Jeffrey Friedman’s best essay (so far)

One random excerpt:

Citizen-technocracy is not only impossibly demanding; it is highly paradoxical.

As a citizen-technocrat, I can participate in politics, whether by voting or through more persistent activism, only if I am first convinced that I know the truth about the social and economic problems facing millions of anonymous fellow citizens (or if I think I can learn the truth through political participation). But if citizen-technocrats took the full measure of the knowledge they need, either (a) they’d recognize that as a practical matter the truth is unobtainable, leading them to select themselves out of the electorate; or (b) their political participation would consist of handing power over to experts (or people who strike them as being experts). In the latter case, citizen-technocracy would turn itself into epistocracy. In the former case, citizen-technocracy would perpetuate itself, but only by weeding out the most sophisticated citizen-technocrats, leaving the most simplistic and thoughtless to make decisions. People who (overall) don’t know what they’re doing would end up running the citizen technocracy. And among them, disagreement would congeal into mutual hostility.

I strongly recommend the entire essay.

5 thoughts on “Jeffrey Friedman’s best essay (so far)

  1. This essay makes me wonder if he is preparing the ground for a case for futarchy.

  2. Sad and pathetic, really, that what is obviously implicit in any understanding of the principle of subsidiarity, should be a revelation to allegedly libertarian experts. Couple this with Tyler Cowen’s demented rant on Catalonia, and one may easily surmise that a libertarian perspective, if one ever existed in the US, is but of the most vapid sort.

  3. Well, there are elements that are rather uncharitable. It almost reads in parts as a fancy description of the Rush Limbaugh “low info voters”.

    That said, Friedman’s article does have an interesting model on the five types of knowledge in his epistemic challenges of modern politics.

    A few areas where it seems to fall short.

    1) Each individual has their own incentives, motivations, and desires that may / probably affects their political choices (not unlike a utility curve in micro economics)

    2) Decisions are not static. The must be some anticipation taken as to actions and outcomes. Some kind of game theory model is missing. For instance, even being self aware enough to know that one cannot possibly know everything does not necessarily lead to one withdrawing. The smart move might be to still participate.

    3) We don’t live in a completely knowable world. Following the Friedman argument, one might then find the best candidates for entrepreneurship are the ones who self withdrawl, leaving only the blissfully ignorant the opportunities to wealth. Yet, that is not what we observe, by and large.

    4) Also, it does not explain our relatively low US voter turnout in a satisfactory way. Would the majority of those folks be the ones most self aware and knowledgeable?

    • The five areas of required knowledge apply not only to the decision whether to participate in voting. They apply to nearly every decision we make: Should I marry? What career should I choose? If I choose a career that involves writing, what should I write? Applying his own criteria to himself, lack of comprehensive knowledge should have led the author to write nothing.

  4. 1. He simply hasn’t demonstrated “sociotropy”. Two rival explanations of political differences are “common good” and “personal interest”. In the sociotropy story, everyone is advocating for “the common good” or “the national interest”, and merely disagree in good faith about what that interest is and how best ot achieve it. In a sociotropic political world, there is at least a possibility that opposing viewpoints result from “misunderstanding” and “uncharitable attitudes”, and that partisans can reach some kind of closer, shared position on the big questions related to “the common good” via civil dialogue and intellectual humility. In the “typical politics” of personal interests story, the world is necessarily zero sum in some respects, and certain policies will help a group of winners at the expense of a group of losers, and the winners are the ones who were able to use the powers of the state to force this kind of result on the losers, and there’s nothing “commong about it.”

    Our actual politics and contemporary polarization has a mix of both scenarios, but “sociotropy” is just a clearly wrong way to describe many of our disagreements, and even to describe the socially-desirable “sociotropic-seeming” cover stories to some of those disagreements. Now, it is always possible to simply hand-wave some rationalization for why the group that wins from some policy in a zero-sum situation reallyought to win, and those losers really deserve to lose, so it’s for the “greater good” after all, but most sophisticated observers understand the game being played. I’ve seen people do this even in cases of buyers and sellers negotiating over price – a classic zero-sum, pure conflict of interest situation. For example, consider the arguments regarding redistribution or affirmative action. Saying that it is good to help some marginal members of one racial group at the expense of some marginal members of another racial group can always be couched in terms of the common good as above. But if it were a merely matter of “sociotropic” disagreement, uncertainty, and misunderstanding, then we would expect to see a whole lot of randomness and “Brownian motion” in voting patterns. Instead, we see the marginal winner group and marginal loser groups tend to line up against each other in reasonably correlated and predictable partisan ways. That weighs in favor of “normal politics” and against any kind of “sociotropic theory”.

    2. Seeing political polarization in the “normal conflict of interest” framework of interpretation also helps to resolve the epistemic problems Friedman poses, at least to the pragmatic extent they can be resolved at all.

    How does any layperson choose a lawyer or a doctor or hedge fund manager or economics professor or, really, any expert at all, when they need some expert advice? No one expects a plaintiff or defendant to participate or be able to solve various kinds of issues related to their case, but they don’t really need to, because the whole point is to pick an agent who will use their expertise to vigorously represent the interests of their client, especially in some kind of adversarial proceding.

    In the law – even in a particular narrow subfield – it is completely typical for lawyers to specialize in a particular kind of agency, for example, on the plaintiff or defense bars, or tending to exclusively represent hubands or wives respectively in divorce proceedings. So, some father who just got handed papers and wanting better alimony and custody arrangements doesn’t need to know any local family law at all in order to be able to pragmatically pick a divorce attorney with a good reputation for positive results in such cases.

    That is easily analogous to at least the idealized theory of “voting for representative in a democracy” case. One doesn’t need to know about the estimated deadweight loses of various redistribution schemed to understand which representative is more like to use thier expertise – or, like lawyers again, access to appropriate expertise – to make one more likely to end up on the winning side of the conflict of interest, or to otherwise maximize one’s interests in the negotiations.

    3. The rest of the essay cautioning against the frequently overconfident hubris of the epistocrats in the face of intractable causal density makes good sense. However, all that should stand apart as its own case, and it really serves that argument a disservice to get mingled together with a very incomplete discussion of issues related to politics and voting.

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