Freakonomics Radio - 98. We the Sheeple

Episode Date: October 24, 2012

Politicians tell voters exactly what they want to hear, even when it makes no sense. Which is pretty much all the time.

And let me make this very clear. I will not raise taxes on the middle class of America. You can choose a future where we reduce our deficit without sticking it to the middle class. We will cut the deficit and put America on track to a balanced budget. Independent experts say that my plan would cut our deficit by $4 trillion. I have a plan to create 12 million new jobs. We can create a million new manufacturing jobs in the next four years. Now is the moment where we can stand up and say,

You can make that happen. I'm an American. You can choose that future. I make my destiny. That's what we can do in the next four years. My children deserve better. My family deserves better. My country deserves better.

Brian, do you vote in presidential elections? I confess that I do not. Why not? I mean, to me, anyone who could actually make it through the system has views that are just so repellent to me. And what they say just seems to be so contrary to common sense and common decency. I just couldn't bear to really identify with either of them. OK, so Brian Kaplan is not what a political pollster would call a likely voter, not by a long shot. This can best be explained by the fact that Kaplan is, yes, an economist.

He teaches at George Mason University. Kaplan has iconoclastic thoughts about a lot of things. He's the kind of guy who will tell you that just about everything you think about voting, about parenting, about higher education is wrong. Honestly, if I just listen to any speech that any successful politician gives, it just seems like it's so unfair and so untruthful. And there's every sentence. I would say, can you fact check this sentence? Is the sentence actually factually correct? No, not really. It's just very unfair and just appealing to people's emotions. And that, I have to say, I really object to it. All right, there are 47% who are with him who are dependent on government, who believe

that they're victims, who believe that government has responsibility here for them, who believe that they're entitled. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. I almost never actually listen to politicians. I sometimes read transcripts, find the transcripts less emotionally aversive

than actually listening to them say their words. And when I read those transcripts, find the transcripts less emotionally aversive than actually listening to them say their words. And when I read those transcripts, no matter what the party the person is, I just think, like, I wouldn't give you a C in my economics class. This is just not acceptable for a person to be saying. It's just so wrong. From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Before the last presidential election in 2008 when Barack Obama beat John McCain, Brian Kaplan published a book called The Myth of the Rational Voter, Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. The background assumption is this. Everyone understands why dictatorships choose bad policies.

There's some awful jerk at the head of a country running it like his own personal piggy bank. The puzzle, though, is why democracies would choose bad policies in a similar way. So in other words, the question, everyone can agree that dictatorships choose bad policies. There's no big intellectual puzzle as to why that would happen. But the idea that democracies, which are run by the people or by the people elected by the people, would also make mistakes is the puzzle. So, I mean, you can think about the right way to read the title is why even democracies choose bad policies. The cover of Kaplan's book shows a flock of sheep standing up like humans in a sort of military formation, ready to follow someone? We, the sheeple.

Right, so I'm really going against two different baseline wisdoms. One is with the public, just the idea that if a majority of Americans think something's a good idea, then it's right. You can see this in almost any presidential debate where someone will say the American public wants this. And the last thing the other guy is going to say, well, that's true. The American public does want it, but the American public is mistaken for the following reasons. You never want to be the politician saying that. The idea that if something is popular, then it's a good idea is quite widespread in public opinion. At the same time, I also wanted to argue against a view that's become very common in economics and political science, which is that even if there's a lot

of ignorance in the public, voters are factually mistaken on a lot of issues, nevertheless, it all balances out so that on average, if the public thinks something is a good idea, then it really is a good idea. Consider one topic that just about everyone cares about during the upcoming election, unemployment, or really employment. This issue is at the core of both the Obama and Romney campaigns. The argument is over how the Obama White House has done in creating jobs. But as Brian Kaplan points out, not all jobs are created equal.

Some of them are what he calls make work jobs. And that feeds a make-work bias. I mean, make-work bias is the view that you should judge the performance of an economy based on employment rather than production, which especially during recession is a totally natural view. But once again, if you step back and realize, well, suppose that we had thought this way in the 19th century. Someone comes up with new tractors, new fertilizer, new ways of growing food. Someone else says, well, wait a second. These are going to put farmers out of work. We should stop them. We should ban them. These innovations that sound good because they create more food are going to be bad because they're going to destroy jobs. If we'd listened to those people, we would still be farmers. We'd still be hungry because they

weren't growing enough food then. Since we didn't listen to people like this, we had a huge increase in food production. We did have a large decrease in employment in agriculture, but those people and their descendants just found something else to do, which again is so unsatisfying to hear because at the time you want to say, okay, well, tell us specifically what will they do instead of agriculture, which is what mankind's been doing for thousands of years. And the answer really is when you're in a period of change, it's very hard to say what it's going to be. All you can do is say, well, there's going to be something. The labor is valuable. Someone will figure it out. Well, Brian, how much of the rational voter idea is pegged simply to voting your pocketbook? In

other words, voting for the candidate whose policies or at least the policies that he promises most closely align with your own economic interests. So there's actually two separate issues here. So one of them is how clearly or unclearly people see the world. The other one is how selfishly or unselfishly they vote. A person could be very rational but totally unselfish. A person could, first of all, carefully understand the world and then vote on the basis of what he thinks is best for society. A person, of course, could be the opposite.

A person could be very confused, but still voting for what he thinks will advance his selfish interests. What I do in the book is, first of all, just to clear some rubble away, I go over all the evidence on voter motivation, showing that despite what a lot of people think, voters are shockingly unselfish. Your individual interests have very little to do with how you vote, have very little to do with your views on particular issues. In general, it's not true that rich people are Republican, poor people are Democrats. There's a very slight tendency that way, but it's nothing like the picture that people have of all rich people vote Republican, all poor people are Democrats. There's a very slight tendency that way, but it's nothing like the picture that people have of the all rich people vote Republican, all poor people vote Democrats.

So that sounds kind of wonderful, yes? So far, so good. That actually does make democracy sound better. Here's the problem, though. Even though it does look like people really are voting for what they believe to be good for their society, they actually seem to know very little about that. In fact, they have a lot of very mistaken views about how to advance their interests. And I say that's actually probably the worst possible case. The worst possible thing is to have people with good motives but bad understanding, because then there's a lot of agreement and consensus about what we ought to be doing. The problem is just that what we

think we ought to be doing is often ineffective or counterproductive. All right. So in terms of this year's presidential election, pick a plank, any plank from each candidate's economic platform and give me an Obama plank and give me a Romney plank and talk about how good that policy is from an economic perspective and then talk about its viability as a voting appeal. I mean, I'd be perfectly happy if you wanted to actually just give me a couple. Sure. So let's see. So President Obama has talked a lot about financial inequality, but also access to education, let's say, right? So he has made moves toward and talked about making more moves toward making college more affordable in more ways toward more people. Talk to me about that idea as a piece of economic policy, and then talk to me about it as a good piece of voter bait. All right. So I mean, at minimum, in terms of economic policy,

it's not at all clear that this is a good idea because we already have an enormously high dropout rate, especially for marginal students. Most of, or at least a lot of the payoff from going to college comes from finishing. And yet, over the last decade or so, we've had a large rise in the number of people who start going to college, but the fraction that actually finishes has been very flat. So, I mean, it seems quite likely anyway that this is just going to encourage a lot of people to waste a couple of years of their life and get very little show for it. And yet, what I just said is not anything you'd ever want to tell voters. You certainly don't want to get in front of a national audience and say, you know,

I think too many people would go to college. A lot of people aren't very serious. That's just the fact. A lot of people aren't meant for college. That sounds terrible. And therefore, campaigning on the idea of sending more people to college is a great thing to campaign on. Yeah, sounds great. Of course, we're going to pay for more of this stuff. Sounds good. I mean, who wants to pay for stuff?

And again, it's not just a selfish matter of I don't want to have to pay for my kid. No one should have to pay. Wouldn't that be great if no one had to pay? All right. Let's take something from Governor Romney's campaign. Let's say it's a tax issue, right? Let's say that the Romney camp describes President Obama's forward-looking tax policy as wanting to raise taxes on the highest earners, whereas Governor Romney would argue and has argued that that would be a mistake because it would disincentivize small businesses and maybe large and that there comes a certain point at which raising taxes rather than or at the expense of cutting spending is counterproductive. How does that rank as an economically sound or unsound issue in your view? And how does it rank as, again, voter bait? Hmm. I mean, that one is kind of funny because if you take a look at voters' views on government

spending, they're literally contradictory. Voters in general favor lower spending overall, but for virtually every category of spending, they want to spend more. So this is the kind of thing where if you say it right, almost anything can be good. If you say it wrong, almost anything can be bad. A politician says we need to cut spending. That is a popular appeal. The only problem is if someone says, okay, which kind of spending? Oh, let's cut the waste. Can you identify the waste specifically? Is there something that it actually is? That's the problem. What I would say is that in general, Republicans try to tap into the general public desire for lower spending.

They also try to very carefully tap into the public's resistance to cutting any particular kind of spending. So even though Republicans know very well that to really cut spending, you've got to cut entitlements. You know, you've got to get Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid under control. Those are really the fast-growing areas of spending. But Republicans are very careful electorally not to name any of those because people are going to say, wait, when I said cut spending, I didn't mean cut any of the kinds of spending we like, which are basically all of them except for foreign aid. Coming up, my Freakonomics partner Steve Levitt talks about his voting history. I voted for Obama because I wanted to tell my grandchildren that I voted for Obama. And I thought that he would be the greatest president in history.

And I don't think I'm going to bother voting this election. From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. You know, if you're a successful politician, you know you don't succeed by figuring out what's really going on in the world and then trying to explain it to people. You need to find out what people want to hear and then tell it to them. You know, successful politicians instinctively are trying to read people, trying to read their faces. What does this person want me to say to him? And that's how they win. I mean, economists often look down on politicians and sort of mock them for being incompetent. I have a very different view.

I think they're extremely competent. It's just that they're competent at a skill that economists don't appreciate. They are people who win these incredibly competitive races to get a job thousands of people would love to have, maybe millions of people would love to have. They have some incredible skills. It's just their skills are not figuring out what's really going on or deciphering the best research around, their skill is finding out what the public wants to hear and then saying it to them in a way that is emotionally compelling. So what bothers you more, that electoral candidates give the people what the people

want or seem to want or that the people seem to want what they seem to want? That's a very good question because ultimately the source of the problem is that people are so confused in their views about how the economy and other things work, which means that a politician who wants to win has to actually say these things. People have often said that politics has been the religion of the 20th century. And I think there's a lot to that. In the same way that people get attached to religion, they get attached to a political party. And once you're part of it, you don't want to hear someone talking about the horrible things that your religion or your party did in the past. You don't want people to go and say the people who now run it might be morally questionable or hypocritical or just wrong. Instead, you want to find a sense of community with a bunch of like-minded people. You all tell each other how wonderful you are and try to defeat your satanic enemies who, for some strange reason, continue to dispute the truth that you have obtained.

Can you answer a couple of questions for Freakonomics Radio? Freakonomics? I'm not a freak. My name is Joel, and I grew up in Chicago, but I live here in South Minneapolis right now. I live in Decatur, Georgia. Sparta, Wisconsin. I live in Lawrenceville. I'm currently a student at the University of St. Thomas, originally from Fairmont, Minnesota. So, what political party are you registered with?

Republican. Republican. Registered with the political party are you registered with? Republican. Republican. Registered with the Democrats. I'm registered as a Democrat. Considered myself a fiscal conservative. A conservative Democrat. Can't remember if I actually registered with a party. Can you tell me one good thing about Barack Obama?

Tell me one good thing about Romney. Well, hold on for a minute. I got to think about that. I'm trying to think of how to be polite. Sorry. Can I think about that for a while? I'm kind of at a loss there. I'll admit I have spent a lot of time kind of looking at what's wrong with him instead of thinking about what I like about him. Barack Obama, I believe, is a good person, a good husband, but he doesn't really reflect any of my views on what's going on today. He's a family man, and I believe he has the best intentions on running for president. He can be cool.

He got a full head of hair. Great hair. He's a handsome man. You know, honestly, I can't think of anything right now that's positive. People are always talking about the dispiritingly low voter turnout rate in the U.S. It's less than 60 percent for a presidential election. But after hearing Brian Kaplan talk for a while, you may ask yourself a different but equally dispiriting question.

Why is voter turnout even that high? I asked my Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levitt about this recently. He's an economist at the University of Chicago. So Levitt, how can you in your life when you wander around tell the difference between a smart person and a not-so-smart person? Well, one good indicator of a person who's not so smart is if they vote in a presidential election because they think their vote might actually decide which candidate wins. Well, that sounds anti-American, doesn't it? And that's a terrible

heresy you're saying aloud. Well, you know us, Dubny. Well, we try to tell the truth. And the fact is that there has never been and there never will be a vote cast in a presidential election that could possibly be decisive. And one thing we see for sure, and you saw it in the Gore versus Bush election, is that if it's even within thousands of votes, it's not the votes themselves that decide the election because nobody can figure out how many votes are really cast. It's the courts that always decide, the judges who always decide. It's virtually impossible that any vote you cast in a national election could ever actually be decisive. But don't you think that people pretty much know that by now, that people are aware of electoral versus popular vote? And, you know, if you live in a state like I do,

New York, or where you do, Illinois, it's kind of a foregone conclusion. So let's assume that most people kind of think about that and know that. What drives them to do it anyway? I mean, people complain about low voter turnout. Sounds like you're saying it's strange that it's even as high as it is, around 50%. Yeah. So I think you're right that most people understand that their vote doesn't really matter for the election, which is exactly why I said that I think it's only the not so smart's expressive. And it's a way to say the kind of person you are. And it's a way to be able to say when something goes wrong, when the opponent wins, well, I voted against that fool. Or when something goes right, when you voted for a guy to tell your grandchildren, well, I voted for that president. So I had nothing wrong with voting.

I think you can tell whether someone's smart or not so smart by their reasons for voting. Why did you vote for Obama for president in 2008? So I voted for Obama because I wanted to tell my grandchildren that I voted for Obama, and I thought that he would be the greatest president in history. I don't think I'm going to bother voting this election. So, Levitt, some places around the world have essentially mandatory voting, Australia for for one. I don't really know too many of the details about it. But as a citizen, you must vote. There are different incentives for voting and penalties for not voting. Do you like that idea for here? I think it's totally backwards. Why would you want people

who aren't interested in voting? Why would you want to compel them? These are either people who are uninterested in voting, uninformed, indifferent between the candidates. Those are exactly the wrong people to try to get to vote. If anything, I think you want to go the other direction and find ways to let people who care a lot vote repeatedly. That's really more in the spirit of trying to get to the right answer. That way you get the people who have the strongest convictions acting most aggressively to express those convictions. Can you tell me one good thing about the Democratic Party?

What's something you admire about Republicans? Their tenacity. They're very passionate about what they believe in, and they always take into consideration emotion. I'm not too keen on them because, well, for a lot of reasons. Well, I truly believe that we all want good for the people. I don't think there's much that I really admire in the Republican Party these days. Actually, the Democrat Party that I'm familiar with now is not the Democrat Party that I grew up with.

I feel the Republicans have a much better handle on free enterprise. Like most political groups, their heart's in the right place. There have been good Republicans. I really cannot think of something that's very good that I've seen. I don't identify with anything of the Republican Party. The Democrat Party, I think, has lost its way. Both parties. I'm kind of disgusted with both parties, honestly. In our next Freakonomics Radio podcast, what do you do when your dad and your little girl wants to know how to get the best candy on Halloween night? That's easy. You write to Freakonomics.

How to get the most bang for your buck, treats for your trick, Snickers in your knickers. That's coming up on the next Freakonomics Radio podcast. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, APM, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes Susie Lechtenberg, Catherine Wells, David Herman, Beret Lam, and Chris Bannon. Colin Campbell is our executive producer. Special thanks to Jake Smith. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.