally killed to death by basically the thugs in the employ of Hosni Bubarak's regime what transpired with this particular case was that his family went to the morgue and secretly took cell phone photos of his incredibly mangled appearance and the contrast he was a very handsome young man and there are photos of him smiling and his living photos in this horrible image was basically the centerpiece of the We Are All Haled Saeed facebook event in that in that page he invited for police day in Egypt January 25 people to come out to Tahrir Square in Cairo there were a million people who viewed that and there were 100,000 that said yes I'm going to show up now whether they did or not that's a mystery but the fact is when he showed up he lived in Dubai he didn't even live in Egypt he lived in Dubai he was marketing head for Google and he was conducting this revolution in Egypt from another country he did go to Egypt he showed up and there were of course the crowds had arrived and very much once the the movement hit the streets took a life of its own part of the recent he had scheduled that demonstration for January 25 was what had transpired in Syria where another young man called Mohammed Bozizi had essentially felt himself humiliated he had been insulted by a woman and the employee of that particular authoritarian government of a man called Ben Ali and he was so distraught that he doused himself in gasoline and burnt himself alive and there are photos there are photos of us there's two images out of Khaled Salid and Mohammed Bozizi that stand at the origin of the Arab Spring and of course three weeks after the demonstrations got started because of this event the dictator in Tunisia was gone this in turn inspired the Egyptian while going to try the same thing in Egypt on Facebook it worked basically none of these none of these self-assemblies of the public would have been possible without the conditions of Fifth Wave all of them appeared to the people in authority to be like suddenly a materialization of people from nowhere suddenly one day there was nobody another day there are 100,000 people on the square in fact they were all planned pretty carefully and at length on Facebook or other digital platforms it's just that the hierarchies of government tend not to pay attention to that those are not important outlets so I think part of what the clash that the Arab Spring illustrates and that of course the same thing happened in Syria where the conditions were different you had no no access to mass media there because the government was far more totalitarian but they could put out YouTube videos of the crowds the size of the demonstrations you could tell these were very large crowds and then you could put out YouTube videos of the repressions you could tell the bad things were happening there so there was no way that governments even at an aspiring totalitarian government like Bashar Assad's in Syria no way that he could close the borders with the media and that's the real information I think the information sphere is larger than any any government and of course in Egypt Mubarak tried, I mean this is an old man's mistake he thought that if he switched off the internet somehow or another the demonstrations would lose their voice but the information sphere part of the point that I make in my book this talk of new media and old media it's kind of useful at a certain level the fact that all of these media have made connections to a gigantic and redundant sphere and it's completely out of the control of any government so switching off the internet really did very little in terms of taking away the public's voice and if you compared that to TNM and Square in China in 1989 you see a very different story because there the information was controlled and then squelched and it wasn't democratized in that way the Chinese had walls as I remember correctly they had walls where they would post their proclamations and there was a little bit like blogs I guess but there were literally physical walls and of course if you are a policeman you can see what's being put on the walls and it is not a big mystery and I mean the Chinese government during the Tahrir Square uprising filtered out the word Egypt from you could that search the government during the Tahrir Square no I mean the Chinese if you were a person in China and you wanted to search on Egypt you could not they considered to be a very alarming thing that was happening there I mean the Chinese are on the brink they are on the brink all the things that I am talking about are events that have happened and I am not prophetic so I am not going to say they will happen here or there but if you look at what the Mubarak regime was not that much more incompetent than the Chinese regime all these governments are on the brink so is there anything inherently libertarian about this I mean libertarians are going to be pretty excited about anything that undercuts state authority but that doesn't mean that anything that replaces it is going to be necessarily better or less authoritarian but so should libertarians be generally happy about these developments I have been kind of surprised by how the book has been so well received by libertarians I am sort of like a man without a label unfortunately I always find reasons to argue with myself so whenever I think I am something I end up being something else so I am not a libertarian and the book was not particularly intended as a libertarian tract but it speaks to the failure of government and it speaks to the fact that government is failing in a very open way in the past government could fail much more discreetly than today and it speaks to the self-organization of the public and in the past the public found it impossible to organize without a structure without a hierarchy without a mass movement or a party of some sort and I guess those are as I understand libertarianism which I mostly don't I guess those would be sympathetic to that point of view I think in the end you have to replace something with something my concern is that we are trying to replace something with nothing and I don't know how that could be and that's sort of the way that the trend of a very negation obsessed public and a very failure prone government and I think that's a question between the two where we're headed perhaps one of the lessons is is that mass centralization or centralization of many groups of people together who have many access to different information different narratives different types of information it's not going to work if you try and get them all to centralized together but maybe they can govern themselves on a smaller level possibly there is a book called seeing like a state by a very brilliant James C. Scott yeah yeah I mean that's a brilliant book okay and much of many of my insights were frankly stolen from his because once you think it best there's no point in getting any better and I think he describes what he calls a high modernist temper which is what you say is neutralizing is programmatic is everything under a gigantic umbrella and we deal with these huge what they call problems which are really social conditions for example economic underdevelopment or unemployment that it to call it a problem makes it sound like a mathematical equation in fact it's just a condition but there's some gigantic colossal expenditure of political power theoretically bringing in scientific know-how that's going to quote solve this problem that's high modernism at work we have inherited that rhetoric I mean we are way beyond high modernism nobody believes in much of that anymore but our rhetoric our political rhetoric it still speaks in terms of those gigantic problems and gigantic solutions Obama very much talked that way so did Bush and I think yes the first step towards good health in a democracy is to step away from this gigantism and to to understand that most knowledge happens in the personal sphere happens locally most direct causal effects happen in that sphere when you're dealing with governments at the level of the hundreds of millions of people unintended effects almost always swamp whatever your intentions are when you're dealing with yourself as an individual or your community it's a small group where you're face to face and you know that if there's a job opening you can apply for it and you get a job so that is a very direct cause and effect if we have a 7% level of unemployment and there is a program to fix that you have no idea how that works what are you to do about that you're basically swamped by unintended effects and if you look at if I may plug another book that I think is fundamental has not gotten nearly enough play brilliant book called why most things fail by Paul Ormerad a British economist basically he's a a very brilliant statistician he makes a really excellent statistical case that almost everyone at every level of human life we mostly fail but at certain levels we can do trial and error correct that but the problem with government is that it accumulates failure it's a system that accumulates noise and becomes more and more fragile as it does that because to accept failure is political death so you have the system that fails constantly and is unable to move beyond that thank you for listening to Free Thoughts if you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on twitter at Free Thoughts Pod that's Free Thoughts P-O-D Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks to learn more about Libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org