| 0:37 | Intro. [Recording date: August 18, 2026.] Russ Roberts: Today is August 18th, 2026, and my guest is Mike Munger of Duke University. This episode is scheduled to be the 1,069th episode of EconTalk, and this will be Mike's 52nd appearance of those 1,069, which means our archive, after this is published, will contain a year of Munger. You can listen to Mike and me for once a week for a year or an episode for every card in deck of cards, which has no meaning whatsoever. He was last here in March of 2026, talking about the UNC-Duke basketball experience and how Duke allocates tickets for that game. Our topic for today is a set of essays that Mike has written, and we're going to focus on the one on public choice, which is a technical term that we hope to explore in our conversation today. Mike, welcome back to EconTalk. Mike Munger: The 52nd episode. I want to assure you that I feel all the honor that the situation merits. Russ Roberts: You're bowed by it. I can see it's heavy on your shoulders. Mike Munger: I had no idea. Russ Roberts: Well, I'm grateful to you for all the times and knowledge that you've given the program. |
| 1:52 | Russ Roberts: So, let's talk about public choice. It is a subdiscipline of economics. It's a way of looking at the world, and that's what we're going to explore. Get us started. Mike Munger: I'm now president of the Philadelphia Society, which is--some people say it's the American Mont Pelerin Society. At our meetings, 3- or 400 people who are classical liberals and conservatives get together, and many of them would like to reclaim the label of liberalism because, in most of the world, liberalism is a label that attaches to what we call classical liberalism, and public choice is a branch of that. But, I wanted to start out by defining what I think liberalism is, because I think public choice is an offshoot of that. Liberalism, to me, is a combination of two things: humility and tolerance. Humility is the assumption that I may not be right. Tolerance is the assumption that you may not be wrong. Now, obviously, in our hearts, we don't believe either of those things. Clearly, I am correct, and you are mistaken. So, when I say it's an assumption, you have to adopt that as a position, and that takes a great deal of self-control. So, I cannot force you--and it doesn't mean that I'm not capable of it; suppose I am capable of it. So, I have to forbear. So, liberalism requires that I forbear acting as if I know I am correct or acting as if I know you are incorrect. Now, there are limits on that. There may be things that you could advocate that, if you push on the hard cases, perhaps we can go around the edges; but for the most part, I have to believe that I might be mistaken, and therefore I have to persuade you, and I have to listen when you talk because you might be right. So, the tolerance and humility are the two watchwords of liberalism, I want to argue. |
| 3:59 | Russ Roberts: So, I want to take us back to a episode we did a few episodes back together that haunts me in a good way--in a good way, not the kind of wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-sweating kind of way--which is the episode we did on Lord Moulton and the concept of obedience to the unenforceable. Which is to say the norms and practices that, they're not part of the legal system, they're a part of the culture, and they impose limits on decent people, on how they behave and what they say and what they do; and I would argue that your definition of liberalism, it's probably never existed. As you said, we might just pay lip service to--we don't really believe it. But, having said that, I think at the heart of the Founding in the United States was some idea of that tolerance and humility combined. It's why we have the checks and balances in America. And, as listeners who have been paying attention know, I feel like a lot of those norms have been eroded in the United States over the last 50 years, 25 years, and certainly the last 10 years. I'm not sure they're coming back. It's much harder, I think, to create a norm than to live by it. So, in a certain sense, what you're proposing is an ideal, a stance, a way of looking at our discourse, yours and mine or any two people's conversations in a political system, at the highest level and in the most ideal way; and understanding that those limitations, those norms, get stretched, as you said, and they're going to get tested, and at times there'll be issues where we're going to have a great deal of trouble living by those norms. But, if you don't live by them ever, you have a very different system, I would suspect, than if you try to live by them most of the time. Mike Munger: That's why I think the connection with Lord Moulton is right. If--people may or may not remember; I suggest that they listen to that podcast after they finish listening to this one, of course. The thing about that Lord Moulton said is that there are a bunch of things that are wrong that are not illegal, and we have to do that because people have to be capable of self-control. Patrick Deneen, in his book--a professor at Notre Dame, in his 2018 Princeton University Press book, The Failure of Liberalism--said that he thinks liberalism is failing because it has come to the view that anything that is not illegal is moral. Now, I think he's mistaken about that as a matter of definition, but I think I am uncomfortably close to agreeing with him that there is that potential, because it is possible to say, 'Well, since it's not illegal, you're allowed to do it.' But you still shouldn't do it; and Moulton's example of debate, a free and open debate in the Parliament, I thought was good. So, we could have a rule that you can't talk for more than a minute, and if we all vote, we can stop you from talking. But, sometimes someone may want to take a position, and I'll learn something from it. I'll be persuaded. And so it's better just to have it as a norm than as a rule. So, to the extent that liberalism has allowed itself to define anything that is legal as moral, it's gotten rid of all of Lord Moulton's middle nation--the middle nation that he talked about. And so--well, we could obviously spend an hour talking about liberalism. I do suggest that, if you get a chance, listen to the Lord Moulton episode. In the United States, the idea, the definition, of liberalism has become vexed. In most of the world, liberalism is an emphasis on individualism, individual rights--not necessarily ethical individualism, but the rights of individuals to act as they see fit, and an emphasis on emergent rather than imposed norms. And so, in the United States, liberalism has come to mean more like progressivism. Progressivism, between 1890 and 1920, focused on the idea that people were not actually capable of acting as individuals because they lived in the context of a matrix of forces that were far beyond their capacity to participate, and so the government needed to put a thumb on the scale to equalize the rights and abilities of individuals compared to these giant, shadowy corporations and trusts. So, liberalism in the United States took that direction. I would say--and this is probably not quite right--but I would say what Americans call classical liberalism is what, in the rest of the world, is just called liberalism. Classical liberalism is mostly, in the United States, a focus on the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, but also Edmund Burke, so a kind of classic conservatism with a concern for limited government and individual rights, but also with a sense of individual responsibility. So, classical liberalism really is a kind of civic republicanism that relies on individuals to create their own meaning and to accept the responsibility for creating their own meaning. Whereas liberalism in the United States has been the idea that we need other institutions, and the government in particular, to help us create communities of meaning. I'm sure people could quarrel with parts of that definition, but the main thing is that, in most of the world--if I'm in South America, if I'm in Europe--and I say someone is a liberal, then they are what, in the United States, I would call a classical liberal. Russ Roberts: Beautiful. Carry on. Mike Munger: There's a branch of classical liberalism, although the Venn diagram, it's not entirely contained because there are parts of it that are not part of classical liberalism, that are--they're in the subdiscipline called public choice. And, public choice--I'm a past president of the Public Choice Society, I'm a past editor, North American editor of the Journal of Public Choice--and public choice is often called, and it was called this by James Buchanan himself--James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for his work in public choice--James Buchanan said that public choice was 'politics without romance.' In the essays that are up on liberalism.org--notice it's not classicalliberalism.org--we're trying to reclaim liberalism to have the same meaning as in the rest of the world. It's aspirational. That may not work. Russ Roberts: It's quixotic. Yeah. Mike Munger: Well, some things that are hopeless still happen, so it is worth a shot. So, on liberalism.org, I've written a series of essays, and in one of them, I was interested in the kind of romance that public choice is not. The kind of romance that we're talking about here, we might define--you know that I define this in the essay; let me read it--it's from William Burke--Edmund Burke. Burke claimed that custom and loyalty to nations is what we now think of as a romantic inheritance because these are inherited traditions. Quoting now: In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars. [Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France] So, Church, Family, State--those are all the same things. That's romanticism on the conservative side. Now, famously--and this is a quote that may have appeared 10 times on EconTalk, but it maybe can't be said enough--Friedrich Hayek pointed out that we can't really do these--that we have to keep those things separate. So, Hayek, quoting now: ... the structures of the extended order are made up not only of individuals but also of many, often overlapping, sub-orders within which old instinctual responses, such as solidarity and altruism, continue to retain some importance by assisting voluntary collaboration, even though they are incapable, by themselves, of creating a basis for the more extended order. [Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit] So, pausing the quote for a moment, as Adam Smith said, it is important that we have brotherhood, fellow feeling. If I work in a business, it is important that I treat people well. But that doesn't really work at scale. Now, going back to--and this is from The Fatal Conceit: Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or say our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. [Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit] So, that's the argument against romance. |
| 14:08 | Russ Roberts: Yeah, and I want to pause you on that. I don't think that quote has been said enough, even close. Because, I haven't thought of it in a while, and it has a lot of relevance for this current moment, I think, in domestic policy in the United States and in the Western democracies. I just want to try to restate what he's saying because Hayek's prose is sometimes a little-- Mike Munger: It's a bunch of words-- Russ Roberts: yeah, is a little prolix, I think is the right word. What he's trying to say is that we have an extraordinary--imperfect, but extraordinary--connection to our family members, our spouse, our children, our parents. The extraordinary part of it is there's an emotional connection, and there's an immense amount of information that I have about my kids: what they care about, what they understand, what they might not understand, what they are desperately craving. I know a lot about their preferences, especially when they're little. And I allocate goods to them effortlessly. Many is the time I don't divide things equally because I know that one kid had a harder time than the others that day or are struggling with some issue. Doesn't matter what the reason is. I am a dictator. My wife and I were dictators. And-- Mike Munger: But, you're substituting goodness for fairness-- Russ Roberts: Correct-- Mike Munger: because you're in a position of saying, 'This is what is good.' Not some abstract rule of fairness. Russ Roberts: And, we cared about them deeply. And, to take an example I may have mentioned once on the program before, when I got a note from the governor of Missouri that I needed to vaccinate one of my children--this was when vaccination was not controversial--I was offended. Because the implication was I didn't know my children well enough or love them enough or care for them enough, and the governor of the state had to weigh in and admonish me about my duty as a parent. And, what Hayek is saying there is that the natural impulse to treat the people that I'm not close to--that I know almost nothing about--is very--the natural impulse to treat them the way I treat the people close to me because it's very powerful and wonderful is very destructive. In a piece that my wife forbade me from publishing, I invited the governor to come babysit for our kids so he could learn their names. It would be a good starting point. I suggested--so I never ran that piece, but-- Mike Munger: Thank you, Sharon-- Russ Roberts: Yeah, exactly-- Mike Munger: That was well done. Russ Roberts: But that's what Hayek is saying. He's saying that you cannot treat the world writ large like a family, even though there's a very natural impulse to do so. And then, the reverse: You can't treat your family like a firm, like a business, where you're maximizing profit. It's like, 'Oh, profit's good. I should charge my children for their rent, for their rooms.' Mike Munger: Again, a frequent theme on EconTalk: If one were to give one's spouse a gift card to Best Buy for their birthday, obviously that means they can buy whatever they want. If I guess-- Russ Roberts: That has to be better--at best, I would pick the gift they would want. But I might not. So then this gives them a chance to pick something they'd want even more than what I would pick. It has-- Russ Roberts: to be welfare-improving. Mike Munger: I can draw the indifference curves and the budget set and prove this definitively. It is always better or at least no worse for me to give the gift card. And yet--a raised eyebrow at least, and probably worse, would be the result if I were to give that to my spouse. Because, we can't take the rules and understandings of the larger commercial extended order and bring them down to the family. So, there has to be some sort of understanding that we live in several worlds at once. And liberalism--classical liberalism--is, to me, the idea that we have to, at least as a matter of aspiration, keep those worlds separate. |
| 18:54 | Russ Roberts: That brings us back to romance, because the romance we're talking about is the sweet, emotional comfort that comes from a familiar norm or behavior that works beautifully in one order but not so well in that other order. Talk about what politics without romance would be, then. Mike Munger: Well, I was interested in what romance actually is. There is our mutual friend, Pete Boettke, who has--Boettke's rule is that we should always understand that in order to understand a theorist, we have to look at who they're arguing against: so, the sort of Cambridge contextualism. Quentin Skinner came up with the idea of contextualism. To understand, I think, you have to understand what they're arguing against; so I had spent some time trying to figure out what is the romance that public choice is not. And, the simple version of it is that the romance in public choice--that public choice is against--is: we have a realistic conception of the warts and problems with markets. So, in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a theoretical development of what is called the market failure theory: and there are four main failures of markets. There's asymmetric information, externalities, public goods, and natural monopolies. Those are all technical conditions. They're real. They are ways that markets might--the functioning of markets alone will result in outcomes that appear improvable. And then, the romance was to say, 'And, we will take this perfect organization called government that will step in and we'll correct those things.' Now, I argue in this essay, a couple places, that all institutions should be understood as 'Seeing with two Is': Information and Incentives. And, the problem with saying that the government has the perfect information and the perfect incentives runs afoul of, respectively, Austrian economics--which questions the information that government has, because it doesn't use prices--and public choice--which raises questions about the incentives that government faces, because we can't assume romance. I've proposed, immodestly, the Munger Test as a way of thinking about public choice. The Munger Test is--and this happens all the time, and I've had people get quite angry at me for doing this, which, as you might imagine, happens often. They'll say, 'I think the State should be in charge of deciding what people can say on the Internet.' I'll say, 'Wait, stop. Take out State, because it doesn't exist, and put in Donald Trump and see if you still believe it.' 'Oh, no. No. Absolutely not.' Well, there's no such thing as the State. That's a romantic notion. The people who run the State are the same people who run corporations. Now, they may face different incentives; they may behave differently; but in terms of self-interest and their ability to get information, and the incentives that they face, we have to put them in a context where we're comparing a real market setting with a real government setting, and then see if you believe it. [More to come, 22:33] Russ Roberts: Just a couple clarifying things, reminding listeners that when you talk about markets, you don't mean stock markets. You mean the decentralized way that we produce and buy and sell most of the things that rely-- Mike Munger: Yeah, I should call it commerce. Russ Roberts: Yeah, or whatever. Mike Munger: I should call it commerce. Russ Roberts: But, 'markets' is a good shorthand, but that's what it means. |
| 22:53 | Russ Roberts: I want to take your point about the two Is, which--very cute, the Incentives and Information--and bring it back to the family situation. When I'm allocating goods in the family, I have the information because I live with them. I also have the incentive because I care deeply about them. Now, it's imperfect. I may care sometimes about my own desires relative to theirs in a imperfect way. But probably better than the governor of the state I'm living in. That's just an application of what you're talking about. And now, let's come back to the Munger Test. It's extraordinary, the romance we do have about government. Forget the academic, scholarly market failure/government failure thing--and we'll come back, I'm sure, and talk about it in different ways. But, many times people can divide the world up between greedy corporations who are out to hurt you and public servants who are there to protect you. And I think what public choice says is that often we are--public choice says, 'Sure, corporations are run by people who are self-interested and maybe sometimes even selfish. What protects you from them might be the government. It also might be competition, other norms, and so on. And, the government that's going to protect you from that and intervene in that process is a human being.' You picked Donald Trump, but you could pick-- Mike Munger: Or I could have picked Nancy Pelosi. I'm not trying to make a partisan point. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Mike Munger: Pick a real human. Russ Roberts: And, I just want to come back because there is a great richness to the 52 conversations we've had. Recently--a year and a half ago--you used a beautiful metaphor. You said you don't want to forge a sword that you would want to see your opponent wield-- Mike Munger: Right after the next election-- Russ Roberts: Yeah. You might believe that your side is so obviously right--coming back to your opening point--you may be so convinced of your side's righteousness, your view's righteousness, that it will persist forever. But a little bit of empirical evidence suggests that's not the case, and therefore you should be very wary of giving power to people that you will not like. I think--you said there's no such thing as government. People say, 'Well, that's silly. Of course there is such a thing.' That's true, there is such a thing, but to use it in a sentence as the subject, 'The government will do X,' is not really quite right. It's a group of people. Mike Munger: The government wants something, the government will do something. Treating it as an organic, unitary actor is the mistake. You're right-- Russ Roberts: And-- Mike Munger: there is a thing called government-- Russ Roberts: and lastly, the other piece of this romance, which I think it's important to put on the table, is that the romance we have about democracy, whichever system we're in--you're living in a republic, I'm living in a parliamentary democracy here in Israel--it's very easy to remember some of the flaws of these two systems, but I think the conceptual thing to focus on is that what government does does not represent the will of the people. It is the outcome of a complex set of institutions and norms and the incentives that the individuals inside those institutions and norms face, and there's no reason to think that it will reflect what people want. And, even more strongly, people almost always want more than--they don't want the same thing. So, what could it possibly mean to say it reflects the will of the people? What it does is it reflects an imperfect, by definition, process by which group decisions are going to have to get made. Having said all that--and then I'll let you respond--having said all that, this doesn't mean that government intervention is a bad thing; it doesn't mean the market is always right; it doesn't mean capitalism is perfect or should be left to run amok or run free or whatever way you want to describe it. To me, all public choice does is take the romance out. I think it's really important. It just says, 'Be realistic. Don't be romantic.' Mike Munger: But, it is well said that public choice--another thing people say that public choice is, is politics as exchange. So, it is something we participate in as a group because it makes it all better off. In the essay, I talk about--I don't know if you'd call it a metaphor or an example--but suppose we all wanted to go to lunch. And notice I said we all want to go to lunch, not I want to go to lunch, you want to go to lunch, you want to go to lunch--because each of us individually is hungry, so that's the individualist part of this. But, generally, I would prefer to go to lunch with a group of people whose company I enjoy, even if we go to a restaurant that is not my favorite. It's good enough; but, I have a favorite restaurant, and I would like to go to lunch with everyone at that restaurant. You would like to go to lunch with everyone at your favorite restaurant, and we disagree about the restaurant. One possibility is we all go to lunch by ourselves. That's not the way groups work. Usually what happens is we all want to go to lunch together, but then we have to make some sort of decision about where it's going to be. And usually what happens is we don't formally vote, but we will make arguments: 'Oh, the line is too long there. That's too far. That's too expensive.' And we'll come to some kind of consensus. So, that's politics as exchange. There's a shared--there's a goal that we all agree on: We'd like to go to lunch together. And then we have a process of revealing information about what each of us believes and wants, and we all have the incentive to come to an agreement because we have a shared goal, and that is we want to go to lunch together. So then, maybe we notice that it's important that each of us has the exit option. We decide we want to go to some place that I just hate, and I say, 'Well, heck with you. I'm going to go by myself.' And I go get takeout, and I go to my office, and like Achilles in his tent, I pout in my office and eat my takeout with my plastic fork--maybe not exactly like Achilles, but I wanted to get in an Odyssey--well, I wanted to get a-- Russ Roberts: An Iliad-- Mike Munger: an Iliad reference in here somewhere. So, we get to the restaurant. And, how do we decide what each of us is going to eat? We could--each person could look at the menu and make a proposal. We could discuss the merits of the different dishes, and then we could vote about which of those all of us will order. So, then [inaudible 00:30:07]-- Russ Roberts: And then, share them equally, very carefully parceling out to each person their share. And of course, no one has ever--well, economists might have a meal like this sometimes, but real human beings don't eat this way, right? So, carry on. Mike Munger: But, the question is why? It's not obvious that you wouldn't. After all, you're a group. And so, the big problem that public choice focuses on is an informed, unromantic choice between what is mine and what is ours. Not between what is mine and what is yours. This is not a property rights question. This is a negotiation that we, as a group, are going to make. So, the 'ours' part is what restaurant will we go to? The 'mine' part of it is each of us gets to order what we want off the menu. And we may have different things. And so the line-- Russ Roberts: But, we may also decide we're going to share today, and we're going to have to decide which dishes to order. And as the group gets bigger, this gets unwieldy, and it's difficult, and--but as you said, I might decide I don't really like raw tomatoes, but I know most people in the group like salad with tomatoes in it, not on the side, and so we order a salad. I kind of pick around it, or I don't eat the salad that day, and I get, quote, "taken advantage of." But it's worth it because the whole group is happy; and I like eating; and they're my friends. I'm happy to see their happiness. |
| 31:31 | Russ Roberts: This is where the--by the way, sorry to take your example and run off the rails with it. This is one of the problems, is the example, which is trying to get at how politics involves horse trading, compromise-- Russ Roberts: exchange, and sometimes allowing people to exit. By definition, this very example of five people sitting around a table at lunch has some romance about it because we actually like each other. In the political process, many of the people at the table, I can't see them. And some of them I don't like. Mike Munger: You raise an important point, so let me say two things about that. One is: we're still having to deal with the problem of information and incentives. We have solved the incentive problem here because this is a microcosmos problem. We all like each other, and so that means that we're solicitous of it. If you tell me you're allergic to tomatoes, for example, then I'm probably going to say, 'All right, we're not going to choose a dish where you have to eat that or have nothing.' The other thing is, though, that this is an information problem. So, if we see with two Is--it's information and incentives--suppose we go to an ethnic restaurant that I have no experience--or a tapas restaurant--and I don't know the dishes, but one person is a regular. I might very well put myself in that person's hand: 'You choose the--.' Some of the best meals I've ever had have been with someone who really knows that cuisine and say, 'Why don't you order for all of us?' And then we all share, and those are terrific. So, all of those things are negotiable in this little setting of five people. But, that is an example of politics as exchange. Question is, does it scale up? And, generally, the answer is going to be no, because we don't have the same incentives, and we don't have enough information. So, saying that that example works at the micro level, you would want a different set of institutions, and you might be skeptical. So, there's more to public choice than just politics as exchange, and the politics without romance part says that we're going to have to add some other aspects. And, those might include--and I'll run through them very quickly--for public choice, it's methodological individualism and behavioral symmetry. Methodological individualism means that we have to assume that the locus of choice and the locus of enjoyment or disappointment is the individual. We can't say, 'The government acts. The government thinks.' What the government is, is a collection of people who come up with some aggregate process where we look at the information that people have. And, often we do this through voting. We might do it in a bureaucracy by gathering information, looking at the rules, maybe getting public comment, but the--methodological individualism means that, as a matter of constraint, we can't just assume that a group of individuals can be treated as an organism. Russ Roberts: Before you go on to the behavioral symmetry, I just want to try to get at that a little deeper. We will say after that lunch to someone who wasn't there and asks, 'How was it?' I'll say, 'We had a great time.' But, what I mean by that is each of us individually enjoyed ourselves. If there was a person who had a allergic attack but was only one of the group, the rest of the people thought it was one of the best meals they've ever had, it would be bizarre to tell the questioner, 'Yeah, we had a great time. Well, that one guy had to go to the hospital, but'-- Mike Munger: Yes. It's [inaudible 00:35:21]-- Russ Roberts: but we--whatever that--my point is it doesn't mean anything in that particular example. If we're all alike, which would be, in a way, the essence of that individualism approach, is to say: We're never alike. We're all different. Whether it's our preferences, our opportunities, our aspirations, our moods, we're all different. And so to say, 'We all had a good time,' is a generalization that presumes that most of us individually had a pleasant experience. If that wasn't the case, it would be absurd--this part says--to say we had a good time, because I'm just going to aggregate over all of us. That would be strange. Mike Munger: One of the reasons that what you just said is important is that it actually rules out ethical individualism. Methodological individualism does not imply ethical individualism. Ethical individualism means if you ask, 'How was it for the group?' and it was good for me, I just get to say, 'Well, it was great,' because it was good for me. So, there is an entity--Buchanan called them clubs. One of the things that's mentioned in the Nobel Prize announcement was that there are these voluntary, maybe evanescent, groups called clubs, and you can exit; but I participate in this group, and we can talk about the quality of the experience that people have in the club. It is not necessarily ethical individualism, where all I care about is myself. I might very well care about the other individuals. But we are acting as individuals in a group, and that group is constituted with a small 'c'. That small-'c' constitution is: we invite people who we like. Maybe someone else shows up, and we roll our eyes and say, 'Okay, yeah, sure, you can come along.' But, the way that these groups form is kind of spontaneous. They are voluntary associations, but even though we're assuming methodological individualism, we're not assuming ethical individualism. |
| 37:33 | Russ Roberts: I think it's really important because I think a lot of times when people talk about, say, classical liberalism, they presume it means every man for himself. Or every woman for herself. I don't know how to improve that. But, the expression 'Every man for himself' is: I care about me. So, if I had a good time, it was a good choice. That's bizarre. Most human beings don't feel that way. There are certain settings where it's appropriate, but in general, just because we're making these claims that we've been making about the importance of individuals and the limits on what we can say about the group as a whole does not mean that we are atomistic or that we can't join together, that we can't ally ourselves with people with similar preferences or causes or organizations that are trying to solve a problem we care about. But it's almost the opposite. We're going to associate with other individuals and create something larger than ourselves, but we're going to limit what we say and how we describe that thing we create together, and we're not going to be romantic about it. We might be--when we're laying in the dark before we go to sleep, we might get great satisfaction that our Little League team played well today, but the point is it's not all about me. This allows for altruism and love and the freedom to associate with people who care about the things you care about to do those things even better than you can do them on your own. That begins to open a question about what is the scope of our activities as in groups, either in voluntary groups or in political groups, and the choices we make to what we put under public policy's purview is then crucial, and it recognizes that because the groups don't always work as well as we might like doesn't mean we should do everything in a group; and we certainly shouldn't do everything alone. Mike Munger: The reason we're spending so much time on this--listeners may think you're arguing about a tiny point--that is usually the claim that is made about public choice, is that: You're saying that people are selfish. What we're saying is that they're self-interested, and that that self-interest often contains an important social aspect and the participation in groups that are larger than myself. Now, calling it 'politics as exchange' might be rather odd because maybe it's politics as cooperation or politics of choosing in groups, so the reason that my Cambridge book was titled Choosing in Groups was I wanted to look at the analytics of how people choose collectively. But, I've actually come to think that politics as exchange means that I want to participate in this group with you, and I want you to be in it because I think we will both be better off as a result, and that's kind of just the essence of exchange. The question is: How do those institutions work that is different? So you said: Don't be romantic about it. And I went to look at what romanticism means. Because, romanticism is--it was a philosophical movement, particularly German idealism, and, above all, Hegel. So, in 1821, Friedrich Hegel published a book, The Philosophy of Right, and he advanced a--we don't have time to say much about it, but he advanced a doctrine that in German is Sittlichkeit, which is ethical life, ethical customness, even the march of God in the world. And his claim is that, as human beings develop, the State has a will and purpose of its own. And it's irreducible to individual wills. And so, romanticism would say that the State is an organic entity that we should--and that's actually the highest purpose. And what's interesting is that Edmund Burke thought that also. So, Hegel is an essentially conservative religious view, where you have a combination of the volksgeist--the spirit of the people--and it is embodied in the State. And so what we need to do is create better and better institutions. So we start with the family; we move to civil society; but ultimately the State. And the State is not a contract among preexisting individuals: the State is the actualization of freedom itself. The State is, according to Hegel, an ethical substance with its own rational structure, and so, again, he uses the phrase, 'The march of God' in the world. So, that idea of romance--if the State is Sittlichkeit actualized--the concrete, historically developed, ethical substance of the people rather than a set of offices held by ambitious, budget-maximizing, vote-seeking individuals--then you can talk about what the State would will. So, that is literally the kind of romance that Buchanan is arguing against. And it's actually obscure. I realize-- Russ Roberts: Say it again. Mike Munger: I used a bunch-- Russ Roberts: Say it again. Mike Munger: Well, the State is the concrete, historically developed, ethical substance of the people. So the State actually is the embodiment of the people. It's not a set of offices that are held by ambitious, budget-maximizing, vote-seeking individuals. So, the State is, and quoting, although it's English, not German: it is 'the actualization of freedom itself.' The State is an ethical substance with its own rational structure. It is prior to and higher than the individuals who compose it. Russ Roberts: Is that Hegel? Mike Munger: That is a paraphrase of Hegel. Russ Roberts: Okay. |
| 43:31 | Russ Roberts: A recent episode hasn't aired yet, so you would not have heard it. I mentioned reading the Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, and it's hard to read that book and maintain much romance about the state. It's a portrait of Austria-Hungary and the Emperor Franz Joseph. They're in the background--it's actually about the lives of a family--but in the background, ever-present is the State. The father is a bureaucrat, the son is a soldier, and the grandfather, the father's father, was a soldier; and so they are entangled emotionally, practically, in all kinds of ways with the Emperor and with the regime, the empire. And they have a lot of romance about it. What-- Mike Munger: It's a family. It is a family sort of metaphor-- Russ Roberts: and what that book is about, I'm just realizing it now to some extent, is the loss of romance, the inevitable loss of romance, when the illusions that the people have about the State have been shattered. I want to say one other thing. I want to give a different example of romance that also might be helpful. Listeners know I'm a Patriots fan. So, I have a lot of romance, and most people do, about their sports teams. Tom Brady was accused of inflating the footballs against the regulations. I know that was wrong because Tom Brady would never do anything wrong, and I believe deeply in my heart that if Tom Brady were sitting in my office with me, he'd be a swell fellow. And he might be. I don't know. He might actually be. But by definition almost, franchises, sports teams, traffic in romance, they create the aw-shucks charm of Tom Brady's successor, Drake Maye, who 'is just a good guy. I can tell.' We have this about our movie stars and our pop stars often. When they fall--when we find out they have feet of clay--we're very disillusioned. But, it's pretty harmless to believe that your sports team could do no wrong and that its players care about you or that--and I'll say, by the way, 'Hey, we won this weekend,' to my brother who is also a-- Russ Roberts: How weird is that? We didn't play. 'What a great game we played,' I'll say to him. So, we have a romance that we are part of this collective that is clearly irrational, and it's a harmless irrationality. It adds a richness to life that's delightful. It's not healthy to do it about politics. Mike Munger: Why? Why is it not? Human beings are literally evolved to feel embedded. The reason that you can take advantage of sports teams is that we are evolved to feel like part of something larger than ourselves, so the Dunbar-- Russ Roberts: That's Hayek's point. We're taking our-- Russ Roberts: my parents would never do anything to hurt me, and 'neither would Tom Brady or Bill Belichick.' Mike Munger: Well, but notice the--and Hayek calls this an atavism. An atavism is a vestigial element of something that was once adaptive. So, the Dunbar number is something like 150. That's the number of people who can live together in a hierarchically flat society and keep track of reputations. So, hunter-gatherer societies, clans, they could go up to about 150 people, and if you were to act badly, I could keep track of it. One of the reasons that human beings like to gossip is that--so we actually get pleasure from gossiping because that allows us to keep track of the reputations of other people in our clan. If you act badly, if you don't say, 'Oh, we won,' or be sad that we lost, you get put outside the wall, and there's big animals out there. You won't last long by yourself. So, the people who did that, they went away, and their-- Russ Roberts: Their genes-- Mike Munger: That's not an evolutionarily successful--so we have a brain architecture that makes us want to be part of teams, and sports teams are a harmless and, in fact, I would say, a healthy way of having that attachment. But when that becomes an attachment to the state as if it were an organism--so at the Patriots game, maybe at the first game of the year, there's a flyover of a bunch of Delta Airlines jets--no, wait, those are U.S. Air Force jets--and my throat swells, and I am pleased to be part of something larger than myself. This militaristic, jingoistic display makes me happy. And so--maybe he said this, maybe he didn't--Napoleon Bonaparte said that his particular military genius was his ability to make men die for little pieces of ribbon, and that if he had had more ribbon, he could have won more battles. Geez, that's cynical. In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith talks about the fact that the soldier, when he imagines his death and funeral, thinks about the applause that he will receive because people will be--and he won't be there. But we have this ability to say we want to be part of something larger than ourselves. That's all great. However, we have to have a society that recognizes the importance of individuals rather than saying you have to subsume your interests and self to the volksgeist--to the larger. I'm not trying to make a Nazi point here. The point is that most of idealism, German idealism, is a reaction of Marx to Hegel; and so all of the words, all of the technical words that we use to describe this, but this long predates, and there have been many other nationalistic expressions, and it's quite possible that the United States is now guilty of that. We've talked a fair amount about what public choice is, and I have given some definitions of the parts of public choice. In the essay on liberalism-- |
| 50:17 | Russ Roberts: Well, you didn't get--I'm sorry. Do you want to say something about behavioral symmetry? We went off into a rather lengthy tangent. Before you go on, do you want to add anything about that? Russ Roberts: I don't remember what that is. Mike Munger: Right. Behavioral symmetry is--in another way, it is a key aspect of public choice that we can't do without, and it is an obvious--Alistair Cooke, when he was talking about the Nobel Prize in Economics on BBC Four [British Broacasting Corporation 4], said that public choice is, after all, the rather homely observation that politicians are just like you and me. Well, they actually aren't like you and me; they are you and me. There's this difference, but they're basically like us. They're us. [inaudible 00:51:09]-- Russ Roberts: Yeah. Gorillas are like you and me. Mike Munger: Yes. They have important similarities. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Yeah. Mike Munger: So, if a corporate CEO [Chief Executive Officer] becomes a U.S. senator, they don't have a new soul implanted; they're basically the same person. If a consumer who is too dumb to know what size Coke they're going to buy in New York at the 7-Eleven walks into the voting booth, they don't become a genius and now understand the niceties of foreign policy. These are the consumers, and voters are the same people, and economic leaders and political leaders are the same people. Now, I wrote a piece with Geoffrey Brennan and Cameron Tilley about behavioral symmetry, where we argued that maybe it should be called motivational symmetry. Because, behavioral symmetry doesn't mean--economics doesn't say that people act the same in all situations. In fact, what economics says is that people act differently according to the incentives. It may be that, in politics, the incentives are quite different than they are in commercial settings, and so my behavior might be different. So, we don't have behavioral symmetry; what we really have is motivational symmetry. However, I am motivated by self-interest, and that self-interest might include concern for others. So the behavioral symmetry might say, 'You know, in markets, we should recognize the fact that people might have concern for others. They're not narrowly self-interested.' And in politics, they're like that. But, in both cases, we need to make the same assumptions about human motivation. That's all the claim is. Russ Roberts: In another episode that hasn't aired yet, with Adam Mastroianni, he makes the claim that incentives are for losers, and by that, what he means--and I want to apply it now to this example you just gave--you just recognized the reality that a corporate individual who goes into politics doesn't get a soul implant or a brain surgery. They're the same person. But what economists like to point out--correctly--is that the incentives for good decision making--both those Is, the information that person has and the incentives they have to do something--might be very different. Public choice tends to emphasize that it's not so important who is in the job: it's more important about what the incentives are. What Adam was pointing out in that episode is that you don't have to follow the incentives. And the romance we might have--I'm not suggesting Adam has it--the romance we might have about politics is believing that once you become a U.S. senator or a representative or president of the United States, while the incentives might be the same, you can--for whoever else could have won--you are free as an individual to make the choice that you think is to do the right thing. And I think the clash between public choice and what we might call the street view of politics is that the street view of politics tends to assume that people will rise above the incentives, and the public choice view tends to say, 'No, they're going to be enslaved by the incentives.' I think the truth is in between. I think believing that incentives are the only thing that matters is not a bad starting place. It's not a good finishing place. But I think that distinction of the two extremes that, 'No, people will do the right thing because they're public servants,' versus, 'No, they're going to serve their own self-interest like they would if they were in the corporate CEO, the C-suite.' So I think the reality is somewhere in between. We like the idea that politics selects for people who are good-hearted and good-spirited, and we're tempted to believe that business selects for people who are rapacious and greedy. I think neither is true. I think the truth is in between, and what makes a society successful are the norms and the regulations, both the enforceable laws, legislation, and the unenforceable norms that affect how people behave in those different situations. And they're not exactly the same. The norms are different in politics versus business, but they emerge from culture and time passing and so on. And if they're good norms, you tend to have effective political outcomes and good marketplace/commerce outcomes, and if they're not, you're in trouble. Mike Munger: That is nicely done because it does set up the--in my view--crushing counterpunch that public choice has to that argument. Russ Roberts: Let's hear it. Mike Munger: So, Knut Wicksell is, in some ways, the ur-text of public choice because James Buchanan, in the famous incident of serendipity, found Knut Wicksell's dissertation on the shelf at the University of Chicago. And he could read German, and so he finds it, he takes it down, and a big part of what Wicksell is talking about is that economists have generally taken the view that they should advise the state as if whoever is in charge is an omniscient, benevolent dictator that knows everything and wants the right thing. Now, let's suppose that there is a king, and the king doesn't have to answer to anyone. That means that the king is free to do the right thing. Do you think a U.S. senator is free to do the right thing? What disciplines corporations? Well, the answer is competition. What disciplines U.S. senators? The need to seek reelection. There is no way in hell-- Russ Roberts: No, it's competition-- Mike Munger: And it is competition; and there is no way in hell that a senator gets to do the right thing, because the senator lives in a world where political power is exercised by concentrated interests. Most people in the United States cannot name even one senator. They don't know very much, and that's actually rational. They're responding to incentives. So the lack of information is rational. If I'm a U.S. senator, I have to seek reelection, and I'm going to seek reelection in a system that's dominated by organized interests, where most people don't have much information. And, our mutual friend, Bryan Caplan, has talked about the fact that this means that people can have irrational beliefs. And, I'm going to substitute the word 'romantic.' I can have romantic beliefs about what candidates for senator say they're going to do. And so, if I buy a car and it's a bad car, I have a bad car. I have reasons to do research. Russ Roberts: I may have romance about the backseat being big enough for my family of six, but reality will hit me in the face. Mike Munger: There is some immediate feedback for making bad choices. And I get to make the choice about what car I'm going to buy. When it comes to a U.S. senate race, then there are--most states, millions of other people that are also going to vote. There is no chance of my vote influencing the outcome. So, politics and elections are dominated by organized interests that are able to influence, in disproportionate way, the outcome. There is an alternative for this, and we said before that Edmund Burke was a romantic. In his "Speech to the Bristol Electors"--and I hope you'll put up a link to the "Speech to the Bristol Electors"--Edmund Burke talks about the fact that what a elected official owes to the people is his judgment, not just simple compliance with their wishes, and, in fact, if the elected official believes that the right thing to do is different from what the voters want, he should do the thing that is right, not what voters want. That's basically the claim that we often hear--the romantic claim--and what's important is that--an historical detail--in that election, Burke lost. He was taken out. So, he makes this famous argument that people cite in--and they're trying to use it as a defense of the romantic claim that: I'm hoping that the legislator will do the right thing. He lost that election. So, it is simply not true that people in government are free. They may be less free than corporate CEOs. A corporate CEO, if they want a new product, they say, 'Well, we're going to do this,' and people will say, 'Yes, sir. We'll borrow money, and we'll start doing it.' If I'm a senator and I have a good idea, it won't pass the Senate. And if it does, it won't pass the House. And if it passes that, the President will veto the bill. So, the ability of individuals in government to do the right thing is less, not more, even if they wanted to. Which they don't, because people who are active are going to become corporate CEOs, not senators. The people who become senators are the ones who like to spout nonsense to cameras, in my personal opinion, because the incentives reward that kind of behavior. The main thing is that you have to get reelected, so the public choice insight here is: Yes, behavioral symmetry means we're going to get different behaviors given the difference in incentives, but the incentives in politics are pathological. They actually rule out the romantic notion that officials want to do the right thing. |
| 1:01:16 | Russ Roberts: I'm going to disagree with you, which is really uncomfortable, but such is life. If I want to get reelected, I deal with the will of the people. Now, you're suggesting sometimes the people might want unethical things. I would argue, as I did earlier, that there's no such thing as the will of the people. There's some people who want one thing. To take one of our favorite examples, if you're a senator from Florida or South Dakota, strangely enough, you're going to be persuaded that it's really an unhealthy thing to have sugar coming into the United States. Sure, you can take it from other places because the sugar cane and the sugar beets grow in Florida, and they grow in South Dakota, and as you suggested in passing a few minutes ago, the people who grow those sugar cane and grow the sugar beets are really focused on the foreign sugar coming in and keeping it out. And the average consumer who pays 10, 25, whatever it is, percent more for their products; they're getting sugar, aren't paying so much attention. There's no incentive for them to pay the amount of attention they need to pay to do something about it, and so we get restrictions on imports of sugar in the United States. And it enriches a very small group of people, and it impoverishes a very large group of people a small amount. So, senators, yes: they often will do those things to protect certain groups, and there's no will of the people that they're failing to respond to. What they're failing to respond to is the majority of their people; they might be failing to respond to a utilitarian case. But I'm talking about just their effectiveness on the job. You're making out like they're clowns who enjoy preening in front of the camera and being popular. Well, there's some of that, of course; we're all human beings. But, do you really want to argue--and I don't think you do, because I know you pretty well--do you really want to argue that all of political outcomes are a cesspool of failure because of the horrible incentives and the ability of politicians to exploit the imperfect information and incentives of their constituents--the two Is? Mike Munger: I don't think they're exploiting the information; I think they are facing the fact that they can't get around the ignorance of voters. I'm convinced a lot of senators would like to pass legislation that they think is needed by the country. In the last close-to 10 years, there has been very little legislation passed by the U. S. Congress. We are more and more ruled by executive order, and that was true under Obama, that was true under Trump 1, Biden, and under Trump 2; and the reason is the incentives that now face the U. S. Senate and the U. S. House are so pathological. Most of them, if they were to take a principled position, would lose the primary because the parties are so extreme. Voters have very little information; there is no way for me to inform voters, and as you said, the idea of the will of the people is nonsense. But this is not even a majority of citizens. In primaries, maybe 15 or 20% of the population turns out, and they are the, in some ways, least informed and most ideological. And so I have to win the primary, and then I have to win the general election. So, sure, there are individual politicians that are principled. You talked to Ben Sasse a couple of weeks ago. It just came out recently, the time that we're now recording this. There are some great people. They don't last. They get frustrated because of their inability to act. So, I'm convinced that many people who stay in the Senate, the ones who stay in the Senate for a long time, are the ones who are interested in power, not in the ones who are interested in being effective. |
| 1:05:31 | Russ Roberts: I'm going to give you my summary take, and then I'm going to invite you to give yours, unless you want to lay some more groundwork. Do you have other groundwork you want to lay? Mike Munger: No, we're good. Russ Roberts: Okay. So, I have no romance about politics. That's the product of my economics education, my interest in this field that we're talking about called public choice, but I'm not so cynical. I don't rule out the possibility of people in politics who are, say, let's call it, public spirited; and all I get from that is what our friend Dan Klein called, when talking about Adam Smith, a presumption of liberty. It means the default should be give people the freedom to make their own choices, which includes what they buy, where they work, and it also includes their ability to give to charity; it includes their ability to start nonprofits that would help people who are struggling. It is not a dog-eat-dog, free-market-capitalist free for all, which is the parody, the caricature, excuse me, of those of us who like liberty a little more than other things. At the other end, I understand that there are some times when government involvement makes the world a better place, at least as I would define it; and while I'm skeptical about its ability to do it regularly, for the reasons we've been talking about, I don't look on the political world and the outcomes with the disdain that I used to have when I was younger. I'm a little more--I don't know, I don't know what the right word would be--tolerant, accepting. I do think--I have a presumption of liberty: I think that's the default, but I would not say that public choice by definition pushes you to leave almost no role for the state other than, say, the night watchman role of security, national defense, and, say, police. Mike Munger: That's certainly fair, and I have elided two things, so you are right to call me out on that. There is nothing inherent in public choice that would say it is not possible for the state to make good choices and improve things. Russ Roberts: You've said that many times on the program, which is why-- Mike Munger: There is nothing in public choice that makes that--however, in the current situation in the United States, I think it has become impossible. And maybe a dialectic process means that there will be a response. But, I mean, I know we don't want to name specific people, this is not a politics podcast, but in the current round of elections, several people who were the sort of person that you're talking about--who believed in limited government, who thought about individuals and emergent institutions--have lost in primaries because the current situation in the United States, and so this is the two things I was--there's nothing inherent in public choice. The current incentives do, in fact--and I would double down--current incentives do, in fact, rule out anyone winning an election who has the point of view that you and I think is the correct approach to politics. Now, I've run for office many times, and I will run again. I actually switched my registration to be a member of one of the two State-sponsored parties, so that now, instead of getting 3%, I might get 30%. And I would be happy to win, and I would be happy to serve, and I'm pretty confident that, if I did, I would last one election, and then I'd lose a primary because the current atmosphere, the current notion of the centralization of power in the executive, and the power of the executive to say, 'I endorse this one, and I do not endorse that one,' means that our system is not capable of--not only is it not the will of the people, it's a tiny majority that are in charge. That's not inherent in public choice, but the United States is facing the problem that we have not been able to maintain my goals of liberalism, which are humility and tolerance. Everybody thinks they're right. They have no tolerance for the beliefs of others because they're mistaken. |
| 1:10:19 | Russ Roberts: Okay, so let me close with a question. When you were talking about how our principles of, say, classical liberalism have no purchase in today's political marketplace--can't get a foothold, can't get a toehold--that's been true almost our whole lifetime. It's ebbed and flowed how often they get discussed, whether they're on the table in some sense, and I think our side--so to speak, our philosophical approach to government and policy--has to reckon with that, in some sense, that reality. It should bring one up short if you were a tolerant, humble person. But, what I would say--I'd say something different on top. First point is: there's nothing new there, unfortunately or not, but that's just the reality. But, something else has changed--and I want you to react to it--which is: the issues that motivated voters in most of our lifetime aren't what motivates them anymore. When I was younger, people cared about--let's just say guns and butter is a silly simplification. Should the defense budget be bigger, or should we pay more attention to consumers and to private consumption? These were the kind of issues: what fiscal policy, monetary policy, how much economic freedom there should be, what should the minimum wage be, how deregulated or regulated should transportation be? These were the big issues that have been in part of the United States' conversation for 60 years. They're not the big issues anymore. They're not what people care about. And, we're in a world where it's not just that the freedom-oriented perspective that we sometimes care deeply about doesn't win. The other side isn't just doing better: It's radically different. Right? We have candidates--at least winning primaries and sometimes elections--who are espousing radical restrictions on economic liberty and socialism and so on. So, why is that happening? What does public choice have to say about that? Has the electorate moved to the Left, away from freedom, away toward more control by the government? Bigger swords? What do you personally think we ought to be doing as citizens if you care about those things to deal with them? Some people would say this is a huge improvement: we're heading toward a much better world finally. But I'm curious why. What has happened here? Mike Munger: That's a great question. The sort of, to me, unexpected return--resurrection of romanticism--on the Right is, I think, the result of the abdication of--and I would say people like me, that is academics, people who write about public choice and classical liberalism, who, until recently, simply ignored the moral parts of our life. We just talked about consequentialism: If we all have markets, you'll all be rich. The problem is we didn't make the moral argument. And, Adam Smith makes both parts of the argument. We, for the most part, if you look at the sort of triumphalism following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the end of history, the idea that liberalism was triumphant, that liberal democracy would always win, we didn't take up the part of the argument that satisfies people's desire for a positive, optimistic vision of the future. Not just: you'll have a better microwave and a better cell phone. So, our abdication of the responsibility to talk about people's hunger for meaning and a yearning for belonging to something larger than themselves has resulted in a kind of atomism. And that's the reason that I cite Patrick Deneen. I think he has partly correctly diagnosed this problem. I, as I had said before, president of the Philadelphia Society; and I have seen something in the past three years that actually has made me much more frightened and much more militant. And that's why I think, whereas I used to agree with you and be more optimistic, I'm now pretty pessimistic. And the difference is this: The young conservative people, 25, 30 years old--and there's dozens and dozens of them in the room, if I sit with them at lunch, if I talk with them, used to be that they would have on a coat and tie. And they would have in their pocket the little, red copy of the Cato Constitution. And they would pull it out, and they would be able to talk about it, and they were basically Reagan Republicans. Russ Roberts: Yeah, that's the Cato Institute's edition of the--it's the U.S. Constitution. Mike Munger: Right, and I'm making an analogy to Mao's Little Red Book, and it is an impious one. But the people had the Little Red Book that they would pull out, but it was the U.S. Constitution. And the thing is that the United States is different from other countries. The United States has a liberal tradition. The Bill of Rights in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, that is a liberal tradition. The United States--in the United States--conservatism used to mean conserving a liberal tradition. Now, all of the young conservatives, they still have on the coat and tie. They do not have a copy of the Constitution in their pocket. In fact, they will say, 'The Constitution is a dead letter. We are fighting with one hand behind our back, and what we need to do is take over all of the institutions and centralize power in the hands of a good president. And as long as we can continue to do that, we can win, and we can impose the policies that we want. And, what we need to do is to get rid of these restrictions that the Constitution place on our ability to act.' And, what I find frightening about that is, you have already cited, they think they'll win forever because everyone that they talk to agrees with them. But, there's a lot of people that don't agree with them, and some time they're going to lose an election. Maybe not this time, maybe not next time. But you should never make a sword so large, powerful, and sharp that you don't expect to see it wielded against you--immediately after the next election. So, liberalism is what Thomas Sowell called a constrained vision. It means that I want to do good things, and if I could make the government more powerful when I control it, I could do those things. I'm going to have to accept the fact that there's some good things I will not be able to do because I want to prevent bad things from being done in the future, and by bad, I mean my own assessment of those things. They're not objectively bad, but I disagree with them. Instead of wielding power, we're going to have to wield persuasion. We're going to have to be humble and believe that maybe I'm wrong, and we're going to have to be tolerant and believe that maybe the other side is right. Accommodation and persuasion need to come back. I think we're moving in the wrong direction, because the young people on the Left and the young people on the Right, who soon will be the middle-aged people on the Left and the middle-aged people on the Right--we're seeing a generational replacement. So, the ones who thought that government is a shared enterprise for trying to work out the best compromises that we can for the country, they're disappearing. What's replacing them is people who think that we have to win, and the idea that you have to win is probably going to lead to losing. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Mike Munger. Mike, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Mike Munger: A pleasure as always, Russ. |
Before you give the government new powers, try the Munger Test: cross out "government" and insert the name of the politician you trust least. Then see if you still like the idea. In his 52nd EconTalk appearance, Mike Munger talks with host Russ Roberts about public choice, politics without romance, and why treating government like a loving family (or your family like a business), ends badly. Along the way, they talk about why Edmund Burke's famous defense of legislators voting their conscience cost him his seat in Parliament, how a group lunch explains politics, and why voters rationally know so little.
READER COMMENTS
Gary D. Lynne
Sep 28 2026 at 4:38pm
DIT (Dual Interest Theory) has a placeholder for romance. It is part of the shared-with-the-other-interest, or simply other-interest. It is internalized within the own-interest = self&other-interest. Or, like Adam Smith said it (so, DIT is old news), wealth(incentive)&moral sentiment(ethic). In a Public Choice Theory based in DIT, we might say incentive&romance(the ethic shared widely). Try DIT. You might like (D)IT.
Michael C. Munger
Sep 28 2026 at 7:44pm
Dr. Lynne has a point, of course.
But to be fair, the “public interest theories” public choice is reacting against assume ONLY public interest and altruism for state actors.
Gordon Tullock himself famously wrote a piece (admittedly, a short piece!) on “A (Partial) Rehabilitation of the Public Interest Theory.” The point being that one should not assume public officials are never public spirited. The mistake is to assume they are always, and only, public spirited.
Greg Eubank
Sep 28 2026 at 9:50pm
One of the best ever, but I’ve never listened to one with you and Dr. Munger that was not special. I hope you have Munger on several more times this year. And I will have to go back and listen to the first 15 or so and take you up on the idea to listen to one per week from you and Dr. Munger. I have to listen to ones you do with him more than once to make sure I get all the nuance especially including todays. Thank you again for doing all the work to make things interesting and educational.
Matt
Sep 29 2026 at 8:05am
I can see why Mike has been on 52 times. Especially the definition of liberalism. Thanks to you both!
Matt
Sep 29 2026 at 8:24am
PS, Russ – I literally LOLed at your commentary on Tom Brady.
(You can also try “everyone for themselves” in place of “every man for himself.”)
Todd Mora
Sep 29 2026 at 1:49pm
I always find Dr. Munger and Dr. Roberts conversations enlightening. I think they identified a root cause of many of the issues today is the inability for people to be humble and tolerant. I would like to think things would get better, however, I don’t see how in an environment where the most extreme views are rewarded and the humble and tolerant are castigated.
I feel strongly that the blame doesn’t lie with politicians or bureaucrats, but rather with the electorate. Collectively, we all need to do be better citizens and voters and show the way for politicians. I realize I am being naive, but a guy can dream, right?
Michael C. Munger
Sep 30 2026 at 10:08am
Yes, Todd! That’s right.
There really are politicians who want to do the right thing, and they know what the right thing is.
BUT…voters aren’t paying attention, and PRIMARY voters in particular punish leaders who try to find centrist solutions.
I think you have this right, yes.
Thomas
Sep 29 2026 at 9:59pm
At last, another Mike / Russ linkup.
As a (likely one-term) school board president … the last section hit me pretty hard.
I’ve seen this play out over and over — fellow board directors making bad votes because it won’t play well in the broader political environment or it will compromise their bid for city council or because it’ll annoy their base who they count on to campaign for them etc. I try very hard to employ *exactly* that Burke quote, but I’ve fallen into exactly the dynamic you describe. I’m pretty sure I won’t have friends to campaign on my behalf if you do this again and I’m sick of the insanity.
DG
Sep 30 2026 at 8:04am
I think there may be a problem with the feed. I’m not sure what happened, but there seems to have been some kind of crosswire where another podcast was uploaded in error.
Imagine my surprise when the main topic of the episode turned out to be economics! While I enjoyed it, this is certainly not the type of content I’ve come to expect from EconTalk.
Please address this technical issue at your earliest convenience.
Michael C. Munger
Sep 30 2026 at 9:13am
Ouch.
I mean, that’s funny and all. But, ouch.
Jay
Sep 30 2026 at 5:04pm
“I got a note from the governor of Missouri that I needed to vaccinate one of my children. I was offended. Because the implication was I didn’t know my children well enough or love them enough or care for them enough, and the governor of the state had to weigh in and admonish me about my duty as a parent.”
Would you have been offended if the governor had reminded you that you had to have your car inspected. The implication is that you don’t know your car well enough to take care of it properly and make sure the brakes and headlights work.
What follows is so obvious, I’m embarrassed to be writing it.
The state has rules about what you can and can’t do to your kids. Some of these rules protect the child. You can’t beat them severely (the way that might have been allowed a century ago). You can’t put them out to work in a factory. These rules protect the child. But you also can’t give an eight-year-old the keys to your car and tell him to go to the store for you. Or give him an AR-15. These rules are designed to protect others. Not vaccinating your child puts other kids at risk.
Michael C. Munger
Oct 2 2026 at 7:56am
Wow, Jay. That’s amazing.
“The state” does not have rules; the set of legislators who happen to have been elected in a system dominated by particular interests, and ignoring others, passed some legislation.
Those rules are NOT “designed to protect” anything, they are the product of a process of compromise and deal-making.
You seem to have bought the whole “the state loves us and wants what is good for us!” line.
What follows is so obvious, I’m embarrassed to be writing it.
If you take out “state” and put in “Donald Trump,” do you still believe it? That is, “Donald Trump has rules about what you can and can’t do to your kids.” And that those rules are automatically, good, and just, because “the state” imposed them? You support ICE raids, and mass deportations? After, the state is doing THAT, too. It must be good, right?
I have to admit, I’m very grateful that a commenter put up something that actually embodies the naive “The state loves us” view that I’m trying to question. So, thanks for that!
Jay
Oct 6 2026 at 8:17am
Michael Munger: OK. The government – oops no, a bunch of politicians — enacted laws that prohibit eight-year olds from driving or carrying assault rifles not in order to protect you and me and the general population but to further their own “particular interests.” But my amazingly gullible naivety leaves me with two questions: 1) do these rules not protect the general population? And 2) which particular interests do they serve?
Brent Sloat
Oct 1 2026 at 10:26am
I’m no genius or grand philosopher but I always feel better when someone on Econtalk validates my thoughts and philosophies with their own that are eerily similar to mine. Mike distills classical liberalism to mean humility and tolerance. For years I’ve distilled liberal thought and liberalism, and used it in conversations, down to “maybe I’m the ignoramus; maybe I have something wrong and the other person has it right.” Albeit it’s not as professional or eloquent as Mike’s, but it’s very much in the same vein. My entire career has been in government, particularly public finance, so the Mike Munger episodes tend to be my favorite. Thanks to you both for such a wonderful time.
David Clark
Oct 5 2026 at 11:03am
The year of Munger should be a collector’s edition boxed set!
Another great episode!
Ben
Oct 6 2026 at 11:02am
Hi Dr. Munger,
Lovely episode, but I had one thing.
The ancient Latin definition for “tolerance” means to suffer. You may not like someone’s view, but you suffer through it and tolerate it.
Why must I make space for them to be “right”? I believe your definition of toleration is too demanding. Isn’t it enough to treat each other fairly, without needing to necessarily attempt to believe them?