My Biases

Three institutions, a problem and a general approach

"Graffiti: BIAS" by Franco Folini is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

It is very easy to spot bias in others, but we are all biased in one way or another. In the last two posts, we have seen that the media needs to be more transparent about the judgement calls that go into the making of the news; and how fact-checking can be a political act. In that spirit, I would like to openly discuss my biases in favour of three institutions, tackling a knotty problem and a general approach to politics.

Liberal Democracy

In 1887, Lord Acton wrote a famous sentence in a letter to a clergyman: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The phrase became known as Acton’s dictum. It is probably the closest we have to a general law of politics, even though it doesn’t tell us why some people are more venal than others or how long it will take to corrupt someone well-meaning. If we take this idea seriously, we can see why war, genocide, famine and societal collapse will always be a real risk. Power will corrupt our leaders; and corrupt leaders will take bad decisions.

If we accept this dark view of power, we can recognize that liberal democracy is an institution that has slowly evolved over the centuries as people have experimented with ways of curtailing the power of their leaders. It has three legs. The most important is the youngest: Universal human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was agreed by the United Nations in 1948. It is designed to protect the right of individuals, families and minorities to live their lives as they please, even if their choices displease the government or a majority of the population.

The next leg is the oldest: The rule of law. Philosophers have been struggling with how to deal with bad governments since the people of Athens voted that Socrates was too annoying to be allowed to carry on living more than 2,400 years ago. The idea is to make our laws as universal as possible, to write them down and make them applicable to everyone, even our leaders. More recent developments include splitting power between the executive, legislative and judicial branches; having a free press to act as a counter-weight to the government; and embedding individual rights in written constitutions that are hard to change.

The final leg evolved slowly over the centuries: Regular rule-based elections. The principle is to have a mechanism to remove the worst politicians from power before they become too corrupt or do too much harm. It is important to note that elections are often misunderstood by populists as a way of establishing that a certain leader is channelling “the will of the people,” whatever that is supposed to mean. Unfortunately, populists often become authoritarians as they seek to change democratic constitutions to make it easier to suppress those who oppose what they see as “the will of the people.” I freely admit that I am biased against both populism and authoritarianism.

Permissionless Innovation

The great economic historian Deirdre McCloskey teaches us that modern capitalism is based on permissionless innovation. It developed in the Netherlands, spread to Britain and then the US and is now the dominant economic system in the world. Letting ordinary people try and improve things and then test whether the betterment has worked in markets has led to sustained economic growth. Compounding it over hundreds of years has led to what she calls the Great Enrichment. Those of us in the West are roughly 30x richer than those of our ancestors who lived before the Dutch began their experiment in economic freedom. The number is smaller in countries that have been late to develop this formula, but even so compounded economic growth based on innovation is the closest our species has come to magic.

Of course, many people on the left will find the word “but” bubbling in their brains. That is fine. I am trying to encourage critical thinking! It is certainly possible that humanity will one day develop a better economic system than capitalism. However, experiments to do so have a dark history. If you want to replace capitalism, the burden of proof is on you to come up with a better system, try it on a small scale, iron out the problems and then scale it up. Until you have done that, I freely admit to being biased against old-fashioned ideologies that want to smash capitalism.

The Welfare State

Let us return to Acton’s dictum: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It should be obvious that this applies in economics as much as it does in politics. Capitalism will tend to concentrate power in the hands of the winners. A huge amount of failure is the price we pay for innovation - most experiments will fail. It should be obvious that we need a counterweight to capitalism to curtail some of these issues. However, a light touch is probably best, as pressing the brake too hard can be counter-productive.

We can call this counterweight the welfare state, although actually it is a little more complex than that. Progressive taxation seems sensible; as do inheritance taxes, with a high threshold to avoid punishing the middle class. We need a high-quality and free education system so the children of the poor have a chance to improve their lives. We need to show solidarity with those who are unlucky, including ill health. Some right-wing populists and libertarians want to dismantle the welfare state. I freely admit to being biased against this project.

Climate Change

The single most pressing problem facing our species is probably climate change. I freely admit to being biased towards thinking seriously about this problem, while trying to preserve the three institutions mentioned above. Innovation needs to be discussed much more often in this context.

Skeptical Liberalism

Skepticism is the cornerstone of the Sharpen Your Axe project, alongside probabilistic thinking. One of the hardest lessons of skepticism is the idea that it is difficult to ever have enough information about complex situations. Isn’t it better to devolve decision-making to the lowest possible level, the individual? We might sometimes need to change that, but the burden of proof is always on the person who wants to curtail freedom. This idea isn’t new, but it retains its power today. Applying skeptical liberalism (or skeptical libertarianism for Americans) to climate change means we should be thinking about improving the incentives to developing cleantech and the disencentives to throwing plastic into the sea. It should be obvious that I am biased in favour of skepticism, individual freedom and thinking hard about incentives.

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the critical-thinking rabbit hole.

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.