217 | Margaret Levi on Moral Political Economy

0:00:00.0 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. For many reasons, in recent years the world has seen stress being placed on its governments, the notion of democratic governance in particular, and this polarization that makes people on different sides of political issues really turn against each other, really think of other people, other citizens within their country as the enemy rather than as someone they have to learn to get along with. And maybe that's justified in some cases, maybe it's not, but it's hard to have a flourishing, long-lasting community, democratic community, in a country or in a society that is like that, where people don't trust each other or even think that other people are fundamentally on the same side despite their disagreements.

0:00:53.4 SC: So today we're talking to Margaret Levi, who is a very accomplished political scientist and someone who has thought a lot about the question of what makes a government legitimate. We'd like to think that the people in a democracy are what legitimates the authority of the government, but as a matter of fact, our government is usually there when we're born, right? The government's already there, it's an institution, most people do not participate in the setting up of the government that they are ultimately subject to. So, what is the theoretical justification for saying that the government has any right to have the power over us that it does? Why do people for the most part, voluntarily hand over authority to the state, either historically or philosophically?

0:01:42.6 SC: And so, Margaret's done a lot of work on this, she's written some wonderful books about it, and comes to a set of conclusions that I think are both really important, but also they seem almost charming in some sense like, Oh yeah, sure, I wish it were that nice, but nevertheless this is a case where that's the way to go, I think. And what she emphasizes especially is the need for people in a community under the same kind of government to think of themselves as sharing a fate, a community of fate. Whether or not you agree with someone else in your country about a certain political policy or not, we still are going to live in the same country, we are still going to flourish or suffer depending on how we do as a society as a whole, and we have to take that fact into account when we think about how to make a government and how that government should behave.

0:02:39.7 SC: And a huge role is played by the idea of trust, the idea that we can actually trust our governments to at least try to do the right thing, to be responsible to our needs, things like that. Institutions are sometimes trustworthy and sometimes not, and again, it can seem almost hopeful and overly optimistic and naive to even talk about trust in government at a time like this, but that doesn't make it any less important. And finally, an important role here is played by the idea of empathy and understanding that your fates are intertwined with people who are very far away, people who might not be like you, people who you don't run into all the time, but in our interconnected world our collective fates are going to rise and fall together.

0:03:27.3 SC: So this is both kind of a descriptive question of how government actually does work and a prescriptive question of how we should try to make things better. So, Margaret is extremely eloquent talking about these things and has thought about them very deeply. This is one of those things, unlike talking about black hole thermodynamics, this is something where we've all thought about it a little bit, we all have opinions, so it's nice to talk to someone who is a true expert. And with that, let's go.

[music]

0:04:13.4 SC: Margaret Levi, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:04:14.1 Margaret Levy: Well, thank you, nice to be here, Sean.

0:04:17.1 SC: I thought that... You know, you've had a long and very productive career talking about really big questions that cross political science and even some political philosophy and other kinds of social science. I thought, I found a sentence that you wrote in a quasi-autobiographical article in Annual Reviews that I thought just reading it out loud we could probably base the whole podcast on this one sentence, but you know, understanding what goes into it. But let me read it for the audience. This is you speaking. "My commitment to combining normative concerns with empirical social science led, perhaps a bit counterintuitively, to early adoption of rational choice political economy."

0:04:57.6 SC: So, on the one hand that's pretty straightforward and... But it packs a lot in. So I thought I would ask you to elaborate on some little bits of it, starting with what do you mean by combining normative concerns? What do you mean by normative concerns? What are the kinds of concerns you have in mind when you say that?

0:05:17.7 ML: Oh, there are a whole long list of them, but we'll start with something I'm working on right now which has to do with political equality. I'm writing a book with Tim Besley in London and Pablo Beramendi at Duke on trying to understand the concept of political equality and what it means to live in a community of equals. So, we have a normative goal. We would actually like to make the world more politically equal, at least the democratic world, and live up to its, help it live up to its aspirations. But in order to do that, you don't start with a set of the principles you want to achieve. You really have to understand how the world is working. What's going on? What's blocking things? What's facilitating certain kinds of goals? Where the trade-offs are? And those are deeply empirical questions.

0:06:11.2 ML: So, my work on trust, my work on citizenship, all of that work is motivated by deep, deeply-held ethical and normative commitments. But in order to create an understanding of how we might achieve those ends requires, at least for me, some in-depth research about how those processes actually work.

0:06:40.3 SC: Well, when you just say the phrase political equality, this is one of those things that maybe sounds good, but I know from talking to people in the real world, I also had Elizabeth Anderson on the podcast some time ago.

0:06:49.8 ML: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fabulous.

0:06:51.1 SC: And there are people out there who don't like equality, [chuckle] who think that it's a code word for making sure that everyone has exactly the same amount of wealth or something like that. So, you put political in there, what do you mean by political equality?

0:07:06.2 ML: Well, when people are talking about economic equality, they're generally talking about distributional issues achieved through a variety of means, but they mean evening out the income and the wealth to some extent. Different people have different levels of what that extent means. When you talk about political equality, you're talking about there may or may not be economic inequality, but when there is economic inequality, which there almost always is, it clearly has some effect on who has voice and how they can express it. So what you want to do politically is create institutional arrangements that delimit how much that economic inequality can impact the political inequality. But it isn't just about the interaction between the economic and the political.

0:08:00.4 ML: So, Elizabeth Anderson is a great segue here, because I've been very influenced by her work on relational equality and by Danielle Allen's work as well, which is a little different, but is getting at the same set of issues about ensuring that when we talk about equal consideration, we mean that people are given relatively equal, and I always use the word relatively because it's never perfect, relatively equal respect and dignity and that their voices are seriously taken into account. And that is very different than economic inequality or equality, which is, can be measured by wealth or income.

0:08:46.3 SC: And somehow it always surprises me that people are not more outraged by political inequality, as you've just defined it. I mean, economic inequality, there's a story that says everyone strives to be rich and they think that eventually they will be rich, so they're happy that rich people exist now. But why aren't more people really upset? Maybe this goes into the empirical side of things. Why aren't people more outraged that economic inequality feeds so strongly into the size of voice you have in the political system?

0:09:19.8 ML: That is an empirical puzzle.

[laughter]

0:09:23.8 SC: Yes, it is.

0:09:24.0 ML: And one of the ones we're trying to resolve, that's, you know, I'm outraged. Sounds like your instinct is to be outraged.

0:09:31.2 SC: Yes.

0:09:31.9 ML: But in fact a lot of people could care less. I mean, how deeply held is democracy as a value? And what do people mean by democracy? Do they even mean political equality, equal consideration? So some people just mean you have a constitution that says one person, one vote, and you don't get in the way of it too much. But if you get in the way of it a little bit, that's okay. Other people don't seem to value that at all and yet think they value democracy. So, it's a complex empirical puzzle, I think.

0:10:06.3 ML: The other piece of it is that when you think about political equality, there is no perfect set... There's no perfect equilibrium [chuckle] outcome. There are a lot of trade-offs here. So, you improve the suffrage. I mean, this is back to the old problem that John Stuart Mill raised. You improve the suffrage, if you don't improve the education, do you get a worse electorate? And what are you trading off for getting a worse electorate even though you're giving everybody equal voice? So I think you got to really think deeply about what the actual trade-offs are and face up to that, and that might help you get at some of these underlying reasons, even if people won't say them out loud, why they don't value political equality.

0:11:00.9 SC: Well, good. See... Like you said right there in the sentence that I read at the start, empirical social science is an important part of how you do these things. So what does that mean for the people out there who are, you know, young protophysicists or whatever, who have no idea what it means to do empirical social science? Like, are you out there doing experiments on people, or what's going on?

0:11:21.0 ML: Personally I am not...

[laughter]

0:11:22.3 ML: Out there doing experiments on people, though I have no problem with those who are engaging in various kinds of experimental research. It means drawing on whatever tools and approaches are best for answering the question that you have at hand. And given the complexity of the world and the complexity of our skill sets, you might notice in my CV that I do an awful lot of collaboration and a lot of co-authoring, because very few of us have all the skills you need to do the work. So, for example, in the political equality book, Tim Besley is a very distinguished econometrician. Now, I can sort of read what he does and I can read...

[chuckle]

0:12:03.0 ML: But I can't do the kinds of sophisticated statistics that he does, and yet I value them and see that they really play an important role. So, I think it really depends on what the question is and then making sure that you have the right people and skill set there to help you answer the question. A lot of my work is actually archival, historical, interview work, my own personal work, or deep reading, pulling out of work that's... Research that's already been done and synthesizing it in a new way. That is still doing empirical research, but it's a different set of skill sets than collecting statistics or doing experiments.

0:12:48.0 SC: The bringing up of collaboration is interesting, because I'm completely on board. I almost always collaborate myself. I'm now technically a member of the Philosophy Department faculty at Johns Hopkins and we just had a meeting on to what extent we should let our graduate students collaborate on papers that will end up as part of their dissertations, for their PhD. And the philosophers just aren't used to this yet. So, the more interdisciplinary ones in the room raise their hands and say we've got to let our students collaborate because we're not trying to train them to be neuroscientists or physicists or whatever, but we want them to talk to those people.

0:13:25.6 ML: That's right. I'm totally on board with that, but I do see that that's a continuing problem in virtually every field, except for some of the sciences which are used to collaboration.

0:13:35.8 SC: Okay, so then you say that this combination of normative concerns and empirical social science leads you perhaps a bit counterintuitively to rational choice political economy. So, number one, what do you mean by rational choice political economy? And number two, why is it counterintuitive that you'd be led there?

0:13:58.8 ML: So, let's start with what it is. Rational choice political economy is using the tools of basically economics, microeconomics, largely, and the kind of reasoning that goes into microeconomics and applying it to political problems and making the assumptions that we no longer make. By the way, I no longer consider myself practicing. I never practiced traditional rational choice and I'm even farther from it now, but it certainly was an important part of my career, so that's why it appears in the autobiographical essay.

0:14:34.1 ML: But rational choices really makes the assumption that people are largely rational, that they have a sense, a clear sense of what their preferences are. Those preferences are transitive. If you prefer A to B and B to C, you're going to prefer A to C and B to... And not prefer C to B. [chuckle] So, that it makes certain assumptions about a kind of rationality. In the narrowest version... And it's kind of decision theoretic. And in the narrowest version of it, it makes the assumption that individuals are narrowly self-interested, that their objectives really have to do with material and narrow, largely material and certainly narrow interests.

0:15:27.3 ML: They may include the family, but doesn't necessarily even have to go that far. So it's a very individualist approach. Its power, however, its limits are already obvious in what I've said, that its assumptions are relatively unrealistic and it's individualistic, as opposed to thinking about networks or interactions, or the interactions only come from thinking about the individual and not interactions that are created by a group. Those are limits that I confronted early on. But it also has some power. It's parsimonious, it's rigorous, when used with certain kinds of game theory, it lays out a way of thinking about the world that tells you that this is likely to happen and gives you reasons why things might not have happened or have happened.

0:16:28.2 ML: And if you can't find those reasons in the world, [chuckle] then something... You can actually debunk your theory, which is very hard to do, as we know. So, one, it provided, at least initially for me, a form of discipline on doing historical or ethnographic work, where what details are essential to the story and which are not, how do I make that determination. And it also gave me a way to think about, Okay, if this detail exists, if this thing happened in the world, then the outcome shouldn't have been X, it should have been Y. And yet the outcome in this historical event or this particular place was Y.

0:17:22.7 ML: So, it was a great way to emerge from what I had learned, [chuckle] which was very fuzzy, I have to say, until I learned about some of this kind of thinking. I mean, I read great people, I learned a lot, I went to good universities. I mean, I have no complaint about my education, but I didn't have... I couldn't find the right method for the kind of work that I was trying to do. So that's what rational choice is and why it was important to me.

0:17:56.6 ML: Why was it counterintuitive? Because rational choice was really identified with what we now call neoliberalism, what was called public choice, and represents a kind of... There's a bias many people believe is in it, I don't believe it need be in it, but many people do believe is in it, that leads it to be conservative or to have a vision of the world and a set of values that I don't share. I'm not an individualist in that particular way, but that's part of what rational choice means to a lot of people. So, I'll just give you a story to illustrate the implication of that.

0:18:34.5 SC: Please.

0:18:38.2 ML: So I went on my first sabbatical and came back, and almost no one had, no graduate students except for three, who I had known before, had signed up for my graduate class, which was unusual, I have to say, for me. I was a fairly popular teacher. So I asked them what was going on. And they said, Well, the rumor spread around that you're rational choice and therefore deeply conservative.

[laughter]

0:19:05.5 ML: And I said, what? You know that I'm probably the most radical person in the department. They said, We know that, we tried to tell them, but they said, No, she's rational choice. Dismissive.

[laughter]

0:19:16.7 ML: Which only ensconced me more in it, because I don't like being dismissed on the grounds of something people don't understand. So that created a mission at the University of Washington, which I fulfilled ultimately. [chuckle]

0:19:29.2 SC: So, is it possible, in a small number of words, to explain why rational choice wouldn't be right? You sort of defined it kind of narrowly but couldn't we just expand the definition of rationality a little bit? And even if from the outsider's point of view, someone who's acting irrationally, maybe from their perspective, given their values, could we figure out a way in which they're acting rationally? Or is that just not the right way to go in some big picture way?

0:19:58.8 ML: Well, that's how I started. In fact, that was what I did. So, I brought ethics in and ethical considerations as part of the preference set of people, and that those norms that were guiding people and affected their preferences were in fact often socially constituted, not just individually constituted. They came from a particular culture and context, which was another important piece of the puzzle for me. So again, let me make that concrete. One of the pieces of research I did was on conscription and volunteering for military service across six countries, five Anglo-Saxon democracies and France, over 200 years, basically the history of conscription and volunteering for military service as opposed to being impressed only [chuckle] into military service.

0:20:54.1 ML: And one of the most interesting case studies was of the Francophones in Canada versus the Anglophones in Canada, who had very different reactions to the First World War and the Second World War. And in the Anglophone case, they thought rah-rah to the two world wars, Britain's under attack, we have to defend Britain. That means Canada's under attack as we're a dominion. The Francophones said, wait a minute, our constitution for Canada and the confederation principles say that we only have to be at war if Canada itself is under attack, not the Empire.

[chuckle]

0:21:32.6 ML: And beside... And they said, Well, what about the French? Don't you identify with the French? The French are under attack. They said the French left us on the ice floes in the 17th century and then had a revolution and changed their religion. We don't care about the French. And they make fun of us when we come to Paris because of our accents.

0:21:48.5 SC: All true.

0:21:49.1 ML: So... All true, right? I'm, of course, characterizing... Caricaturing the situation, but what was going on was two very different cultures had emerged with very different views about how the central government was treating them. The Francophones felt very neglected. Many promises had not been kept about quality of education and quality of treatment and a whole variety of other things. The Anglophones, at least the Ontario Anglophones, felt very good with the government. It was very much their government. So one, the Francophones did not volunteer for military service, whereas the Anglophones did it at a very high rate. And when conscription came up for a vote, the Francophones voted it down and the Anglophones voted it up. The votes were like totally different. And this was in two different world wars. The same thing repeated itself in the Second World War.

0:22:45.5 ML: So, you know, that was a case where they were both acting rationally, given their preferences, but they had different ethical maximands as well as interest maximands. In fact, if you were only going by narrow economic interest, you would have expected the Francophones, who were poorer than the Anglophones, to sign up at a higher rate because it was a job during a depression. [chuckle] We're talking about the Second World War. So, you know, that was where I used rational choice and I could, in fact, do some game theory, I could lay out a whole set of counterfactuals as well as some alternative hypotheses that were derived from the rational choice model. But I had different maximands in there, or different preference rankings and different preferences than the normal economists doing rational choice, or even the normal political economists doing rational choice.

0:23:54.3 SC: And so this sounds very sensible, in that a real person, real human beings, don't just maximize their average income or expected income or something like that, they have other values that they care about and they want to maximize their allegiance to those values. But then I think you're hinting that at the end of the day, you just don't think that the rational choice theory is the right way to go, even in that expanded sense.

0:24:18.0 ML: Well, I think there's still some value to some of it, just as there's lots of value to economics. I mean, I'm not throwing the baby out with the dishwater. But one of the things that happened during the course of my academic career was Kahneman and Tversky. And a whole lot of other research that's followed from that, which has just raised questions about the kind of rationality we use and where our biases come from and what are the sources of our beliefs, that really has to be brought in. And so the story... Rational choice is great because it's simple and parsimonious. And so there's still some ways I want to use it. But in order to fully explain the differences because of context, because of individual differences, because of group biases, you need more than rational choice can provide.

0:25:10.6 ML: And that has created a whole new frontier for those of us who are trying to combine some form of parsimonious theory. You just spoke with Henry Farrell. He's another one within this camp who is very committed to trying to think about parsimony and rigor, but also very committed to having the right kind of level of complexity in the understanding of the world and bringing context in institutions in... The rational choice world initially was institution-free.

0:25:48.4 SC: Ah, okay. It was all individual...

0:25:49.7 ML: And so, that changed. That changed too with North and other, the new economic institutionalists began to bring that in, and I was very much part of that. So we were bringing institutions in, but before you knew it, we had... It wasn't rational choice anymore, it was something. And we're still... It's a kind of political economy, and we're still struggling to make it really work.

0:26:13.7 SC: You know, it reminds me of yet another podcast interview I did with Thi Nguyen, who is a philosopher, who actually studies the philosophy of games and gaming, like literal video games, etc. And it then extends that to gamification and argues that the clarity of rules and rewards in a game is what makes them so seductive and attractive, and it also, ultimately is what leads people to conspiracy theories, very simple models that explain everything in the world. And maybe in a much milder form, I don't want to get in trouble here, but maybe that's the kind of reason why academics might be attracted to rational choice theory, right? It's simple, it seems rigorous, you can make predictions, might not always be right, [laughter] but it has that level of rigor to which we aspire.

0:27:04.9 ML: Right. And you know, for certain kinds of problems, it can be right. It's just that itself, it selects the problems. And if you're interested in problems that aren't amenable to that particular method, and I often am, like political equality, [chuckle] where you can use bits of rational choice, but it's only going to get you so far.

0:27:27.4 SC: Right. Okay, let's go back to the French, French Canadians and Anglo-Canadians and their differential responses to the draft, because this is also an example not only of the modeling failures or successes, but of the bigger project that you've been involved with, is trying to understand why citizens or people in society give their allegiance to a government, right? Why they give their authority, their rights to make decisions over themselves to some form of government. So again, maybe, I don't know if you have a short answer [chuckle] to that question, that sounds like a very complicated one, but we can dig into it more broadly. What is it that makes a person say, Yes, I will let this government make up rules and then inflict them upon me?

0:28:17.6 ML: Well, I think there are a couple of things, and this predates democracies, because we've seen this happen in all kinds of regimes, where I don't think people are being brainwashed. I feel like they are actually giving, ceding authority to government. And what generally does it is... And this can be very simple, I mean, [chuckle] simple in statement, not simple in practice, let me put it that way. They perceive the government as trustworthy. That is, they believe that the government has made some promises to them that it is likely to keep and seems to be keeping. They're often, but not always, economic promises. They can be about security, but they're in that material bucket generally, including national security, that can be part of the, as it were, contract with the citizens. So the first thing is that they perceive the government will provide things and will actually deliver on them.

0:29:29.5 ML: Two, they believe that the process by which government is handing out the goods and making the decisions who will get the goods meets standards of fairness of the day and time and place. So they're not seeing their next-door neighbor because she's young and beautiful getting all the perks.

[chuckle]

0:29:52.8 ML: Or their obese male neighbor getting all the perks because he owns the brewery. Whatever it is. That in fact, by the standards of the day, which obviously vary. And finally, and in many ways this is, I guess, the thing that I brought into the story that not everybody had seen before, which is that there is confidence that government will catch and punish the free-riders. So those who don't accede to the authority and try to rip off the system in one way or another, even though they're getting the benefits of the system, will be punished, that the government has the competence and capacity to deliver the goods as well as to locate and punish those who are free-riding. So that makes for a trustworthy government.

0:30:45.6 ML: And when people perceive a government, and I'm using the word perceive here because it's not totally factual. I mean, there's a perceptual element, as we're seeing right now in the United States. Strong perceptual element that can be influenced by other factors than reality. [chuckle] But when they perceive the government as trustworthy, they're more willing to willingly comply or consent with its extractive demands.

0:31:11.1 SC: And it sounds like there's an, I don't know, equal but at least very big emphases both on having trust that the government is trying to be fair, but then also the government is competent. That the government [chuckle] is actually relatively successful.

0:31:27.6 ML: That's right. So competence and fairness are both critical elements here.

0:31:31.9 SC: And is this something that... Is this either especially or almost exclusively true for the founding generation of whatever governmental form we have, or is it kind of a constant renegotiation between the citizens and...

0:31:44.1 ML: Constant renegotiation. Constant renegotiation.

0:31:45.4 SC: Yeah. So the government's job is to convince the citizens that it is trustworthy at all times.

0:31:52.4 ML: So one of the cases that I researched was a tax case in Australia where the tax system had really gone awry. [chuckle] This is not an unusual problem. This was in democratic Australia. I mean, it's not an unusual problem around the world that the tax system goes awry for a variety of reasons. But this was particularly egregious. So, certain very... Certain well-off people could find tax loopholes and they were just getting benefits through the gazoo. And part of why that happened was because, and it's going to sound like a familiar story, part of why that happened was the man who became the Supreme Court Justice had been a tax lawyer and he had failed to win some of these cases that made things loopholes, so he had the cases brought up again and this time they went through.

0:32:47.2 ML: But think about workers whose taxes are taken out as they earn, right? They don't have a choice about loopholes and all the rest of that. And the Australian system is fairly simple, so there aren't a lot of deductions and stuff. So what happened was a tax revolt, and a political revolt. Because it was hard to have a tax revolt, but you could have a political revolt. And the government was voted out, and the Hawke government was voted in, a Labor Party government, and Hawke confronted the situation where the tax system was totally distrusted by a huge proportion of the population, and particularly his constituents. And so, he basically called a new constitutional convention.

0:33:33.4 ML: Now, some of that was smoke and mirrors, but the idea was to rethink the tax system, bring everybody into it, rewrite it, say we're starting again. Now, that's well after the founding. We're talking in the 1990s. Australia began in 1900. Not a lot of people left from that founding [chuckle] moment by 1994. If they were, they weren't very effective in government. And they'd been babies when it had started. So, it was really a new generation creating a new, as it were, fiscal contract with the population.

0:34:16.5 SC: Is there some, this is the physicist in me...

0:34:18.4 ML: We saw that with the New Deal. I mean, that's part of what the New Deal was in principle about in the US.

0:34:23.3 SC: This is the physicist inside me talking, but is there some sense in which pressure builds up and the government sort of accumulates deviation from trustworthiness and then some kind of revolt happens, either financial or political or something like that, and the government has to correct itself? And if it goes too far then we're in trouble?

0:34:45.2 ML: Sometimes, and sometimes it's... Sometimes that's the form it takes, for sure, and sometimes it's a big rupture. So, I mean, I think of recent history in the US. I mean, I found Trump a big rupture with what I understood government was supposed to be doing. And a big rupture in a way that, I mean, I didn't like many of both Bushes' policies but I didn't find them a rupture from my understanding of how government was supposed to work. I just disagreed with the policies. The... Different problem.

0:35:18.6 SC: Where does the difference come from? I get, also there is a difference. So is it a symptom of a pre-existing loss of trust or is it causing the loss of trust?

0:35:30.9 ML: Well, I think it can be both. I think this is a complexity problem. [chuckle] So, I think of course there's some build-up in either case, because there's popular pressure that leads to a Trump. But the actual break is very sudden as opposed to... There can be very gradual changes that may not be an effective pressure at all. It may simply be that you keep tweaking with something. I'll give you another example of that. In the United States we have the National Labor Relations Act which was passed in the 19... Mid 1930s. It's still the law governing labor today, how unions can form and what counts as a strike and how you appeal when an employer or a labor union is abusing its power or the law.

0:36:29.5 ML: But we're now almost a hundred years later. So that's a law that has gotten a little bit of tweak, a little bit of tweak, mostly in the administrative law side, not the big congressional law side. And so, now you have a system that barely works at all, right? So it's a different kind of build-up of problem than the build-up of popular pressure about being unhappy about something, where you finally get something that just isn't working and everybody recognizes it, but doing something about it isn't always so easy.

0:37:08.9 SC: And it, again my physicist hat talking, it seems like a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics that entropy increases and things become messier and more broken. And it doesn't seem like there's an obvious acknowledgement of that in governments, as far as I know, that over time systems will get less and less responsive so we have to replace them. Do we have a predictive theory for that kind of behavior?

0:37:35.1 ML: Well, I'm trying now, of course, because you put me on the spot, to think of the people who who've written like that. But there certainly are people who've made that argument, whether they use this, the second law of physics, I'm not sure. But certainly people think along those lines.

0:37:54.0 SC: Okay, so going back to the trust that the people have in the government, correct me if I'm wrong, because I've always had this, sort of, folk theory and you know much more about this than I do. But in the 1990s when Newt Gingrich was in charge of the Republican Congress and so forth, it seemed to me that there was a shift where people in Congress, real... Like, they did the game theory calculation and they realized that if what they wanted was to maximize their chance of winning office, they would behave differently than if what they wanted was to maximize some particular policy preference outcomes. And in particular, negotiating with the other side is always bad even if it leads to a policy that you like. And since then that's made it a lot harder for the government to get things done. Is this just a figment of my imagination or is there some correlation with reality there, you think?

0:38:45.7 ML: I think there's a correlation with reality, but I think it would be mistaken to think that that's the only time that's happened in the history of the United States or other democracies. I think that there... The way in which... You might recall that the founding, and they were all fathers, conceived were very nervous about political parties because they would lead to this kind of competition and lead to this kind of view of interest and they were worried about factions, even though they started with them and continued with them and [chuckle] had to have a war over one of the biggest ones.

0:39:24.7 ML: So, you know, that's been a constant tension, really, because there are some issues that quite... And periodically you get to a point, and this happened before the Civil War and it's happened again now and it's happened at other moments in other democracies, where you get to a point where some of the leadership just will not compromise. Compromise goes out the window. And then you get to a place where the country's ungovernable because the democratic government, most governments, frankly, are based on some form of negotiation and bargaining and you give up something and you get back something. I actually think one of the worst things that happened in Congress was when it gave up... I'm blocking the word for it, but the side benefits you get, the pork.

0:40:17.6 SC: Oh, yeah, right. Pork-barrelling.

0:40:17.9 ML: When it gave up pork-barrelling.

0:40:19.0 SC: Earmarks.

0:40:20.5 ML: They were... Well, they're now called earmarks. When I was growing up they were called pork-barrelling.

[laughter]

0:40:25.9 ML: I know what earmarks are. They're the same thing. But it's basically, you know, a way in which you can create trades. Now, that doesn't mean that all the pork-barrelling and all the earmarks are good and they certainly are expensive, but are they more expensive than not getting to any kind of agreement at all? Is an occasional bridge to nowhere the worst thing that could happen to us?

0:40:48.7 SC: Yeah, no, that's actually, I mean, is that a... That seems perfectly sensible to me when you put it that way. I think that the naive view is pork-barrel politics is corrupt and it's just buying votes etcetera, but if you cast it as the price you have to pay to get things done, then maybe it's worth the cost. Is that a consensus view among political scientists or is that something that is not...

0:41:12.8 ML: It's a view. I don't... Is there a consensus view among political scientists? No. But not about anything.

[laughter]

0:41:19.4 ML: But... [laughter] But that certainly is a view. I mean, I'm not the only one to have said that. Now, and even think about... You think about what you were talking... So, even if you're not in the Gingrich world and refusing to compromise, you... Almost all Congresspeople and senators are in the world where they have to worry about pleasing their constituents or they can't, to some extent, or they can't be re-elected. Now, occasionally someone will take a very principled stand, as we recently saw, and she loses big in her home state. But mostly people have to pay attention to what their constituents believe they need or bring home some pork to the constituents. And that's not necessarily leading to lack of compromise, it can actually enhance compromise in those kinds of situations. And that's recognizing the reality that representatives have two roles to play and we haven't figured out how to enhance their ability to play both at once. One is to deliver to their constituents, to act, actually represent those who elected them, and the other is to represent the whole polity, bringing the voice of their constituents into the wisdom of the crowds.

0:42:43.9 SC: And is there any way that you've noticed historically from other times when trust in government has broken down that we can recover from that? Are there things that government successfully do to get working again? I guess there's two hidden questions I'm trying to ask at once. One is this, is there a way to get people in the government compromising and being effective at passing legislation again? And number two is, are there ways to get people to think that the government is fighting for them?

0:43:18.1 ML: Yeah, two very different questions. So, the first question, the most effective way to get people to work together is a war, unfortunately.

0:43:24.0 SC: Aah, too bad.

[chuckle]

0:43:26.9 ML: Yeah. When you look at the historical record, the times when countries really pull together and overcome those partisan and sectarian differences is often when they're under threat. Now, the threat need not be a war. It has generally been a war. It could be climate change. I mean, I keep hoping that the environmental crisis we're facing might evoke that. So far it hasn't. It could be COVID. It didn't do it. But my prediction at the beginning, my wrong prediction, was that it would have, that here was a common threat we were all facing where a solution had to be found and in the meantime we had to work together to protect each other and ourselves. But in principle, those kinds of threats should have or can have and in some countries they did. Taiwan they did. Not just because it was small but because it managed that, the threat of COVID in a very different way.

0:44:32.5 ML: So, it can under certain circumstances, institutional and leadership circumstances, have that kind of consequence. I'm not asking for threats. [chuckle] But I'm just recognizing empirically that that's a major way in which it happens. A more benignly, it's really... I think this is what Biden and other leaders have been trying to do, right and left, is to really try to clarify to the public what's at stake right now and how we have to be engaged in a common purpose if we're going to ensure that the United States be a peaceful, healthy, growing place that can encourage flourishing of most of its population. Those attempts have seldom totally succeeded but they're not... They do get some distance. Biden's done a remarkable job, I think, in the last less than a year, certainly not at the beginning, but now in this past year in getting things passed. And part of that is recognizing the art of compromise.

0:45:44.6 SC: But okay, I'm going to put forward a pessimistic take here, that maybe you'll just go along with, maybe you'll refute, I'm not sure. But, like you say we could have predicted that something like COVID or maybe something ongoing like... Also ongoing, like climate change, is a common threat that would bring us together. But in some very real sense that is not happening, because in some very real sense the information ecosystem is making it the case that there are no more common threats. No matter how bad a threat is it will be politicized and polarized. And that might be one of the signs that our society is just breaking down in that sense. Is that something that I should really take seriously?

0:46:31.1 ML: Yes.

0:46:32.6 SC: Okay.

[laughter]

0:46:35.3 SC: That's what I feared you would say.

0:46:36.2 ML: I mean, it could be. I'm hoping it's not. I'm hoping there are ways out of this. And to say that the information ecosystem, yes, it's faster, it's more intense now, but newspapers used to do that. There were different newspapers for different publics. Radio stations did that. Television does that. We're not just talking about the digital media here. So, it's been an ongoing... The printing press did that. Just having access to different sources of information controlled by not just the church or the state, as soon as that was opened up, you were going to begin to have some of these kinds of conflicts.

0:47:29.0 ML: So, the question really is not that they're going to exist or that they're going to happen again, but how do we overcome them when they do? How do we create some common sense of understanding, at least around some key facts? And I think that's the really tough question that social scientists are facing today. This period has really revealed how deeply held false beliefs can be, impermeable to the kinds of things that we thought information was permeable to.

0:48:05.2 SC: And I guess that is one very big worry, simply false beliefs at a factual, empirical level. But the other big worry is this no longer thinking of ourselves as part of a common future, a common society. There's... People on both sides are talking about civil war and or just dividing the country up or something like that, and maybe this is also true outside the US. I'm just not as familiar...

0:48:34.8 ML: It is true outside the US, yeah.

0:48:35.9 SC: Yeah, and...

0:48:36.2 ML: Look at the Scotland, it isn't sure it wants to be part of Britain. It hasn't for a long time but it's becoming... Catalonia doesn't want to be part of Spain.

0:48:46.9 SC: The UK didn't want to be part of Europe, right?

0:48:49.5 ML: Right.

0:48:50.5 SC: And so... Alright, that sounds like a tough challenge for democracy. Like, I always like to say, a democracy is not about you vote and the winner gets their choice, but you vote and the loser has to put up with the winner's choice, and we seem increasingly unwilling to go along with that philosophy.

0:49:08.1 ML: I think that's right, [chuckle] but there are a couple of ways possibly out of that dilemma. One is to really, as many people are right now, really look deeply at what we mean by democracy and how it's being practiced and see if that's encouraging this kind of splintering as opposed to overcoming this kind of splintering and how we can fix that. Another is to think of democracy itself as an experiment that may have reached its limits. And I'm not saying we go to autocracy, there may be authoritarianism, but there may be other ways in which we can self-govern that are different than what we've inherited in so many countries from the past, that maybe this particular kind of system just no longer works for the kinds of complexities of the world today.

0:50:05.0 ML: I don't have that alternative in mind. Lots of people are engaging in experiments and thinking about that, and I'm focused on the first, about how we can fix the democracy that we have, but I'm open to the second as a real possibility, because it may be that this is unfixable and then we'd better have people out there really being imaginative and thinking about what do we put in its place.

0:50:29.0 SC: Well, that's a...

0:50:30.5 ML: As opposed to a, you know, a terrible leader who is... We don't want demagoguery, so we've got to find us an alternative at some point.

0:50:43.0 SC: So, just to get us thinking, because this is a fascinating idea that I'm not very familiar with, what kind of alternatives might there be, even if they're bad and we haven't hit on the right one yet, that would be sort of not autocratic but not a democracy either and yet let people ultimately be giving authority to the state that is governing them?

0:51:06.5 ML: Well, they're not democracy in the sense in which we have practiced representative democracy, so they may still be democratic.

0:51:13.5 SC: Okay.

0:51:15.1 ML: For example there are a lot of experiments going on with elections by lottery and large numbers of people and, you know, you just get picked, like you'd get picked for the draft and you have to go serve for two years in the legislature and you're just a normal person.

[laughter]

0:51:36.3 ML: And you have to learn things and you have to realize where expertise is useful and where it's not and... But there are a lot of experiments going on with that kind of thing. There are experiments going on with public bargaining... I mean, public budgeting, where certain parts of the budget are subject to a very democratic public process in the community where that budget is going to have an effect. Those are a couple of the experiments that are going on.

0:52:10.0 ML: There are things going on using digital tools that give people voice in a variety of ways. There's some cyber experiments. I mean, there are all kinds of things that are happening that I think are worth really paying... RadicalxChange is an organization that has encouraged a lot of different experiments. Hélène Landemore, who is a philosopher at Yale, has written about a variety of ways in which constitutions and other kinds of policies can be made in a much more public way, engaging many more people. I'm just citing two concrete people organizations who've thought about changing the processes of voting in very radical ways as Glen Weyl has advocated and, yeah, as others have advocated.

0:53:04.2 SC: I once on...

0:53:05.1 ML: Those are all worth considering. I'm not advocating any of them, because...

0:53:08.8 SC: Sure. No, no, no. I get it. I once on Twitter half tongue-in-cheek suggested that if a wealthy person runs for national office they have to give up almost all their wealth if they win. [chuckle] The idea being that it would really be if you wanted to be a public servant you would really be doing it for the sake of being a public servant. It was one of the things I put on Twitter occasionally that just was universally condemned. People thought that I was completely nutso for saying that. Like, How dare you exclude the best and brightest from serving their country, which maybe goes back to the equality discussion that we started with. But you know, it's yet another maybe tweak, I would say, on the process of democracy rather than giving up on democracy altogether.

0:53:57.5 ML: That's right. So, there are three possibilities here, right? There's one, fixing the democracy we have, two, finding some fairly radical changes to the kind of democracy. We have the lottery systems or the some of these voting systems are not like anything we've ever practiced before or anybody's ever practiced, except in very small communities, maybe in Ancient Greece. Or really finding a serious alternative to democracy. And I think all those are on the table.

0:54:29.9 SC: There are people who want a constitutional convention, but that scares the living daylights out of me [chuckle] to imagine what would actually come out of such a thing. This goes back to the trust that we have in our fellow citizens. I'm kind... Even though I think that the current system is not great, I worry about realistic changes to it making things much worse.

0:54:50.7 ML: Well, here's where institutions can create the trust. I'm not saying... And it's not easy to do, so again, it's not like, Oh, here's a simple solution, let me just write you a prescription, dear, and you'll be fine. But to go back to that case of Hawke and the kind of constitutional convention that he created around the the tax law. What he did was set up a set of arrangements that people had real confidence in, that their voices would be heard, even though they were disparate voices. That they would be heard, that they would be respected, that they actually had a chance of making a difference, and created a circumstance in which people could argue civilly, and enforce that.

0:55:37.2 ML: So, that's a set of institutional arrangements that then create confidence that you can go into that forum and be treated with respect and not be allowed to act in a way. Now, that's not easy to do, particularly in a world... That was a conflictual world, this is an even more conflictual world, the one we're in right now, with real antagonisms and anger of a level that is something I have seldom experienced in my lifetime. I've seen it, I lived through McCarthyism, I lived through the war in Vietnam, this is not totally out of keeping with some of the things. My mother says, McCarthyism... She's no longer with us, so I don't know how she'd feel about it now.

[laughter]

0:56:20.8 ML: But she said McCarthyism was the most dangerous and disturbing thing she ever lived through in the history of her long life, and she lived to about a century, for about a century. Died just as Trump got elected. [chuckle]

0:56:38.6 SC: And it seems like there is something completely legitimate about people's feelings that the government is not responsive to their needs, people on the left and the right, this sort of a cross-polarization thing, but it is certainly too simplistic, but is part of the problem just that the institutions that we deal with on a daily basis are just so big that individuals are ignored by them on a regular basis?

0:57:06.2 ML: Well, I think that is part of it. Bureaucracy should not be underplayed here as having a role. And even though the bureaucracy in principle is, in principle, is treating people fairly, somehow being treated as exactly the same and... The bureaucracy is not competent these days when it can't... We've got so many regulations that have divided the bureaucracy so... [chuckle] Okay, I'll give you a silly example, I just finished running the Center where Henry Farrell is currently a fellow, the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Studies.

0:57:42.7 SC: Oh, yeah.

0:57:45.8 ML: And we were doing a construction project up there, the first construction project since the place was built. One day I come there and the road leading up to the Center is being redone. We're about to have big trucks going down the road and up the road. This is all being done... This is all under the supervision of Stanford. One piece of the bureaucracy wasn't talking to another piece of the bureaucracy.

0:58:10.2 SC: Ah, right.

0:58:13.4 ML: And just take that to the level of a country. How many times have we run into one regulator saying one thing and another regulator saying another thing and they're both right within their narrow thing, but they're not talking to each other. If you think about, someone I very much admire is a woman named Hillary Cottam, C-O-T-T-A-M, she's currently a fellow at New America, but she's an important designer and player in Britain. And she's basically trying to build an alternative to the current welfare state. In which... In the current welfare state you're a poor family, let's say some of your members are dysfunctional, they're alcoholic or they're addicted, some are truant, some are disabled, some are unemployed, some are breaking the laws, you have different people coming in to the same person with each of those different things. So you might have ten people or twenty people coming into this family, and they're not talking to each other.

0:59:20.4 ML: So, her idea is to... And therefore you lose all trust in government. One person's telling you one thing, one person's telling you something else, one person's not paying any attention whatsoever or can't provide the kind of help you need. So, she's trying to create a system that is, actually starts with the family and what it needs, or a unit and what it needs, and then building a bureaucracy or a set of carers who respond to that as opposed to them, so the police works with the social worker, not separately. And that's an indication of what I think your question originally was that we've lost confidence in the competence here of government, not because the individuals aren't necessarily competent, but because the system has proven itself unwieldy and not really delivering what we fundamentally need, even though it does give us certain things. I mean, we're not living in the pre-government world.

1:00:21.4 SC: Sure, sure. But also we're not even only living in the government world, there's all these different interlocking systems that affect our lives.

1:00:27.2 ML: That's right.

1:00:28.6 SC: Just before we started doing this recording of the podcast I had a moment of abject fear because my internet seemed to be out. [laughter] And I thought I was going to be in trouble, but also I felt a little bit powerless. It turns out it was my computer's fault, not Verizon's fault, but you know, we... And probably, maybe I'm guessing people don't even distinguish between the faceless bureaucratic nature of the internet company and the healthcare provider and the government and the police, it's all something against which their individual needs seem to sort of rattle helplessly against and so...

1:01:03.4 ML: Well, I do think they sometimes distinguish the police from the others, at least in countries where police carry guns. [chuckle] I think that's the one they can distinguish. No, but that's absolutely true, there's a merger of all that. One of my graduate students from a long time ago, Audrey Sacks, who's now at the World Bank, her dissertation work was trying to find out, in Zambia, whether the aid that people were getting, whether they attributed it to the government who made the roads possible and brought the Gates Foundation or whoever in, or whether they attributed it to the Gates Foundation. How much credit does government get for the things that it makes possible?

[laughter]

1:01:47.1 ML: And it wasn't that much.

[laughter]

1:01:50.1 SC: Wasn't that much, huh. Okay. Well, okay, let's think a little bit more, because this is... I think that I've been shortchanging a lot of what you're currently working on, which is about making things better, right, and you do... You put a lot of thought into how do we get people to recoup or recover that sense of shared fate toward the future. Maybe you can say a little bit about how we can we can try to get back to that state where we're all in the same boat, or I don't know whether getting back is the right formulation, but you know what I mean.

1:02:18.5 ML: Yeah, I'm not sure getting back is... And there are cases where there have been... Well, we all have. So the term that John Ahlquist and I used was community of fate, F-A-T-E, not faith, but the interlinking of people. And subsequently I've expanded that to say inclusive and encompassing community of fate, so that we're talking more broadly. Because if you think about it, all of us, almost all of us, unless we're psychopaths or sociopaths, live in some kind of community of fate. It may just be our immediate family, it may be our religious community, it may be an ethnic community.

1:03:02.5 ML: But many of us live in situations where we feel responsible to people who are not our immediate relatives and hope that they feel some obligation to us, and that can be community created. I'm interested in how to replicate that in places where it doesn't exist and how to expand it so that it's not just, I will help someone who looks like me or sounds like me or lives next door to me, but will even consider making significant sacrifices, in some cases, for far distant others, who can never reciprocate but who are deserving of my care and attention.

1:03:51.1 ML: And what... This is again where empirical and normative interact, back to the original issue. So, my question, my nor... I'm interested in trying to create these kinds of communities and I'm interest... Those are... That's a normative concern. I'm interested in how do we evoke from people that part of themselves which is pro-social and not just privately self-interested, because I recognize both are in us, and there are times when my survival might take precedence over everything else, I get it. But I'm interested in where we can evoke from people that pro-social behavior, what we were talking about in a way about the representatives actually acting in the public good, not just in their private interest or just in the interest of a narrow set of citizens.

1:04:42.7 ML: And I found that the answer, we, John Ahlquist and I studied some labor unions that had succeeded in doing this, as well as some that had not done that, but were in the same sector, attracted the same kind of workers. So these were transport sector unions, they were longshore workers and truck drivers in the United States and Australia, so basically the same kind of people, and they were all heterogeneous politically, we could document that. They weren't all Republicans, they weren't all Democrats, they weren't all radicals, they weren't all radicals on the right or radicals on the left, they were a mixture.

1:05:21.9 ML: And yet one set of organizations was able to evoke these kinds of commitments and another set of organizations were not. And it really came back to a set of government arrangements that were created in whatever the crucial constitutional moment for that union was and a kind of leadership that was committed to sustaining that. So the government's arrangements that evoke pro-social behavior involve a rank and file democracy, the workers actually vote on the contracts directly and they vote and discuss all kinds of things. It required socialization, so they learn the norm that you fight for what you believe in, you sometimes lose, you sometimes win, but you go on and discuss it again another day, that becomes an important norm.

1:06:13.8 ML: It required socialization in terms of education about the world, not just about these norms, but what the world actually looks like and what's actually happening in the world, so that if you came to... If some leadership came or even some members came to the rank and file and said, See those ships over there, they're in Australia, in Sydney, they're loading ammunition for the Dutch to put down the rebellion in Indonesia. And the workers could say, they could have the reaction, which many of them did right off the bat, That's not fair dinkum. We can't allow that to happen, people have a right to rebel. Others could say, Are you sure? Prove to me that those are... That's ammunition that that's going into a Dutch ship and that Dutch ship is going to Indonesia to put down a rebellion. So that required a discussion in which they had to really evaluate the kind of information they were getting and come to some kind of collective understanding of it by arguing with each other.

1:07:20.1 ML: Now, they've already created some community for a basis to do that by the socialization of norms, by working together and other things which are definitely an advantage over starting sui generis, but not insuperable things. We can create circumstances where people's kids go to school together, where people work together, where people play together, where people form communities around all kinds of things, we know that they do that. Soccer clubs, right? So, and then to actually create circumstances where they were taking a vote and putting something on the line, some kind of sacrifice, giving up a day's work because... And therefore pay, possibly facing going to jail, something on the line for this action. And they could be, they could feel efficacious in this case, and that's the trickiest part, actually, about how to scale this because these were longshoremen or truck workers who could actually stop something from happening, they could not load the cargo or unload the cargo.

1:08:34.2 SC: They had some...

1:08:34.4 ML: Most of us can't find that point of leverage. So that's the sort of next thing that I'm working on is where are those points of leverage. How do you create those communities or the basis for those communities so that people will begin to talk to each other, they'll come into the room and have that constitutional debate without tearing each other apart. How do you create enough of a structure around that so that they can do that, and then how do you give them something where they can feel that they've been efficacious, that by acting they've done something. Now, what I find remarkable in this contemporary world is what some of the kids have done around climate change, some of those... And they're... I mean, they don't feel like they've won, but they certainly feel like by mobilizing, by shutting down schools at times, by doing things, that they're acting and that they're getting... Beginning to get heard, that they're beginning to get recognized, and that's a form of efficacy.

1:09:34.3 ML: So, I think there are ways to do this and I... Hahrie Han, who you mentioned earlier, is someone who thinks a lot about these issues, Marshall Ganz, it's people who come out of the social movement background or literature who really want to think about what's the next step here. We want to get beyond the social movement, the Arab Spring that erupts and dies, but how do you actually create that expanded and inclusive community of fate that is able to sustain itself and is willing to really evoke from people pro-social behavior when it's important to engage in pro-social behavior, which is not all the time. This is not about being self-sacrificial every moment of your day and night, this is not being a martyr.

1:10:19.5 SC: And I think some of those things you just said, just instantly make sense. Like, if you're experiencing different kinds of people and different kinds of lifestyles, maybe you get to humanize them amongst yourselves a little bit more. But the one that I really liked is the idea that when you do, if I... Tell me if I'm misrepresenting this, but when you do something for somebody else or for another group, you become more invested in their success. It's not when they do something for you that you feel you owe them, then you start feeling resentful. But when you give them something you want them to do better, and I love that idea and that sounds like something we should figure out institutions to make that happen a lot more.

1:11:02.2 ML: And the way we saw that first was actually empirically, was... So the very first actions that the longshore workers on the West Coast of the US did of this sort and the Australian longshore workers did was in response to the Chinese communities in the cities like San Francisco and Sydney, in Melbourne, who came to the longshoremen and said look what the Japanese... This was in 1930s. Look what the Japanese are doing to Manchuria and to the peasants in Manchuria, those are our brothers and sisters. And the longshore said, who have a slogan, an injury to one is an injury to all. An injury to one is an injury to all. So when the Chinese came to the longshore workers and said those are our brothers and our sisters, the longshore workers said they're our brothers and sisters too even though we'll never meet them and they can never do anything for us and we probably never even have a meal at their house but, you know, an injury to one is an injury to all. If it could happen to them, it could happen to us and we've...

1:12:07.0 ML: So there were two motivations. One, you feel better by doing something, but also you feel like you're protecting your own world and what you value in your own world if you act on behalf of others whose worlds are under threat.

1:12:22.1 SC: I want this to happen, it sounds maybe a little bit utopian. Are we old... Yeah.

1:12:27.4 ML: It's very utopian, but this is a proof of it happened.

1:12:31.4 SC: Right. That's actually good.

1:12:32.3 ML: These are groups that actually did it and they continue to do it and they've survived for over 80 years with an organizational framework that looks like this despite technological change, so it's the proof of the possible, not the proof that it will be possible, but the proof that it can be done.

1:12:50.4 SC: And is it completely... Is it a very unfair question to say, could we apply that kind of reasoning to polarization in the United States between very QAnon people and, you know, the the wokest folks out there?

1:13:07.6 ML: I would like to believe so, but...

[laughter]

1:13:11.3 ML: I'm not sure. There may be some people... There needs to be some level of willingness to have a conversation. So, but I think the Q... The wokeness, I don't know if they're willing to have a conversation, some are, some aren't. The QAnon, not at all, as far as we can tell.

1:13:28.2 SC: Probably, no.

1:13:30.0 ML: So, I think there is... There have been times in this country and other countries where there's been some minority, sometimes a significant minority, that will hear no reason, and you just have to live with that and try to contain it.

1:13:40.8 SC: Don't worry about those people.

1:13:43.7 ML: I don't mean kill the people off, I mean but try to contain the damage that they can do.

1:13:48.6 SC: Good. Okay, but then for the 80% in between the extremes, again, unfair question, but is it... Are there institutional changes that rather than just being kumbaya and let's all get together, can we change the system in such a way as to get those people into mutual dependency, I guess, helping each other?

1:14:16.5 ML: Yes, I think there are. And I think it's around, probably starting... There may be ways to do it big, but probably starting around things that are smaller, either smaller issues or smaller organizations, where people already share some common interests, see the problem, may have different solutions. So I'm thinking about schools. Right now, schools are a place of yelling and screaming by parents against each other and against school boards. But one could imagine rejiggering all of that institutionally so that you're allowing a lot of different voices to be heard in a sensible way and not allowing one group to take control, that they're... That would have to be blocked so that you could continue to hear, obviously things that are totally out of bounds would have to be totally out of bounds, things that are illegal or totally racist or whatever, we always have those delimitations on any structure that we have. But we could find ways of reconstituting some of these institutions that are clearly not working, in a way that begins to evoke this kind of behavior and attitude.

1:15:37.3 SC: I think this is a very good point. I think I tend to err on the side of just wanting to fix everything at once at the highest level, but I think you're a more empirically grounded social scientist than I am and pointing out that oftentimes probably starting at the small levels and letting things bubble up might be a better strategy.

1:15:56.3 ML: Well, but there are also larger cases where things might work. So, Marshall Ganz who I mentioned has been working with mayors in the United States, and if you think about the mayors in the United States, they are incredibly diverse, on absolutely every dimension you can think of, including what you just mentioned is woke and QAnon. [chuckle] You've got that in there too as well, as all the other kinds of ways in which people can be different from each other. And he's able through a series of strategies to get them to listen to each other and to talk to each other, and I think that's another good starting place.

1:16:35.1 ML: Now, here's an organization that already exists, the Organization of Mayors. Here's something where there is some common interest, they're all coming to these meetings, but they need to find a way to have a conversation with each other across these boundaries. And there are strategies to enable them to begin to have that conversation, and then you build from there.

1:16:56.7 SC: That sounds...

1:16:56.9 ML: And you're not going to achieve everything because there are going to be, let's not forget, there will be real policy differences, so you can't expect a... There will never be a kumbaya moment. Politics is about conflict and controversy, that's what it's about, and people trying to wield power over each other.

1:17:14.2 SC: It is, and I'm a big fan of not forgetting the substantive policy differences. There are certain attempts at new political parties that seem to want to paper over that, and I think it's important to keep them in mind. But maybe as the very final question I'll ask something completely different. Because you mentioned in the memoir article and elsewhere your willingness to think about the biggest problems within these spheres that you are working on, is... How unusual is that? Are there enough people thinking about the big problems? Should we be encouraging more people to think about the big problems and does it make sense to put our efforts into thinking at this bigger scale?

1:18:00.1 ML: Complicated question, because at one level there are lots of people thinking about the big problems, but they're doing it in a sort of op-ed kind of way from my perspective, or popular books, TED Talks, not that I haven't given a TED Talk [chuckle] but it's a different way of going about taking a big problem on. And then there are people who are rigorous scholars who are trying to address big problems using the best tools of the trade and... Often what I mean by taking on a big problem is addressing a big problem, but getting at it through... So to understand how citizens and governments get along I look at a series of case and under what conditions there will be compliance, consent, dissent, I look at a series of case studies of conscription, of military service, of taxation, of very concrete things to understand how you evoke pro-social behavior, a big question.

1:19:06.6 ML: You parse it by looking at an organization which has succeeded in doing it and contrasting it with organizations that are quite similar but made different choices at different parts of the path. So, my way of looking at a big problem is through, often through a series of small bits of the big problem that then get married together, and I'm not alone in that, though different people have different strategies of how to do it. What distinguishes me is my... From the rational choice group that I emerged from was that I was willing to admit that these were the big problems, I wasn't just trying to find out why people complied with taxes in this part of Ancient Rome in these years, but really how it spoke to the larger question of when people will comply with or avoid or actually get engaged in tax revolts in response to the extractions of government.

1:20:10.9 SC: That sounds like...

1:20:11.2 ML: Sometimes killing the tax collectors.

[chuckle]

1:20:13.8 SC: Okay, yeah. I mean, no, it sounds like a very good point. I bet that there's plenty of academics who assume that once you start thinking about big problems you've moved into the realm of TED Talkers and pundits and away from serious academia, but by keeping yourself grounded in the specifics might be a way to really make progress on the big problems through rigorous work.

1:20:38.6 ML: And there are a number of people who do that. I am not alone in that.

1:20:41.8 SC: No, I don't think so, but you're definitely a good example of it, and I like to end on a optimistic note, so I think that's a very good place to do it. Margaret Levi, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:20:52.6 ML: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

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