4: Timur Kuran - The Economics of Revolution and Mass Deception: Difference between revisions

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'''Eric Weinstein''': Timur, you have been accused of many things—are they true?

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'''Timur Kuran''': Are they true? Well, depends on what the accusations are.

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'''Eric Weinstein''': Well, they're pretty extensive, I don't have time to go into them all.

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'''Timur Kuran''': Okay, well let me, I trust you, we're friends, so yes.

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'''Eric Weinstein''': Welcome, you found ''The Portal''. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and today we have something that I think is going to be very interesting for many of you. We are happy to have a guest that I've been looking forward to meeting for quite some time, has been a personal intellectual hero of mine, and he is the Gorder Family Professor of Islamic Studies, a professor of economics and also a professor of political science all at Duke University, so welcome, hoş geldiniz, to our esteemed colleague, Dr. Timur Kuran.

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'''Timur Kuran''': A delight to be here Eric, thanks for the invitation.

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'''Eric Weinstein''': So the reason that I've been so eager to have you here is that this podcast is themed around the idea of escape from a more humdrum existence that is starting to, I think, work less well for more people, and so we're trying to find ways out of the cognitive traps that we've been held within for quite some time, and I first became aware of your work when I was searching for an explanation of why the field of economics builds such an utterly simplistic model of human preference and belief, and I was led to one book of yours in particular called Private Truths and Public Lies, hope I have the ordering on that correct.

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'''Timur Kuran''': Yes Private Truths Public Lies, yes without the "and."

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'''Eric Weinstein''': Okay, Private Truths, Public Lies, which brought an entirely new perspective in the field of economics which is that of preference falsification, I wondered if you would sort of just give us a brief introduction to this theory, and then perhaps I'll say a little bit more about why it's so powerful and also so incredibly dangerous to the field.

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'''Timur Kuran''': So preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting our wants under perceived social pressures, and it aims deliberately at disguising one's motivations and dispositions, is very common, and sometimes that occurs in innocent situations—if I go into somebody's home and they asked me what do you think of the decor I've selected, I might actually, even though I don't like the decor, doesn't suit my taste, I might say oh it's wonderful, compliments my host's taste—I falsified my preference but not much harm has come out of it, I've avoided hurting my host's feelings, but preference falsification happens in a very wide array of settings and some of these settings it leads to terrible consequences—in the political arena people are, and people whether they're on the left or what they identify with the right or somewhere in between, people routinely falsify their political preferences for fear that they will be skewered—if they express exactly what's on their mind, if they say exactly what they want, if they express the ideas—excuse me—that lie under those preferences—and just to give some examples from our society, immigration is one of these issues, abortion is another issues, we have a clash of absolutes—you're either pro-choice or pro-life and there's nothing in between—and if you take a position in between and offer a more nuanced opinion that you favor free abortion let us say in the first trimester but not later on, you will be accused by both sides—there's very little that you will gain and there's a great deal that you may lose—and in today's society you may lose a lot of friends because the main fault line in American society today is political ideology, there are more people who will object to their son or daughter marrying somebody who holds the wrong idea, who supports the wrong party, has the wrong ideology, then will oppose to their son or daughter marrying somebody of a different ethnic group or a different religion, so it can lead—what can happen on issues like this, is happening on issues like this—is we simply don't come to a resolution.

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'''Eric Weinstein''': Yeah, so before we started this podcast, the time that we were talking together, I sort of made an unfriendly accusation which is that I think that you have developed a brilliant theory but that you have not actually even understood its full importance, and that part of this has to do with the oddity that sometimes to see what's so dangerous and what's so powerful you actually need curator—so I'm hoping to help by curating a little bit of what I've gotten out of your theory and how you've taught me even though we've never met before this week—one of the things I think that's fascinating is that we have a democracy that is stitched together through markets, and when you think about the role of economics in the free market or even a managed market allows us to each individually direct a larger amount of our action without central direction, and so anything that happens in the economic sphere like a new theory of preferences could have absolutely powerful implications because of the role that our understanding of economics plays in underpinning civil society—one of the things that I think that's extremely dangerous about your theory, and one of the reasons I'm attracted to it, is that it is backwards compatible with standard economics—that is if my private preferences and my public preferences are the same preference then without loss of generality is we're fond of saying in mathematics, everything that you're bringing to the table is just some unnecessary extra variables because in fact the two are coincident—however if my public preferences and my private preferences are different then while I can recover the old theory from your work I'm now in some new territory in which I've expanded the field to accommodate new phenomena such as an election whose result no one sees coming.

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'''Timur Kuran''': And we've broadened the field to accommodate vast inefficiencies that our political system that involves people expressing their political preferences once every four years through a system that involves primaries, nominating conventions and so on and ultimately an election, that this system ultimately produces an outcome that reflects people's preferences, when you introduce preference falsification into the picture—when you accept it as something significant, and I would suggest that its significance is growing—you open up the possibility that our political system can generate outcomes that very few people want, that generate very inefficient outcomes, you open up the possibility that because people are not openly expressing what's on their mind that the system of knowledge development—knowledge production and knowledge development and therefore solving problems—that gets corrupted.

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'''Eric Weinstein''': Well in one of the ways in which I've tried to figure out how to make what you do a little bit more mimetic so that more people start to appreciate it, one of the ways I've tried to talk about it with among friends is that you have developed a theory of the black market in the marketplace of ideas—that is underground concepts, underground desires, unmet fears—that can't be discussed in the curated market managed by institutions, another way of saying is that this is the economy of silence or the economy of deception, do those fit?

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'''Timur Kuran''': I would prefer economy of deception because people don't say, stay silent—we don't have, in our society on most issues people don't have the luxury to stay silent when they are in an environment consisting mostly of pro-choice—people are mostly pro-life people—they are asked to take a position, so it's not that some people are speaking and other people are silent—if that were the case we would know well there 70% of society is silent, they must not agree with either of the two extreme positions pro-life and when people say things like—but people actually pretend when they're in a group that is primarily or exclusively pro-choice or pro-life, they sense this, they take that position—that is preference falsification and in doing that they also fail to express or choose not to express the reasons why they find an intermediate position more attractive.

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'''Eric Weinstein''': Sure.

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'''Timur Kuran''': And those—all of those reasons get subtracted from public discourse—we have a very distorted public discourse on which that is underlying our whole political system.

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'''Eric Weinstein''': So I mean there's so much that's juicy to dig into, I think that there, that you may be undervaluing some of the aspects of silence where somebody will say "Well look, I am not a very political person"—somebody else might make an admonition "keep your head down", "stick to your knitting", stay in your lane—there, all of these ways in which we do favor silence but those of us who have to speak in a professional capacity—we're expected to form opinions on these things—we really don't have the luxury usually of staying silent.

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'''Timur Kuran''': Yeah I think—I will grant this point that there are many issues on which we consciously avoid putting ourselves in positions where we will have to take a position. We—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —we take ourselves out of the game—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —we take ourselves out of the game—but and we're successful in doing that in most contexts—but in going through daily life we find ourselves in situations in social events or in the workplace where we have to take a position—everybody's taking a position—there's an issue that is—you're sitting around the table and issue is being discussed, and it has to do with workplace policy on some issue, and you have to take a position and you have to sometimes vote. So your point is well taken that there are whole—in any person's life there's a pretty broad zone in which you can avoid not taking a position—so yeah.

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'''Eric Weinstein''': Let's go back through a little bit of just modern history and talk about the times in which preference falsification even though people have often not had the terminology for this theory really came into its own in a way where people were so surprised by a turn of events that they came to understand that people held preferences that were far different than the preferences that had been assumed to be held and relatively—let's say—radical quick shifts in that structure.

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'''Timur Kuran''': Let me give you an example of from Eastern Europe—communism was, remains high inefficient social system—inefficient economically, highly repressive also—it was a puzzle to many people that it survived for decades in Eastern Europe, and for a long time the dominant view was that what kept communism in place for decades in the Soviet satellites—in the Soviet Union itself was brute force—and people would give the examples of Prague in 1968 or—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_trial show trials]—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —or Hungary—the show trials of Stalin—this is the kind of thing—the Gulag—people would talk about—refer to Solzhenitsyn's book—when you actually looked at these societies that were some of them in which there was no gulag and the prison population was smaller than the prison population at the time in the United States as a proportion—Czechoslovakia is a good example—so the, wasn't Czechoslovakia a place that we associate with show trials—yes there was—we think of 1968 when Soviet tanks came rolling in but even after that you didn't have major trials—you didn't have huge numbers of people disappearing. So what is it that kept Czechoslovakia communist society—and what kept it a communist society is the people who hated the system pretended to approve of the system and turned against dissidents—the very few dissidents who had the courage to say this is a system that is not going to last forever—it's an inefficient system, it hasn't brought us freedom—the state hasn't withered away, it's gotten bigger, it's more important in our life—and they would turn against them. What sustained communism all across the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites was preference falsification—now what this meant was that the system was extremely unstable—people were falsifying their preferences because other people were doing so—I was, even though I was against communism and you were against communism—we both supported the system because the other was—now this is a system where if one of us decides for whatever reason that we're going to call a spade a spade and say this system doesn't work, I don't like it—I go out in the street and I start demonstrating—a lot of other people are going to follow. So what happened is ultimately, when some demonstrations began—and it happened to be the demonstration started in East Germany—these demonstrations started growing. Every week more people found themselves—in themselves the courage to say what they believed and to come out against the regime. The regime itself didn't want to overreact—there were discussions in the Politburo—some people said we better crack down right now or this is going to get out of hand—other people said well if we crack down now and some people die, that can—the negative effects could be greater—their winter is coming—pretty soon it will be—people will be more reluctant to go out in the street—let's let this pass—let's not overreact—before they knew it the Berlin Wall was down and that created a domino effect. Nobody foresaw that—and it's quite significant that among the people who missed this were the dissidents—the East European dissidents who were the only people—and I include in this all the top experts—CIA experts—the top academics studying Eastern Europe—almost a little understood what was holding the system together—Václav Havel wrote a book called ''The Power of the Powerless'' and its main message was this: ''society that hates communism holds within it the power to topple it''—even he missed this—even—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —yeah—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —he was surprised—when Gorbachev came two weeks before the Czechoslovak revolution—when Gorbachev came to town—a million people came out in Prague to greet him. They were enthusiastic, they thought change was coming. A New York Times reporter Robert Apple asked Václav Havel, "Is this the revolution that you are predicting? Have people discovered that they have the power to topple the regime?"—and he said, "I'm not a dreamer," he said, "I'm probably not going to live to see"—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —"this happen." So here's a case of a system built on preference falsification that was sustained by preference falsification that suddenly collapses when a few people call it out and then you get the—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —the cascade—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —then you get the cascade—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —so this is one of the things that I want to dig into because the cascade effect is really a refinement as I see it of the old story of the Emperor's New Clothes where all it takes is one person—but then it's missing the mechanism—it's like Newton's laws—there's no ability to transmit gravity—it's an instantaneous action at a distance—to my way of thinking the best way of understanding your theory for most people is to understand a motif that is found throughout American cinema—and the motif has a name I believe inside the business which is called the slow clap—which is that somebody can't take it anymore—and they give an impassioned speech that nobody's expecting that starts speaking to the unmet beliefs of a large group of people—none of whom have understood that there is a lot of support for this in terms of private preference—that's the first action. Now if I understand your theory correctly, people have private preferences and public preferences but they have some threshold of alternate support in the group that will be necessary for them to update their public preferences towards their private preferences—and then the most important thing is—is that that crazy speech is followed by some anonymous member of the group who starts the slow clap—and that slow clap becomes oppressive—because in that group that person is saying we all know that what has just been said reflects the group and then the slow clap is joined by a third person and that you watch the cascade visually.

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'''Timur Kuran''': So the way—this is what you're describing is a cascade that involves a large group of people who have different thresholds—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —correct—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —so can imagine that the very first person in your example who gives an impassioned speech—who's just had enough—at some point something happens—this person was boiling with anger against the regime or the system or the policy—whatever it is—but knew—has known all along that there's a huge risk to acting on this—but something happens where that person says I have just had enough—I'm willing to take the risk of going to prison for 20 years—I'm going to make this speech—I'm just going to say I can't live with myself—and there are people in society with any given issue—there are people on it—and that person on one particular issue might feel that way—on other issues might not—then there's somebody else who is also quite impassioned—boiling with anger—which is a little bit less so—so the person—again—to go to your example—the person who follows the impassioned speech with the slow clap—is that next person—the person with the slightly higher threshold—but that's the person who gave the impassioned speech—awakens that person—that courage was just enough to tip that person over the threshold—there are other people in the audience who have slightly higher thresholds—it takes two people to call a spade a spade—say the Emperor is naked—say I'm opposed to this policy—that person then jumps in and so forth—what a cascade is a self reinforcing process where every person who joins the movement—who changes his or her preference—induces another person—tips another person over his or her threshold—and so the system builds on itself—and over a very short time you go from a condition where nobody is opposing the status quo to where everybody is now in opposition and it becomes now—it can become dangerous to support the status quo ante and this is actually something if we go back for a moment to the East European example—I spoke with the famous New York Times reporter Robert Apple—well two weeks after the Czechoslovak revolution—the New York Times decided they had written about dissidents for two weeks—they'd written lots of stories about dissidents and about all these people have said oh it was so bad living a lie—and I'm so—now we're going to start living in truth and so on—it occurred to somebody in the New York Times editorial board—you know this is a society that was run by communists—there's lots of people who are members of the Communist Party—we should do a story about them—what's happening to them—you know they've been in power for half a century and they've suddenly overnight been pushed out of power—let's send our best reporter to back to the region to interview them—so Robert Apple lands in Prague and he starts looking for communists and of course he finds lots of people who have held Communist Party membership—they say oh I'm not a communist and never was a communist—I was falsifying my preferences—I had no choice—I have children—I had to put them through school—I wanted to keep my job—I'm not a communist—and he wrote back a famous article in the New York Times that I can't—I could not find a communist anywhere—so what—of course this is now preferable solution in reverse because there are people who were benefiting handsomely from the system—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —so it’s an overshoot—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —this is an overshoot—now and now in Czechoslovakia you did not have a witch hunt against the supporters of the old regime—of course the members of the old Politburo were all—or most of them were sidelined—that the two or three of them managed to repackage them as social democrats and repackage themselves as social democrats and continued in politics—most of the people were sidelined—there wasn't the witch hunt—but there were other countries in which there was a witch hunt—so it was—and of course Czechoslovaks didn't know why—what was going to happen—there was always a danger that the new regime would go after the old communists and try to punish them and punish people who ran the jails and had important positions in the Communist Party—but it was so—because there was a possibility of this danger—now they pretended that they were all—uh—all along they were lying—so events—massive events that changed the course of history which were unpredicted—after the fact they become—one looks at them and one finds it impossible not to understand why they happened—we have they're overdetermined—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —we have tremendous amount of data showing why the system had to collapse—yet in reality to go back to your example if that one person hadn't made the impassioned speech—this thing could have gone on for more years—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —well let's play with this a little bit—one of the things that I find so fascinating about the theory is it also sort of starts to explain how in a society where people's private and public preferences are somewhat aligned—they can go out of alignment very quickly—so I don't know if you've seen the video for example of Saddam Hussein coming to power at a Ba'ath Party meeting in Iraq which is fascinating.

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'''Timur Kuran''': I'm not sure I have seen some videos of Saddam Hussein in Ba'ath Party meetings—I'm not sure I saw that—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —you’d remember it—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —maybe—maybe you—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —let me describe it for you because you’ll see the mechanism—the opposite direction—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —yes—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —so he’s sitting there on stage smoking a cigar and he’s videoing himself—I think knowing what comes next—he says hey we’ve got a special guest today—and a man who I don’t know exactly who he was stands up and start speaking and saying I have plotted against Saddam and I have co-conspirators in the audience and I’m going to name them now—well you see terror take over this auditorium because there’s also cameras if I recall correctly on stage filming the people—and these names get read and these people are being led out—and then the preference falsification sets in and you start seeing the private preferences suppressed and the public preferences going into nonsense territory and people are saying long live our brother Saddam—he is the one—because they realize that their life is on the line—and according to legend—and I don’t know whether this is exactly true—those who are left at the end are given sidearms to execute those who have been led out to make them complicit in the crime to freeze in the preference falsification—or if you like people are now preferring to save their lives rather than preferring to explore their politics—so do we see—I mean—I’m just trying—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —I hadn’t seen this video—I’ve heard just as a little footnote here that in North Korea the Kim’s have used the same sort of thing where they actually will say that they’re going to name some people in the audience—the latest one where was where a relative of Kim Jong Un was—might have been an uncle or something who was actually led out—this was the same sort of thing that happened—in that case I don’t think it was somebody from the audience who pulled the trigger but everybody could hear a shot go—he was obviously murdered—everybody could hear that this was instantaneous—if you did—if Kim decided you had betrayed him—you will be put to death—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —well this is what I have—a pet project of mine which I don’t think I’ve ever advanced sufficiently is what I term the analysis of message violence—that there’s certain violence that is committed theatrically as a instrument of transmission to induce preference falsification—so this is used by the cartels in Mexico—this used to great effect by the Kims—it was used by Saddam Hussein—and with message violence the idea is to create something so horrific beyond what is necessary to silence someone through murder and death—to communicate to others the instant necessity of beginning to falsify their preferences—so that a—it’s a leveraging effect where a small amount of violence results in the maximum amount of preference falsification—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —yes this does happen and there are plenty of examples—we can—given—go back to the show trials of the Soviet Union where every single member—we’re stalling—got rid of every single member of Lenin’s Politburo—all the heroes of the October Revolution and the building of the Soviet Union—one by one he got rid of them through show trials and the fact that such heroes could be executed in such humiliating ways sent of course a message to the entire society that if this happens to them—this could happen to any—anyone—but I would want to emphasize that preference false question—even massive preference falsification can occur even without such theatrics—and if we come back to our own society—jumping from the Soviet Union and Iraq to the United States today—there are many issues on which we do not talk to each other honestly—which there’s a great deal of polarization and people and expressing nuances can get you in great trouble—and we cannot point to a single event—we can point to many smaller events but no single event that has the theatrical acts of Saddam’s executions or what the Kim’s are doing—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —well and I’m so glad that we’re making this transition—because as interesting as the historical examples are and those that are particularly bloody—the best application of this theory in my opinion only comes from when we realize that violence can be moved from the physical sphere to the reputational and the economic sphere—so if you think about your reputation as part of what Richard Dawkins might have called our extended phenotype—it’s something that you carry around with you—that is necessary for let’s say employment—we now worry about reputational violence which can be exacted theatrically for example through social media—so the question of what we can say—what we can discuss—what we can explore—has a similar character—if I take the James D’amour situation at Google—this was a particularly—you know—whether or not you thought his memo was brilliant or a little bit tone deaf—it certainly wasn’t an insane exploration of misogyny—it was some exploration of differences between men and women at the level of Big Five personality inventories—the idea being that success or failure might have a lot more to do with one’s Big Five—let’s say hedonic decomposition of our personalities—rather than our actual gender—and then if males and females had different hedonic profiles at the level of Big Five personality inventory traits—that could explain some of the imbalances—and he was actually to my mind talking about the fact that if you wanted to have a more equal society of engineers—there are things that you might explore to try to actually better utilize women in the workplace—now whether or not you buy into that—or—it certainly didn’t seem like an insane thing to suggest—and yet the reputational violence that was exacted on somebody who was told to attend a seminar and asked for feedback seemed to me to be of a piece with this kind of message violence but not at a physical level—at a reputational level—do you think that there’s some parallel there?

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'''Timur Kuran''': Yes I think the reputational violence can do enormous harm in the society—not only can it affect your job prospects—your prospects for promotion in the company that you’re working for—you can lose a lot of friends—it can affect your prospects in the marriage market—so 50 years ago when people were asked—Americans were asked whether they would mind whether their daughter or son married somebody of the opposite party—about 20% said that it would make any difference to them—by contrast more than half of Americans said that if their son or daughter married somebody of a different ethnic group or have a different religion—this would matter to them and many people said they would not accept the person—a different religion—different ethnic group—different race into their family—those numbers have come way down over the years—by contrast the numbers regarding ideological differences and party affiliation have gone way up today—so this—being attacked or coming back to reputational violence—being pigeonholed as a radical Republican or even as a Republican—or being pigeonholed—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —radical is implied—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —and radical is implied for many people or—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —same on the Democratic side—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —or being pigeonholed as a Democrat—even then—

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'''Eric Weinstein''': —now you’re a radical leftist—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —not even a progressive Democrat—just—

''00:38:47''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —to many people—the all Democrats are the same whether—the nuances between—

''00:38:53''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —well they’re libtards—

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'''Timur Kuran''': —with the progressives and more what we call—the way many of us would call more moderate Democrats—there’s no such distinctions—they’re all on the wrong side—and there are people who do not want to befriend them—who would be completely against their son or daughter marrying a Democrat or Republican depending on who they are—and you can see why at the Thanksgiving table the tensions would be enormous because it would bring them to bring Democrats and Republicans together—even moderate Democrats and Republicans together these days—let alone people on the right side of the Republican Party with the progressive Democrats—is a recipe for complete disagreement—for opening up issues that will expose hatreds—because the two sides no longer talk to each other—because no one accepts the possibility—the viability of a middle—of some kind of compromise—people don’t know how to talk to each other—people don’t know where their differences begin and where they might actually have some room for compromise—and so there’s a reason why these days people feel that if they are pigeonholed—if they say something that then allows others to put them into one of these pigeon holes—political ideological pigeon holes—that their life will be ruined—and so this is—let’s go back now to the East European situation—this is similar to what the dissidents faced in Czechoslovakia—yes—dissidents who didn’t distance—like Václav Havel who did spend short periods in and out of prison—but mostly he was allowed to be a dissident playwright—but he got enormous amount of hate mail—most people—even people whom he knew from earlier times in his life would not say hello to him for fear that the friendship would imply that they sympathized with his ideas—they cross to the other side of the road that they saw him coming to—so they wouldn’t have to confront them—this—so his social circle got smaller—the number of people he could go to ask for help diminished—so all of this was—these inconveniences—this is happening right now in the United States—it means that if you cannot live with somebody of the other party as a close relative of yours—if you cannot talk to the other side because you think they’re just beyond the pale—they’re subhuman—their ideas just are inhumane—there’s no way you can even begin to consider their validity—or consider them as worth discussing—as part of a conversation—you’re certainly not going to see them as people you can go to in a time of trouble—that is why you would rather live in a neighborhood consisting of Republican—where everybody’s Republican—and if you’re a Democrat—where everybody’s a Democrat—because you like—in a time of need and time of emergency—you’d like to be able to go to your neighbors—you’d like to have neighbors with whom you can have pleasant chats when you meet them in the street—when you’re walking your dog and you meet them in the street—and not have to ignore them and see them as evil people.

''00:43:24''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': Well so this is—and I mean it’s fascinating to me—so many different ways to go here—I’m trying to figure out what the best line through is—one thing that I’m fascinated by—maybe we’ll come back to this—is what is the force that makes the middle so difficult to hold—that pushes more people to towards either being what I’ve termed troglodytes or dupes—makes it very difficult to—I guess—what my model is that you had A-frame roof—as the A-frame roof gets more peaked—there are a fewer number of Fiddler’s who can stay on the A-frame roof without falling over to the left or to the right—and so that right now I think that the skill level needed to inhabit a sensible position is priced out of almost all of our abilities.

''00:44:21''

'''Timur Kuran''': I mean this is—it—for what leads you from a position where 50 years ago where we had—again—people on the extremes—we had people who favored segregation—people favored desegregation—we had serious disagreements before—but there were many people in society who held positions—had strong opinions—but also felt that the people on the other side were humans—were well meaning—

''00:45:09''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—

''00:45:09''

'''Timur Kuran''': —and could be parties to a conversation—

''00:45:13''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—

''00:45:14''

'''Timur Kuran''': —and you could compromise with them—so when you picked up the New York Times after some vote in Congress 50 years ago—there would be a list of Democrats voting for—Democrats voting against—Republicans voting for—Republicans voting against them—there are lots of people in all four of those groups—and all four of those groups were considered legitimate—

''00:45:37''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—

''00:45:37''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —even the people who have voted yes—it considered the people who had voted no in their party—they considered them as legitimate senators or legitimate Congresspeople and they—on some other bill—they cooperated with them—so this was—and of course you just mentioned a skill set—there’s a skill set that went with that—the skill set was that you could—you and I could disagree on issue A—

''00:46:10''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —yeah—

''00:46:10''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —and debate for days and why your—I could say that your thing is going to lead to disaster along this front and you could say the same thing about me—at the same time—at the end of the day—one of us would win—the bill would either pass or lose—or there would be this—would go into some conference who does some kind of compromise—you and I would accept that compromise as legitimate—and so we would—we develop the skills—as we did this—we develop the skills of compromise—the whole political system developed this—and society saw this and accepted that people—Republicans and Democrats—both legitimate—representing legitimate sides of legitimate positions on issues—subject to screaming—we gradually have moved—it’s a cascade—

''00:47:11''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—

''00:47:11''

'''Timur Kuran''': —that has moved us gradually—that has expanded the area—an area of absolutes—positions on which we have apps—issues on which we have absolute positions and they’re not subject to discussion—and what’s happening—what has happened in the last few decades—is that the number of such issues has grown—as this has happened we have the number of issues on which we no longer discuss—we just have absolute positions—where pro-choice or pro-life—we don’t discuss—we don’t have conferences where we discuss what kind of—bringing people from both sides—say what kind of compromise can we—

''00:48:01''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —will this compromise at a political level but I think it’s also a question about the intellectual basis of our conversation—so let’s just take pro-life and pro-choice—

''00:48:09''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —yes—

''00:48:11''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —I talked about sometimes dining ala carte intellectually where I can’t get my needs met in a low resolution world anyplace—and so I sort of pick and choose which bits of things I need—and I think of this as political flatland—that people are trapped in pro-life versus pro-choice—and my real position is a plague on both your houses—I’m not pro-choice—to the extent that I’m willing to call a child four minutes before its birth fetal tissue—nor my pro-life to the extent that I’m going to call a blastosphere a baby—both of those seem patently insane to me—and nowhere do I get to discuss Carnegie stages and embryonic development which would be a kind of a more scientific approach to what quality of life is it that we’re trying to preserve—and yet I caucus—if you will—with the pro-choice community—not because I hold the idea that it’s simply a woman’s right to choose because obviously there’s something else that’s going on inside of the woman—there’s the whole miracle of gestation and reproduction—but if people see that I caucus pro-choice then they say okay you’re willing to sit with somebody who’s willing to terminate a third trimester pregnancy frivolously because they’re ideologically committed to it—ergo you’re evil—ergo we can no longer be friends—and my key point is look I’ll drop these people in a heartbeat if you give me some nuanced room in which to maneuver—let’s talk about the neural tube formation—let’s talk about what we think of his life—is that the emotional connection to seeing something one recognizes is human—is it the quality of the brain—is it something mystical in—ineffable—are you coming from a religious tradition—the key point is to make it impossible to have a discussion—and—I remember being beaten up on a picket line—in a picket line where there was a group that was picketing an abortion clinic and I was demonstrating for the right to keep it open—and I got beat up in Rhode Island on camera—and after this incident I think I had a chance to talk to the person I thought it hit me with the picket sign—and it turned out that we could come to—we couldn’t get all the way there—but there was at least a partial rapprochement where we could say well I see where you’re coming from—I see where you’re coming from—maybe we can understand that you’re both motivated by the best interests that we as we perceive them—that has gone away in large measure because what we’ve taken—or at least this is my understanding—is our institutional media and our sense making apparatus—and they have become complicit in making the center—that is the sensible and analytic center—absolutely uninhabitable.

''00:51:20''   

'''Timur Kuran''': Yes—

''00:51:20''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —does that match your—

''00:51:21''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —I think this has happened—and I think this has happened in a growing range of issues—which is why—now we go back to New York Times lists of who in which party voted which way—sometimes that list doesn’t appear because simply party—they say—is just a party line vote—and this is a reflection of society—that and it’s not that within the Republican Party or within the Democratic Party you don’t have people on whatever the issue is in the middle—but that if they take—if they bring up the nuances—if they try to bring the conversation a little bit toward a compromise—they will get skewered by the people—by their own people—or the other side—

''00:52:26''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—

''00:52:26''

'''Timur Kuran''': —and the other side will not come to their defense—and in fact if the other side does come to their defense—that’s a terrible signal for them and they’ll be skewered by their own side.

''00:52:37''

'''Eric Weinstein''': What concerns me here though is that we are dependent on people of integrity who risked everything when it was least popular to do it so that we can hold these people in reserve—so when the madness becomes too great we can turn to them—so let me just take a couple of examples that matter to me—one of which was the Patriot Act—and then when the Patriot Act was voted in—in the wake of 9-11 and there was this mob hysteria to do something because something very significant had happened to us—only one person—only one senator voted against it—and that was Russ Feingold—and so I don’t have a clear memory of the other names in the Senate at that time but I will always remember Russ Feingold for the courage to stand alone—a different version of that I think about as Katharine Hepburn who is the most loved of all Hollywood actresses—I think she had four Academy Awards that she used as doorstops for her bathrooms—because she didn’t seem to give a wit what other people thought of her—and she went and did—if I recall correctly—Connecticut community theater during the McCarthy era because she was just going to wait out the stupidity—the excess and the idiocy of the movement—whereas a Humphrey Bogart who—or organized an artist’s push to fight back against this—was immediately cowed by an article in Filmfare magazine—if I recall correctly—he said well sorry—he had to write an article saying hey—don’t call me red—I’ll never do that again—and the great Humphrey Bogart—the tough guy of movies—crumbled under this pressure—whereas Katharine Hepburn his co star stood tall and waited it out—do we have these hyper individuals—these incredibly disagreeable people in the sense of the agreeable component of the Big Five personality inventory—where we know who they are and we know to whom we can look in times of crisis?

''00:54:46''   

'''Timur Kuran''': Well on particular issues you will find people who write books that advocate a middle position—that I do identify all the nuances—that portray both sides as having legitimate goals—they don’t necessarily get attention—so they write a book—whether the issue is abortion or immigration—it takes some kind of middle position—it doesn’t get the play in the media—

''00:55:27''

''00:55:27''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —that a book that takes a very strong position—a very absolutist position does—so yes there do—on any given issue there are some people who—you can find people who are trying to start a dialogue—you can find here—their little associations—little nonprofit organizations that are trying to start a dialogue—doing so—but they just don’t—that’s not where the media pays attention to—so effectively they don’t exist—and the groups that increasingly get attention are the groups that pigeonhole people into one side—you’re either for us or against us—and the two sides—the two extremes—both of whom are playing this game of you’re with us or against us—they’re actually reinforcing each other—

''00:56:40''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —yeah—yeah they’re agreed—

''00:56:41''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —they’re completely agreed on that—

''00:56:43''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —yeah—

''00:56:43''

'''Timur Kuran''': —that there is no middle position—and having a middle position and having the media pay attention to the people in the middle would hurt them both—

''00:56:52''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —yeah I don’t think it’s in the middle—I mean I really think and for those of you who were watching rather than listening—I think that there’s this very flat low dimensional plane where these positions live—and what we’re calling the middle is not the thing between these—it’s in a higher dimensional space that combines these crappy low-resolution moronic positions and it projects to the middle—but it isn’t the middle—

''00:57:18''

'''Timur Kuran''': —absolutely—there are many more dimensions that they—these—it’s simply that these simple positions hide—I completely agree with that—and the middle is often more complex—involves many more dimensions—and these dimensions—to go back now to these extreme groups that don’t want these dimensions to be brought into the picture—so for the pro-life group the issue is—are you going to terminate the life or not—

''00:57:56''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—

''00:57:57''

'''Timur Kuran''': —and for the pro-choice group—is do you respect a woman’s right to choose—and so each one of them—for each one of them is just a one dimensional thing—there’s a yes—no answer—and there’s no—bring in some other dimension is immediately gets you in trouble.

''00:58:20''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': So I want to talk about the specific weirdness of economic theory—yes—now I claim to be an economist—I’ve never taken a class in economics and partially—the reason for that is that I developed a theory with my wife about gauge theoretic economics—and I always thought that if we could get attacked and somebody could say well you’re not really an economist—I’d get a chance to defend myself because it dealt with another aspect there—they’re the great adjustments to preference theory—preference falsification is yours—yeah—gauge theoretic changing preferences is ours—Paul Samuelson had one about incoherent preferences—that was he buried in his Nobel acceptance speech—

''00:59:05''

'''Timur Kuran''': —which has received very little play in economics—

''00:59:07''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —almost nothing—he was the one who pointed it—

''00:59:09''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —yeah—

''00:59:09''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —pointed me to it saying—you know—this idea that we don’t actually even have preferences is something I always thought was important—he saw it as the lack of integralability of tangent planes to create indifferent surfaces—for those of you geeks following at home—and all of these theories about what’s wrong with our preferences—George Soros has one about beliefs with reflexivity—have been really effectively kept out of the mainstream of economic theory—and I find it—I view economic theory is a little bit like—it’s not quite as totalitarian as North Korea but it’s very similar to certain places in Eastern Europe where there’s that—what you can explore freely—in that what you can’t talk about—or at least it was this way until recently. Now, I look at the moment where I think you had your kind of Saddam Hussein moment about what we can and can't discuss. And I trace it in part—its funny to even think of it in these terms to Becker and Stigler's paper called De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum—and in it they hardened the theory of fixed preferences to a dogma by comparing preferences to the Rocky Mountains—and they said on our interpretation there's an alternate view of why we can't discuss tastes—and that's because like the Rocky Mountains they are unchanging over time and the same to all men—and, you know, my jaw dropped as an outsider because I hadn't been indoctrinated when I read this—and I thought that is the single, craziest, idiotic thing that could be said about human beings and their beliefs and preferences—and yet somehow it became, have a famous paper as opposed to being laughed out of the field.

''01:01:03''   

'''Timur Kuran''': Well there was, here's an example of a theory that is foundational to discipline that gets falsified—I think his first name was Richard—Richard Herrnstein—you would—does the name ring a bell at—ah—Harvard was Richard or Robert—remember but anyway Herrnstein—he developed a theory that explained a phenomenon that Becker swept under the rug which is that an addicts, heroin addicts preferences—

''01:01:51''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —hyperbolic discounting—

''01:01:52''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —do change through hyperbolic discounting—so there are many addicts who after they've taken their fix—want to—they understand now that the panic attack is gone away—and they understand that this heroin addiction is ruining their life and they very sincerely want to give it up—they very sincerely want not to take more heroin—

''01:02:31''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—

''01:02:32''

'''Timur Kuran''': —but a few hours pass and they need, their body starts—

''01:02:40''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —jonesing—

''01:02:40''

'''Timur Kuran''': —they start craving—

''01:02:42''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —yeah—

''01:02:43''

'''Timur Kuran''': —heroin again—they need a new fix—and they get to the point where their preferences change to let me have one more—

''01:02:53''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —I'll quit afterwards—

''01:02:55''

'''Timur Kuran''': —and I'll quit afterwards—I am prepared to quit now—a few hours ago they were prepared to put immediately—now they're willing to quit—but after I get my next fix—and this thing can go on again—so you have inter-temporally inconsistent preferences—so this is another problem with the economics discipline—but economics is not immune to the forces that we've been talking about—

''01:03:30''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —well—

''01:03:30''

'''Timur Kuran''': —there is preference falsification—in the economics discipline—there are certain fundamentals of the discipline and if you challenge them as a young person—you're never going to get a job—

''01:03:49''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—

''01:03:50''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —and if you challenge them before you get tenure—you're not going to get a job—but if you develop a reputation to get tenure—you have to develop a certain reputation—and that has involved adhering to the conventions of the discipline—theoretically you could—after you got tenure—you could switch—but the costs then are huge because you've developed a certain—there's a lot of reputational capital you have.

''01:04:23''

'''Eric Weinstein''': And we're watching a lot of prominent economists sort of change their position without announcing that they used to be—in effect—working for a nonsensical theory—or at least quieting themselves—I was astounded by Paul Krugman's column—or maybe as a blog post called A Protectionist Moment where he starts talking about the scam of the elites—forever freer trade—where I associated that with sort of the intellectual force of Jagdish Bhagwati—and some of these theorists who clearly were sort of pursuing political position where—you know—in the case of like free trade—there are two separate phenomenon—you can say that something would parado improve the society if everyone is made either as well off as they are today or better off—and then there's this other kind of more technical version of this called Kaldor Hicks improvement—which is that if we were to tax winners to pay losers—then everyone would be parado improved—and I've noticed this very interesting thing about economists where they have two voices—they have the voice that they have to use in the seminar room because there's nowhere to hide from the fact that a lot of these public pronouncements are absolute nonsense—and then the claim is—is that oh well when we're in our seminar voice—and then maybe this was Danny Rodricks phraseology—I can't remember whose it was—but then when we speak publicly—we're allowed to say something that is actually different—it's not the same thing in two different voices—it's an idea that there's an exoteric and an esoteric way of expression—which is a sort of Straussian theory and the esoteric is reserved for one's colleagues—but we're actually allowed to lie to the public to help the fortunes of the politicians we favor when we're speaking publicly—what the hell is going on?

''01:06:22''   

'''Timur Kuran''': So there, there's some people who have achieved a certain stature in the profession—and yet they feel there's certain things that are wrong about the profession—or that they can't say within the profession—they develop a second persona which is their op-ed personality—

''01:06:44''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —they're policy entrepreneurs—

''01:06:45''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —and they're policy entrepreneurs and as public intellectuals—they're much more critical of the discipline than they are within the discipline—or they have decided that there really isn't a possibility of changing the discipline—but there's certain points that have to be made—and they're going to make them anyway—and they're going to ma—

''01:06:59''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —Erdogan pulled this genius move—

''01:07:52''

'''Timur Kuran''': —well the parallel was the parallel here is that Erdogan was taking—removing one of the checks and balances in Turkish democracy and preventing it from from going in any direction—towards in any ideological direction—towards dictatorship—

''01:08:10''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —genius—

''01:08:11''

'''Timur Kuran''': —he convinced enough secularists—

''01:08:17''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—

''01:08:18''

'''Timur Kuran''': —he was removing—he removed this without putting in place some other checks and balances—

''01:08:26''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —perfectly said—

''01:08:27''

'''Timur Kuran''': —now so here's the parallel with the United States—we have right now two extreme groups that hate each other—that consider the other side inhuman and who are willing to suspend all sorts of democratic—or all sorts of democratic checks and balances to defeat the other side—Trump is doing this and AOC would like to do this as well—and there are various things that are happening in society that are the equivalent of—of that—and they're leading us toward a dictatorship of one kind or another.

''01:09:14''

'''Eric Weinstein''': Well—and there are very few people who are willing to say I can see this problem—both of these are saying things that resonate with me—both of them are presenting dangers and there's no place to go to say—hey—our problem is our extremists in our—and our exploitative entrepreneurs who are seeing the turmoil in the country and offering us these solutions—because what I see is—I see bravery and courage on the extremes and cowardice in the middle—and there is no kind of a courageous person moderate perspective that says—what are we talking about giving up all of this great stuff that defined our country so quickly—at the first sign of trouble.

''01:10:02''   

'''Timur Kuran''': Yes—and yes—we don't have—and within American politics today—the hope is that within the Democratic Party there will be some moderate candidate who will say what you have just said and defend—compromising with the other side and defend moderate solutions—admit openly the complexity of various issues and start a conversation on how we prioritize solving these—these problems—what's happening—is that all of the candidates are afraid of crossing—in the case of the Democratic Party—AOC and the people around her and so they are not saying the things that could actually form a counter coalition—and the party is being driven to an extreme—and the people at the extreme—including AOC and her—her squad—they are—think of many of Trumps supporters in the same way that ardent Trump supporters think of AOC—

''01:11:32''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —and there's an interval way in which I agree with both of their verdicts about the other—in that the extremes of Trumpism and the extremes of this sort of—you know—justice based thinking that throws out civil society—I have to say that I understand the fear of closed borders—of open borders—of people just saying such dumb stuff—with no adults anywhere in sight—

''01:12:03''

'''Timur Kuran''': —and nobody pointing out the implications—laying out all the implications of any of these—whether it's completely closed borders—having no immigration—or—

''01:12:19''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —which would never happen—or totally open borders which can't ever happen—

''01:12:23''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —which can—never happen—and there are—and most Americans believe in a policy package—so you cannot be a xenophilic—somewhere in between—

''01:12:37''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —well—

''01:12:37''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —that involves—that involves some immigration—

''01:12:40''

'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—

''01:12:41''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —with restricted—with restrictions—with certain—certain rules—they're not for closed borders—or open borders—

''01:12:55''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —well so—so I've been trying to figure out—there's a game that gets played by demographers who are trying to help a candidate get elected—which is can we identify a sector of the economy that nobody's found yet that can be swayed—so soccer moms was an example of one of these sort of Democrat—demographic discoveries—another one was the exurb—so you had rural—you had suburban—but nobody noticed that before—you got to—sorry—before you got to urban from rural—there was the exurb between rural and suburban—and that had a voting bloc—to me one of the largest voting blocks—which is there for anybody—I talked about this all the time—and it's—it's amazing to watch people falsify that it even exists—I call it xenophilic restrictionism—people who are fascinated by other cultures—they've got foreign friends—they're interested in having immigrants as being a vital part of our society—but they're not coked up on this sort of beautiful nonsensical dream at the base of the Statue of Liberty—which somehow has this mystical old on a immigration expansionism—now of course immigration expansionism—is a weapon for transfer of wealth among Americans—that is—if you can selectively open borders and increase certain groups—share the pie—George Borjas has showed mechanisms by which you can transfer wealth—you claiming to take a tiny little bit of efficiency called Harberger triangle—but what you're really trying to do is transfer a giant amount of wealth—which we might call the Borjas rectangle—from American labor to American capital—now you can't have that conversation about the misuse of immigration as a tool of transfer—because our media will instantly set upon you and say—well—the only reason you're talking about restricting immigration—is your hatred of foreigners and you can't disguise it form me—restrictionist—

''01:14:35''   

'''Timur Kuran''': —restrictionist—so that—that cannot exist by definition—it cannot exist—

''01:14:54''   

'''Eric Weinstein''': —right—of course because in so this—I introduced this thing called the four quadrant model and the idea—DIA's—is that the media in particular enforces a narrative that all restrictionism—100% essentially—is motivated by fear of foreigners—and then you get to fear of brown people and fear—people who are not like us—or people with accents—and it is the largest—dumbest lie.

''01:15:22''