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

'''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 one’s dispositions, is very common. And sometimes that occurs in very innocent situations. If I go into somebody’s home, and they ask 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 wide array of settings and in some of these settings, it leads to terrible consequences. In the political arena, people are, whether they’re on the left or 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 issue. 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, than will oppose 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.

'''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 a 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 is 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, as 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.

'''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.

'''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 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?

'''Timur Kuran''': I would prefer economy of deception because people don’t stay silent. We don’t have, you know, 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 or 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, 70% of society is silent. They must not agree with either of the two extreme positions, pro-life and pro-choice. 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.

'''Timur Kuran''': And 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.

'''Eric Weinstein''': So, I mean, there’s so much that’s juicy to dig into. I think that you may be undervaluing some of the aspects of silence where somebody will say, “Well, look, I’m not a very political person,” somebody else might make an admonition, “Keep your head down,” “stick to your knitting,” “[[Stay In Your Lane|stay in your lane]].” There are 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.

'''Timur Kuran''': We take ourselves out of the game, but 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, you’re sitting around the table and an 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 in any person’s life there’s a pretty broad zone in which you can avoid not taking a position. So yeah.

'''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, radically quick shifts in that structure.

'''Timur Kuran''': Or Hungary, the show trials of Stalin, this is the kind of thing, the Gulag. People would talk about, you know, refer to Solzhenitsyn’s book. When you actually looked at these societies, 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 it wasn’t, Czechoslovakia wasn’t a place that we associate with show trials. Yes, 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 a 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. 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 demonstrations started in East Germany, these demonstrations started growing. Every week, more and more people found 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. Winter is coming pretty soon, it will be harder, 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 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—