your hair it's horrid it's almost it's almost fro like it is well because we got a picture of our so freaking unhealthy I was I was coloring it I was using cheap shampoo I wasn't and conditioning or oiling it I was also sometimes blow drying it my hair was hideous back to our stupid director it's of Corbin I'm Rick you can follow us on Instagram if you haven't seen somebody made a coffee with corn rapid fire for us to do and we did it it was lots of fun video he made was fantastic yep this version is apparently regional special so this will all be regional questions and and and films like that cool we will try to do better than we did last time well we don't try to fail no but it was our first time yeah no the format yeah we know the format now and so we will try to pause as little as possible and to give a rapid and fiery answers we will not wrap it lots of you rapidly fiery in the crotchinal region exactly if you're rapid if you're firing the cross region see a doctor please yes or stop eating that much hajmola here we go love these 92 the regional special well found oh oh oh oh and welcome to coffee with Karan I'm your couch sitting guilty pleasure I hope you've been enjoying the show as much as I've enjoyed boasting it okay neither are we okay okay it's you all right a recent film or show which you wish you had done or a character that you saw and you wish you could have projected a portrait um the character we loved his dance in the rain the which one when he was dancing in the rain the one we loved so much I forgot the name of the film but that role dancing in the rain yeah he was dancing in the rain he's the killer the guy who's killing oh oh kk gg or the gg vv gg vv gg vv now okay yeah if you woke up one morning as it actually said what would you do put my wig on the best wigs in the business the spectacular he has the greatest wigs ever okay roger sir oh my goodness oh right I would love to know right what that feels like right with his brain yes might be amazing okay okay well she'll like this one I would do another post about being kind and saving animals yeah okay all right an overrated film according to you a regional overrated film um well y'all grand I probably would have seen it in a few years but we didn't like Bahubali so for us we felt that that was probably for me I would say that's probably one of the more okay an overrated actor or actress I can't I can't think of one that I think is overrated you lost okay right in order of acting talent um Fahad Fahad Fasil no Kamal Fahad Fasil um Rajnikanth Ujham Kumar non-apotager we haven't seen enough of the yeah we don't know the other ones well enough but that that's for sure I put Kamal and then all right right in order of acting talent um big list uh Swastika Kani Savitri Madhabi Samantha and that's just off the top my head Samantha's at the bottom well you're crazy you're crazy all right rank in order of wanting to work with her oh my goodness okay um oh geez she wins uh ljp okay money radnam oh my goodness Aditya Rima Rajmali oh no no oh nice oh nice all right Pooja now we hook up avoid Mary I'm not playing moral police okay uh okay let's see um Alu Arjun hook up Prabhu Mary yash avoid Mary hook up um Mary Ramsharam hook up NT avoid the how could I not go with NT give me an alternate failure for the following people um junior NT an alternate career um lion tamer all right for Kamal Hassan can't be any of his film stuff no he'd run a deli in brooklyn okay clothing designer okay lastly rike in order of preference oh yeah good good grief kisa graded in kitchen ggpv fanry mohanger there you go okay fantastic and applause applause that is going to be a tall order to live up to uh true i'll live up to it right now watch all right let's see what happens well you didn't pause though so that's good that's true i didn't go quick answer one that's true all right a recent film or show which you wish you had done or a character that you saw and you wish you could have projected or portrayed it's my question i had you should have been thinking about that a long time ago yeah but i wasn't actually oh shit that's not regional i went okay the horror moly on the film which are the questions you would ask the following oh uh has your stardom ever affected uh what you do as an artist that's exciting okay i think it is what would you ask such it right um what kind of cigarettes do you use that's what you would ask such it right i bet he rolls them okay oh geez what would i ask Prabhu Deva uh do you think anybody can be a great dancer that's a good question because i do know all right an overrated film according to regional only okay uh i'm not going to use Bahubali but i do agree with that um that Kamal Hassan the first oh yeah yeah absolutely very overrated actor or actress regional yeah that's the thing regional uh regional do do do do i'm thinking this is the one i couldn't answer aloo arjun but i haven't seen enough i thought okay right in order of acting talent fahat subhan uh vj sadhapathi uh danush reedy sen that's hard because putting reedy sen at the bottom that's exactly what i was gonna say it's like why you put reedy sen at the bottom that's real sad though yeah that's that's difficult but fahat is by far number one all right right in order of acting talent sorry sorry it's not too great in kitchen uh tell otama's regional is she uh great in kitchen tell otama swashka Samantha limadas you you i put Samantha last you put her second to last all right rank in order of wanting to work with them is this directors basically is this director's it is right yeah okay this is tough shit basal joseph uh the uh uh uh kisa the oh nice oh nice all right i can't say these names one for each avoid pravas hook up with the new shmeri diljit oh god is this the actor from syrat okay uh syrat avoid mary give me an alternate career for the following people i can't read these names who's that sartaj's mom oh sartaj's mom makeup artist that's a good answer i can't read some of these names i'm sorry i'm dyslexic that's why i have to read them alternate career for mamoudi mamoudi street sweeper street sweeper okay probably good alternate career for fahat in i model um he'd make samosas on the street probably really look good ones too make samosa last this rank in order of preference is this the film okay okay that's the talugu classic kumbala g knights uh super deluxe ames uh apu maya bazar of course it's gonna be first all right then i've never had a rapid fire round where a guest has answered every single question without any hesitation okay we will have to have a winner and you will find out who the winner is in our last and final segment whoever answers this question gets massive bonus points and edges the win uh i don't think it was even when we got to the end yes it gets the singer in the following clip this is you're gonna get this you're you're better at recognizing singer voices guess the singer is it was guess the singer where's it him i think it's sachi jirai i think it's i think it's actually right but i guess it could be that actor as well and your final answer actually right and i was first so here you go it was kudos if you got it right if you said oh i don't see them i'm guessing that was the actor uh oh there was no ali about one no yeah that was fun that was good thank you for putting that together these are always a lot of extremely fun and hard work yes a lot of work goes in for you and so thank you so much thank you and i apologize i don't recognize some of the names sometimes in terms of not only the actor who i also just can't pronounce and then some of the film names as well sometimes it's one thing if we were doing this and you're being told yeah corbin gets a huge disadvantage having to read this stuff he's dyslexic guys it's really not fair for him to have to read especially some that i don't recognize yeah so if you gave like an image and saw like a face oh yeah i would know that or heard a sound you'd be fine but especially south stuff where you have to see the letters and he's seeing letters that we're not seeing in the right order so anyway so that was fun though i enjoyed i always enjoy these me too they're so so fun um it's a great format i mean he's it's such an original format we love coffee with karan and it's fun to play it this way i think thanks for putting it he's uh he's he's doing the like he's like the the trailer release for kgf he's like hosting it right yeah i think it's for the hindi one okay but um i didn't know if he was like a producer on it or what wouldn't surprise me if you wouldn't surprise me if he was involved in that in some way yeah yeah wouldn't make sense yeah anyways let us know who you think won uh and uh thank the i think it's our ja our john sen our ja or i think that's right yeah or arga arga sen for putting these together yes i think it's so fantastic and so so fun and so thank you so much and let us know who you think won down below we need to actually get a hamper


All right, what's up everyone back for another episode of not related I am Luke Smith and in this episode as promised and requested We're gonna be talking about democracy the rule of the NPCs a couple weeks ago We did an episode on Joseph Schumpeter's book capitalism socialism and democracy and we talked about his views on capitalism and socialism Which if you want to check them out you can see that episode But in this episode since we didn't have enough time to talk about his views on democracy We're gonna cover that and we're also gonna cover some other works since Schumpeter has died while he died back in 1950 there has been an entire field to arise called public choice economics or Really political science as we know it today which studies not just the mechanisms of democracy But all of the innards of it that in a more scientific and rigorous way than people did beforehand not to downplay anyone before but in a Formalized way, so we're gonna talk about some of public choice economics and stuff like this I also want to focus on one particular book Which I read around I want to say or I read it around 2011 And this is a book by Brian Kaplan called the myth of the rational voter now Brian Kaplan himself as an interesting character He's written More recently a book critiquing education and things like this. He he himself Politically speaking he he's one of these Libertarian economic economists at George Mason But his political beliefs aren't particularly important for what we're gonna be talking about in this episode We're more focusing on his specific mechanistic view of democracy But his book I find it very useful again the myth of the rational voter you might want to check it out I remember when I first read it. I really liked it. I think I read it in like one sitting it was around 200 pages It's not that long. But yeah, I really liked it. My view on it has sort of changed, but not not as if I dislike it now But anyway, so in this episode Talking about democracy, I guess we should go ahead and get the awkward things out and that is All of us who grow up in a Western or Western influenced society are born with a positive view of the word Democracy we are told that it is a good thing democracy means freedom and smiles and happiness and Anti-democracy actually everything that's not democracy. We're taught is the totalitarian state where the soul of everyone is crushed etc Etc. Now in this video, I'm not gonna be critiquing democracy It's not my objective to critique democracy if you had asked me a couple years ago I was very much anti-democracy back then but you know as I look at it now democracy and This is what I think people might have struggle under Understanding democracy when it comes down to it is just a political method a method of choosing policies and leaders and you can Assess the goodness or badness of that now. I want to separate the democratic Ideology from the democratic method and when I say democratic ideology I mean the sense in which you know, we have this egalitarian notion in political science that are not political science but in our popular culture where we should have you know government by the people by The average Joe's or something like this people should have a say in political affairs There's a an ideology to this and I'm not this episode. I don't think we're gonna focus too much on that Rather I want to focus on the mechanics of democracy. How does democracy actually work? Who does it benefit how what what struggles happen in democracy? What are its potential short company?  Of course when I say people I mean everyone but us, right? I mean the fundamental conceit of this critique is of course Oh, I know what I'm talking about, but everyone else out there. They're the they're the ones who are misinformed They're the ones who don't bother doing whatever etc etc But we'll talk about that later But I think everyone understands regardless of any sniden remarks I make about people who make those comments people Understand that generally when others are assessing political Topics or beliefs or stances It's not the case that they go crawling through old books and statistics to rationally, you know deconstruct their preconceived notions deconstruct what is Indoctrinated in them. They don't do any of this when people are talking about politics They are acting at a mostly non-rational level This is just a part of life and despite the fact that You know, it's something that we think of as being something important People are not fundamentally very well informed on political domain in the political domain. I mean You have polls going around every once in a while that ask people in some place, you know For example, that will ask americans. Who's the vice president? And a lot of times they'll be totally clueless But again, this is the most basic level of democratic critique now shumpeter, of course Notes this kind of stuff famously and on page 262 he says the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters a political field He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile Within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again And that I think is something that you see quite often. I mean a lot of people will have Friends who might be intelligent in their daily lives But then they have some political beliefs that are just Extremely basic. You know what I mean? This is something very common or they have extremely reactive or Emotionally manipulated political views or something like this. This is something that happens all the time Or a lot of times people are just going with their gut and not really thinking about the long-term consequences of political actions Now shumpeter this when shumpeter says this it's part of a more general critique of his view of rationality and economics A couple couple pages before that quote. He actually Talks about the general problem in economics that economists have this tendency to think that people are more rational Than they actually are on page 257. He says economists learning to observe their facts more closely Have begun to discover that even in the most ordinary currents of their daily life Their consumers do not quite live up to the idea Ideal that the economic text used to convey So the idea one of the problems in classical economics is the idea that not just in a political domain But in a an economic domain People are imagined to be highly rational, but they don't really act this way And that's one of the initial problems that cause the Arisal arisal Arrivement just going to make up words The origin of public choice theory Now public choice economics is something that comes to bear shortly after the second world war You can look at the specifics of what it's on. It's partially on the analysis of democracy, but also institutions, you know regulatory capture the interaction between Corporations and the government stuff like this It it's a a field that actually touches on a lot of things But a lot of it focuses specifically on the mechanisms of democracy Now one of the concepts that was fundamental to the field is it typically attributed to anthony downs and that is the idea of Rational ignorance in a lot of ways. This is what shumpeter is talking about And of course this term doesn't exist in shumpeter's day, but it does shortly after now the idea of rational ignorance It's almost self-explanatory, but let's explain it anyway It's the idea that really no one is going to go searching through the amazon for truth That is in real life. We are not just magically informed about things in politics We have to go looking for them. We have to go read about them. We have to learn we have to Look at the numbers. We have to learn how to analyze statistics so we can make sapient judgments There's a a lot of cost that goes into actually learning and in reality people are constantly faced with the decision of Is it worth me? Is it worth is it worth it to For me to go and learn about this issue With all the cost it is worth now in public it will let's say in private domains Let's say that I am going to invest a bunch of money or I'm I have a bunch of money I don't want to invest it in some kind of business Now if that's the case I have a lot of skin in the game because I'm going to be putting my money on some kind of business And I want it to go somewhere so I'm going to do my research But in democracy that is not the case that is if I Don't know everything about some political policy And I vote in a bad way if I vote for someone who is Supports policies that are bad that is not something that's going to harm me because one of the The ironic facts of democracy is that although we think of it often is being ruled by the people ruled by you You get the make to the the decisions one of the first facts about democracy Is that political power is divided in such tiny slivers in the form of votes That each vote is functionally meaningless So your vote Whether you're voting for candidate a or candidate b we can pretend that it's important, but it's really not Your vote doesn't really matter As a single vote so when your practical decision in real life is Should I invest all of this time into learning who is the best candidate? It might come at extreme cost Or should I just vote for whoever and it doesn't really matter because I'm not going to you know If the candidate I vote for is bad and he wins or he loses My vote doesn't actually really change that and I'm not going to have to pay for my mistakes as a democratic voter That's the idea of rational ignorance. Now. It doesn't just apply to democracy.  That is people in democracy They are not being irrational. They're actually being very rational But that rationality means them making the conscious or not necessarily conscious, but the deliberate decision to Not be more informed because being informed or not informed does not really make a big difference in their life That's the takeaway from this Now at this point you might just be like, okay, well democracy btfo How will it ever recover and there's a sense in which that is the case That is rational ignorance is something that is always going to be there no matter what it's an inherent property Of information existing in the world and it taking a cost for us to learn about it We have a set amount of time We're never going to get more time in our day to research these issues Now you can think of a sort of band-aid solutions to this I mean people will in america We often have civics classes or something like this and the attempt there is to Inform people about political affairs, but that also can be a little problematic and that what if we Incidentally tell them something that's actually bad. What if we imply that a particular policy that is actually really terrible Is actually really good and they believe it Well that still we still have the problem of rational ignorance In fact, it's even worse because in order to overcome that programming they have They have to be even more assertive. They have to put more time into overcoming rational ignorance So there's a kind of catch 22 when dealing with this so superficial solutions Uh, they're a little problematic Now there is an argument out there that is actually common among many, uh, public choice economists and people in the public And that is rational ignorance doesn't actually matter Now this is going to be the view that brian kaplan in his book the myth of the rational voter is going to dispute But let's go ahead and introduce this idea Now there's a book back in actually kaplan sort of wrote his book in a response to a particular book written by a new yorker Journalist called what was it wisdom of the crowds wisdom of the crowds? so this book, uh, Illustrates an idea that's sort of common in a lot of people when talking in in an attempt to revitalize democracy In its idealistic form And that is it's the idea that people might be rationally ignorant But in a democracy it actually doesn't matter and what's the idea behind this Now the idea behind the wisdom of the crowds or sometimes kaplan refers to it as the miracle of aggregation Is that sometimes you can take 90 ignorant votes and 10 informed votes And actually get extremely good policy that would be the same as if you had 100 informed votes How does that happen now the original parable? Which actually isn't a parable that actually happened comes from the life of francis gullton now gullton He was uh, it's hard to describe him with one noun. He did everything. We'll just say that he was a A renaissance man. He was a scientist actually a parascientist too. He went into even some more occulty things He's an interesting fellow But one anecdote from his life is that one day he was Out and about walking around town and he stumbled by a butcher and a butcher had this ox And he asked the crowd, okay How how much do you think this ox weighs and he took an answer from everyone in the crowd Now everyone in the crowd might uh, you know Including children Scenile people people who didn't know anything about farm animals would give different answers sometimes wildly different sometimes Oh, it weighs five pounds or you know weighs a thousand pounds or something like this widely varying answers But one of the things that gullton noticed is when the butcher took all of the Entries and summed them up averaged them. The average of them was actually pretty much exactly what the ox actually weighed So the idea here is okay. Well somehow Despite the fact that most people have no clue about oxes or how much they weigh They've never had to deal with any of that. There's a sense in which everyone got it right altogether Now how does that happen? Is that some kind of uh miracle? It is if you call it the miracle of aggregation, but it actually happens for a very particular Reason and that is when you think of it this way If you don't know how much an ox is going to weigh or if you have no idea You're going to give a wild guess and your wild guess might be on the low side. It might be on the high side And let's say you make a guess on the low side. Let's say you underestimate the ox's weight Someone else in the crowd probably is going to overestimate the ox's weight by about the same amount And in fact if you take the whole crowd, even if 95 of the people have no clue and they're just guessing random numbers Even if the other five percent All you need is the other five percent or so to know about what this ox's real weight is And they can their answers become the median of all this so all the variants that people have It sort of cancels it's sort of like the law of large numbers numbers All the statistical noise cancels out and you actually have a very good estimate at the end and that's something that's very nice Now this has been used in many other circumstances I remember one common example people talk about is that I think the navy the us navy Used to use a technique where you know, they were looking for a ship at the bottom of the ocean or something like this Or there's some some kind of lost cargo and they actually just asked a whole bunch of people In the navy, where do you think this is and you know, they put their estimates Plotted them on a map averaged them up and strangely enough It actually ended up being pretty much exactly where the lost luggage was So this is the idea of the miracle of aggregation or the idea of the wisdom of the crowds is that while The crowds might be brainlets Individually if you put them all together they suddenly become big brained or really the biggest brain people Become the ones who define what the crowd is actually going to do So now this is going to be the idea that Kaplan's book is a critique of but before I talk about the specifics I want to give sort of a personal introduction to when I read this book Which again was back in 2011 and this was during the Occupy Wall Street protests you might remember that it is probably before you zoomers times But the Occupy Wall Street protests again, they happen pretty much In a lot of major cities. I at the time was in Atlanta I was an undergraduate at Georgia Southern University and I walked by the protests pretty much every day Um, and sometimes I had my smoke anime girl face on but I actually had a lot of friends who were Not a lot, but you know a couple who were involved in this protest Now the ideology of the Occupy Wall Street people or the ideas in the air Were such of radical democracy. I mean it was your typical sort of Boiler plate anti corporate anti bailout kind of stuff But also there was a lot of raw democracy that is you had these groups of people who would stand all together and then they would Vote in one voice. I mean they all agree on everything. So it wouldn't really be real voting But you know, they'd have this sort of mass management of their movement and stuff like this and there was a lot of ideology of democracy that was Sort of being talked about and again I had a couple friends who were in my economics department at the time Who had been exposed to a lot of the miracle of aggregation this kind of wisdom of the crowd's mindset where Even if they disagree well, I mean in defense of Occupy Wall Street or any other protest It's just inevitable that 95 percent of the people in it are going to be total brainlets But the other 5 percent would have this view of the miracle of aggregation That is a lot of the people in the movement might not know what's going on But it would be great to have democracy not just for the movement but direct democracy for everything Because of this miracle of aggregation because of the fact that Yes, well people sometimes make mistakes. They are not necessarily well informed But it's really the smart people the people who are have a systematic bias to the truth That end up ruling democracy all of the errors sort of cancel each other out So a lot of my friends had this view at the time This is something that a lot of people were talking about including myself and I ended up reading Kaplan's book I don't remember how I ran across it, but I think I said earlier. I read it nearly in one sitting I I really enjoyed it at the time I probably agreed more on Kaplan's politics back then that I do now I reread it this week and at the time I thought it was like just full of hot takes now I'm re I reread it last week and I was like, ah, it's not as not as hot as I thought before But I still think it's very good of a book in terms of public choice, but it also illustrates Kaplan's key concept of not just rational ignorance, but rational irrationality Now what is rational irrationality? Okay, so it's an extension of this idea of rational ignorance that actually critiques the idea of the miracle of aggregation So specifically just as a reminder, right? So in any kind of democratic system You have no real control over what happens in politics You have one vote and the chance of that vote actually making a difference in election is about the chance of you Getting struck by the light by lightning On the way to the polls that is basically the chance of you ever affecting an election So you'll have no skin in the game to actually inform yourself on any particular policy Now the thing that Kaplan notes very crucially and this is not just in his book He actually put out a paper in I think 2001 where he came out with this concept originally But what Kaplan notes is that the miracle of aggregation and the wisdom of the crowds that is reliant on the idea That the errors always cancel out or the errors are not systematically biased Now what Kaplan's view is and he has a lot of very interesting statistics behind this Is that people's Political errors or the things that they misunderstand. It's not that To use the example of the ox. It's not that half the people are underestimating the weight and half the people are overestimating Overestimating the weight. It's not like the it's not like the ox estimation That is in politics the reality is even if there's one good policy There is also something that people want to be true Or there is something that they feel is true or there There's something that they are sort of Brainwashed into thinking is true, etc. Etc. They are errors are not just random. That is if you make a political error It's not that you are just making a guess in the same way you would guess about the weight of an ox You are usually following some kind of bias you already have and those biases are systematic Now how Kaplan teases apart these Systematic biases he alleges people have is by looking at the survey of americans and economists on the economy the SAE Now the SAE is exactly what it sounds like. It is a comparison of the political beliefs and dispositions of the public And economists and Kaplan's idea he actually compares three different categories One is the views of the general public on the economy One is the views of phd economists And one since of course phd economists and average people don't have the same political party orientation They don't have the same socioeconomic status in order to tease out those variables He creates a statistical category called he calls the enlightened public and what that means is if you had the social class and the political orientation of the general public but with the Beliefs or the dispositions at that level for a phd economist So you might of course object i'll go ahead and say you might object to the fact that he is Using as a indicator of informed decisions or informed views on policies phd economists because i'm not a big fan of economics A lot of people aren't and there are many reasons to think that there might be systematic biases in the In the way that economists think or believe now despite that that I don't think really gets in the way of kaplan's point in fact, I don't really think he even Uh agrees with everything that economists believe as opposed to the public, but i'll just say that The idea the rebuttal of the idea that there is no systematic bias the idea that there is a miracle of aggregation is still just as Troubled by the fact that there is a systematic bias in the public And an or in some other group that is so to make kaplan's point extremely clear the idea is Let's take one example So one bias he gives is the make work bias. That's what he calls it And the idea of the make work bias is that average people as opposed to economists have a tendency to look at economic The economic domain as if the objective is to provide labor that is provide jobs Provide, you know people have to be out there doing things. So when it comes to something like technology Gradually replacing workers Average people are like no, we have to keep it so that technology doesn't replace us We have to be in our traditional jobs or something like that now phd economists tend to Not really buy that argument. They have the general idea that well, yes Technology is going to replace jobs. It's going to put people out of work But in the long term that's actually going to be something good because we're going to get things Produced more efficiently with machinery that money is still going to be there They're just this is going to be a movement from one job to the other Okay, so that for example is one of the biases that kaplan illustrates now again the point Whether you believe the particular arguments the political arguments I think is not necessarily the point the point is there is a systematic it is not the case that Either phd economists because they're dumb or the public because they're dumb is making just random decisions people have systematically different political beliefs based on, you know, their Disposition so if we take back the The allegory the parable of the ox It's not the case that people who are less informed are just making random guesses and half of them are Overestimates half of them are underestimates people are making systematic decisions They're they vary systematically from other groups. It's not random Now another question that kaplan tries to answer in some sense is where do these biases come from so people have systematically flawed beliefs whether they're average people or anything else So where do these beliefs actually come from and he gives a couple Options and I think there are others aside from this one for example An obvious one is self-serving bias That is people have a tendency in the example of mechanization of a factory Obviously someone who works in a factory and is liable to be replaced by a machine Is not going to like that machine taking his job Uh that even if you go to him with all the typical economic arguments about oh, but this is going to be efficient You know in 40 years once the global market Equilibriumizes You're actually going to be getting a whole lot more money. This is much better for economic efficiency Obviously people are not going to buy this kind of argument even if they buy it at a logical level There's a sense in which people are going to be rationally self-serving They do not want this to happen in the same way that you know people are biased against you know someone like kaplan, right? so kaplan um actually is noted for occasionally being bulliesided for his uh Effectively open borders views on immigration and he makes the same point there.  It's going to be a more efficient market going to produce things more effectively And of course people who are affected by immigration or something else Obviously are not going to like that even if you come up in their face with an argument about how it is More efficient later on or how it looks how pretty it looks on some kind of economic diagram People are going to be Self-serving and self-interested in their political beliefs. So that is one fundamental distinction between your average person that's a bias that they have And the phd economists now, of course you can again. I'm not necessarily giving any credence to Kaplan's particular interpretation You could just as easily say that an economist in a ways is biased against the short term that is if there's There are a lot of equations that economists have and there are a lot of variables that are not part of that equation So don't take me my saying this as an endorsement of his general political beliefs, but we'll just say that but aside from that the general idea still still stands that is People have systematically different beliefs and systematically different from what Reason dictates in his Now you can of course imagine other biases that might push people's political beliefs in a systematically different way as well Again as we sort of alluded to earlier I mean especially nowadays there is a kind of social bias that people have that is There are particular political beliefs, which are high class which you can say anywhere which you get claps for And there are some political beliefs which you can be de-personed for and fired for and stuff like this So in any society, you know that has these kind of social incentives for particular political beliefs Your given assumption should really be that there's a sense in which The a democracy is going to be biased in the way that those biases Nudge them towards that is if you get credit for having a particular political belief If you get money or fame or something like this for having a particular political belief You are more likely to believe in it. Whereas if you are fired or shamed or Light about for some kind of political belief you are going to be less likely to believe it and that again Puts us in a dangerous position where there might be some ideas that need particular questioning that are totally unquestionable because to Nudge society in a way that is less harmful to itself would require enormous personal risk in political affairs And anyway, so I think we're about at 30 minutes or so. So I'm going to take a break I'm going to have a little lunch and then I'm going to come back read some donations emails comments from the last episode on I'll be on seed and uh, yeah, I'll see you guys then All right, folks. We're back. That was quick, wasn't it? Um, so Let's go ahead and read some donations emails and then we'll talk more about democracy and politics, etc, etc So donations first off news I did recently get uh, you can donate by a bitcoin now If you go to my website, you can click on I think there's a donate or bitcoin thing I I did it a week or so ago. So I forget what I named it, but you'll see it. It's on the front page Um, I just got my first bitcoin donation from miguel He says I'd like to thank you for your work on youtube and the podcast also compliment you on your eloquence and Audacity to talk about advanced topics with such ease. Thank you the one day sovereign portuguese miguel Thank you miguel for my first bitcoin donation. So eventually that's going to be worth millions of dollars that $15 worth of bitcoin, but um So in addition, uh, I might as well read the new patreon people Our room our room core joined $10 a month michael k joined $5 a month Stefan g $3 a month. Thank you guys Um, let's go ahead and look into emails. So a couple general emails First off, I've been getting a lot of questions about what kind of podcasts I recommend people listen to that are similar to mine. I honestly don't think there are any similar to mine. I don't know I'm not really a big fan of podcasts. I'm doing mine as really more for myself I mean, it's not like I'm gonna listen to my own podcast anyway, but um Uh, I mean, it's really just an exercise just for me to get some of the stuff I've read over the years out of out of my head and into somewhere to make it useful for someone besides me But um, yeah, I don't know if there are any podcasts of similar topics to mine Mainly because mine is on different topics every time, but anyway, some other Some other comments, um, I'll sum up. I got a lot of questions on albion seed that are again albion seed for british folkways in America, I think that's the subtitle or whatever. You can check out that episode again It's on four different british ethnic groups that defined american socio political culture how they interacted over this period Um, I got a lot of questions on that some general ones. Let's see Um One question that was common is where do people in the west fit in? So for example, where do the mormons fit in people of utah and stuff like that and I think well to give Give fissures general view again is he has a primarily assimilationist view of most immigration into the united states And I think when it comes to westward movement a lot of the cultures mormons being an example Might be thought of as a kind of hybrid of a lot of the different groups, but he's not very specific You can check the book out. You can get the pdf and search for it. I search myself There are only a couple times he even mentions utah mormons stuff like this or a lot of the other west cultures And the other thing you have to remember is a lot of the people moving out here I mean the west the the so-called flyover states. They're not very densely populated anyway So a lot of these people are just particular families that moved out and You know, they have a culture, but I don't know if it distinctly fits into one of the four categories or if they're more a general They take traits from the different ones Other questions. So I got some questions about What about the urban and rural divide, you know people in the united states? So a lot of people would say stuff like Oh, well, that's an interesting theory the four ethnic groups in american history But what about just doing it in terms of urban and rural or some kind of class distinction? Maybe it's just the the so-called puritans in the book are really just more like upper class people And the borderers are planters. Well, less the planters in history, but you know The borderers tend to be lower class people I think that works for some Things but to give the examples that I gave particularly of contemporary american politics Look, for example, again at the electoral shift in the 2016 election Okay, so a lot of people who are plugged into like Nate silver and all of this stuff They have the idea that there is a change in educated and non educated white voters And there's an urban rural divide and the reason they think that is because those are the statistical categories That people like Nate silver have easy access to But if you look at it if you look at the interface between those categories and geography You actually see there's a huge geographic Switch in the 2016 election Specifically, you know in the northeast and in michigan, wisconsin all of these former puritan or quasi quaker Places, um, you have an electoral shift to the republican party of something like 30 points Now you don't have this in other rural Places in north dakota or something like that in fact in a lot of places since you know in the south There's a lot of places where the south actually moved to the left because all of these people were already voting republicans So if there's any movement in any particular class to the uh, the democratic party, you're going to see that so I think I think urban and rural Do have something to do with it. I think it's all part of an ensemble But I think that the ethnic group uh, interpretation has has a lot more weight than Looking at other narrowly demographic things and of course the difficulty is how do you determine Who's a a boarder or a puritan or something like that? You have to deal in generalities a lot at the time Um, but you know that those are just things to to think about. Uh, let's see anything else about uh, Oh, okay, so, uh, a guy. I don't know how he pronounces this name, but nucleus Thiette He brought up in reference to albion see he brought up, uh, mitchell heisman's suicide note I don't know if you've ever heard of this guy mitchell heisman. He's this guy. I think he Went and shot himself on harvard like in front of some kind of group of students or something and he left like a 2000 page manifesto suicide note that was Uh, a lot of it had to do with like ethnic distinctions between the native anglo-saxons and the normans and britain and how History was a conflict between them and stuff like that So I don't know if that has much to do with albion seat. I mean it's similar They have you know in that they deal with a lot of history in terms of ethnic distinctions Um, but yeah, I've never read his 2000 page suicide note. I haven't I I forget when I first ran across that I thought it was crazy at the time, but I was like, oh man. I'm not I'm not red-pilled enough for this Maybe I'll look back at it. I don't know. Maybe it's crazy. Who knows Uh, let's see Another question here. I got a couple of this nature This was on the the note that the quakers used Thou to mean the singular pronoun and you as this plural pronoun when addressing multiple people Um, and this of course was common in older english all the time. I got a couple people This guy, uh mega more Says he is lithuanian and asks Lithuanian has words that are basically exactly the same and they like earlier english The plural form is often used as a polite form is this of the singular and he's wondering if they are Coincidentally related to the english words because since they are indo-european languages And of course that is in fact exactly the case. They are demonstrably related through a set Chain of sound laws. I'm sure you could look it up yourself But yeah, most of the pronouns of europe are going to come from the same origin and of course, you know the Other indo-european languages of north india and iran or wherever they are related and uh, yeah And there is a tendency. This is actually not just an indo-european languages But other languages to gradually use the plural pronoun to mean the singular as a form of politeness This is actually a common tendency out there. So that's just a little minor note for people who don't know it All right, that about does it for the feedback for this episode again I couldn't touch on every single comment or email I got just because there are so many but I hope Those I responded to gave a decent enough response to what people were thinking And again, if you have any questions, you can email me at luke at luke smith dot xyz You can donate at paypal dot me slash luke m smith That's m as in monolith Or you could just go to my website luke smith at xyz and it has everything in there including the donate to bitcoin Or don't donate via bitcoin or with bitcoin or just donate bitcoin. You know what I mean So anyway, let's get back into democracy. Let's get back into what we were talking about earlier now I've covered a lot of of what kaplan's view is. I think if you want to get more into his particular beliefs, I recommend you read his book again the myth of the rational voter But I want to talk about shumpeter's take on democracy and I also want to take Another take from another writer that who I strongly recommend and that is james bernum now bernum wrote a book a while ago It's a pretty pretty big brain book That I want to read from in a bit But it's called the maki of ellions the defenders of freedom It's a it's a hot take not just on democracy but on politics in general But first I want to talk about the idea that we sort of left off on and that's the idea of public will And people having different interests Now as I said before if you're a factory worker who is going to be affected by Mechanization or immigration or something like this you are going to have a horse in the race You are not going to want a particular policy To be implemented even if even if you logically concede that down the line There might be some efficiency bonus to everyone including yourself Now aside from that now kaplan is mostly dealing with the difference his view of Biases among people is that people are short-sighted in this case He thinks of the factory workers being short-sighted or he's focused too much on himself. That is his bias But I think one thing important to remember is that there are sometimes where There are differences in politics that cannot be mediated by logic And this is something that I think a lot of people have some trouble dealing with There's a tendency nowadays, you know, people talk about this thing that is called identity politics, right? So identity politics whenever someone's talking about that they're talking about it in a bad sense identity politics in bad is bad But there's some sense in which Pretty much all politics in one way or another is a form of identity politics And it might not be blatant But there's a lot of sense in which the policies you take are often those that benefit you at a subtle level or at least Are not massively antagonistic to you now one example I like to use is You know, I live in Georgia right now. I actually grew up in Georgia. I've been moving around but I grew up in Georgia And one thing one political issue in Georgia is that we have share borders with both Alabama and South Carolina And those borders are partially mediated by rivers Now one thing one political issue that has been important for all of these states Is which states have the rights to manipulate the river? Where can you dump things? Where can you take water out? Who's right is it to use the river and stuff like this now? In the case of the factory worker who's going to be unemployed you can take an economic bugman perspective of Well, there are two sides. There's the pro mechanization and anti mechanization side But really the pro mechanization side they are in the long term more efficient But in a lot of political affairs, it is really just a zero sum game So in if Georgia and Alabama have a dispute over How to use the river that partially separates the states they will There's not there's not like a rational side and an irrational side One party wants to be able to dump here one party wants to be able to Take water out lower on the river or something like this. This is something that happens all the time So a lot of people have the idea when they're dealing with politics that There are rational people and there are irrational people And you know, oh the problem is we need to make people more rational And then we could all agree on the same things, but the reality is in a lot of places The difference the problem is there's no concrete thing called public will People have different opinions those people might belong to different social political racial Economic groups that have different interests, but it's not necessarily the case that all of society has those same interests Now Schumpeter puts it. This is on page 251 is there's There is first no such thing as a uniquely determined common good that all people could agree on Or be made to agree on by the force of rational argument one of the things you need to get used to in politics is that What's good for one person might not be good for another and it's not necessarily the case that there is some Rational way even if we could convince people even if we could convince them Or or make them rationally rational or rationally knowledgeable instead of rationally ignorant Even if we could transcend those informational boundaries There's still a sense in which sometimes what's good for you is just good for you And what's good for someone else is just good for someone else Schumpeter also says This is a couple pages later He says through a common though a common will or public opinion of some sort may still be said to emerge from the infinitely complex and individual group wise situations volitions influences actions and reactions of the democratic process the results Lack not only rational unity, but also rational sanction Now his point here is that in democratic society What often high happens is the different interests in society again class interests racial interests Other economic interests things like this or even geographic interests in the sense of One state wanting a river and another state wanting a river They can compete in a lot of ways and what policies they end up making together In the federal legislature somewhere else aren't necessarily going to be something Even either of them really want I mean we live in a society where often you'll have A political party which starts some kind of government program And the other other party doesn't want to support it or wants to undermine it or get rid of it And so we end up in a position where it's sort of you know a prisoner's dilemma in the sense that we have a lot of Things in political affairs that are based on that are flawed because there is a difference in opinion between the or incentives Or interests between the two different groups Now this is not so much. I mean this is not something that's going to go away There is just a sense in which no matter how you organize your society There's no such thing as just everyone having the same interest even if it's just you and another guy who Make decisions quote unquote democratically. There's no way for you to perfectly have perfectly aligned interests It's not just that we're a multi-ethnic society. So we have different racial interests We also have different economic interests between different classes. We also have different Geographic interests, etc, etc Now this is often something that's not too difficult for people to understand But it does take an extra level of Uh introspection I guess to make the next leap and the next leap is While other people we can look at other people in politics We can look at our political opponents and we can see ah, well, they're being irrational You know, they're using they're using logic But they're using logic is just kind of formal where they're they are really just doing what they already think is true At a pre-rational level and we as their political enemies we can see through that We can see every logical node in their decision making might be flawed or based on bad assumptions Or wishful thinking and you know, oftentimes times it's coded in, you know, cool calm Allegedly dispassionate rhetoric, but when we see political enemies advocating for something that is in their interest They might adopt some kind of ideology to propose it But we can usually see through that right and in the same way they can see through our Our pretenses that is you might take some kind of deep Ideological stance that has all these principles and stuff like that But at the core you're just defending yourself from assault or political loss or something like that That's something that I think takes a little bit of of uh You have to be a little self deprecating or self aware to be able to make that realization Now this is why I bring up the book by James Burnham because now I know I'm not going to talk about the entirety of this book I'm going to talk about just about the first section, which I think has The powerful kernel of truth in it and what the first section the first section is called I think it's Dante politics as a wish or something like that. I might be a word off, but The idea behind it is relatively simple He talks about Dante and this of course is the Dante of the divine comedy You know the inferno and all this stuff So Dante wrote a book called de monarchia Latin title that means on monarchy or on the empire or something like this. It depends on how you want to translate it Um, but Dante wrote this treatise and it's on Politics it's on a sort of I don't want to say spiritual, but it's on his general metaphysical political views and What it amounts to it argues in effect that there must be a in a sense global empire One imperial unity uniting the entire world and there are particular moral reasons for this One of the most important ones is The crucifixion of jesus. So in his idea the roman empire Jesus had to come during the roman empire where there was a kind of global world Government in a sense uniting all the different peoples at least the Mediterranean at least the world that you know, he's paying attention to There had to be a global government here because in order for jesus to be Condemned to death. He had to be condemned to death by a jurisdiction that was global in scale for him to be You know convicted sentenced to death to rise again that conviction had to be universal Okay, that jurisdiction that he was convicted and had to be universal universal That's the the sort of background to his view and he has other views as well that this kind of global monarchy That is going to be one where since there is a political unity There are no states to fight among each other and the monarchy mediates Uh, it effectively causes a kind of pox romana And in his view it was the holy roman empire that was the successor to the roman empire, etc He had very particular views on this and again, he goes through a metaphysical a spiritual a religious Or I don't want to say rationalization Yep, but a very spiritual worldview that communicates a kind of political Context or a political goal and that political goal is one pox romana one universal empire mediated by You know a secular state as opposed to a Divine state because it's his view that a secular state had to be the one to convict jesus, etc Now bernum, of course goes through all of this ideology of dante. He explains Demo narquilla he explains the justification for it all the arguments and he ends up saying that Nowadays we look at this and it's a ridiculous document, right? It doesn't mean I mean all of this stuff first off most people don't believe in this kind of stuff the Universal jurisdiction, of course, lots of people don't believe in jesus or anything like that.  So in terms in political terms. This of course is utterly worthless But what bernum notes is that in reality Dante was not really putting forth a metaphysical worldview that is supposed to stand alone He's putting forth really a practical rationalization of his real world politics now bernum proposes that In political affairs, there are two different meanings to everything There is the real meaning of things and that is, you know, why do you actually support something? Why do you actually support a policy and there's a formal meaning to things and that is that means well This is the the ethical rationalization for what you believe. So in bernum's view What dante does in demo narquilla is gives a formal rationalization for his worldview his All of this stuff about the universal jurisdiction and the Universal piece all of this stuff. There's some practical stuff in it But most of the ethical justification is just nonsense. It's formal nonsense. It's meaningless And what bernum notes is that if you take this and put it in its actual context the actual context that it's written in You really see that dante was not making some kind of dispassionate ethical and political judgments He's really making a very specific political argument at his time Now to explain what's actually going on. So i'll be specific During the late middle ages you may have heard of this But there were two major factions that occasionally butted heads in medieval europe And that is the guelphs and the gibbalines now the guelphs were the party of the papacy They supported the papal states papal power in italy and in other places and the gibbalines were the party of Either the aristocracy or often the holy roman empire and these different parties these different Allegiances so to speak would often clash in a lot of the politics of different countries in europe constantly Now for dante dante grew up as a guelph as a pro Papacy advocate and long story short. We'll just say that he was part of a moderate conciliatory member of One a guelph or pro papacy group Which was exiled from his hometown and when that happened All the sudden he finds himself allied with his previous enemies the gibbalines And what ends up happening is that he crafts this political narrative Which is a rationalization of the holy roman empire the supremacy of secular authority against papacy He crafts this political document which happens to support the politics of someone like him who has converted from this papal worldview On to this i shouldn't even say worldview into the an allegiance with the papal power to an allegiance with secular power So bernum's idea is effectively that okay. Well, it's cute to look at this as if it's some kind of political like rational You know rational political worldview, but in reality it's him Providing a justification for his own particular incentives at the times He is supporting the pa the party which is he's aligned with and there's not necessarily any deep ethical meaning behind this This is just how it is the way that bernum puts it. This is only page 19 He says eternal salvation the highest development of man's potentials Or potentialities everlasting peace unity and harmony the delicate balance of abstract relations between church and state All these ghosts and myths evaporate along with the whole structure of theology metaphysics allegory miracle and fable The entire formal meaning Which has told us nothing and proved nothing assumes its genuine role of merely expressing and disguising the real meaning This real meaning is simply an impassioned Propagandistic defense of the point of view of a turncoat. Bianchi. That's the faction or the moderate well faction He was a member of exiles from florans specifically and more generally of the broader gibbaline point of view To which the bianchi capitulated demonarchia. We might say is a gibbaline party platform Now bernum is wise to use a political example of this Which is far in the past. I mean no one cares about the guels and gibbalines I mean you might say they exist in some sublimated sense nowadays, but they're gone. No one cares No, no one has any emotional attachment to this But what it illustrates is something very fundamental and that is In the real life a lot of times we look at these things called ideologies. We look at these The the ideological cloaks that people wear the justifications the ethical worldviews that people construct That have values and morals and goods and bads all of these things But there's a tendency for people who are making those to make them in their own image to create them In a way that is very convenient for their particular Class or group or whoever they are advocating for and this is one of the things that I think we have to keep in mind where When analyzing politics and Analyzing democracy in particular because a lot of times we think of we think of democracy So well, not most people frankly most normies Don't really think of democracy as being a battle between ideologies So if they do it's it's at some abstract level that a lot of times people are starting to understand politics is something between I am for this party Against this other party and you're a member of that and we disagree we are groups We are fighting each other But I think there's a tendency of big brain people to sort of deceive themselves in a lot of ways Where they get so engrossed in the logic of their ideology that they forget the fact that oftentimes that what they're rationalizing is often just something that's good for them or at least convenient or at least Avoiding some terrible terrible bad for them now. I'm not saying that all the politics is like this But I think you have to keep in mind that in any kind of democratic politics I mean people if you're trying to convince people of something you can't just go into You can't create a political campaign and say I want this because it's good for me What happens in a democracy? What happens in not just the democracy but even a society like Dante's world where there are Allegiances of individual people that matter what often happens is there's a kind of self deception that people put themselves in Where they try and rationalize their worldview and they try and make that worldview appealing to people who it might not necessarily be the interest of to support Now this goes back to what shumpeter says about the non existence of public will there is no such thing as one democratic Interests that all people have and share and fight for and stuff like this There's no such thing as this people are really different and even at the realm of logic People are often not necessarily dealing in good faith. They're dealing in political rationalizations They are liable to look at things with particular assumptions based on what is politically expedient for them Now having thrown away the concept of public will Shumpeter creates what he calls a new theory of democracy He contrasts that with what he calls the classical theory Which uh, you could trace back to different people, but it's just sort of a common assumption Now what what the difference he makes between the classical theory and his own theory is that in the classical theory the Democracy the voters were the active participants of creating a government and policy They are the ones who you know politicians appear. They have different beliefs And people will pick those or pick the policies based on what they think is good And it is them who are making the decisions. They are the active participants Now in shumpeter's view, which is really just a kind of a reinterpretation a kind of re-emphasis of the same thing His idea is that in reality people are just sort of stagnant In fact, he actually he thinks of people as being a kind of a landscape a political landscape with which has a different Geography, which of course people have different interests. There are different classes groups and all this kind of stuff and What really happens is there's a kind of political geography and the active participants are really the politicians politicians come and it is their political goal to create government and When I say or shumpeter says that they are the active participants It means they are the ones who based on the democracy are making their decisions of what policies to support Now in his metaphor of the political a literal political landscape where two armies are fighting being two political parties It's literally the case that Well, not literally, but you know what? I mean, it's the case that you know, you might have In the same way that an army might occupy a hill or a valley or some strategic location Politicians do the same thing and their goal is gaining a particular majority gaining government In this democratic landscape, but the democratic landscape itself doesn't necessarily change So in his view one of the he uses the example of gladstone at his time I mean you could think of someone else like, you know, donald trump or something like this Um, we're for a more contemporary example But you know in a lot of times in politics you have enormous electoral shifts or shifts in what policies Politicians are pursuing not really because the public has changed its opinion But because someone comes like gladstone or donald trump and realize, ah, there's a tactical position which no one is exploiting Maybe it's immigration or something like that and he is going to go and fortify that and make his decisions based On what he thinks he can gain from it Now one implication of this kind of view that might I guess go against the idealisms of some people in democracy Is the fact that for any Rational party in a democratic society It's not necessarily the case that that party is going to have One particular set of ideological Stances that they're going to have constant over time In fact, I mean if you look at american politics, we actually sort of talked about this in the last Episode, uh, when we talked about albion seed But there's a lot of sense in which the two parties in the united states or this is true in other countries as well Often will make tactical decisions of what policies to support or not support and over time They might actually even switch places or uh on particular issues or sometimes generally on their social outlook So it's not necessarily the case that a rational party is going to be one that's going to be ideologically consistent Now this is very contrary to the classical Assumptions of democracy. I mean if you look at uh, Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote, you know, democracy in america This you're probably familiar with this book. You may have heard of it Maybe even only name dropped But one of the he has this kind of classic idealization of democracy And he divides parties in a democratic society into what he calls grand parties or great parties and small parties And these aren't actually descriptive. It's not actually about their size But in his idea grand parties, which are good Uh, that's why they're called grand are parties that are motivated by ideology. So In contemporary american politics The green party or the libertarian party are grand parties great parties and de Tocqueville's definition Whereas a small party is one that just chooses whatever it supports at the whim of politics whatever is most convenient And in his definition the republican and democratic parties in the united states would be small parties So this is sort of interesting because you know the terms of course are the exact opposite of what you would think If you're thinking in terms of size now de Tocqueville's editorial stance in calling them like this is of course to make the point that Parties should be based on ideology But what shumpeter sort of makes clear here is that in the reality of politics There are so many issues to make tactical decisions about that it's not necessarily the case that even a party Well, actually let's make it even wider even a party that is motivated by merely ideology might for tactical reasons Shove aside one of its more controversial things that it supports in order to gain in all the other policies that it supports So even if you have an ideological party that is tied to a particular world view It's still in the reality of democratic politics. It still has to make particular sacrifices to get the other things that it wants Now as a final note on this Despite the fact that shumpeter isn't going to believe in a public will he does embrace the reality that while People's interests don't come together into one uniform will It is the case that political decision-making has to be unified and again behind a government government and the parliamentarian since I I suppose I should say a majority And that is once someone has successfully conquered the political landscape and becomes a majority There is a necessity or not just the necessity It's just an inevitability that policy will be worked into one particular frame That's to say that Well to put it this way a lot of people who will have colder takes on democracy will often say something like Well, you know the problem with america, for example, is the two-party system if only we had more parties then You know, uh politics would be more like how we liked it Now if you compare american politics to australian politics or british politics or Other systems where there is a voting system that is not win or take all in one way or another in the uh Congress or whatever or the parliament You see that in reality this isn't necessarily the case because while you might have let's say we implemented some kind of parliamentary A proportional representation in the american legislature And that would mean that people could vote if 10 of the people voted for the libertarian party 10 of the representatives there in Congress would be libertarian Now if this were the case might seem like there is more representation of libertarian beliefs But in a lot of ways this isn't really the case and the reason for that is Despite the fact that there might be more people in the actual legislature There is still the reality that everything has to converge At a median of policy consensus within the legislature itself So what you're doing in effect when you have a parliamentary system You're really replacing i mean to put it in american terms. It would be like replacing Some democratic congressmen with green congressmen and replacing some republican congressmen with libertarians or something else Or to constitution party or something like that And despite the fact that there would be more diversity in the legislature It would still have to converge on a majority And especially in terms if we're dealing in terms of a narrow right and left or something like that It's the case that really electorally if you have more extremists It doesn't really matter because you'll have to get to that median point to actually decide what kind of policies to implement And those are the only ones that are going to actually pass the legislature So if you have hard five hardcore communists on in your legislature It's not going to make a big difference unless you give them some kind of particular power like filibustering or something like that But in general democracy is not necessarily changed by having a different representation of policy Or of parties Schumpeter makes the point that the only thing that really matters is the ability to make government or to make majority Great so we've gone on for around an hour or so and there's a whole lot of stuff to talk about with respect to democracy But I think a lot of it we're going to have to leave to some other episode I don't know if it's going to be directly on democracy. It might be sublimated in something else But I hope this has given you sort of an introduction not just to the specific books But some of the ideas that are out there in public choice and other discourse on democracy And before we go, I do want to talk about back back to Kaplan or more generally How given the constraints of democracy given the fact that people are Rationally irrational right they cling to their biases and that causes political democratic harm in some sense Given that how can we Provide How can we either improve democracy or what is an alternative democracy because a lot of people nowadays? I might have said this before but a lot of people nowadays have the idea that You either live in a democracy or you live in a totalitarian state and that's not really the case That's something we can go into in another video. In fact Schumpeter I didn't note it here, but Schumpeter Has nearly a whole chapter on the fact that democracy in a lot of ways is antithetical to personal freedom He talks about the persecution of minorities and stuff, which is really a democratic A democratic thing the aristocracy doesn't isn't necessarily interested in stuff like that But I won't go into that too much read Schumpeter if you want it But Kaplan incidentally sort of talks about the same thing, right? So Now Kaplan's ideal, I suppose you could say is not necessarily the replacement of democracy with something else Maybe even something bad But it's really just the scaling back of some aspects of democracy or politics Away from certain parts of American life or well, whatever country you're living in life Now he says I'll read the passage on page 192. He says before 19 the 1930s Many areas of u.s. Economic life were undemocratically shielded from federal and state regulation The market periodically trumped democracy on everything from the minimum wage to the natural national recovery administration And unless you're a democratic fundamentalist, you have to be open to the possibility that this was all for the good Now, of course, he's referring to the fact that during the new deal administration new deal Administration there was a tendency to further and further centralize economic decision making a lot of times that meant the reduction or the regulation Of individual people's land or property or stuff like this So Kaplan, I think makes a point again. He's he comes from a libertarian perspective So, you know, he has the idea that we don't necessarily need to replace democracy with something else But if we just got a lot of people's economic and personal decision making out of the realm of government constitutionality constitution now really With with respect to the constitution We don't have to worry about whether democracy is bad or good We can live in a society where okay, maybe democracy doesn't produce the best results But a lot of our life is shielded from it. Now another option he throws out there I don't I don't know if he really supports this but it's an idea that he throws out there is the idea of double voting So he might not have heard of this but in the united kingdom He notes this is something they practiced even into the late 40s Where people who were had university degrees had the ability to vote in their local precinct And their vote also counted doubly in the place where they got their degree from So people in effect had double votes if they were highly educated And one of the things that kaplan notes when he goes into his comparison of Normal people and economists in terms of their opinions. He notes that there are a lot of demographic categories in the public which for which The decision making becomes more characteristic of an informed economist and he says for example People who have been in education longer are more likely to vote like an economist Maybe we could give these people double votes or maybe people who are older, etc Now, of course, there are other there are other demographic groups that In his model vote better as well. For example men vote better than women But he doesn't want to be a bad boy and suggest that men should vote double But his whole point here is that instead of denying the suffrage to people You could just throw some extra votes in in targeted populations that Tend to have more long I was about to say long-winded long-sighted political economic views But that again is not necessarily what he wants. That's just a band-aid He suggests if we have to live in what he calls democratic fundamentalism His goal is simply a repeal An increase in personal freedom at the expense of democracy As I as we noted just a second goes those are very different things despite the fact that sometimes they get conflated Now maybe a more practical solution would just be a kind of Decentralization of political decision-making now remember that rational irrationality and rational ignorance Happen when people do not have Don't pay for the direct consequences of what they vote for Now in a lot of respects when we vote for someone in a federal election or a nationwide election We have very little control of that and that I mean realistically speaking For most affairs who the president is what's going on in washington dc Doesn't really affect you that much day to day and that might seem like something strange to say But it's true in a lot of ways in a lot of ways what changes where you live How you live what you pay for what all this kind of stuff is affected by your local government Now despite the fact that we don't really focus on that a lot that is There is a whole lot that happens at that local level and of course that affects the federal level level as well Now one concept out there that Kaplan might have mentioned it, but it's common among other critics of democracy Who don't want to replace it with totalitarian or totalitarianism or something like that Suggest what I guess you could call subsidiarity and that's the idea that if Some kind of political organization Happens it should happen at the lowest possible level ever. That is if you I mean it's in the united states, of course, we have this idea of states rights But it actually goes further than that that is if you have a political Issue if you have some kind of social issue to deal with should be dealt with at the closest level to you Now this isn't just a way of keeping your eggs in different baskets politically It's not just a way of making sure that we are all or not on the same sinking ship It also serves to put the consequences of your political behavior very close to where you actually live That is if you make a particular decision about Of something financial or something with respect to immigration Or something with respect to a social policy or zoning laws or any amount of political decision making If you make those and they happen in your community and that's where your Decisions affect them. That's something that you affects you great very greatly and you are much more incentivized to Educate yourself or be informed of the issues when you're making some kind of decision So in a lot of ways localizing decision making even if you still have democracy even if even if you have A much more local democracy or local rule This gets rid of a lot of the problems because it reduces rational irrationality people might have their biases But they're much easier to overcome when you have that sort of damocles over you that Your decisions in an election of you know, 100 or so people might affect you quite a great deal And so you have every incentive to make the right choices Now, of course, there are plenty of other Band-aids for solutions for Replacements for and comments on democracy that we can talk about in another episode We've only touched the surface here. We didn't even talk about arrows and possibility theorem Can you believe it? But i'm going to go ahead and draw this to a close and remember as always if you guys are still watching this on youtube Don't you don't you don't got to watch it on youtube go to notrelated.xyz There there's going to be the rss link to this podcast get it on the podcast I see every week more and more and more people are using it on the podcast and less people are using it on youtube So I guess that's good even though theoretically i'm getting money In monetization on youtube, but whatever use it's always best to use the actual podcast RSS it's there. Everything is nice and tagged for you. I'm such a nice guy If you have any questions about this episode any suggestions for what you want to see Email me at luke at luke smith.xyz And you can email any donations with your comments and I will read them out at paypal.me Slash luke m smith. That's m as in Oh running out of m words um Metric metric system. Okay, that'll be enough. All right. Well, I'll see you guys next time Oh, wait. Yeah, I should probably say what I'm no, I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do Next time on I actually haven't quite decided. I always like to make the decisions as late as possible but there are two books in mind And uh, well, I'm not going to tell you you'll find out. See you next time