What Counts as Political Knowledge?

Since the late 1950s, many political scientists, economists, and political psychologists have measured what Americans and others know about politics. The results are uniformly stark and depressing: Around the world, the majority of citizens are deeply ignorant about basic knowledge. In the US, the average citizen knows who the president is but not much else. That citizen doesn't know what bills have passed, what various indicators are of economic or social health, who their representatives in congress are, who controls congress, or most of the other stuff you'd think they'd need to know to vote well. They are also systematically misinformed about the basics in the social sciences.

When I cite such stats, some democrats dissent. They say that while the kinds of knowledge that Pew or the American National Election Studies test are indeed forms of political knowledge, they are not the only forms. Lots of things matter for politics: the local price of daycare, a bus ticket, or milk, the way police treat you in your neighborhood, and so on. We shouldn't privilege what political scientists call "basic political knowledge" because the actual knowledge needed to make good political decisions is far wider, and many so-called "ignorant" or "misinformed" citizens in fact have this kind of knowledge. 

Two responses:

1. Even if so--and I agree that citizens have such local knowledge--that doesn't tell them how to vote. So you know the local price of milk and know that the jobs are drying up in your local town. (Actually, citizens almost never know their local unemployment rate.) Your local school system sucks. Should you vote for protectionist Trump, anti-immigration Bernie, or free-trade and pro-immigration candidate? Your local knowledge doesn't help you. Should you vote for someone who wants to raise or cut the minimum wage? Your local knowledge doesn't help. Should you vote for someone who wants to strengthen teachers unions or expand school choice? Your local knowledge might help a bit here, but then perhaps the national problem is distinct from your local problem, and you still need to understand the political economy of unions and the social science of school choice. So, yes, your knowledge matters, but it's not enough to ensure you can vote for your professed goals or interests. You need more than that. Knowing there is a problem does not mean you know how to solve the problem. 

2. A deeper response is that I don't think the people who make these arguments actually take their own arguments seriously. What I mean is that they are onto something deep, but their arguments are actually arguments against expanding the scope of democracy precisely because democracy--and, indeed, all political systems--does a terrible job accommodating and using local knowledge. 

As Hayek pointed out in 1945 (and others before him), decision-makers need to know not just general statistics, but various kinds of local and dispersed forms of knowledge in order to make good decisions which properly solve the economic (or social) problem. The problem decision-makers face is that much of the knowledge they need is dispersed among the many, is implicit or tacit, and is constantly changing. Even if you had a snapshot of all that is known right now, the economic and social situation constantly changes. Make a decision tomorrow based on information from today and it will be suboptimal at best, because things have changed. 

Market prices turn out to be excellent (if imperfect) ways to communicate this knowledge because they are functions of supply and demand, and because supply and demand curves are functions of our individual actions in response to our disparate knowledge. Market prices are an emergent feature of the aggregation of individual decision-makers acting on their local knowledge, personal desires, and so on. Market prices communicate information to others in ways they can use. Even better, they do so without requiring the people using that knowledge even understand what the information means. If a fire closes the mine, the price of tin will increase, and people will substitute aluminum or plastic, even if they have no idea why the prices have changed. 

Market prices are an excellent way to communicate disparate, local knowledge to all decision-makers. (In a market, everyone is a decision-maker and planner.) Voting is not. It is not even comparable. It is many orders of magnitude worse. Voting is infrequent. It is monopolistic. You vote on only a few things. The information signal is weak and unclear. It lacks the features that make market prices work. 

It's precisely because of the importance of such local knowledge that we want, all things equal, to minimize the scope of politics and increase the scope of the market and civil society. The democrats who use "local knowledge" to justify voting actually don't take the very issue they invoke seriously. Their arguments actually undermine rather than support their conclusions. How does voting Democrat over Republican every four years help communicate my local knowledge of the price of a gallon of milk to the people in charge? Answer: It doesn't. 

Mask Mandates and Politics

 

People should wear masks to prevent the transmission of COVID-19. If you don’t wear a mask, and you give someone COVID-19, then you might have violated their bodily rights (assuming they couldn’t consent to the risks). That’s wrong. So you should wear a mask.  

 

If it’s wrong to refuse to wear a mask, should it be illegal to refuse to wear a mask? It depends.

Most things that are wrong shouldn’t be illegal. Even if refusing to wear a mask is risky, so is prohibiting mask-refusal. Public officials should weigh the risk of mask-wearing against the risk of enforcing a mask mandate.

 

Depending on the severity of the virus in a place, it might make sense to enforce a temporary mask-mandate, but this should usually be a last resort. As it stands, public officials haven’t invested enough in less prohibitive ways of reducing contagious transmission, such as contact tracing and expanded testing, so mask mandates are probably unjustified in a lot of places.

 

Mask mandates can also backfire if people view them as illegitimate. In which case, public officials shouldn’t enforce them because they won’t be effective and they may be counterproductive. Elsewhere, mandates may be unnecessary if almost everyone wears a mask voluntarily and private businesses require them. And mask mandates may be enforced in ways that are discriminatory or inegalitarian. In these contexts, mask mandates are especially morally risky.

 

So while it’s possible that public officials can justifiably enforce temporary mask mandates in some contexts, that doesn’t mean that everyone everywhere should be required to wear a mask throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

When it comes to the ethics of mask mandates, there’s not an easy, one-size-fits-all answer to the policy question. Even if people have enforceable rights against being infected with COVID-19, in some contexts, officials will lack the authority or the ability to enforce these rights in a morally acceptable way.

 

These answers don’t make for good politics because proponents of mask mandates have political incentives to discount the risks of unjust enforcement and opponents of mask mandates have political incentives to discount the risks of contagious transmission.

 

But contagious transmission and law enforcement are both morally risky, and in both cases the risks are sometimes distributed in inegalitarian and disproportionately harmful ways. Public officials should balance the moral risks of enforcing a mandate against the moral risks of not enforcing a mandate. If they did, then they’d find that there’s not a yes or no answer to questions about mask mandates—it depends.

Perverse Incentives Created Our Dysfunctional Criminal Justice System

Chris Surprenant and I have the lead essay this month on a Cato Unbound symposium on why the US criminal justice is so terrible. It draws from our book Injustice for All. 

Abstract of the symposium:

We all know that the United States imprisons many more people per capita than otherfree countries. But why? Progressives, conservatives, and libertarians all have their favored theories, but this month’s lead authors, Chris W. Surprenant and Jason Brennan, argue that none of them captures the whole story. Here to discuss with them this month are Clark Neily, the Cato Institute’s Vice President for Criminal Justice; and John Malcolm, the Heritage Foundation’s Vice President for the Institute for Constitutional Government and Director of the Meese Center for Legal & Judicial Studies. The conversation will continue through the end of the month, and comments on posts are open to readers during the same time period.

Protesting Police and Policing Protests

The  Marc Sanders Foundation recently hosted a  hosted a Zoom Panel Discussion on Protesting Police and Policing Protests featuring Ekow Yankah, Michele Moody-Adams, Brandon del Pozo, and Jason Brennan, moderated by Barry Lam and Simone Gubler. The event was co-sponsored by the The Philosophy, Politics and Economics Society, and Hi-Phi Nation.

You can watch the video here:  https://marcsandersfoundation.org/protesting-police-and-policing-protest/

 

My part draws upon Injustice for All. 

Two Worlds on One Street: Guest Post by John Hasnas

The following is a guest post by John Hasnas, Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy, and by courtesy, Professor of Law, at Georgetown University.

One of the curses of too much education is that you cannot just experience life as it is, but constantly see what is going on around you as concrete illustrations of abstract principles.

I am fortunate enough to live in a community of homes that surrounds a lake, Lake Barcroft, near Bailey's Crossroads in Northern Virginia. Not far down the street from us is one of the beaches the homeowner's association maintains where residents can swim in the summer. At the other end of the street, just across the road from the Lake Barcroft community is a private swim club with two pools where member families can swim, dive, and play during the summer months.

The swim club is governed by the state of Virginia's plan to contain the coronavirus. Virginia is currently moving from Phase 2 to Phase 3 of this plan. This requires users to make reservations in advance to use the facility. Members can sign up for “Kids Fun”–using the pools while remaining 10 feet away from others, “Lounging only”–sitting in the sun in open areas 6 feet away from others, “Diving”, and “Lap Swimming”. Members may use the pool for 45 minutes after which they must leave while the facilities are cleaned before the next group is admitted for their 45 minutes. Members may sign up only once per day, must wear masks while waiting in line 6 feet apart to enter the club, answer questions about their health status as they check in, and use hand sanitizer upon entering.

The swim club is a sad and quiet place. Perhaps unsurprisingly no one signs up for the cruelly- named Kids Fun or for lounging. The pool is used almost exclusively by adults coming to swim laps for their 45 minutes and go home.

In contrast, the beach is governed only by the residents' voluntary behavior. The beach is full of families happily playing in the sand and swimming. They typically sit in family groups separated from other family groups, but kids throw frisbees and footballs back and forth and interact with other children. There are also many teenagers at the beach, playing spikeball, taking out paddle boards and floats, and generally hanging out together. None of the families or teenagers wear masks, but the general tenor of interaction is more restrained than it typically is in summer. A few older residents are there also, usually wearing masks and sitting away from everyone else.

The beach is a happy and cheerfully noisy place. People apparently believe that the risk of transmitting the virus is greatly reduced outdoors, and that only limited restrictions on their activities are necessary to prevent the spread of the infection. They are apparently correct because the beaches have been open since memorial day and there have been no increases in local coronavirus infection rates.

As a lap swimmer at the pool, I move between the sad, quiet world of the swim club and the happy, noisy world of the beach. Unable to prevent my over-educated mind from fleeing to abstractions, I see the two ends of my street as representing the difference between central planning and spontaneous order.

The swim club is fighting the virus under a one-size-fits-all mandate from the state's central

planning agency. Its goal is to suppress the spread of the virus. It has little to no incentive to run any risk of increased infection merely so that citizens can enjoy themselves. Using the pool reminds me of going through a TSA checkpoint and leaves the impression of just being more security theater.

The beach is fighting the virus on the basis of individual decisions as to how to balance the risk of infection against the other things that make life worthwhile. This approach requires people to learn by trial and error how to adjust their conduct to the new conditions. It carries a both greater risk of spreading the infection and a better prospect of obtaining other values that make life worth living.

Going to the beach makes me smile both because it is nice to see families and teenagers having fun and because I feel like I am part of a grand experiment to figure out how to live with a new risk without being controlled by politicians or scolded by their rabid supporters. For most people the pleasant experience would be enough. But because I am a pointy-headed intellectual, I characterized myself as having a real Hayekian experience.

Moral Catastrophes and Progress

The past is full of moral catastrophes. 

The good news is that people seem to be getting better. Moral catastrophes like slavery, mass violence, genocidal war, the use of torture as punishment, and the denial of political equality are way less common today than they were in the past. As Michael Huemer argues, this is a sign of our collective progress toward adopting better, objectively correct values. 

The bad news is that people seem to be getting better, which suggests that we are probably living through moral catastrophes that we cannot recognize because we haven’t made enough progress yet. Evan G. Williams writes about this in “The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe”. He argues that even if it’s pretty unlikely that any particular practice is wrong, it’s also pretty plausible that something we’re doing is seriously wrong. Williams then writes,

Our descendants may well view us with the same repugnance as we view our slave-owning forefathers….The fastest way to end this catastrophe, so that our wrongdoing will stop sooner rather than later, is to build a society that makes rapid intellectual progress and is flexible enough to take decisive action when the need is recognized. (981)

 

On his view, this requires the cultivation of a marketplace of ideas that is more effective at enabling good ideas to outcompete bad ideas. Williams emphasizes the importance of investing in education, effectively communicating scientific theories to people, and discouraging social norms that make it hard for good ideas to gain wide currency. 

 

The bad news about Williams's bad news is that there are also barriers to progress within education, science, and culture. For example, it’s often unclear how much education actually promotes learning (see here and here). And it’s unclear that science is set up in a way that really rewards or advances the ideas that have the most merit (see here). And it’s unclear that increasing exposure to different viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas actually makes people better at evaluating claims in a nonpartisan way.

I think Williams is right about our present circumstances, and the value of institutions that foster 'rapid intellectual progress.' So what would an investment in intellectual progress look like? 

Here are two new models that aim to improve our current approach to intellectual investment. First, consider Collinson and Cowen's proposal for a discipline of Progress Studies. And second, there's Minerva's innovative approach to effective education. Avoiding moral catastrophe will not only require that we rethink our institutions, it also requires rethinking how we rethink things. 

Faith and Distrust

Advocates for social change can approach those who are resistant to change by having faith that they are capable of reform. Or, they could withhold their faith until others demonstrate that they have changed. Call these dispositions Faith in Humanity and Democratic Distrust. At first glance, it may seem that these dispositions are at two ends of a spectrum. On one end, someone could adopt a disposition of expecting the best of people, investing them, and communicating those high expectations. On the other, someone could adopt a disposition of expecting nothing (or worse), and communicating those low expectations.

 

Ryan Preston-Roedder makes a case for Faith in Humanity. Preston-Roedder writes:

Many of the people we regard as moral exemplars have profound faith in people’s decency: When segregationists bombed a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four little girls, Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted that “somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and worth of all human personality”

Preston-Roeder characterizes faith in humanity as a disposition to adopt charitable beliefs in others and to invest in other peoples' decency. On his view, this kind of faith can encourage people to be more decent, and Preston-Roeder also worries that a disposition of distrust can backfire in this sense. Additionally, he argues that faith in humanity can help people avoid injustice in themselves because it protects people against the tendency to blame or sanction people who don't deserve it.  

 

On the other hand, faith in humanity is risky. It can make people vulnerable to exploitation, and they may fail to blame or sanction people who really do deserve it. Preston-Roeder argues that the risk is worth it because it is better to fail to punish the guilty than to mistakenly punish the innocent.

 

Contrast Faith in Humanity with Democratic Distrust. Meena Krishnamurthy makes that King also displayed democratic distrust. She writes,

The value of distrust is primarily motivational: distrust motivated Black citizens and their supporters to engage in new forms of action that would work to ensure racial justice. Its value is contingent. The connection between distrust and being so motivated is not a necessary one, but it is a tight one. If King had continued to trust White moderates, then political change would likely not have come or, at least, would have come very much later. It is King’s confident belief that White moderates would not act justly and that Bull Connor and other avatars of institutionalized racism would continue to act unjustly that motivated him to take things into his own hands. It is why he couldn’t wait any longer.

 

How can faith in humanity be compatible with democratic distrust? How could both dispositions explain King's civil rights work? Preston-Roeder and Krishnamurthy’s accounts both have a cognitive and a volitional component. Both accounts are justified on principled and pragmatic grounds.

 

Maybe the answer is that the two dispositions aren’t on a spectrum, as King's example shows. Maybe the two dispositions rely on each other. On the one hand, people have faith in the goodness of others and their capacity for change only when they can recognize that others are falling short, need to change, and won't do it on their own. This is a kind of distrustful mode of recognition. On the other hand, distrust can only be motivational and pragmatic if there is also some hope that people can change eventually.

                                                             

Or, it could be that distrust is a justified disposition to adopt when considering direct action or immediate political reform. Still, this disposition is not as productive or motivationally useful in the absence of faith that even the worst people are capable of profound moral transformation.

The Epistemic Burdens of Imposing Lockdowns

In principle, governments may impose lockdowns. But in practice, they have to meet certain epistemic burdens before doing so. 

In this paper with Eric Winsberg and Chris Surprenant, we argue those conditions were not met. Here is the abstract:

ABSTRACT. In spring 2020, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, many world leaders imposed universal lockdowns. We argue that these restrictions have not been accompanied by the epistemic practices morally required for their adoption or continuation. While in theory lockdowns can be justified, governments did not meet and have not yet met their justificatory burdens. We will not argue that less stringent policies were optimal or better justified. Rather, we explain how government leaders failed and have continued to fail to meet their epistemic duties by relying upon data, models, and evidence of insufficiently good quality to justify their actions.

The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal released an entire special issue on issues related to COVID-19. Read it all here.