Links - Brutal Honesty

Steel yourself to handle the truth.

Bryan Caplan takes up what was already a theme I wanted to write about—brutal honesty. This is from the announcement of a finished draft for his upcoming, latest book: Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets.

You probably sense some ideological issue lurking in the background. Can I really derive any deep lesson about the human condition from truisms about Social Desirability Bias? Strangely, yes.

To repeat, the lessons of Social Desirability Bias are twofold. First: When you spend your own time and money, actions speak louder than words. Second, when you spend other people’s time and money, words speak louder than actions. Now consider: If everyone spends only their own time and their own money, what do we call it? Among other things, “the free market.” What about when people spend other people’s time and money? Among other things, “government.” The ideological issue lurking in the background of SDB is none other than the great ideological issue of the last two centuries. Capitalism versus socialism. Laissez-faire versus the welfare state. Markets versus regulation and state ownership. Neoliberalism versus the Third Way. Libertarianism versus statism.

After two centuries of ideological debate over every variation on “free markets versus government,” believing that we can make much further intellectual progress is damn hard. Haven’t we already heard all there is to say, ad nauseam? Yet in this book I’m going to try to convince you that we can break this logjam by taking Social Desirability Bias seriously. Yes, we’ve been quarreling for two centuries. We’ve practically been deadlocked since the mid-90s, when disillusionment with the post-Soviet transition set in. The cause of the deadlock, I shall maintain, is not that the facts are too muddy, or the arguments too evenly matched. The cause is our all-too-human reluctance to be brutally honest. Many of the leading arguments against markets are, intellectually speaking, arguments in favor of markets. Many of the leading arguments for government are, intellectually speaking, arguments against government. Once we replace SDB with utmost candor, the logjam largely dissolves — and logic rapidly flows in a libertarian direction: pro-market, anti-government.

What exactly does brutal honesty buy us? To start, brutal honesty lets us affirm that the correlation between what is good and what sounds good is quite low. So low, in fact, that we can justifiably praise free markets because they give business incentives to do good stuff that sounds bad and criticize governments because they give politicians incentives to do bad stuff that sounds good. “Good stuff that sounds bad” like: downsizing superfluous workers, hiring tens of millions of low-skilled foreigners, deliberately infecting volunteers with Covid to speed up drug testing, greatly curtailing end-of-life medical care, and leveling historic neighborhoods in San Francisco to build new skyscrapers. “Bad stuff that sounds good” like: free roads, free parking, free college, free health care, licensing medical workers, regulating prescription drugs, requiring building permits, banning recreational drugs, sanctioning employers who hire illegal immigrants, and ensuring a dignified retirement for every American.

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Republicans’ critics, for example, often claim that they favor a world where “anyone who can’t afford health care dies.” Yet in reality, virtually zero Republicans favor such a world. At most, they oppose the expansion of medical programs that already spend over a trillion taxpayer dollars per year. The brutally honest argument against government-funded health care, in contrast, is that the cost of saving a marginal life is too damn high. Spending $100,000 a month to keep an 85-year-old on life support is a terrible use of taxpayer money; a faithful steward of the public interest would pull the plug. Yet flesh-and-blood Republicans don’t merely avoid this brutal truth. They make the opposite argument, accusing the friends of government healthcare of supporting “death panels” to deny taxpayer funding for cost-ineffective coverage.

I look forward to reading it.

Leaning strongly against the tide of social desirability bias is Caplan’s intellectual colleague and person friend Michael Huemer. He is holding nothing back in expressing brutal honesty comparing propagandism and realism.

Propagandism: An ideology that places great stock in the efficacy and importance of propaganda. It ascribes many problems in life and society to bad propaganda, and it looks to good propaganda to solve problems in life and society.

Realism: An alternative ideology that ascribes primary importance to the objective facts and relatively little import to the bullshit that people put out about them.

What I mean by “propaganda” is, roughly, persuasive content that is produced for some practical end, without regard to truth or evidence.

I have noticed that propagandism is a large and growing strain of contemporary leftism. Leftists think that bad propaganda is making other people disagree with leftism, and good propaganda is one of the keys to solving society’s problems.

I find this viewpoint utterly benighted.

He goes on to discuss examples in many areas such as language policing, speech, and affirmative action showing how the propagandist’s viewpoint for each is highly flawed. From his general lessons:

It doesn’t matter

All the lying and misleading is pretty much for nothing even if you manage to trick people into believing what you want. The supposed emotional benefits (like someone feeling slightly better for a few seconds) are trivial, and there’s no evidence of any downstream benefits. E.g., there’s no evidence that getting participation trophies makes your life go better, or that using different words for things makes any significant difference to anything, or that “anti-racist” propaganda reduces discrimination.

I don’t know where progressives got this idea about the amazing efficacy of messaging. Maybe they’re thinking that average citizens are basically like children who believe whatever the “adults” (the intellectual elites) say.

Often people on “the left” and sometimes those on “the right” embrace what is called the “noble lie”. Huemer is arguing against it without mentioning it by name. The inherent condescension of the noble lie (propagandism) is transparent making it ineffective as a tool and destructive to its wielders.

And as Huemer says, it is not messaging that ultimately matters but rather the value of the ideas the message is communicating. Otherwise, shooting the messenger would be a reasonable solution to problems.