So yesterday I managed to catch an HPRA meeting featuring Jeffrey Friedman, editor of the journal Critical Review, as the guest speaker. Critical Review is one of the few journals out there which is genuinely worth reading. The Economist is still a good read, as are various online newspapers throughout the world. On rare occasions I still pick through Foreign Affairs or some other journal. Good history books are always fun to read. These days though, much of my spare time for reading has been swallowed up by reading on IT issues, though I still can draw upon a vast background of reading which I have done over the decades.
There is plenty of economics or political blather out there for people to read no matter what your views are on these matters. Materials have become even more available with the advent of the Internet. However little of what is out there is really interesting. I can usually tell within the first 2-3 pages of reading an online academic paper or a print journal article whether the treatise is worth reading or whether it was probably written to keep tenure. I stay away from anything written by English professors, as well as most Sociology. If I exert serious effort, I can tell whether an Economics paper simply rehashes an old idea with newer and more complicated math.
What drew me to Critical Review was an incident that happened about 9 years ago. I was in a bookstore which used to be on South Shepherd, across the street from my auto mechanic. While getting my car worked on one day, I went across the street and perused through their offerings. That is when I saw a now classic issue of CR where they debated the issue of Public Ignorance and what such matters might mean for republics and democracies. I picked up the issue and probably learned more about how decision making goes on in the political arena than I had learned in years of reading anything else. I was hooked. I have read the journal on and off ever since. Most recently, Friedman has republished Philip Converse's 1964 classic paper on public ignorance, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics", along with an issue of scholarly debates surrounding the subject.
Friedman started off his talk by saying that he started CR in 1987. He talked about how the modern world really is too complicated for anyone to understand, and that this really has immense implications for those who would desire to craft public policies to shape the future in certain directions amenable to them. He then went on to describe the Converse paper and said that the great man's research is just there and is known in the political science community, though not widely known outside of it. Nobody has challenged or successfully rebuked what Converse wrote. It just sits there seeming to be something of a curiosity.
But there is far more to it than that. Friedman went on to say something that is not well known about some political polls, namely that many people do not know an answer or do not have answers to questions that might be asked of them in polls. What happens in such situations is that pollsters will push such sample members in their polls to take a position on poll questions when they say they don't know what to say. I found that to be very interesting.
Friedman mentioned that 90+ percent of the public knows little about politics, while the other 1-10 percent do know quite a bit. The more you know, the more dogmatic you tend to become. That does not surprise me one bit.
For my two cents worth, I have long felt after reading my original issue of CR that a big reason for public ignorance is economics. Time is scarce and there is little monetary gain to be had from spending endless hours reading about or becoming knowledgeable about politics, unless you happen to be a politician, a lawyer, a political scientist or other university professor, a bureaucrat, military officer, or a professional such as an engineer or doctor, or perhaps a single issue activist. Otherwise you would be better off simply concentrating on improving your job skills so that you would get better paid.
Friedman went on to talk about what he called "The Hobson's Choice (or Rule) of Democracy". We can basically have rule either by the largely ignorant masses or the dogmatic elites. Ignorance of politics is a worldwide phenomena, not something peculiar to the United States. So if you think that the French are all sitting at Left Bank cafes, sipping coffee at tables and holding forth on deep discussions about philosophical and public affairs, then think again.
Friedman says that dogmatism largely comes from the huge number of decisions and complications arising in our modern world in an array of issues. This results in huge amounts of data which need to be collected and analyzed. What dogmatism does is simplify understanding of complex issues and helps people screen most of the complications out. Friedman went on to say that one idea or theory is all it takes to change or see the world in a different way. You need an idea as a peg to hang your hat on.
So what do we have as alternatives, if any? Friedman went on to say that one Nobel prize winner stated that there are two forms of participation in life. One is what was called "Exit" and the other is "Voice".
What Exit denotes is the process of the personal and economic life of an individual. Life is a process of experimentation whereby someone feels their way forward towards the things that make them happy. Friedman gave as an example how someone might experiment with smoking cigarettes. If the would be smoker didn't like the taste of a cigarette, that is all that mattered. That person would not smoke that cigarette again. There was no need for the smoker to understand the cause of why that cigarette was disagreeable to her, whether the manufacturing was bad or the tobacco was bad or any other reason. All that mattered was that the product was disagreeable. Our female smoker will never try that cigarette again, ergo the "Exiting" or quitting of the action. The world then becomes a better place for it.
What "Voice" is denotes the world of politics. What politicians or political activists do is that they try to actively look for and identify "problems". They then try to dissect the cause of these "problems" and offer some "solution" using the coercive powers of the state. Using the above example, those in the political sphere might start investigating the tobacco company, complain about the product, the health care costs on the public dime, the habit forming aspects of smoking (note I didn't say its addictiveness), and so forth.
Wisdom is the accumulation of knowledge. The big problem here for people is that political outcomes or solutions are so hard to interpret that we end up arguing the same issues over and over and over again, going round and round in circles in the process. Rarely do the best ideas get into the arena because powerful organized groups who might get threatened by them will see to it that they get stomped out.
A question was raised where Friedman was asked to differentiate between a public ignorance critique of politics verses public choice. Friedman mentioned that two big problems of public choice are that public choice often allows its subscribers to go about demonizing politics and that public choice is arguably part, but not the whole picture. A fuller picture of politics is that the arena has both selfish interests who are out to gain something for themselves at public expense, but that there are idealists (often misguided ones) who need to be dealt with too. In a memorable turn of phrase, Friedman characterized public choice a kind of "right wing Marxism".
Friedman addressed the issue on how do voters make decisions. Citing Converse, voters often fall back on two big things. First is the "Nature of the times", meaning that if a war is going well or if the economy is going well, then voters often stick with incumbents. The second is nationalism or voting along ethnic / religious lines.
Another topic of discussion came up and that was whether free market economics is common sensical? Arguably, Friedman says no it is not. He pointed out that good economics often has unseen aspects to it (Amen brother!) and that you often have to think abstractly in order to grasp its implications. Meanwhile our brains which evolved during hunter gatherer times did not weed through the gene pool for men and women who were good economists, but they did weed out for beauty, brains, strength, and being able to hunt deer. The field of economics itself was invented in Britain in the 18th century and the complexity of the modern world has complicated its study even further.
Other topics Friedman spoke about had to do with the "Myths of Democracy". Does everyone's vote count? The answer is - No! Another myth of democracy is that voters should have had time to be fully informed going into the voting booth. That is true, but they rarely have much information digested, nor does it help that the vast majority of journalists who are supposed to be responsible for disseminating information to the public rarely have had any formal study of economics. Instead they rely on heuristics instead of detailed knowledge of issues and candidates in order to guide them.
Friedman stated that the goal of his journal and his seminars was to try to reach young people and educate the future judges, bureaucrats, and politicians of tomorrow so that they would at least have some grounding in freedom and free market arguments since they are often so bitterly attacked. They need defending, whereas as one member of the audience pointed out, wherever you look in the political economy of modern day America, everything is an absolute mess. That includes Social Security transfer payments, Medicare, Medicaid and health care, transportation, farm subsidies, education, policing and law enforcement, the list is endless. Even if the whole of the political economy is a mess, every program has plenty of defenders and well monied interests who have every incentive to make sure that things stay that way or get even worse.
In all, Dr. Friedman gave a fascinating talk and one I will always remember. I never thought I would get to meet the professor. I brought my copy of the latest issue of CR and had him sign it. He said he was thrilled to meet long time readers and was happy to hear that there are people out there really valued what he was doing since he didn't hear enough of that.
Bye for now...