Whose opinions matter?

Everybody thinks that they know politics. This, I've gathered, is a common complaint among political scientists, not just mine. While many people will defer in conversation to the genuine expertise of someone else, most people seem to believe that every citizen in a liberal democracy has a fundamental right to hold whatever beliefs and make whatever conclusions they wish with regard to politics. Because telling someone that something they believe with regard to politics is wrong is considered bad manners, I usually don't say anything. It's bad enough when people make plainly nonsensical claims about the "meaning" of elections or what one political party or another stands for, but I find it more aggravating when people make value assertions that are flatly at odds with other values they committed to a minute earlier. This happens with shocking regularity.

With celebrities and other notable high profile people weighing in all the time on yesterday's elections, particularly the presidential election, I've been left wondering several times how I feel about the generalized sense of expertise that people hold with regard to politics. I've gotten several media requests to comment on the presidential election, particularly about how presidential politics have changed in the last two elections, but I always defer, since I don't study campaign or voter behavior. I've answered a couple of questions about election litigation, but haven't gotten too many of those, and now it looks like I won't get any more. Even though I am a political scientist, I don't feel qualified to make "expert" conclusions in many areas of politics, and I'm sure most political scientists feel that way. Still, Sean Penn and Bruce Springsteen apparently feel that successful acting or music careers qualify them to make conclusions about politics that other people really need to hear about.



To broaden the issue, I've been thinking about how different prominent people, even people who are prominent for their intelligence or other cerebral gifts, talk about electoral politics. An article the other day in the Guardian about Tom Wolfe focuses on his attitudes toward the political opinions within his own Upper East Side community. The article notes the preoccupation with sexual immorality of his new novel, and his sympathy with the Bush administration and the support of it he observes among "Americans," with whom he contrasts the liberal elite. Although literary figures like Wolfe are often asked for, and readily give, their opinions on matters like this, are they really more qualified than anybody else to hold valuable opinions about politics? Wolfe and the other novelists respond to the choice offered in the presidential election just as your friends or the randomly chosen voters speaking to reporters do. They know how Bush or Kerry makes them feel, or what support or opposition to one or the other candidate "means" in a literary or symbolic sense, but don't have anything to say about what a second Bush or first Kerry administration would mean in regard to governance. By that I mean that presidents make thousands of political decisions over the course of their tenures, and the differences between those choices can have a substantial impact on the quality of public services, or the collective goals that the country may or may not commit itself to, or the laws that we enact, or regulations to which we are subject, etc. Wolfe feels that the feeling of his "liberal elite" circle is out of touch with the feeling of ordinary Americans. I can get this observation from anybody. I'd appreciate an observation based on some informed thought. Wolfe says nothing about President Bush that can be translated into any expectation of what another four years of his administration will mean in a sense that anybody can use.

Not that I find the responses of Russell Banks, E.L. Doctorow, or Norman Mailer noted in the other article more informed. I have my own feelings about the President as a human being, but as a political scientist and as a voter, my thoughts about him as a leader and as a policymaker are more relevant. These people may be interesting writers of fiction, but they're observations on politics are singularly uninsightful.

The issue of authority, and the lack of it, does remind me of another article I read recently, a review of a book called Bad Thoughts by a philosopher and management consultant named Jamie Whyte. Although its author sounds like a real pain in the ass, it sounds like a potentially useful review of logical fallacies. Still, the interview is not particularly encouraging. He rails against, among other things, the mistake of trusting someone who has achieved some celebrity (such as having published a book,) rather than relying upon genuine expertise. Then, as an example, he cites the British Medical Association's recommendation that the fat content of foods be taxed to improve public health. He responds first by questioning whether the BMA "knows anything about how we should live" and then asserting that the BMA knows nothing about what the effects of a tax on fatty foods might have.

The nonsensical element of this outburst (or at least, the first) is the assumption that recommending tax policy is a normative conclusion about lifestyle. The BMA might not be authorized to decide whether people would prefer eating fatty foods to being healthy, but they probably know a lot more than a philosopher about the social costs (in terms of public and private sector spending on health care) due to the consumption of fatty foods. The BMA, as an organization, probably includes or has contact with epidemiologists and biostatisticians who can opine credibly on the effect of reducing fat consumption. They may have even contacted economists who could inform them about Pigovian taxes, commonly used to reduce the negative externalities produced by people who make choices that impose costs on others, which is exactly what they recommended. A person can still choose to eat fatty foods, but only by agreeing to pay for the social costs of that choice.

After saying the BMA should "shut up," since they clearly know less about policy than Mr. Whyte (this after insisting that only people with genuine expertise should be trusted,) he goes on to assert that the BMA's recommendation "should be an input to the decision making of somebody else." Maybe I missed something, but that's what the BMA did when they recommended to the government (who is someone else) that they should tax fatty foods. Certainly the government, which is a mechanism for assessing the relative merit of competing values if nothing else, can decide whether the health and consequent economic effects are worth it. Apart from that, now Whyte is asserting that he is an expert in organizational or collective decision-making, which he is not.

He attributes the BMA's fallacious recommendation to "this blind assumption that health is everything" which he attributes to "doctors (who) often seem to forget that" we are all mortal. In his very next statement, he raises the "motive fallacy," which he explains, sort of, as the dismissal of arguments because they are alleged to be motivated by the personal commitments of "tribal groups." How this differs from saying that the BMA's policy recommendation is based on the blind assumption of doctors that health is everything is lost on me. I'd have much more confidence in his book about how to avoid bad thinking if he didn't commit the fallacies he warns against seconds after warning against them.

Whyte pontificates on several other subjects, including behavioral economics and psychology, of which he appears to have a lay understanding, oblivious to the irony of it all. Some things are more credible than others, but I was particularly struck by his confidence to conclude on matters of politics and policy with no grasp of what he was talking about. Bad thinking indeed.

He does slam celebrities for talking about politics, though, and I can get behind that.