A Conversation with Garett Jones on Democracy
On democracy and oligarchy, Aristotle, courage, women’s suffrage and open borders, political legitimacy, and metaethics.
Garett Jones is an economist and author who is Professor of Economics at George Mason University. His research interests include macroeconomics, monetary economics, and the microfoundations of economic growth. In addition to his academic work, Garett has also served as Economic Policy Adviser to Senator Orrin Hatch and as a staff economist to the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress. His books include Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less, and The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left. You can learn more about him on his website and follow him on Twitter.
Vatsal: You observe that there is often vagueness, even contradiction, in how people use the term “democracy”. For example, they may describe the independence of the judiciary or the central bank as democratic, not realizing that this actually makes them undemocratic. There is a tendency to describe as democratic what is really good governance. Do you find a similar conflation between the descriptive and normative in the use of the term “equality”? Felix Oppenheim pointed to the tendency to apply the term to “those, and only those, institutions or policies which one wishes to commend, and to qualify as inegalitarian those of which one disapproves”.
Garett Jones: I’d say it’s worse with democracy. With equality, at least in U.S. discussions over the last three or so decades, there’s been a clear distinction between “equality of opportunity” versus “equality of result”. Further, the word “equality” seems to be used by presumption to refer to equality of opportunity, which led progressive leftists to turn to the neglected term equity, which now means something a lot like equality of result. I’d be happy if popular discussions of the nature of democracy were as nuanced as popular discussions of equality!
Vatsal: You suggest that Aristotle would describe modern democracies as a polity—a mix of democracy and oligarchy. In Politics, Aristotle says that the many, though ordinary as individuals, can collectively be better than the best few, “just as a feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of a single purse”. Some have seen in this an instrumentalist justification for democracy and made the case that the cognitive diversity for solving collective problems that democracy enables produces better decisions than rule by experts. How do you think Aristotle would evaluate his observation against modern evidence?
Garett Jones: Aristotle was also deeply worried that democracy gave too much political power to the poor, who would vote for endless benefits for themselves. So while Aristotle was open to getting a lot of participation from the masses, he also emphasized that the middle classes—people probably best interpreted as owners of small- to medium-sized businesses—were an extremely important class in creating good governance. In Book 4 of the Politics, section 1295, he says:
[S]urely the ideal of the state is to consist as much as possible of persons that are equal and alike, and this similarity is most found in the middle classes; therefore the middle-class state will necessarily be best constituted in respect of those elements of which we say that the state is by nature composed.
That’s something he had in common with Friedrich Hayek, by the way, though apparently for different reasons—Hayek was concerned that the rise of office workers, the proletarianization of the bourgeoisie, would lead to a class of affluent folks who didn’t have the lived experience of meeting a payroll. That led Hayek to worry that even fairly affluent citizens might vote to take a nation down the road to serfdom.
So would Aristotle mostly agree with what I said in 10%? I think so—since I’m arguing that he’s right! I point out that successful governments get the right balance of democracy with oligarchy, of mass and elite influence, and I argue that there’s a Goldilocks point, a happy medium. I call that tradeoff the Democracy Laffer Curve.
And if there’s one point Aristotle kept making throughout his writings, it’s that best safety lies in moderation. He called that optimal balance between democracy and oligarchy polity, and I think that while we’d surely disagree on precise policy conclusions, he’d be fascinated by the last century of serious data-driven research that’s looked into where the optimal balance between democracy and oligarchy might lie.
Vatsal: Speaking of Aristotle, you have written about how intelligence predicts most of the virtues that Deirdre McCloskey argues were crucial in the rise of the modern commercial world, with the exception of fortitude. Could qualities like courage, which might not correlate with traditional measures of competence, be more consequential in shaping institutional effectiveness than we currently recognize? I’m particularly thinking about your response to the question your colleague Tyler Cowen asked regarding the cases where voters’ judgments are more likely to be better than those of experts, where you referenced academic indoctrination. I’m also thinking of the incident you mention in the introduction of your book.
Garett Jones: Bravery can help and it can hurt—and the old saying goes, “He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day”. So too much bravery is a mistake, and getting the level of bravery right depends on the situation. Many an angry young man has decided to be too courageous, too brave, and quickly wound up in prison or dead. There’s a Goldilocks level of courage.
But to compare the value of courage versus intelligence: there’s no Goldilocks level of intelligence—the more the better, as far as we can tell! Smarter people make more money, produce more inventions, save more, and so on. They are more likely to be nearsighted (raises hand), so that counts as a negative, and I’m open to other idiosyncratic downsides of being smarter, but on net it’s something one wants more of.
On the incident: you’re referring to the time I got a call from George Mason University’s Campus Police letting me know that someone had left a very hostile (but not physically threatening) voicemail message on a campus number. Fortunately, nothing came of that. I got that call a day or two after I’d given a campus talk on the ideas underlying 10% Less Democracy, and the talk attracted a lot of negative attention from a couple of progressive media outlets. The most influential one was written by Zaid Jilani, who I suspect has moderated his views quite a bit since then.
Thinking of my own situation as an academic who has taken on some risky research topics, I can say that through the great luck of being in two supportive economics departments (first at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and then at GMU), and perhaps through exercising some good judgment from time to time, I’ve been able to accomplish quite a lot, and to reach quite a few people. But I do think that maximal bravery would have been a mistake. I’ve known quite a few well-educated folks who have worked in areas similar to my own and have real career difficulties. It might be honorable to be a courageous scholar, but Falstaff was right:
What is honor? A word ... Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No.
So getting one’s dose of courage right is probably as important as getting a nation’s dose of democracy right.
Vatsal: The reforms you propose for achieving a better balance between democracy and oligarchy are marginalist, and you are skeptical of radical proposals like open borders, at least in the most innovative nations. I wanted to ask a question related to the tension between, on the one hand, the tendency to open the floodgates, as it were, in various social spheres—markets, speech, political power—and, on the other, the preference for a more incremental approach. As an example, we can consider John Stuart Mill’s demand for women’s suffrage alongside his advocacy for the more competent to have more votes. Perhaps the former would have sounded as sweeping as the proposal for open borders does today, while the latter would have seemed more reasonable, especially given Britain’s disproportionate role in innovation during that period. What kind of analysis could have helped someone foresee which of these proposals would succeed and which wouldn’t, based on the kind of evidence available at the time?
Garett Jones: If one is trying to guess the policy effects of women’s suffrage, common sense with the evidence of the day would have given you pretty much the same answer as much later statistical research: women care a lot about children’s health and early childhood education, that wouldn’t have been a controversial claim at the time. And in fact, it appears that women’s suffrage caused big increases in education and health spending. And while women had less formal education than men, it probably wouldn’t have been too controversial to claim that women, on average, were about as smart as men in some general sense (a fact confirmed by IQ tests developed later). So women had differences in policy preferences that mattered—and in my view, women’s policy preferences for more health and education spending were an improvement for the era.
But simultaneously, women had negligible differences with men on our best single measure of voter skill and voter foresight—what we now call measured intelligence. That means there wasn’t good reason to think that women’s suffrage would create a notable risk to voter quality. I think all that could have been foreseen to a respectable degree.
I think that same analysis could be applied to a hypothetical open borders scenario with the realistic assumption of voting rights within a decade or so. Add up the best-guess effects of changes in voter preferences and changes in average voter skills, and you’d have a good starting point for thinking about changes in government policy caused by open borders.
Vatsal: The Economist, in its very positive review of your book, also highlighted the moral component of democracy, stating, “Less democracy may mean more sensible outcomes, but it also means less legitimacy”. Would your response be similar to that of David Hume, who stressed the unfeasibility of Lockean consent and focused instead on good outcomes, and Jeremy Bentham, who also argued that legitimacy depends on outcomes?
Garett Jones: Yes, good outcomes are their own source of legitimacy. Ray Fair’s model of presidential elections puts a lot of weight on election year real income growth and all four years of the inflation rate—and voters reward politicians who rule during periods of low inflation and high real income growth. No surprise there!
But on top of that, people love a ruler, they love a de facto monarch, a head of state who can serve as a focal point. And independent, undemocratic judges are central to The Economist’s vision of legitimate government, as they are to my own! So The Economist is playing it a bit cute, arguing that their version of Legitimate Democracy (which includes undemocratic judges and central bankers who can’t be recalled let alone chosen by the masses) is real democracy while any substantial tweaks (even those which retain frequent elections!) are going too far.
In reality, we’ve inherited this weird blend of elite and mass control of our governments and we’ve just decided to call that democracy. We could tinker with it quite a bit—for example, by reinventing these upper houses of the legislature and turning them into an epistocratic check on government—and it would still feel like a democracy.
Vatsal: Since you take an instrumentalist view towards governance, I’m curious what ethical assumptions guide your support or opposition to policies on a more fundamental level. Are you an intuitionist, like Cowen and Bryan Caplan? Caplan describes you as a meta-ethical moral relativist—would you agree with that? What is your view on utilitarianism, especially its instrumentalist approach to truth? Do you think social contract theories, like contractualism, offer a better alternative for overcoming the limitations of utilitarianism?
Garett Jones: I didn’t know Caplan had described me publicly that way. I’m not a moral relativist in the same sense that I’m not a Santa Claus relativist. Santa’s not there for those who believe in him, and the same is true with moral facts. So actually, I’m a moral nihilist: I think talking about what true morality is like is akin to talking about what real Hamlet is like. The beginning of any serious conversation about Hamlet is realizing he’s just a fictional character.
Another way to put it is that I believe that moral preferences exist, but I believe that moral facts do not exist. I have my own moral preferences, ways I’d like to see the world turn out, and utilitarianism is part of that, since I care about the well-being of a lot of people along with the well-being of a lot of non-human animals. But excellence, greatness, human achievement—those are all central to my view of why I think humanity deserves at least some greater weight than that of non-human animals. And human excellence is, by and large, a team effort—it’s something that requires successful collaboration and cooperation. So I hope that my species continues to find ways to work with each other to create excellence.
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