The failed marketplace in ideas

The “marketplace of ideas” is failing. That is the message of Stefan Stern’s complaint that, in this election even more than others, lies seem to be winning.

Of course, Stefan is right to say that politicians have always been economical with the actualite. But there is, surely, a big difference between Johnson and, say, Thatcher. Whilst we lefties hated much of what Thatcher did, we only rarely thought she was lying. Being a liar was the least of Thatcher’s sins. But it is the essence of Johnson’s identity.

This was not supposed to happen. Liberals used to think that the marketplace of ideas was like other markets – that good products would drive out bad, that, as Mill said, “wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument.

But they don’t. A big reason for this is that, just as ordinary markets can fail, so too does the market in ideas. And it does so for reasons we can also see sometimes when other markets fail. Here are five such reasons.

1. Monopoly. The problem here is not merely that the press is owned disproportionately by billionaires. It is also that almost all prominent journalists (though definitely not junior ones) will be hit by Labour’s tax rises, which surely imparts a bias, or at least reinforces one. And then there’s the fact that incentives to be first with a story leads to an over-reliance upon misleading (often Tory) sources: Laura Kuenssberg’s libelling of a Labour activist yesterday fitted the pattern described by Peter Oborne. On top of this, there’s  what Musa Okwonga calls “the innate bias towards parties in power.”

Perhaps a bigger problem is that journalists, like all professionals, have their perspective distorted by their training, and indeed are selected to have such distortions. What’s especially damaging here is that they like the “theatre of politics” – the “knockabout”, the “who’s up and who’s down.”

This doesn’t just cause them to regard the Tories utter mess of Brexit as being drama rather than chaos. It also causes them to underweight two other perspectives.

One is these is that politics isn’t a game, but a matter of life and death – austerity, poverty and benefit sanctions kill. The other is that regarding politics as theatre leads journalists to think of even moderately tricky issues as – in John Humphrys’ words – as “all getting a wee bit technical and I’m sure people are fed up to the back teeth of all this talk of stuff most of us don’t clearly understand.” The apotheosis of this is the oft-repeated claim that Labour Brexit policy is unclear because it cannot be explained in a single word.

Of course, all of us have partial points of view. The market is ideas is healthy when these points of view collide. It becomes imperfect when one such partial point of view acquires a near-monopoly position. And this has become the case with political journalists.

2. Inadequate incentives. In theory, people should have good incentives to find best value in the market, because they’ll waste money if they don’t. Even in ordinary everyday markets, such incentives often aren’t sufficient. People waste money even on food shopping – and don’t get me started on fund management. This is especially true in the market for ideas. Because our individual vote doesn’t affect the outcome of elections, people have no incentive to get smart about politics. They are rationally ignorant. This is an environment in which lies can thrive.

3. Unpriced externalities. One reason why we lack incentives to know about politics is that the cost of bad decisions are borne not just by ourselves but by everybody. As Jason Brennan has said:

When a democratic majority picks a policy, this is not akin to you picking a sandwich from a menu. When the majority chooses, it chooses not only for itself, but for dissenting voters, children, foreigners, nonvoters and others who have no choice but to bear the consequence.

In this sense, a bad vote is like pollution. It imposes a cost upon everybody. And if people don’t have to pay the cost for such externalities, we’ll get too many of them.

4. Positive feedback. Conventional markets work best when there is negative feedback – when an unwarranted price increase leads to lower demand, thereby discouraging such increases. In the marketplace for ideas, however, we sometimes see the opposite – positive feedback. Barefaced lies do not lead to their teller being disgraced. Instead, they can successfully manipulate the agenda – for example the infamous £350m on the side of the bus encouraged people to think about the cost of EU membership. And they can sometimes stick in the memory. As Tim Harford has written:

Repeating a false claim, even in the context of debunking that claim, can make it stick. The myth-busting seems to work but then our memories fade and we remember only the myth. The myth, after all, was the thing that kept being repeated. In trying to dispel the falsehood, the endless rebuttals simply make the enchantment stronger…Facts, it seems, are toothless. Trying to refute a bold, memorable lie with a fiddly set of facts can often serve to reinforce the myth.

In this way, the market does not drive out lies, but actually encourages them.

5. Arms races. This is true in another way. When one party gets away with lying, its opponents also resort to lies, in the same way that an athlete competing against a drugs cheat might take drugs himself simply to avoid being disadvantaged. This leads to an arms race in which both sides lie more and more. Labour is sometimes accused of lying, for example by claiming the Tories will sell off the NHS or that they will save families £6700 a year. But its accusers fail to ask: might they be lying because they’ve learned that it pays to do so?

My point here is a simple one. There are big market failures in the market for ideas – bigger, perhaps, than in most markets. Ordinarily, such market failures would constitute a strong case for government intervention to mitigate them. Except that in this case, the government actually benefits from these failures.  It is, therefore, difficult to see how political discourse can ever become worthwhile again.

Comments

[Dave Timoney]

I'd add that a further problem, intrinsic to the marketplace of ideas metaphor, is the emphasis placed on branding. Much of the media's approach to electoral politics centres on the dynamics of brand loyalty and customer alienation, which serves to crowd out comparative analysis of the offerings.

[Jim2]

I fear the problem is even worse, that there is no possible way the UK can be made more equal, at least not for very long. The reason is that no feasible profile of job opportunities can be set up such that all can earn a reasonably satisfactory wage through work.

The alternative is some form of taxation/living wage setup which may benefit the have-nots but will send the haves into electoral meltdown. The Tories will never do this, Labour might - for one electoral cycle. And the profile of feasibly sustainable jobs is getting narrower as jobs leak away and house prices stay too high. Labour and Tory will squabble uselessly over this for years.

To avoid the real issues all parties have to promote some sort of fiction and paint a scene of sunny uplands where unicorns graze set in some not far off future. A future that will not materialise. Many will vote for unicorns on Thursday but they won't get any.

[begob]

@DT: The branding has become personalised in big letters - TRUMP! And BORIS! has his own media handler in Kuenssberg.

Still, I take comfort in an old tune from one of the big brand managers:
"To stop those monsters, one-two-three,
Here's a fresh new way that's trouble-free,
It's got Paul Anka's guarantee ... [winks]
(Guarantee void in Tennessee.)
Just don't look! Just don't look!
Just don't look!"

[Jim]

"Barefaced lies do not lead to their teller being disgraced."

You mean in the way every Labour GE campaign for the last 40 years has accused the Tories of being secretly ready to privatise the NHS? And claiming that if the Tories win the election the NHS is doomed? All that '48 hours to save the NHS' shtick? And yet despite there being a Tory government for 27 of the last 40 years the NHS is still here (sadly, I wish someone would privatise it, it might be less sh*t then), but we still get the same old stuff from Labour this time - Boris is going to sell the NHS to the Americans!

Or is that different because reasons?

[SimonB]

Lots of radical, evidence-based ideas endorsed by experts are in the Labour manifesto. Apparently they aren’t common sense according to journos and are therefore rubbished.

The problem isn’t the ideas.

[georgesdelatour]

The £350 million claim resulted in a court case, which Johnson won. From the judges’ ruling:

“The alleged offence set out in the Application for Summons is that the Claimant “repeatedly made and endorsed false and misleading statements concerning the cost of the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union”. It appears that if the Claimant had said/endorsed a figure of £350m per week gross, or £250m per week net, there would have been no complaint.”

I’ve looked through various speeches and interviews from Johnson during the Referendum. They all make clear that the EU usually decides - at the EU’s sole discretion - to spend a proportion of that £350m back in the UK.

If I give you £350, and you decide to spend £100 of it buying me a Christmas present I may or may not like, is that really the same as me only giving you £250? At the very least it's arguable, surely.

[georgesdelatour]

@jim2

That’s a gloomy prognosis. It suggests that maybe politicians lie to voters because voters want to be lied to. Time for a song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMISptQWH_k

[P S BAKER]

This is an excellent piece; has crystalised my disordered thoughts into uncomplicated statements.

[MC]

I would add another point, that is comcept hat Akerlof introduced, i.e. the market for lemons. Put it another way, bad faith drive out good faith, as, given that people cannot really differentiate between two, they end up assuming that everyone is of bad faith. So you might as well lie.

[Phil Jones]

Except, given that ideas are not scarce, and that bandwidth is now effectively infinite, might not a "market-place" metaphor simply be flawed to begin with?

Instead of asking why the market-place is "failing", perhaps it would be better to point out that there is no real mechanism to filter out bad ideas. So why would you expect to see mainly good ones?

[nicholas ford]

I am not buying any of this.
In an election, the voters do not choose just on the basis of specific ideas. The parties put forward a bundle of policy ideas. The voters make their choice based partly on their assessment of these ideas, but also on their assessment of a) the ethos, values and principles of the parties, and b) their assessment of the qualities and weaknesses of the key figures in each party.
Labour lost not because they voters were incapable of assessing its ideas, but mostly because of these second two sets of issues.

[aragon]

What changed between 2017 and 2019 - Brexit

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/12/13/the-revenge-of-democracy/

"Now we know the consequences of demeaning the largest democratic vote in a nation’s history."

[the_last_name_left]

I remember John Humphreys one morning asking the deputy-chief political correspondent to summarise the Breixt situation "in a way even children could understand."

I was left thinking, "What for?"