How Do You Know? The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge

Citation

Adler, J.E. (2010), "How Do You Know? The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 37 No. 8, pp. 649-652. https://doi.org/10.1108/03068291011060670

This insightful, informative, wide ranging, and valuably discomforting book offers a rational explanation of widespread citizen ignorance, focusing mainly on advanced Western democratic nations. The heart of the argument is that the benefits to citizens, were they to attempt to improve their political knowledge, are not worth the costs in terms of effort and lost opportunities.

Hardin is developing a major political economic thesis that, since individual citizens have little influence on the political process, the costs to obtain new information generally outweigh the benefits. The sharpest application of the economic argument is to voting, though unlike extensive ignorance, there is comparatively dutiful participation in voting. Part of the explanation is the immediate feedback from voting, and elsewhere Hardin offers further explanation (74, 81, 187).

In Chapter 2, Hardin applies the argument to explain citizens' impoverished scientific knowledge, which furthers the old conflict between science and the humanities, as well as the renewed one between religion and science. The rational ignorance of scientific knowledge extends to medical knowledge. Discussion in this chapter lays the foundation for Hardin's final two chapters, which culminates in a sustained critique of the pretensions of creationism, intelligent design, and anti‐evolutionary teaching in its myriad forms, as well as of the “crippled” epistemology of extremists.

The book is chock full of asides that display the explanatory richness of the argument:

Many of the subjects of vast numbers of experiments on rationality that seem to show people are irrational might better be seen as evidence that good reasoning is costly and not always worth mastering (112).

Or this:

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects to reconcile science and religion, has offered grants for research on ID [intelligent design]. Proposals “never came in,” an official of the foundation says […] (55‐56).

But mainly the book is chock full of disturbing evidence (mostly from the USA) of our great ignorance of political and historical facts, and our extensive reliance on uneven testimony (hearsay). For one of numerous absorbing facts “Most Americans grossly overestimate how much foreign aid the United States gives” (60). The ignorance has a profound affect on voting patterns. 22 percent of the population are “conflicted conservatives”: they vote for conservatives on this issue, when their actual views allow for much higher foreign aid – more in line with liberalism. Reliance on biased testimony and path dependent knowledge can grossly distort judgments such as by allowing personal interests in a small number of areas to dominate one's voting preferences (68‐9).

Hardin uses the economic model to contrast institutional, individual, and cultural knowledge. In Chapter 8, Hardin takes culture itself to be a product of knowledge, and bound by it. The costs of improved knowledge is high, given the dependence of cultures on cliques, personal relations, and norms that contribute to cooperation in part by excluding other cultures. Endemic to maintaining culture is conservatism, reliance on authorities, path dependence, and an impermeability to outside knowledge. The economic argument is extended to a functional account of the persistence of culture. Hardin discusses Charles Taylor's argument that cultures must be a social good, and he find the argument wanting for, roughly, wallowing in the naturalistic fallacy.

Hardin defends a traditional form of liberalism that emphasizes restraints on government interferences with individual pursuits (Chapter 4). The argument draws on Hardin's comparison of the purposefulness, vastness, and technical facility of institutions to gather, store, and retrieve information with the restrictions on individual knowledge (e.g. 124). While individuals cannot then check on an institution's use of its knowledge, institutions are greatly limited in their knowledge of individual citizens. Yet, policies require inter‐subjective comparisons, but, given knowledge limitations, institutions will not be able to fine‐tune these policies to varied, local circumstances (86). These policies are bound to have “unintended consequences.” So liberalism and economic epistemology are well met: knowledge is diffuse and cannot be aggregated, which fits liberalism's “decentralization of initiative” (83) and its correlative recommendation for restrictions on government coercive power. Hardin's liberalism is “melioriarist.” Social policies require trade‐offs, which cannot either always be mutual advantageous or satisfy a Pareto criterion (132).

In Chapter 5, Hardin's economic rationality approach leads him to a critical, yet still sympathetic, assessment of utilitarianism. From its universalist perspective, utilitarianism notoriously makes excessive demands on us for action, but as well, though less commented on, for information. Discussion here extends the criticism of many standard examples in moral theory as resting on questionable “intuitions”. Straightforward intuitions against lying are not compelling (105), though practices of promise keeping and honesty do serve rational self‐interest (111). These conflicts are profoundly realized in the Prisoner's dilemma. Yet, reflection on Prisoner's dilemmas signal various areas of hope (if, say, the dilemma is “iterated”) that Hardin touches on here and which he fruitfully explores in other works.

Three omissions from the core discussion detract from Hardin's thesis. Recall that the central argument is that, given the tiny influence of any citizen, the benefits will typically outweigh the costs of improving knowledge. Consequently:

[…] none of these conclusions is an indictment of citizens for their ignorance. They are likely to be ignorant because it is rational or sensible for them to be ignorant (61; for a nice illustration 112).

The first omission is obvious: the internet. For the obtaining of simple facts across an endless range of subjects, the internet is a huge and easy resource with many well known sites, e.g. web MD for medical information and FactCheck.org for political data. Given competition, heavily challenged resources like Wikipedia are reliable across a large number of uncontroversial topics and, given competition, organization, and time, it is likely to improve. For the recent health care debate in the USA, I “googled” comparisons between Obama's plan and recent Republican supported plans, and instantly received a comparative study of three, as well as links to the originals. The analysis settled (for me) a crucial issue: that the plans were very similar. The total time invested was no more than for reading a few articles in my morning newspaper. Of course, once we go beyond simple “facts”, especially towards opinionated topics, the costs accelerate in determining good sources.

The second omission is the low‐cost of dissent as a spur to information acquisition. Researchers who have focused on problems of “groupthink” and extremism, stress that these distortions depend on excessive social norms to foster group harmony, which result in silencing diversity of views. But this facade of harmony is easily disrupted if there is merely one or very few dissenters, even in a large group, who are not dismissed. Their dissent is sufficient to drive critical scrutiny and motivate the obtaining of information along less biased routes. Since scant few dissenters are required, the costs are relatively small. I expect that this low‐cost benefit of dissent extends to non‐homogenous and purposive groups, e.g. a local town committee charged with determining whether to invest funds to create a business district.

The third omission bears on the implication of the economic rationality argument that not only are citizens justified in their extensive ignorance, but also that there is no ground or opening to weaken their confidence in their ignorance and to persuade them of feasible alternatives. The opening for such persuasion is Socratic: citizens are not reluctant to express strong opinions on matters of science, religion, medicine, and politics. Those opinions tacitly claim to be backed by representative evidence. Even if a sense that one has satisfied that claim is easy to gain through rationalization and self‐selection of one's audience, the claim places a burden of proof upon citizens to defend the adequacy of their evidence and so knowledge.

One way to press this burden is actually suggested by Hardin early on (2, 7), but he does not follow it up – a partial omission. Two kinds of uncertainty apply to our pursuit of a body of knowledge: uncertainty about parts of that body knowledge, which will prove useful, even if the body collectively may not, and uncertainty as to the future course of one's life where that body (or parts of it) will prove useful, though not evident now. When students ask sarcastically “Why do I need to learn this stuff?” about some liberal‐arts subject like algebra, they can be correct as to how that subject appears in respect of their current interests and plans. Yet that subject as a body, or more likely either distributively (in parts) or as a prerequisite to other learning (e.g. statistics), will prove of practical value within evolving, and often only weakly anticipated plan changes as one moves into the future.

Even in the present, a citizen can be correct about the practical irrelevance of a body of knowledge collectively, but fail to recognize parts of it that will further his current interests or pursuits. A teacher or guide or advisor may be able to convince the citizen that some significant part is likely to be valuable, even if there is less assurance as which parts. These two uncertainties expose a serious, if indeterminate, risk for citizens who not only comply with the rationality argument in their ignorance, but also who take their current assessment to immunize them from rational regret.