Host Russ Roberts and his guest, Pete Boettke, invited us to dive into the “meat and potatoes” of governance in this EconTalk episode. Their wide-ranging conversation on political conversation covered a lot of ground… So much so I find it really hard to narrow down to just a few questions for your further consideration…
So let’s try this…
1. What question(s) would you like to ask Boettke on the general topic of public administration? Are there any particular points on which you disagree with Boettke? What are they, and what’s the nature of your disagreement?
2. What does Boettke mean by “public administration,” and how does he think our understanding of it affects the way economics is practiced?
3. What does it mean to “sustain the mythology” of the US Constitution? To what extent do you think that’s an effective practice, and why? (Related, whose job is it- or should it be- to sustain this mythology?)
4. What are some of the problems with decentralizing government functions? What things might be better handled at the local versus the federal level? (Note: Even Russ admits that not everything benefits from bottom-up solutions…)
5. For me at least, this was perhaps the most significant question raised in this week’s conversation, and it’s a question I do not know how to answer. How about you? How do we market freedom and economic liberty to people who don’t see it helping them very much? (You might read this question as Boettke suggests; how do we get back to the “soul of classical liberalism?”
READER COMMENTS
SaveyourSelf
May 22 2018 at 12:27pm
5. How do we market freedom and economic liberty to people who don’t see it helping them very much?
There’s more than one question here. The first is about marketing. The second is why people don’t see freedom as helping them very much. Answering the second may help enlighten the first.
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman repeats over and over the maxim, “What you see is all there is” to explain why people in psych studies demonstrate complete neglect of absent information in their thinking and actions. Not only do people not consider what they do not know when making decisions, they do not even recognize that there is anything they do not know. They act–in other words–as if what they know is all there is. I think Socrates was killed for pointing out this propensity. Anyway, this is relevant because liberty is not something tangible. Freedom is the absence of violence. And we are rather predisposed to neglect that which we cannot see or sense. The work-around for us to make sense of freedom is to first picture violence, then subtract it from the scene. It’s a two step process. Which brings us to another lesson from Thinking Fast and Slow. The majority of the brain cannot handle two different concepts simultaneously. The frontal brain can handle two disparate concepts simultaneously with difficulty, but it requires focus, is energy intensive, and causes cognitive discomfort in the thinker. Since freedom, by definition, is two different concepts, it is not handled naturally or easily by the human brain. ‘Liberty’ has the same issues as does ‘justice’.
Right out of the starting gate, therefore, economists selling a system founded on freedom except for justice are at a disadvantage. The only way I see around these mental hurdles is to not use the terms freedom, liberty, or justice, and instead spell out their definitions each and every time they are written or spoken. That way the absence is explicit and cannot be ignored. In that light, the posted question then becomes ‘How do we market an absence of violence to people who cannot see an absence of violence helping them very much?”
See how the question is now trivial? The system sells itself. The tricky part that remains is trying to help people distinguish between violence that is helpful [that done in the pursuit of justice] and that which is harmful [violence for any other reason].
Comments are closed.