Honestly, that is not acceptabl. To me. That is not born. Childhood. Just so i can do a job that i love. So im not breaking news here, ive set all of this to my employers, they know this too, and that is my challenge now decided what im going to do. Can i find a way to work with my schedule at fox and continue to do the kelley file and see my children and if the answer to that is no then i will have to make a different decision, because they are most important. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] cspan, where history unfolds a daily. In 1979 cspan was created as a Public Service by americas cabletelevision companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. After words is next on booktv. Georgetown University Philosophy professor Jason Brennan discusses his book against democracy in which he argues democratic medical systems fail to provide the best outcomes and calls for a form of government run by the most knowledgeable in society. P hes interviewed by david boaz, Vice President of the cato institute. Jason brennan, you teach philosophy at Georgetown University has election of donald trump major academic colleagues more sympathetic to your case against democracy . Guest absolutely. Its made them more sympathetic and a general its public more sympathetic. My best evidence was doing an npr interview a couple years ago and people were calling against. I did it again a year ago and people called in and were saying the opposite, like i know. What what we do about this . Its not that people are sympathetic to the point of saying i might be right but rather sympathetic to the point of saying clearly theres a problem and its time to think about solutions. Host some of us without if Hillary Clinton gotten elected that might also been an argument against democracy. Guest thats right. None of the things im saying, i didnt predict trump was going b to win. In a sense am i worried they dont depend upon brexit, they dont depend upon a Trump Victory it is true given how my colleagues can to think and their generally speaking but i leftleaning that when trump comes to power they worry more. Host libertarians have been saying since the election we told you not to give the president so much power. E guest absolutely. Most people say they care about procedural constraint, they care about checks and balances. E i think they believe when they are in opposition they start worrying about procedure. When they are in power they want to get things done. Anything that gets in the way a seems like an unnecessary antiquated roadblock. Of course thats how the reason. People are not very principal about the commitment i think to check some bounces. Host thats true of a lot of times. I heard David Axelrod saying the filibuster will be aware of constraining. Send them a call as an institutionalized who will not change the filibuster. He sounded much more sympathetic to the filibuster as a way to limiting a president power that i think it would been eight years ago. Guest that seems absolutely right. Host the basic thesis of your book is that most voters just are not smart enough or informed enough to cast a sensible vote. Guest thats right. In essence, weve been doing studies about her behavior and knowledge for over 65 years. Whats interesting is how little they know has remained constant. 65 years ago people knew hardly anything. Even though were smart phones or contain all the information at our fingertips, using to look at pictures of cats and argue about meaningless things. Voters hardly know anything. Voters hardly know anything. And phil who said the two simple facts i know about voter knowledge, like the mean is low and variance is high. If youre to sort of take the american electorate and give them questions about basic questions relevant to an election. Done by the National American election studies. 25 of voters get through like a bplus. The next middle. They do roughly about the same and the bottom is worse. And give them multiple choice and they get more than 75 of the question wrong. Thats the electorate of the people who vote. When we talk about who stays home, its even less. If its arguing in the book that dfrjts. Police information is a good thing because you want your plumber to know medicine since id like them to know what the effects are. Why does it matter whether the voters are well informed . Knowing they have stomach pains, its enough to make me want the medicine to go away, or that its stomach cancer, i have to go to an expert to check that out. It may imbue some nationaling and expertise. Maybe when you look around your hometown, people are unemployed and maybe its beyond what most know, they dont know unemployment sta tadisticsadist they might have reasonable outcome preferences. Maybe theyre reasonable in assessing those things, but then to figure out what you want. What policies you want to inmriment. What leaders you want to. You need to know whats going on. If you say theres a lot of crime, im going to increase the drug war, stop and frisk policies. Anoth another the placing people, you know that you dont want you have to look at which policy is going to work betterer. Being a foe tiff is they mostly dont know that. Its carries a celebration to what democrats were to do and we generally goen know that and it who are the abing nom micks. Just burg you the answer, awe are vet very and from princeton, they disagree a lot even though theyre welleducated. Simple facts, never the necessary, we can see if its there. And in a book he looks at data from the National American revelation studies and asking people how demographics, your one income, low income or that youre unemployed and im unemployed. Hes looking for poem, who they are, what they know and what you cant. You can term how spifl is a different result. People are involved regardless of the demographic and they tend to move toward one set of policies and then we can look at the so thor, they fient to backed libeling a and they just Different Things with the different data sites and paul krugman and i disagree on a lot of things, but in general, theyre more favored in criminal Justice Reform and increases taxes opposite the difference than reducing the policies they dont go to a direct generation, theyre nuanced. Nuanced although it does team like they tend in the libertarian direction. I tend to think if you understood the world better, youd be the contrarian. They are in general, the lightened economic one, then the unsolved. If anything they might be more nuanced pro fell wear state department who advocate a significant agree of economic and personal. Which to come extented is the sort of concensus of where the country is. We have a welfare state but we understand that its expensive. We have more or less free trade. We have been moving into the blowings, gay people, jews, immigrants. All of those are kind of the concensus and theyre therefore this influences the way it happened. And one thing, the work being done by benjamin page and mark dylans. Mark dylans has a good book in it he asks, when people in the public disagree about what policies to implement. People with a 10 percentile of income or 50 percent tam percentile, and johnson and obama are unlikely and george w. Bush many of my colleagues would call a plutocat. He notes that high income voters tend to go high information voters. Low information people tend to be low information voting. Pro free trade, free gay rights, and the low information order and have offices of preferences and it looks like part of what might be happening, politicians it to some degree getting away with things that the median voter doesnt want. And my friend has an explanation, maybe this is why democracy, theres significant independence among the politicians and they often do peeve pills than what we would expect if the public got what it wanted. You describe three citizens, hobbits, hooligans and vulcans. And make it easier how people think and react. So if youve ever seen a lord of the rings movies, or read the books, even better. Hobbits hobbits dont care about the outside world, they would eat their lunch and smoke their pipes. The equivalent, would be a hiz who doesnt have a firm or business, and they just want to lead their lives. The average, say, nonvoter in the u. S. Is a hobbit, so described. If youve ever been to a soccer game in another country, where people care about soccer. You know that there are these sports fans, just really rabid by that. Sports fans consume information and talk about plays that took place 40 years ago, they have stats on top of of your head. Take tom brady and deflate gate. Of course not if he guilt. The renes of the country, of course, i think hes youre getting the same information, but it looks as if your side looks good. The clinical analog, knows about politics or has information that ignore information. And they see members of the other political teams as rivals whom they may describe as evil. They dont process everythings in rational way and i use this as an ideal type. Theyre having a dispassionate belief. Its not that i advocate the rule of the vulcans, rather, i think that other democratic spearists spokes about what, how it would react with vulcan, when we have hobbits. Are there any vulcans . It sounds like were not. Some people are more vulcanish, theyre better behaved. They frequently try to get into the heads of people whom they disagree. I think some become closer to that than others. And name one jeff brennan, not a relative of mine. But once you test whether youre an example . Can you find a world view. And the touring test. The touring test, its supposed to be where the compute computers can communicating with humans. And maybe theyre intelligent and in order for a line, are you table to look and depend say that its not yours. Except we find, this book written, it has the question along with a few other questions. What she found. If i ask you, okay, why would anyone be a republican . And your answer is because theyre student and evil. That predicts youre involved and you vote early and often. If on the other hand you say im a democrat. Let me explain why smart publics will say. That you dont get to communicate and you have to stay home. It looks like we have the heightened information information stretchings to become trust and hes between different views and the ideal democratic problems, but the oesh we have people, but theyre not that into. You dont want them making the decisions, they want someone who brings pure rationality in. Maybe its good when youre fighting clingens in outer space. But im not sure when it taste the choosing policies and i think we can look at people how well are their guts and i dont think they do well. And are your Economic Issues a lot of what i know most about. But when we think about trade policy, its not that they understand the economists point of view and find fault with it, they dont understand why commerce would be in favor of this in the first place. Well, tray leaves these people behind and they dont know what to do. They dont know how to test that, i think that were zero tum and they lived in areas 128 level or less. And i always looked people like a loring and the foreigners, this dont trust them. They see interacting with them as dangerous and that kind of men amount might have been up cess if youre a tribe years ago. I think we cant trust our guts and emotion. We have to test our heads more. Is it in unusual for economics professors to know from this. The philosophical gourmet, university of arizona is ranked number one for the mrifl policy. Its also weird for people who concentrate not just on philadelphia itself, but rather, the methodology that hoelgdz that before you flphilosophize, its not how everyone disagrees or things. They say im doing ideal theory. Im trying to figure out what they would look like if case they were answers. Go to my moral critical curb, from better to worse and hand it over to the social scientifics. And i spend, the class i teach tomorrow morning will repend a got half of the cemetery looking at social signs. Thats probably useful. Probably the most famous thing william f buckley, the founder of the conservative movement, id rather be governed by the 2,000 people on the directory than those that go to haar to be. Maybe ask why would say that, but then you think hes wrong . Yeah, so, i think one of the worries people have, if you talk about alternatives to democracy, theyre sort beguiled and maybe thinking of certain things and he might be right about that. You know, i would say id rather be gaff verned by the Harvard Economic park and i had to the take the people and maybe id go the other way. And youre arguing in your book and epistocrist. Its not in my dictionary, or its not in wikipedia. Its something if you concentrate on a small number and extremely educated people, theres a potential for real distortions to take place and people just believe bad ideas and they reinforce bad ideas among each other and thats why i might be worried of the harvard faculty as a whole. And there are some when pop propagate, they kind of pontificate to one another back and forth. I think hes right about that. But my mother is Something Like this. Democrat has bad incentives. Its props lower than ignorance. And misinformed. When you spread out power, youll have choices. If you concentrate on the few and people at the top, then you might have different disportions. You want something in between where political power is spread out widely. Its differents people coming in and other people with other kinds of information, but not giving an equal voice for those around the country regardless of what they know. Maybe its my mistake to have posed it that way because the harvard faculty is high on a come accommodati accommodating, there are more informed people who are not academics. So you do not argue in the books that academics should rule, your he an arguing that wellinvolved people should have more of a really in changing our leaders and policies. When you look at either, having a bachelors degree as opposed to a high school diploma, you do the main thing is if you know something. And if the democratic system you think of that as the power of the people and its supposed to be a system in which all citizens have equal political power, no country is a democracy. We explode 16 year olds, we include felonings, people who arent living there, they can vote. And thats what democracy is supposed to be. And the other term is which political power is by law aportioned in some way by knowledge. There are many ways of implementing this, one is the plato probably didnt advocate that its probably just a thought experiment. And other things that are plausible, plural voting. He want today give everybody at least one vote, but thought perhaps people who had more knowledge and credentials should get an extra vote to make sure that ignorant and misinformed voters dont carry the day. You could have a system you dont have the right to vote, but pass a quiz of political knowledge, identify who the candidates are and which Party Controls congress and two or three facts about what happened recently, then you get the right to vote. Otherwise you dont. And one from the mexican philosoph philosoph philosopher guerra. We have a campaign and then randomly select 20,000 people and they and only they are permitted to vote and first only if they have a confidence exercise, given materials and have to deliberate with one another, whether that can be done in an unbiased manner. You could have a system in way, something that brian kaplan toyed with. Laws are passed through normal Democratic Legislature the, but certain people have a chance to veto power over certain legislation on the grounds that was economically illiterate assuming theyre vetoing on the grounds that its unconstitutional and perhaps the legislature could override it with a majority vote. And the other one, system by oracle. Everyone votes and when you vote you put down your democratic information and of basic political knowledge. Whether its what candidate you want and policies you prefer with that data you can determine what can happen to the American People if they all got 100 on the quiz, what would they have preferred. The demographics and you do that, what the enlightened public wants, rather than what the unenlightened public wants. And thats are different forms. In this book im not advocating and not saying that we ought to do them. The book indicates that democracy is not in itself, its a simple procedure for producing just outcomes and the justice outcomes are independent of the procedure and if were able to find a procedure that works better, we should feel free to use it. Is the Electoral College in itself a form of epistocracy. People say well, its meant to make sure that, you know, some cities and states like, with like large cities dont have all the power and others claim its racist and the point was to reinforce slavery. Nevertheless at least some of the writers and people advocating it sounded, this was a one and final check who the president will be because if its a really bad person. The people pick a really bad person or whatever the process is, the president is a bad person, its one last check to replace that person with someone who might be better. Originally the people werent going to vote at all. The people were perceived not to know who the greatest man in the original 13 states were, but they would know who the leading man, the smartest man in their colonies were, their states at that point. So they would elect leading men from their states who it was presumed would have a broader understanding of the country and then those people would choose a president and that seems like a form of graduated democracy that ideally was intended to end up with people who knew more. Right. Making the final decision. Yeah, and its never really worked out that way. Weve always had a system, basically in which people vote for a president theyre not literally voting for a president. We could have the state legislatures pick the electors. Theyre picking the president and electors will rubber stamp it. Once in a while there will be a switched vote for another person, but there is no checks there. Its never actually worked out that way and probably never will. In your book, you quote the famous suffragist Katie Stanton who sees the vote as affirming the full citizenship and digitty of women. You say shes wrong. If people are excluded through a test simply by saying that women dont vote or blacks dont vote, but through a test, arent they being treated as second class citizens . And wont they at least