Revisionist History - The Bear Was Poked With Maria Konnikova

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

Maria Konnikova returns as Revisionist History’s ombudsman. Today, she talks with Malcolm about assault rifles, tales of the two Matt Dillons, moral hazard, localized mortgage rates, and possible solutions to America’s gun problem.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bushkin. on a six-part series we just wrapped up on guns in America. This is a mailbag in the truest sense of the word. We received an unprecedented amount of listener mail on this series, and Maria's come prepared with a whole slew of your feedback. Some nice, some not so nice. Yeah, well, I am surprised at how much nice we got considering the subject of this particular season of Revisionist History, to be perfectly honest. So let's start with something really nice and positive. Get the good stuff up top.

Exactly, exactly. You know, the praise sandwich, right? That's right. The feedback sandwich. But you had a relatively light episode in there about Gunsmoke. I did. And someone wrote in being a little bit worried that you got the murder rate wrong when you calculated the murders in Gunsmoke. Twitch, I can only say bring it on. Let's hear this. Yes. All right. So basically, you had this episode where you talked about the show that ran for how many years? 20 years, right? Almost 20 years. And your producer, Tali Emlin, actually went through several seasons of it and calculated what the murder rate would be. And you found that it would actually, even though it's insane, it is actually 80 times higher than what it would be in any city in the

United States today. Yes. But it turns out that you might have actually undercounted, according to this listener. So here's the letter. The murder rate in Dodge City was even worse than you calculated. You compared a season of the show to an annual rate of modern day cities. However, each episode probably takes place in a single day or so. The entire season probably only covered a couple months of time. That would make the annual rate five to six times worse than you already calculated. So what do we think about that? Okay. I get where this critique is coming from. I think there's some merit to it. I would point out, though, when I asked Tali about this,

she says if you look at the first two seasons, so we have an episode set in summer we have one in winter we have one on Christmas we've got a blizzard so they're kind of implying that what we're what we're seeing unfolding in the mythical Dodge City is um real passage of time and not a series of episodes. And also, by the way, the actors get older. Right. So, you know, when this starts, Matt Dillon's a young man. When Gunsmoke ends, Matt Dillon is no longer a young man. So maybe the best way to say this is that, you know, I think we should probably split the difference

and say that we were being excessively generous to the fictional Dodge City in suggesting that their murder rate was only 80 times higher than the next highest American city. And, you know, maybe it should, the accurate number is 160. That is absolutely crazy. By the way, I have never seen Gunsmoke and I had to look it up. The first time I heard of it was on your show. This is what you get for growing up in Russia. This is true. But I also had this like brain fart moment where Matt Dillon, I was like, wait, but Matt Dillon isn't that old. Oh, you were thinking of the other Matt Dillon. I was thinking of the actor Matt Dillon.

And so for a second, I was like, wait, how is Matt Dillon in this show Gunsmoke? And it was just like this total fictional universe that I created in my head before I looked up what it actually was. Years ago, maybe 30, 30, maybe 25, I'm at a party in the West Village. And I realized Matt Dillon is there. When he was really at the height of his fame, he's still famous, but he's really hot. I ingratiated myself with him and spent a delightful evening. It went well past the evening, I have to say.

I spent a delightful evening in his company. And I can testify that he is as charming in real life as the movies would suggest he would be. That's wonderful. Was he named after the show? Well, I think it's obvious he was. Right? Yeah.

Because he kind of, he looks not unlike the fictional Matt Dillon. So maybe his parents had a notion, but who knows? Either that or just some agent gave it to him when he was 19 years old. Well, I think that's amazing. And to my credit, I also did not have a TV growing up.

Nor did I. Ah, we have that in common. We have that in common. So we did have this one lighthearted reader's email. But every other email, or at least the vast majority were about one single episode do you want to care to guess which one it was i'm going to guess it was the assault rifle episode and you would have guessed correctly it is that episode before you go before you get into the let me just say that there are things you do as journalists and you know this well

that are deliberate provocations you do them precisely because you do think you are running counter to people's expectations and preconceptions. This would be one of those. I was poking the bear, and I guess the bear— The bear was poked. The bear was duly poked. Mission accomplished. So let's get into some of these letters, because when you listen to excerpts from them, you start realizing that it's as if people listened to two different episodes, depending on where they were coming from to begin with. Their own opinions about gun control colored what they heard you say and how they experienced your interviews to a shocking degree. I mean, actually not shocking. I'm not at all shocked. But it's crazy reading these and seeing just the opposite responses. So they will write things like, let's see, the gun rights guy was more genial than the gun control guy, but he was just as

misleading. All he did was smile while he made you look left when you should have looked to the right. And then they have all of these figures behind that saying that, oh, well, they're saying that, you know, he is saying that it only takes three seconds to do this, but mass shooters, there's going to be so much going on and his math is wrong and this is wrong and that is wrong. And they say that you were led astray. But then you have someone saying, Malcolm, you know, I am so proud of you for finally seeing the light. Now, and now I'm quoting, now let's finally seeing the light. And now I'm quoting. Now let's remember that the problem in America is a murder problem, not a weapon problem. So you have two very, very different points of view, right?

And let's talk about that. How can people walk away from the same episode, listening to the same data, with just completely opposite perspectives? Well, I mean, it shouldn't come as a surprise that when people 30 years of writing books that people don't read or listen to the end. Um, you know, I wrote a book called, my, my second book, Blink, was a book that looked critically at, when I say critically, it examined both the pros and cons of Snap Judgments. But you had to keep reading. It started out on the pros. And then as I dug deeper, got interested in the cons, the number of people who either supported or loved that book or hated that book because they perceived it as being a book about celebrating Snap Judgments was limitless. You know, anytime you tell a story that has a twist, you're going to leave some portion of people along the way.

And I think this episode is a proof of that. Basically where I end up, remember, is a gun is a gun is a gun. Parsing these distinctions between guns is a pointless exercise that leads you away from the central issue, which is that having lots of lethal weapons floating around in society is not the best idea, right?

Obviously, when you were doing these interviews, you want to do the interview and you never want to. You don't want to antagonize a person you're interviewing in the middle of the interview, especially when they're holding a gun. But I'm actually just curious from a personal perspective, if you care to comment, were you persuaded by these arguments that it actually doesn't make that much of a difference and that we're barking up the wrong tree when we're looking at this gun legislation. I was. There are two persuasive things in the reporting.

Persuasive number one was with my gun expert, the guy I've shot with in North Carolina, Greg Wallace. And what's persuasive about his discussion is not how fast you can shoot a semi-automatic weapon versus an automatic weapon, although that I think is relevant. The real core issue he was getting at is that assault rifle bans don't ban assault rifles. They ban a subcategory of assault rifles, which qualify for the ban, not because they are more lethal, but because they have certain cosmetic features that make them unattractive or mean-looking, right? Really what you're getting, so his function in the story is to remind us that, look, this is a bullshit exercise. You may think that an assault rifle band bans assault rifles. It does not, right? The fundamental platform of the AR-15 remains untouched by these bands. You can still use the basic weapon, you just can't use some of these accessories. That's point number one.

Point number two is it is not a distinction without a difference to point out that a semi-automatic weapon is not the same as an automatic weapon. They are fundamentally different. And if people are under the illusion that an assault weapon is basically like a machine gun, they're wrong. Right? Yeah. And that's not a trivial mistake. Right? So a lot of these, as I'm reading through in this one letter, a lot of them, you know, are fussing around in the kind of minor details of these distinctions. And it's just like, it's not the point. The point is like, what we're setting out to do here is not actually what we're doing, A.

And B, this brings us to the second persuasive character in that, the most persuasive character in that episode, was the ER doctor. Yeah. The guy in DC who had studied mass shootings and points out that the truly lethal weapon in the hands of a mass shooter is a handgun and not an assault rifle. And that's because what makes a gun lethal is not just a matter of its ballistic properties. It's a question of how it's used. And there are so many quote-unquote advantages to a handgun in the way it's used that it makes it, at the end of the day, a more dangerous weapon in a mass shooting. There is a whole kind of really weird academic subculture devoted to the analysis of mass shootings. And you would be surprised how divergent those findings are

from a lot of our preconceptions about what happens in a mass shooting. That's really interesting. And I actually saw that as a thread throughout this entire season of Revisionist History, just how strong identity politics and our sense of who we are and how we define ourselves is when it comes to parsing the world and those definitional issues. this anti-gun lobbyist, big time opponent of the Second Amendment in Washington. And I think the reason, he gets very upset and actually we didn't even use the parts of the

conversation where he was most upset. And I think one of the reasons he was so upset is that I was outflanking him on the left. And I was taking a more anti-gun position than he was. And not only that, in order to outflank him on the left, I was using right-wing arguments or right-wing facts. You know, that episode is, if you think about it structurally, that's what it is.

It's taking arguments most commonly used on the right to draw a highly liberal conclusion. It's just confusing to do that. Malcolm, you have come a long way from your debating fiasco in our last season. Don't even get me started. We'll be right back. More from the mailbag. All right, well, let's go back to guns because I do want to talk about some of the other episodes i think that one theme that we haven't touched on but that is you know deeply connected to all of everything we have been

discussing the racial and the socioeconomic underpinnings of all of this um and the fact that it's kind of woven into the fabric of the country and you know you you talk about and these are different episodes there's chicago you know there's there's dc there's um and you have you have alabama you have these very different geographically parts of the country, urban, rural, and yet you have some of the exact same reasons why we have still, despite all of the incredible medical stuff that's happened, and despite how many lives are saved now that wouldn't have been saved in the past,

we still have these huge disparities, and we still have people dying who shouldn't be dying because either they're the wrong color or they're in a place where they seem like they're the wrong color or they're in a place that's so economically marginalized that, you know, they can't get to a trauma center, probably because that area was the wrong color at some point. And it's just, it's heartbreaking, but it's still the reality. Yeah. This reminds me of, I think I'm getting this right, something I read years ago about what is the effect of reading enrichment programs on test score gaps between black and white kids. And reading enrichment programs on test score gaps between black and white kids.

And reading enrichment programs increase the test score gap. They don't decrease it, even though they're intended to decrease it. But what they do is, if you give reading enrichment to someone who reads a lot, they're going to reap the most of that boost. If you give a reading enrichment to someone who doesn't read much, they're not going to get much out of it because they're not reading to begin with. So something that we introduced as a way to narrow the gap

ends up widening the gap, which is a reminder that not all innovations do what. We have an assumption sometimes, I think, that the purpose of an innovation is to shrink the gap between the haves and the have-nots. This is so often violated that it's time we shelve that notion and understand that innovations are just energy, you know? They can be put to whatever use we want.

And sometimes what they do is just turbocharge existing inequities. And I think trauma care is an example of this exact thing, that you can't put trauma centers everywhere. They're too expensive. You can only put them in places where you can justify them economically. And what are those places? Well, those are wealthy places. Yeah. So you put them in wealthy places and they have the effect of making the quality of health care provided in wealthy places,

which was already better than everyone else, everywhere else. Even better, right? So when everyone who goes to a hospital to get treated for a gunshot dies, we don't notice the difference between good hospitals and bad hospitals. But when you put a trauma center in one of those places and you don't have another one, then you begin to notice it's a huge difference, right? I was just at something where we were talking about AI, and everyone's, you know, we're obviously very excited about the possibility that AI will transform all manner of things.

It's really unclear whether AI lifts all boats equally, closes the gap between haves and have-nots, or widens the gap between haves. No idea. Anyone who tells you that they know which way it'll go is fooling you. That's a very good point. And, I mean, if I had to bet on one outcome or the other, I would say probably it's not going to lift all boats equally.

Just because also who's going to have access to AI, right? And who's going to have access to the technologies? And who's going to have the time to learn how to use them? Yeah. So who knows? Who knows? On that one, I'm actually an optimist. Good.

I'm glad. Well, at least I'll say this, that over time, I would expect it to close the gap. So quite explicitly, it's obvious to me it lifts all boats. It's obvious in the short term people with access to the technology will benefit the most so i'm interested in the kind of medium to long term i think in medium to long term it does not merely lift all boats if i had to put my money on something i would say it would close the gap that the the farmer in bangladesh benefits more from AI than the factory farmer with $50 million in equipment in Iowa. I hope you're right.

These days, I'm only really optimistic about one thing, and that's it. Everything else is bad news. All right. All right. Well, let's cling to that. So now back to the optimistic news of the trauma centers. But one of the things that I am curious about is how strongly do you actually agree with this idea of moral hazard that you raise in relation to the improvements in care? Because I don't know if I actually buy that. You don't buy that? No.

So the argument was that doctors have become so good at saving lives that it's relieved the pressure on the rest of society to do something real about the gun violence. Exactly. And that if doctors had done nothing over the last 50 years, this is the counterfactual, the murder rate would be, we probably have four or five times as many homicides in a given year. Let's say we would have 100,000 homicides as opposed to 20,000 homicides.

And at 100,000, the current American policy, set of policy positions would be untenable. We would jump up and down and say enough is enough. Now, do I think that there is some truth in that? Yes. However, then I thought, after I finished the episode and I was writing this next book I'm working on, doing something on the opioid crisis, and I realized, oh, we're at 120,000 opioid, whatever it is, 110,000 opioid deaths a year and hasn't really moved the needle.

We haven't even talked about it. Yep. So, and also opioid deaths are not dissimilar to homicide deaths in a sense that it's clustered in various parts of the country, various slightly younger age groups. You know, the fact that we spend an enormous amount of time arguing about mass shootings when mass shootings are what, less than 1% of total homicide deaths in a given year and very little time on the remaining 99% suggests to me that maybe it wouldn't make a difference. Maybe the moral hazard thing is just a kind of intellectual nicety. The opioid thing would suggest that if it's the wrong people dying,

really hard to get people upset. Yeah, I mean, to be perfectly honest, that's exactly what I was thinking when I was listening to this. I was saying, I actually think the moral hazard argument is bullshit and that we wouldn't care. And that it's just these days we also are so immune to a lot of this stuff where you're just like, oh, yeah, you know. Yeah. I guess more people are dying.

And here's the – so here's the – let me make a – let me return. Let me do another backflip. Okay. And say, okay, here's a moral hazard argument. And maybe it's a mechanism argument. So moral hazard as a term is used most frequently in the insurance industry. If I insure you against a risk, I make your motivation to avoid that risk a diminishing equation. A classic example would be you live in a flood zone and I give you flood insurance or the federal government provides flood insurance. Nobody moves from South Beach.

Logically, you shouldn't live in South Beach. In fact, they built billions of dollars in luxury housing in South Beach in the last 10 years precisely because the builders are—not just builders—the purchasers of those apartments are reasonably sure that in the event of an environmental catastrophe, they will be bailed out by the government. So why not? Why not live in paradise until you get there? The answer to that is that just because one institution or body insures against risk and provides a mechanism for moral hazard doesn't mean everybody does. So what's happening in Miami is that, sure, if the hurricane wipes out your house, the feds may bail you out or the state might bail you out. But in the meantime, no private insurer is writing you a policy, right? So you're either self-assuring or you're naked. The second thing that's happening that I suspect may soon happen, and there are people talking about this now, is maybe when you buy a house

in South Beach, the mortgage rate is three points higher. Maybe it's 10%. Maybe the bank just says, you know what? Why am I writing a mortgage for an apartment in South Beach that's the same as an apartment on a mountaintop in Maine when the odds that one will be swept away in a hurricane are a thousand times higher than the other. But really by a quirk of history, we have national mortgage rates. Why are mortgage rates national if risks are not equal across? What happens when we start localizing mortgage rates? That is a way in which moral hazard problems can be corrected by the market, right? But it's a very different kind of moral hazard, right? It's actually, you can't draw an equivalence there

because one is a personal choice you're making, right? You're choosing to buy a house knowing that it'll be fine or not. The other one is the way that you're looking at policy legislation where you don't think it applies to you, where, oh, well, you know, I'm not the one dying or yeah you know i think i think it's a it's a slightly different decision making calculus and and in one case you're talking about kind of

discretionary spending i mean obviously having housing isn't discretionary but you know what i mean buying but buying a condo in South Beach certainly is. Versus, you know, life and death and policies that are on a more fundamental global basis. Yes. But here, my point was, I should restate my point. Okay. My point is that moral hazard is a term that applies to any kind of policy that removes the kind of necessary pressure for behavioral change. Sure.

My point is, using the mortgage example, was that just because one mechanism removes pressure doesn't mean there are other mechanisms that can't exert it. So you can see that with housing. What I'm wondering is, in the case of if we had 100,000 homicide deaths every year, or if we continue to have these 100 and whatever plus opioid deaths, is there another mechanism by which non-affected populations might be affected. I see. So you could imagine if you live in downtown San Francisco and you see the results on a day-to-day basis of what the opioid crisis is doing to vulnerable communities,

that's a kind of pressure. Sure. is doing to vulnerable communities, that's a kind of pressure. So what if, I imagine that the way you think about the opioid crisis if you live in downtown San Francisco is very different than if you lived in Marin County. So what happens if Marin County starts to look like downtown San Francisco? In other words, it's not absolutely clear to me that the kinds of pressures that would change people's thinking in a place are always going to be confined to downtown San Francisco and downtown L.A., right?

There's a scenario where people living in suburban enclaves may begin to be confronted with the consequences of social policies in a way that they're not now, right? Sure, sure. I mean, I get that argument, and I think that that's actually, that's a valid argument, but I just don't see, you know, how we're going to get, without massive horrible things happening to the world, how we're going to get Marin County looking like downtown San Francisco. It's just a, you know, it's a nice what-if exercise, but it doesn't seem like an actual solution. We are going to take a little break and be back with some final thoughts. So we had, you know, we've talked about a lot of problems. And so we had one letter that finally turns to the question of, okay, so what do we do?

But here's what this letter from South Carolina asks. My request is this. I need help with the, so now what? If Malcolm were in charge of this topic, what would he do? Copy Canada's rules? Build a new hospital in Chicago in a certain gun violence prone area?

Force all cities to report bullet contact injuries and not just fatalities? So Malcolm, you're now in charge of this. Well, all of those things. I mean, I think we have to accept, first of all, that there's no one thing we can do here. Probably have to do 20 things. My big takeaway from doing that series was I came away fundamentally disillusioned in the power of conventional government approaches to solve the problem. I don't actually, I was struck in talking to people who are on the front lines of this epidemic, how infrequently people talked

about gun control. I mean, they talked about in passing, but it's just not, the majority of gun violence in this country is people, two people with illegal guns. You can pass all the laws you want. They're not being touched by that. I mean, there are little things Washington could do around the margin, but just changing the conversation so that we're not arguing in the abstract about which law does this and which law does that. A couple of seasons ago, I did this episode on homelessness, and I spent a lot of time in Jacksonville, Florida, which has an exemplary homelessness program, by the way. And someone involved with that program

said, we had this conversation, which I didn't use in the episode. I've thought about it all the time, a long time since. She said, you know, they do a count of their homeless population. So they have a really, really accurate picture, going back for years, how their population has fluctuated over time. And she said, you know, there aren't more homeless in Jacksonville today than there were five years ago. In fact, there's less. But they're more visible.

And then she went into a long discussion of why, all the reasons why they might be more visible. And then she went into a long discussion of why, all the reasons why they might be more visible. And it was really interesting to me because we do make this mistake where we confuse the severity of a problem with the visibility of a problem. And the thing that causes pressure is not severity, it's visibility. And so when the homeless are visible in Jacksonville, you get movement behind it. So now when the problem is, it's actually smaller than it used to be in the past,

but there's urgency now because they're visible. And when it was this huge problem that was hidden, there wasn't the same kind of, so like that distinction, we so often, I think, allied that distinction between urgency and visibility. So I think that what I hope to get from this series is not that it pass a law or ban AR-15s or whatever.

I think I just wanted to make the problem more visible. The last episode is called Sin is the Failure to Bother to Care. I'm not so interested in what people decide to do to solve the problem because there's a million ways to get at the problem. It's not even just one problem. I'm mainly interested in trying to get people to care and to think clearly about what they're caring about. inspiring and optimistic conversation. By the way, we're probably, you know, we don't have time, but I loved the Shockley episode. I thought it was so much fun. And I hope people listen to the end. That last sentence, that just, what an amazing, amazing reveal. I mean, Freud would have just

like been there. Freud's back, baby. Oh, Freud's back in a big way. He's back in a big way he's back in a big way but it was it was such a great episode I love it thank you all right thanks Malcolm this episode

of Revisionist History was produced by Ben Nadav Haffrey Tali Emlin and Jacob Smith editing by Sarah Nix original scoring by Luis Guerra

mastering by Jake Gorski and engineering by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.