Students for a Free Economy Clarkson Colloquium

“Marketing Freedom in the Age of the iPod”

Dear Colloquium Participant:

In this packet you will find the readings for each session of the Clarkson Colloquium. The event is primarily discussion based, so it is imperative that you complete the assigned readings.

I think you will find the readings to be very interesting and thought provoking. Before the readings for each session, there are a few questions you might want to keep in mind for the discussion at the event. Also, it may be very helpful to highlight, underline, and take notes on the readings.

I look forward to meeting you in person at the event, and am excited to hear your perspectives and thoughts on the material!

Sincerely,

Isaac M. Morehouse Director of Campus Leadership Mackinac Center for Public Policy [email protected]

Page 1 Contents

Session I – “Bringing Freedom to the Masses”

Reed, Lawrence W. The Inspiring Story of Thomas Clarkson: A Student’s Essay that Changed the World. Midland: Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 2005

Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Media, Inc. A Field Guide for Effective Communication. Washington, DC, 2004: Pages 1 – 8 (Chapter 1)

Session II – “Strategies for Mass Communication”

Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Media, Inc. A Field Guide for Effective Communication. Washington, DC, 2004: Pages 47 – 73 and page 93 (Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Conclusion)

Session III – “Communicating to the ‘Elites’”

Hayek, Friedrich A. The Intellectuals and Socialism. Washington, DC: The Institute for Human Studies

Nock, Albert Jay. Isaiah’s Job. From The Atlantic Monthly, 1936

Session IV – “Changing the Incentives”

Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson. Three Rivers Press, 1988: Pages 15 – 22 (Part One: The Lesson)

Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1994: Pages 148 – 167 (Chapter 10) *Abridged from original version*

Reed, Lawrence W. “Hayek Was Right: The Worst Do Get to the Top”. Mackinac Center Commentary. September 19, 2006

Caplan, Bryan. “The 4 Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters (And we’re all stupid voters.)”. Reason Magazine. October, 2007

Russel, Nathan J. “An Introduction to The Overton Window of Political Possibilities”. Mackinac Center Commentary. January 4, 2006

Friedman, Milton. Quote from letter to Richard J. Wilcke in 1981, quoted in "An Appropriate Ethical Model for Business and a Critique of Milton Friedman's Thesis," Richard J. Wilcke, The Independent Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, Fall, 2004, pages 187-209

Page 2 Session I “Bringing Freedom to the Masses”

Reed, Lawrence W. The Inspiring Story of Thomas Clarkson: A Student’s Essay that Changed the World. Midland: Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 2005

Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Media, Inc. A Field Guide for Effective Communication. Washington, DC, 2004: Pages 1 – 8 (Chapter 1)

Questions to consider:

How did Clarkson engage the public in an issue they showed little interest in? Would his tactics work today? How did he change the landscape and open new doors in the battle for ideas?

What does marketing in general have to teach us about marketing freedom specifically? Why do you think libertarians have done poorly in communicating via mass media? How do the authors strategies suggest improvement might be made? Is this realistic? Are there current successful examples?

Page 3

A STUDENT’S ESSAY THAT CHANGED THE WORLD - by Lawrence W. Reed -

Page 4 A STUDENT’S ESSAY Th a t CHANGED THE WORLD A STUDENT’S ESSAY Th a t CHANGED THE WORLD

This essay is dedicated to three of Thomas Clarkson’s spiritual heirs: two longtime friends and superb historians, Robert Merritt of Waterford, Conn., and Burton Folsom of Hillsdale, Mich.; and Dr. Hans F. Sennholz, a great economist and teacher who instilled a passion for liberty in many thousands of students over four decades at Pennsylvania’s Grove City College, my undergraduate alma mater. � o ma� —LWR C�arkso�

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� F��ew��dby John Blundell, Director General, Institute of Economic Affairs London If you leave my office, turn right and walk for, say, 300 yards, you’ll reach Victoria Tower Gardens on the bank of the Thames, across from Lambeth Palace. There you will find a glorious Victorian monument, and on the west side you will read these words: ERECTED IN 1865 BY CHARLES BUXTON MP IN COMMEMORATION OF THE EMANCIPATION OF SLAVES 1834 AND IN MEMORY OF HIS FATHER SIR T FOWELL BUXTON AND THOSE ASSOCIATED WITH HIM WILBERFORCE, CLARKSON, MACAULAY, BROUGHAM DR LUSHINGTON AND OTHERS.

For two centuries, Britain was the centre of the slave trade. Ships left England for West Africa, where cheap goods were traded for slaves. The boats then crossed the Atlantic, where the slaves were often traded for cotton, which was then brought back to the Liverpool Cotton Exchange to feed the textile mills of Lancashire. The monument on the Thames honors citizens who mustered the righteous indignation and formed the organizations that eventually took the “slave” out of the infamous phrase “slave trade,” vanquishing slavery itself within the vast British Empire. What a story Lawrence Reed tells here of Thomas Clarkson, a man who changed the way the world thought regarding this momentous issue! It is a testimony to passion, perseverance and the power of ideas. It should be read and re-read everywhere. If it is, it will help inspire new generations to similarly noble feats. Of course, few causes have the moral gravity of the crusade against slavery, but many important battles remain in the fight for human freedom today. When I first read Reed’s account of the Clarkson drama, the example of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman came to mind. He, too, had some ideas that were unconventional at the time. His insights and writings proved enormously influential in replacing the draft with an all-volunteer military, in making the case for limiting government’s involve- ment in many spheres of life, and in demonstrating that the disease of inflation was the product of mismanagement by monetary authorities. His visits to Clarkson’s homeland in the 1970s, organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs, convinced our country to end many destructive policies, with the result that rampant inflation and nationalisation of industry are things of the past. Like Clarkson, Friedman has focused on liberating people in our lifetime from shackles of one kind or another. Now in his 10th decade, he champions educational choice through the foundation he and his wife have established, and through his support of institutes like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. So the Clarkson story does have modern counterparts, even as it remains a classic example of the strategy economist F. A. Hayek outlined in his famous “The Intellectuals and Socialism”: Reach the intellectuals with reasoned argument. It will be their influence on society that will prevail, and the politicians will follow. The world needs more Clarksons, more Friedmans, more educational institutes like IEA and the Mackinac Center — and more essays like Larry Reed’s explaining how important these contributions have been. — John Blundell, April 2005, London MACKINAC CENTER FOR PUBLIC POLICY MACKINAC CENTER FOR PUBLIC POLICY Page 6 - 4 - - 5 - A STUDENT’S ESSAY Th a t CHANGED THE WORLD A STUDENT’S ESSAY Th a t CHANGED THE WORLD

s a former university professor, I’ve read thousands of students’ essays through the years — sometimes joyously, but just as often painfully. Occasionally, the process of researching and writing exerted a significant influence on a Astudent’s future interests and behavior. But of all the student essays ever written, I doubt that any had as profound an effect on its author and on the world as one that was penned 220 years ago at the University of Cambridge.

The university’s annual Latin essay contest only the start of a hellish experience — end- was known throughout Britain, and the honor less and often excruciating toil, with death at of winning it was highly prized. In 1785, the an early age. topic for the competition was prompted by a horrific human tragedy a few years before: Near the end of a long voyage from Britain to Africa to the West Indies, the captain of the British slave ship “Zong” had ordered his crew to throw 133 chained black Africans overboard to their deaths. He reckoned that by falsely claiming the ship had run out of fresh water, he could collect more for the “cargo” from the ship’s insurer than he could fetch at a slave auction in Jamaica.

No one in the Zong affair was prosecuted for murder. A London court ruled the matter a mere civil dispute between an insurance The “triangular trade” of the 18th century was a substantial component of the economy of Britain, its West firm and a client. As for the Africans, the Indian possessions and its American colonies, though judge declared their drowning was “just as if it came at the horrible expense of enslaving untold horses were killed,” which, as horrendous as numbers of Africans. it sounds today, was a view not far removed from the conventional wisdom that prevailed Moved by the fate of the Zong’s victims and the worldwide in 1785. indifference of the court, the university vice chancellor in charge of selecting the topic for Slavery, after all, was an ancient institution. the 1785 contest at Cambridge chose this ques- Even with our freedoms today, the number of tion: “Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare?” people who have walked the earth in bondage — Is it lawful to make slaves of others against far outnumbers those who have enjoyed even a their will? modest measure of liberty. Enter Thomas Clarkson, a man who, with a Indeed, perhaps the luckiest of the people handful of compatriots armed only with words, taken captive and bound for a life at the end would clutch the public by the neck and not of a lash were those who succumbed aboard let go until it consigned slavery to the moral ship, where mortality rates sometimes ran ash heap of history. The poet Samuel Taylor as high as 50 percent. Surviving the “Middle Coleridge would later call him a “moral steam Passage” across the Atlantic from Africa was engine” and “the Giant with one idea.”

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The original of this portrait us today, it is a landmark on the long, of Thomas Clarkson by Carl tortuous path to the modern conception of Frederik von Breda hangs in the National Portrait Gallery universal human rights. in London. More than two centuries later, that very spot is Clarkson, born in marked by a monument, not far from London. Wisbech in 1760, was a 25-year-old Cambridge This marker along a road near London commemorates the spot where, student when he de- in 1785, an anguished Clarkson cided to try his luck in dismounted his horse, fell to his knees and resolved to commit his life to the the essay contest. He antislavery cause. hoped to be a minister, and slavery was not a topic that had previously interested him. Still, Thus began Clarkson’s all-con- he plunged into his research with the vigor, suming focus on a moral ideal: meticulous care and mounting passion that No man can rightfully lay claim, would come to characterize nearly every day moral or otherwise, to owning of his next 61 years. Drawing on the vivid tes- another. Casting aside his plans timony of those who had seen the unspeakable for a career as a man of the cloth, he mounted cruelty of the slave trade firsthand, Clarkson’s a bully pulpit and risked everything for the essay won first prize. single cause of ending the evil of slavery.

What Clarkson had learned wrenched him to At first, he sought out and befriended the his very core. Shortly after claiming the prize, one group — the Quakers — who had already and while riding on horseback along a country embraced the issue. But the Quakers were road, his conscience gripped him. Slavery, he few in number and were written off by British later wrote, “wholly engrossed” his thoughts. society as an odd fringe element. Quaker men He could not complete the ride without fre- even refused to remove their hats for any man, quent stops to dismount and walk, tortured by including the king, because they believed it the awful visions of the traffic in human lives. offended an even higher authority. Clarkson At one point, falling to the ground in anguish, knew that antislavery would have to become a he determined that if what he had written in mainstream, fashionable educational effort if it his essay were indeed true, it led to only one were to have any hope of success. conclusion: “It was time some person should see these calamities to their end.” This is the monument near the Thames River in London, referenced in John The significance of those few minutes in Blundell’s introduction, time is summed up in a splendid recent book which honors Clarkson and other key antislavery by Adam Hochschild, “Bury the Chains: figures. Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves”: On May 22, 1787, If there is a single moment at which the Clarkson brought antislavery movement became inevitable, together 12 men, it was the day in 1785 when Thomas including a few of Clarkson sat down by the side of the road the leading Quakers, at Wades Mill. … For his Bible-conscious at a London print shop to plot the course. colleagues, it held echoes of Saul’s con- Alexis de Tocqueville would later describe the version on the road to Damascus. For results of that meeting as “extraordinary” and

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“absolutely without precedent” in the history Short in stature and in ill of the world. This tiny group, which named health for much of his life, William Wilberforce, the itself the Society for the Abolition of the Afri- antislavery movement’s can Slave Trade, was about to take on a firmly best friend in Parliament, is established institution in which a great deal of remembered today as a great orator and a towering figure money was made and on which considerable in British history. political power depended. gathered crisscrossing Powered by an evangelical zeal, Clarkson’s the British countryside committee would become what might be — logging 35,000 miles described as the world’s first think tank. on horseback — that Wilberforce often used in Noble ideas and unassailable facts would be parliamentary debate. Clarkson was the mobi- its weapons.1 lizer, the energizer, the fact-finder and the very conscience of the movement. “Looking back today,” writes Hochschild, “what is more astonishing than the pervasive- In “Thomas Clarkson: Friend of Slaves,” biog- ness of slavery in the late 1700s is how swiftly rapher Earl Leslie Griggs writes that this man it died. By the end of the following century, on fire was “second to no one in indefatigable slavery was, at least on paper, outlawed almost energy and unremitting devotion to an ideal,” everywhere.” Thomas Clarkson was the prime and that, “He inspired in his friends confidence architect of “the first, pioneering wave of that in his ability to lead them.” campaign” — the antislavery movement in Britain, which Hochschild properly describes In a diary entry for Wednesday, June 27, 1787, as “one of the most ambitious and brilliantly Clarkson tells of the moment he arrived in the organized citizens’ movements of all time.” slave ship port of Bristol. Genuine misgivings about his work gave way to a steely determina- The credit for ending slavery in the British tion that served him well in the battles ahead: Empire is most often given to William Wil- berforce. He was the longtime parliamentar- I began now to tremble, for the first time, ian who never gave in to overwhelming odds, at the arduous task I had undertaken, of introducing bill after bill to abolish the trade in attempting to subvert one of the branches slaves, and later slavery itself. of the commerce of the great place which was then before me. I began to Wilberforce was a hero in his own right think of the host of people I should have — but Thomas Clarkson was prominent among to encounter in it. I anticipated much those who first proposed to Wilberforce that persecution in it also; and I questioned he be the movement’s man in Parliament. whether I should even get out of it alive. Moreover, it was the information Clarkson But in journeying on, I became more calm

1Another memorable and pivotal figure in this great movement was John Newton. Newton is known today as the author of perhaps the most popular hymn in Christendom, “Amazing Grace,” with its stirring first stanza: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me; I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see. What is less well-known is that Newton’s lyrics were autobiographical. He had been a slave ship captain given to incessant cursing and stonyhearted treatment of his captives, but had undergone a spiritual awakening and penned the song that moves congregations across the world to this day. Newton served the cause against slavery more immediately during this seminal period through an entreaty to William Wil- berforce. Early in Wilberforce’s parliamentary career, before becoming involved in the antislavery effort, he had toyed with the notion of leaving government. John Newton convinced him to stay, advancing the view that God intended Wilberforce to fulfill a great purpose.

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and composed. My spirits began to return. of that went on and on, year after year. None In these latter moments I considered of it ever made the smallest dent in Thomas my first feelings as useful, inasmuch as Clarkson’s iron will. they impressed upon me the necessity of extraordinary courage, and activity, and When Britain went to war with France in perseverance, and of watchfulness, also, 1793, Clarkson and his committee saw their over my own conduct, that I might not early progress in winning converts evaporate. throw any stain upon the cause I had un- The opposition in Parliament argued that dertaken. When, therefore, I entered the abandoning the slave trade would only hand city, I entered it with an undaunted spirit, a lucrative business to a formidable enemy. determining that no labour should make And the public saw winning the war as more me shrink, nor danger, nor even persecu- important than freeing people of another color tion, deter me from my pursuit. and another continent.

But Clarkson did not relent. He, Wilberforce and the committee kept spreading the message and looking for the best opportunities to advance it.

It was at Clarkson’s instigation that a diagram Clarkson’s slave ship diagram proved immensely valuable of a slave ship became a tool in the debate. as a visual tool. The image of hundreds of human beings crammed together in unimaginably appalling conditions Depicting hundreds of slaves crammed like stirred the conscience of people everywhere. sardines in horrible conditions, it proved to be pivotal in winning the public. Clarkson translated his prize-winning essay from Latin into English and supervised its Clarkson’s committee also enlisted the help distribution by the tens of thousands. He of famed pottery maker Josiah Wedgwood in helped organize boycotts of the West Indian producing a famous medallion with the image rum and sugar produced with slave labor. He of a kneeling, chained black man, uttering the gave lectures and sermons. He wrote many words, “Am I not a man and a brother?” articles and at least two books. He helped British seamen escape from the slave-carrying The great pottery entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood, a Clarkson ships they were pressed into against their will. ally, commissioned the creation He filed murder charges in courts to draw at- of this image. “Am I Not A Man tention to the actions of fiendish slave ship And A Brother?” appeared on medallions and plates and in captains. He convinced witnesses to speak. many other media to powerful He gathered testimony, rustled up petition effect. signatures by the thousands and smuggled evidence from under the very noses of his ad- Indeed, Clarkson’s imprint versaries. His life was threatened many times, was on almost everything the committee did. and once, surrounded by an angry mob, he It even produced one of the first newsletters very nearly lost it. and, as Hochschild suggests, one of the first direct-mail campaigns for the purpose of rais- The long hours, the often thankless and ing money. seemingly fruitless forays to uncover evidence, the risks and the costs that came The effort finally paid off. The tide of public in every form, the many low points when it opinion swung firmly to the abolitionists. The looked like the world was against him — all trade in slaves was outlawed by act of Parlia-

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ment when it approved one of Wilberforce’s geous, visionary, disciplined, self-sacrificing bills in 1807, some 20 years after Clarkson — a man who gave a long life almost entirely formed his committee. Twenty-six more to the service of people he never met in lands years of laborious effort by Clarkson, Wil- he never saw.” berforce and others were required before Britain passed legislation in 1833 to free all An essay by a university student struck a spark, slaves within its realm. The law took effect in which lit a beacon, which saved millions of lives 1834, 49 years after Clarkson’s epiphany on a and changed the world. If you ever hear anyone country road. It became a model for peaceful dismiss the power of the pen, just tell them the emancipation everywhere. Wilberforce died story of Thomas Clarkson, his prize-winning shortly afterwards, but his friend devoted essay and the astounding events they brought much of the next 13 years to the movement to forth for humanity. end the scourge of slavery and improve the lot of former slaves worldwide. � Clarkson died at the age of 86, in 1846. He had Lawrence W. Reed is president of been the last living member of the committee the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in he had gathered at the London print shop back Midland, Mich.; for biographical informa- in 1787. Hochschild tells us that the throngs of tion, see www.mackinac.org. This essay was mourners “included many Quakers, and the given as a speech by Mr. Reed at a Mackinac men among them made an almost unprec- Center seminar in January 2005, and a edented departure from sacred custom” by shorter version first appeared in print in the removing their hats. May 2005 issue of The Freeman, the journal of the Foundation for Economic Education In “Thomas Clarkson: A Biography,” Ellen (www.fee.org). Gibson Wilson summed up her subject well when she wrote of this man from the little village of Wisbech, “Thomas Clarkson (1760- 1846) was almost too good to be true — coura-

Sources and Recommended Readings:

“Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves,” By Adam Hochschild, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005 “Thomas Clarkson: Friend of Slaves,” By Earl Leslie Griggs, Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970 “Thomas Clarkson: A Biography,” By Ellen Gibson White, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990 “Hero for Humanity: A Biography of William Wilberforce,” By Kevin Belmonte, Colorado Springs, Colo.: NavPress, 2002 “The Slave Trade,” By Hugh Thomas, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997 Page 8 - Roadside memorial: Copyright 1999-2005 The Norfolk Churches Site and The Suffolk Churches Site. Simon Knott (simonknott.co.uk). Page 10 - Slave ship diagram: Library of Congress, hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.15604100 Page 10 - Wedgwood medallion: National Maritime Museum, London, Michael Graham-Stewart slavery collection.

MACKINAC CENTER FOR PUBLIC POLICY MACKINAC CENTER FOR PUBLIC POLICY Page 11 - 10 - - 1 1 - 1 The Value of Communicating to Joe and Joan “Citizen”

Fred L. Smith, Jr.

Michael Kelly, the columnist for The Washington Post who was tragi- cally killed during the Iraqi war, had many good lines, one of which is relevant to improving political communication. He started his career as a television journalist and was doing quite well. But one day he quit. He was later asked, “Why did you leave? It seemed like such a promising career.” He replied, “Well, yeah, but one of my co-hosts said to me one day, ‘Michael, you just don’t get it. In television journalism a hair dryer is every bit as important as a pad and pencil.’” While that comment prompted Michael to leave broadcast journalism, his story brings up an important point: the way we present ourselves is as important as the content of our messages. CEI and National Media work very closely with many businesses, trying to persuade them not to apologize for being capitalists. That work is important because industry is a significant channel of political communications. Corporations spend more than half a trillion dollars a year selling

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Mick Stevens for Barron’s, 15 November 1999 products. Their messages and ads are trying to reach Joan and Joe “Con- sumer,” and yet they are also reaching Joan and Joe “Citizen.” In other words, business not only reaches its customers in the private competitive world, but also communicates (sometimes unwittingly) in the political policy world. This raises the question: when you talk to Joan Consumer, what are you also saying to Joan Citizen? Business doesn’t ask this question very often. Why not? Because the people who handle product sales are in the marketing division, while the people who handle policy concerns and monitor political threats to the industry are in the government relations division. Business has not yet integrated these two separate worlds into a consistent strategy. This situation exists for a couple of reasons. First, the two divisions are far apart within the organization of the company, and second, many CEOs don’t like politics. They want it to go away. If we could find ways of encouraging companies to think of a dual message, to sell not only products but also the moral legitimacy of a free enterprise way of producing, distributing, and pricing, I believe that would make our policy work much, much easier. At CEI, we’re conducting research to understand the way people go about making decisions, to find new methods to create and distribute free-market messages, and then convince the business leaders of the need to legitimize both their products and their industry.

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Voiceover: In a single year, 93 percent of our toxic chemical waste was treated, converted to energy or recycled. What about the other 7 percent?

We’re working on it!

FIG. 1.1: Chemical Manufacturers Association Ad

Business generally uses two institutional advertising strategies. CEI has labeled those “apologetic” ad strategies and “legitimizing” ad strategies. The apologetic ads say, “Yes, I know we did horrible things. We’re very sorry about that, but you don’t understand. It was a different time, technology wasn’t developed and we’re really sorry. We’re going to do better. We’re really going to do better in the future.” An example of this type of ad can be found in Figure 1.1. The chemical industry spent over 10 million dollars producing and distributing this ad year after year after year. But what message did this ad convey? You heard nothing about why chemicals might be useful things to have. All you heard was that we got rid of 93 percent of the toxic ones. Meanwhile, the 7 percent seems to be indestructible and obviously very dangerous because they’re trying to get rid of it. The ad ends with a new slogan for the industry’s approach—“Responsible Care.” Responsible Care? Imagine this scenario: you’re sitting at home and your teenage daughter or son walks into the room. You look up from reading the paper, and your child says, “Dad, Mom, I want you to know, from now on I’m going to be responsible.” Then your teenager walks out of the room. You’re all relieved at this point, right? Think again. The whole concept that from now on you’re going to be responsible suggests that up to now you have been irresponsible. This is a typical apologetic ad. Legitimizing ads, the ads that we think have value and occasionally are done by industry, discuss the benefits derived from a product. This type of approach is important because people are “rationally ignorant.” They have real lives and no real reason to spend lots of time reading policy reports or learning about issues that have no apparent impact on their lives. So we are all “rationally ignorant” about most things. If

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Voiceover: Three minutes from now, a heart attack victim will be rushed into this emergency room. Medica- tion will be injected. I.V. fluids will be needed. The patient will be protected from infection. Breathing will be as- sisted. And one more life will be saved. …Thanks to advanced medical techniques and a material we call plastic.

FIG. 1.2: American Plastics Council Ad people are going to understand that a world without chemicals might be a scarier world, you’re going to have to give them some reason to believe it. Industry equates profitability with legitimacy, because that is the standard by which businesses judge each other. But if profitability were the only moral yardstick, cocaine dealers, prostitution rings, and other similar “businesses” would all be legitimate. Evidently, some non- business people are applying different standards to business than business applies to itself. Figure 1.2 is almost the epitome of a legitimizing ad. The plastics industry has several others like this. Some of you have probably seen the one in which a mother is warming a baby bottle. The mother looks down at her child, and the bottle slips from her hands. Then, in slow motion, it falls toward the tile floor where the baby is lying. When the bottle bounces off the floor instead of shattering, you think, “Thank God it’s plastic.” This ad came about because the plastics industry was getting ham- mered. Those of you who know the movie “The Graduate” may remember the scene at Dustin Hoffman’s graduation party in which this particularly irritating neighbor, a businessman, looks down at Dustin’s character and says, “I just want to say one word to you... plastics.” That phrase quickly came to symbolize a faddish contempt for the modern world. What soon followed was a whole array of anti-plastic policies. After a while, the plastics companies decided to go on the counter- attack. Their initial ads featured downhill skiers who talked about the benefits of high-tech plastic skis. This prompted us to say, “Well, that’s good, but if you can go skiing in Aspen and drive Corvettes, you’re probably already aware that capitalism is a good idea.” These companies really needed to reach out to people with the egalitarian value that

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Apologetic ads: Legitimizing Ads: • Use technical claims to explain away • Mainly discuss the benefits consumers a perceived transgression. derive from the products or industries • "Apologize" for some past transgres- in an effort to promote "cultural sion and promise to reform. legitimacy" or acceptability. plastics are not only good for society at large, but they’re particularly good for the individual—in this case, a heart attack victim, and in the case of the plastic baby bottle, mothers and children. In many ways, it’s not just a benefits message, it’s a benefits message that carries the fairness value, the egalitarian value. CEI has done focus group research on legitimizing versus apologetic ads, and made some interesting findings. Apologetic ads tend to make a rationally ignorant public more likely to support greater regulation than legitimizing ads. The former tend to create new doubts in the mind of the audience, leading to exactly the sort of government intervention we seek to avoid. We need ads that drive home the point that a world with more regulation, more taxes, and more restrictions is a world that is not only less free and less rich, but also less fair. In our focus groups, the ad on chemicals, for example, raised all kinds of questions. What is this stuff? Why is it so hard to get rid of? Why are they pretending that they’ve done a good job when the hard part of the problem lies ahead of them? And so on. The participants in the focus group were concerned that toxic waste was an insurmountable problem, that companies may not be following the rules, and that maybe the 7 percent of waste not yet cleaned up was created by those bad ac- tors who are never going to do it on their own. Furthermore, they did not find the information presented in the ad credible. Apologetic ads not only don’t work, they also exacerbate the very problems they seek to address. Legitimizing ads, by contrast, can be very effective. Another example of a legitimizing ad is one CEI developed regarding the pharmaceutical industry during the debate over reforming the Food and Drug Administration. The ad in Figure 1.3 delivers a general message about the value of drugs: people die if drugs are delayed by regulation. This message is not one that industry would feel comfortable delivering directly. If the FDA regulates you, you can’t be overly critical of it in public. Our ad essentially took the benefit message, the egalitarian message, and targeted a particular policy group-FDA reformers. So far, I’ve talked about the importance of a company legitimizing

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Speaker: The Food and Drug Administration proudly announces its approval of this major new drug. By our estimates, this drug will save over 8,000 lives per year. Voiceover: If the government approves a drug that will start saving lives tomorrow, how many people died yesterday waiting for the government to act? Shouldn’t we know the answer to that before we start applauding?

FIG. 1.3: CEI Ad about FDA its products. As, or more important, is the need for ads that legitimize the entire industry. The graph in Figure 1.4 shows the reputations of various firms in the oil industry. The bottom set of curves shows the reputation of the oil industry in general. The graph indicates that some companies have better reputations than others. Branding is one way by which a company can raise its reputation, but the industry overall always has a lower reputation than specific companies do. It’s the industry that gets regulated, not individual companies. The only way you can protect your company ultimately is to protect your industry. Another example of that same point is the March 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. As you can expect, when this happened, Exxon’s credibility dropped dramatically with the public. The credibility of other companies, however, dropped a lot less, demonstrating that there is value in maintaining the reputation of your company. But while certain individual companies suffered less than Exxon, the oil industry’s reputation suffered almost as much as Exxon did. Politically, this meant the oil industry as a whole was damaged in the end, and not just Exxon. If you want to defend yourself against the regulating regime, you have to defend your industry and not just your particular company. Companies have not always been so slow in defending their industries. In his wonderful book, Creating the Corporate Soul, The Rise

Page 17 The Value of Communicating to Joe and Joan “Citizen” | of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business, Roland Marchand suggests that industry in the early 1900s was aware that the world was moving into a socialist period. When governments nationalized many sectors of American industry in World War I, companies were terrified that they might have no future in America and responded over a period of decades by developing a moral defense of themselves. Industry did that reasonably well by disseminating messages that created a corporate soul. But, after World War II, when industry could make money by doing almost anything, it went to sleep again. In a sense, industry needs to wake up and revitalize its understanding that companies are always operating in a hostile environment, and if these companies can’t make a moral defense of themselves and their industry, they won’t have a future. A current example of creating a corporate soul comes from a popular ad for cell phones (See Figure 1.5). The interesting thing about the ad

80 75 70 65 55 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 -5 -10 -15 -20 -25 Unfavorable -- Favorable Unfavorable -30 -35 -40 1987 1989 1991 1993

Industry Exxon Firm A Firm B Firm C

Source: Industry data. FIG. 1.4: Public Attitudes Toward Oil Companies and the Oil Industry

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Mom: I’ve got a meeting with a very important client Child: Mom, when can I be a client? Mom: You’ve got five minutes to get ready to go to the beach, or I’m going without you. Child: Hey everybody, it’s time for the meeting!!

FIG. 1.5: AT&T Cell Phone Ad is that, according to Creating the Corporate Soul, AT&T has had it right for a long time. The first AT&T institutional ads in the early part of the 20th century were filled with information about how marginal costs operate for public utilities. The idea was that if the public only knew as much as AT&T did, it would be much more sympathetic to AT&T’s pricing and network structures. That didn’t work. AT&T then went quickly to egalitarian themes and to reach out—“Reach out and touch someone.” Ads like this one show how the cell phone becomes a solution to a problem for working mothers. It captures an element that the cell phone is not only an instrument of freedom, not only an instrument of wealth creation, but also an instrument that makes it a little easier to have fairness in a world with a lot of stress. AT&T has some advantages. It was a very large part of the tele- phone industry, so the value to the industry was captured by the company. It also was a company very much in touch with consumers, so it had to communicate. It did, and arguably, as a result, it resisted some rather strong regulatory attempts in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, the company was spending tens of millions of dollars to legitimize itself. Virtually no company is spending anything like that today, and it shows. The free-market community can learn much from the successes and failures of industries. If we apologize for who we are and what we stand for, people will find faults with our ideas. If we legitimize what we do and demonstrate how people can benefit from our proposals, however, then we might start winning some skirmishes in the ongoing battle of ideas.

Page 19 Session II “Strategies for Mass Communication”

Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Media, Inc. A Field Guide for Effective Communication. Washington, DC, 2004: Pages 47 – 73 and page 93 (Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Conclusion)

Questions to consider:

What is our message? Who is our audience? What principles are we appealing to? What is the ‘prevailing narrative’? How can we measure success?

How could the success of the malaria campaign be applied to marketing general free-market ideas? What kind of values laddering might be effective for communicating free-market ideas? Have libertarians generally failed at communicating en masse? Is this form of communication effective? Is there anything lost by making our ideas simplified to market to the masses? What are we asking people to give up, and what are we telling them they’ll gain?

Page 20 4 Strategic Planning

Clifford May

Albert Einstein said that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Now, I’m no Einstein, and communications is hardly theoretical physics, but, as there are laws in physics, there are laws in communications, and it’s important to acquaint yourself with those laws as you proceed. I’m going to argue that a communications plan has a very simple structure. It contains two equally important components. One is a message that is persuasive to the audiences that matter to you, and second is a means to deliver that message.

The Message Let’s look at an example. As you saw with Fred Smith’s chemical ad, if you don’t have a persuasive message, it doesn’t matter how effectively you deliver it. They spent millions of dollars on an ad that communicated a message that was ultimately harmful to their aims. On the other hand, if you lack the second component of a good communications strategy, a means to deliver your message, it doesn’t matter if you have a persuasive message. You see the following situation all the time; people who have a great message and put up a website, thinking they’ve devel-

Page 21 48 | Field Guide for Effective Communication oped an effective mass communications plan. Perhaps 25,000 people have seen it. Or they spend their time speaking to groups of fifty people around the country, thinking they have a mass communications strategy and that they are driving a message. Well, if they are speaking to only a few hundred people, they are not effectively communicating their message—it will have no real impact. You’d be surprised to find out the number of people calling themselves “communication specialists” who don’t understand this very basic principle. You must have a persuasive message and a means to deliver it. If you don’t have both, you don’t have a communications plan. You also need to ask yourself, what if people are persuaded by your message? Is that enough? Do you need them to act a certain way based on the belief you imparted? That nexus cannot be taken for granted. For example, Republicans believed that once they proved President Clinton was indeed a philanderer and a congenital liar, people would stop voting for him. In fact, only Republicans didn’t vote for him on that basis, and they weren’t going to vote for him anyway. Democrats and Independents, for the most part, didn’t care if he played around or lied. The Republican Party committed a common and dangerous pitfall in communications, which is a projection of your own values onto your target audience. You can’t assume that your target audience thinks as you do. They may have very different values. So, there are really only two ways to deliver a message. One is through earned media. The only way to obtain earned media is to do or say something and hope that what you do or say gets picked up. There is a science and art to how you get the media to take your bait. But you must do or say something that is worth media attention. The second possibility is paid media. Of course, the only way you get paid media is to buy it. Now, one might add that there’s something called “buzz,” or word of mouth, but that’s generally a by-product of either earned or paid media.

The Audience You also need to consider your audience carefully from another perspective. In particular, you need to ask whether the goal is to reach a significant number of eyes and ears, or a small number of significant eyes and ears. In other words, if you need to reach an elite audience, it could be a very small audience, maybe a few policy makers in the State Department or the National Security Council. Or do you need to reach the general public and persuade them? Or do you need to do both? Do you need to

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communicate the same way to both? Probably not. A sophisticated elite audience is going to respond differently from a generalized audience. So you need to understand what audience you need to reach and convince to ensure the success of your mission. You have to keep returning to these questions: What is my mission? What is my goal? What is the strategy for reaching that goal and what tactics can I employ in order to support that strategy? How do you know whether a message is persuasive? Well, both polling and focus groups can help, if you have skillful pollsters and focus group leaders. But you can’t just assume that all of them are skillful because many are not. It’s also worthwhile to have some grounding in the basic psychological principles of persuasion and influence. One useful way to approach the subject is to recognize that virtually every human being has interests and values. Now, you can appeal to your audience’s interests by saying, “This will be good for you; therefore, you should support it, buy it, go for it.” Or you could appeal to your audience’s values by saying, “This is something you believe to be good; therefore, you should buy it, support it, go for it.” Even better, of course, is to appeal to both interest and values si- multaneously because when your values and interests intertwine, you are likely to be convinced. An example might be a proposal for a tax cut on widgets. If you’re a widget maker or a widget consumer, and I say this tax cut is going to save you money, you’ll be inclined to support it because it’s in your interest. But if I say this tax cut will mean more good jobs in the widget making industry for the poorest Americans in need of such jobs, that may appeal to your values. Now, if I say this tax cut will do both, I’ve now appealed to your interests and your values, making probably the most persuasive argument one could make. As you know from previous presenters, a very important theorist in this area was Aaron Wildavsky, who made the case that there are different sets of people holding different sets of values. You need to recognize the psychological character of these disparate audiences and what values they hold before you attempt to construct the message to persuade them. Another interesting thinker in this area is Robert Cialdini, whose book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, I found very useful. Cialdini is a psychologist who writes from a marketing perspective. But much of what he has to say applies equally to communications specialists. In particular, he argues that there are six fundamental principles that direct human behavior in this area. It’s a very broad thesis,

Page 23 50 | Field Guide for Effective Communication but all of these principles are applicable to crafting an effective communications strategy.

Principles The first principle is consistency—once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we are inclined to keep that commitment and to make choices that justify that decision. People like to make up their minds about an issue because once they have done so, they are spared the labor of having to think about it in the future. As the English artist and writer Joshua Reynolds noted, “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.” So, for example, if you know you believe in saving children’s lives, and I tell you that children are less likely to be hurt or killed in SUVs than in any other kind of vehicle, I’ve probably gone a long way toward convincing you that SUVs are not so bad. The second principle is reciprocity. Most people in western cultures feel an obligation to repay a debt or a favor, or make a concession to someone who has made a concession to you. Think about how this operates; you’re at an airport and a Hare Krishna gives you a flower. You accept the flower and say, “Thank you.” Then he says, “May I have a dollar?” Now, even if you didn’t want that flower, even if you know you are going to throw it away in the next garbage can, you feel in your gut a desire, a need, an impulse to give a dollar to that person because of the principle of reciprocity. The third principle is that of social proof; we tend to believe in the collective knowledge of the crowd. We look to the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view others as similar to ourselves. So this is why manufacturers will say, “Crest is the best selling toothpaste in America.” I mean, so what? Why do you care? That’s great for them, but what does it mean to you? Well, what it’s supposed to mean to you is that you are going to figure, “Well, if all those other people are buying it, they probably know what they’re doing, and I don’t need to research this any further. They are probably right. I’ll go with them. I’ll buy Crest, too.” This line of thinking keeps you from having to think about it. It’s a shortcut. It’s also why protesters hold demonstrations. If 100,000 people had marched on Washington to end the war in Iraq, it would have been meaningless as a reflection of the sentiment of the general population, but that may not have registered with people watching on TV. They would have seen a big crowd and somehow perceived psycho- logically that there was a collective wisdom against the war.

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The fourth principle is authority. It’s very well known; we simply tend to believe those who are billed as experts, irrespective of whether they are knowledgeable about the subject. They may have a Ph.D., or a title like ambassador. The key is that the audience believes that they have authority. The fifth principle is one of liking. Clarence Darrow said that the main work of a trial attorney is to make a jury like his client. If the jury likes the defendant, that person is more likely to be exonerated, whatever the merits of the case. That’s why on TV a hair dryer is as important as a notebook. In a televised debate, the audience will consider the person whom they like more to be the winner, regardless of the arguments presented. In fact, something I find useful to do, and I do it with media training sometimes, is to have people turn off the sound, watch the debate, and tell me who won. They usually can do it based on who is smiling, who is confident, and who seems at home with the interviewer. They know who won the debate at the end, and it has very little to do with the merits of the case. While there are audience members who are persuaded by logical arguments, there are many people who are not. They are persuaded either by emotion or by psychological factors about which they are not aware. Finally, sixth, there’s a principle of scarcity. Opportunity seems more valuable to us when availability is limited. People are more moti- vated by the thought of losing something than they are by the thought of gaining something else. It’s an odd thing, but true. For example, if you tell people they can gain significant health benefits by joining your gym, that’s actually less powerful than telling them that they will lose significant health benefits by failing to exercise at your gym on a regular basis. They may or may not want to be thin and beau- tiful, but they sure don’t want to get sick, and the fear of getting sick is more powerful than the idea of becoming healthy and fit. Similarly, it’s less persuasive if you say, “We need to go to war with Saddam Hussein to make the world a better place,” than if you say, “We need to go to war with Saddam Hussein because he threatens our way of life and perhaps our very existence.” You see the difference?

Prevailing Narrative In any event, there is likely to be what I would call the prevailing narrative that, once established is very difficult to change. It’s therefore worth making a strong attempt to establish a prevailing narrative yourself

Page 25 52 | Field Guide for Effective Communication rather than waiting until later to try to change it. It can be done—you can change the narrative, but it’s much harder than establishing the narrative up front. Sometimes two narratives will compete, especially when you have two groups that are both skilled in communications. For example, on many issues, conservatives will have one narrative, liberals will have another, and in those cases, discussions will be absolutely at cross-purposes. A perfectly good example of an issue about which there has been much debate is abortion. Pro-life sounds good, but pro-choice sounds good, too. So as long as it’s framed positively, it’s sort of an even match. The prevailing narrative about Franklin Delano Roosevelt today is that he was a great president, leading America through the Depres- sion and World War II. If, however, FDR’s opponents had succeeded, the prevailing narrative would be that FDR exacerbated our economic woes, shredded the Constitution, and was much too slow in challenging Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (or even that he tricked America into World War II). Ronald Reagan is a more recent president, so there’s more controversy over his narrative. In the end, I believe you will see that he was a president with a few big ideas that he pursued doggedly and successfully. Most importantly, Reagan was the president who told Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall,” who called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire,” and who won the Cold War. Notice the use of emblematic moments: “Tear down this wall” and “Evil Empire.” These things fixate in the mind and nail the prevailing narrative to the wall. By the way, in terms of Reagan, his opponents have a different and less flattering narrative, but I don’t think that’s going to win out in the end. Consider the last election: Democrats tried to drive the perception that George W. Bush was a frat boy without the experience and knowledge to be president. It would be difficult, I think, for them to use that line of attack in the next election. Republicans tried to drive the narrative that Al Gore changes his personality as often as his wardrobe and that he lacked a moral center of gravity. They said that he had been too close to President Clinton, and we were all tired of Clinton. None of this, by the way, was incidental. There were long discussions about what the narrative should be and how we were going to drive that message and persuade most people to embrace that particular narrative. It doesn’t mean it’s not the true narrative. In most cases, it’s much easier to sell the truth than it is to sell fantasy.

Page 26 Strategic Planning | 53 Comparative campaigns — going negative? Let me talk very briefly about positive versus negative campaigns. You always have this choice: you can attempt to persuade your audience to view your side more favorably, or you can attempt to persuade your audience to view your opponents more negatively. Keep in mind, negative ads and attacks are likely to be used against you, your causes, or your clients, whatever the case may be. This leads to the well-known phenomenon of positive versus negative ads with negative ads probably getting you more pound for pound, dollar for dollar. Moreover, this gets back to the principle of liking, which I already mentioned. Now, an example of this would be the demonization of Newt Gin- grich. My mother-in-law thinks Gingrich is a very mean, bad person. When I’ve asked her why she holds this opinion of Gingrich, she doesn’t have a clue. She can’t give me an answer. Gingrich, who happens to be one of the smartest and most fascinating people I know, simply got branded early on by communication snipers who understood that it was much easier to attack him than it was to attack his ideas. So that’s what they did, and they did it rather well. Similarly, I used to do a lot of talk radio, and people would call in angry about the Contract with America, which they call the Contract on America. I’d ask, “Well, name three things from the contract that you really disagree with and really object to.” They never could. I told them to name two, or name one. They had no idea. You sometimes see this in product advertising as well, although comparative advertising is generally more careful in its criticism. By the way, Nick Nichols and Eric Dezenhall have done the best work on this. Dezenhall’s Nail‘Em is the most important book on this topic, providing the most useful information I have ever found on crisis communications. You need to know whether you are winning or losing. Sometimes it’s obvious how well your message is penetrating and persuading. Some- times you need polling to help you determine where the audience is and/or which way the audience is heading. If you’re losing, if your target audience is not with you, you need to reevaluate your plan and then wage information warfare with a very intensive campaign. But if the opinions of key audiences are with you, a less visible program of perception management is needed, rather than information warfare. You may want to avoid open combat and conflict with your adversaries because it’s better to deprive them of a platform. You want to make it hard for them to gain visibility.

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An example is a candidate who has 60 percent in the polls and has a challenger whom he refuses to debate. Why does he refuse to debate him? He doesn’t want to make him his equal. He doesn’t want to give him the chance to start a fight. He wants to make it hard.

Selling Values Let me talk for a moment about public relations versus strategic communication. For those of you who are on the political or policy side of this, it’s very important to look at what Madison Avenue is doing. They make mistakes, but they also do some things right. Note how sophisticated manufacturers sell their products. Coca-Cola could just tell the truth. They could just say, “Look, we make fizzy flavored sugar water infused with caffeine. It tastes good. Please buy it. I’m trying to put my kids through private school.” That would be a truthful, honest, direct message. Or they could try a primitive public relations strategy based on explaining. “Yes, we know our product is just fizzy, flavored, caffeinated sugar water, but, hey, you like it. It’s not so bad for you. Buy it anyway.” Or, they could do what they’ve actually been doing for years, not selling the product at all but instead selling values that they associate with the product. “It’s the real thing.” It’s so authentic, and, by drinking it, you will be, too. “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.” Drinking this beverage says that you’re a caring kind of person. Look at any of the products that are important and think about how they are selling themselves. They aren’t at all. They are selling values that they associate with the product and with you. McDonald’s does not sell you hamburgers; it is selling you the time that you, as a hard- working person, deserve with your family. “You deserve a break today.” When you watch ads, think about what they are really saying. Volvo has been very adept at communications strategies. Volvo does not sell cars; it sells safety. A few years ago, I saw a Volvo commercial that was revolutionary, just stunning. What was so revolutionary about it was that this commercial never showed a Volvo. It never even showed a car. Imagine you’re an ad agency and you go to the manufac- turer and say, “Here’s a commercial, it doesn’t show your product or any other product. None.” What does it show? It shows happy families in pleasant environments—at the beach, in a spacious backyard with a playground—and the narrator just says, very simply, “All these people have one thing in common; they all believe they’re alive today because of the car they drive.” On the screen there’s a black background with the white letters, “Volvo.” You want that car. You must have it. If you love

Page 28 Strategic Planning | 55 your kids, you really want that car. You don’t need to see it. Who cares what it looks like? It doesn’t matter, you want that car.

Measuring Success So how can you measure if such ads are successful? It can be very easy, but it can also be very hard and sometimes close to impossible. If you are doing communications for Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, you can start with how many doughnuts you are selling now or what percentage of the market share you have, and then see if you’ve made progress after a given time has elapsed—an easy, simple way to proceed. If you’re running for office, you’ll know on Election Day whether you’ve reached your goal of a 51 percent or better share of the vote. With some issues and debates, you can do a benchmark poll, then you run your campaign, and you come back and see if you’ve made a difference. For example, I can conduct a poll and find out how many people know who Fred Smith is and what they think of him. Then I could design a communications plan, implement it, and conduct another poll to see if I’ve increased his name recognition or improved his image. It would take a lot of money for me to try such a challenging task, but, theoretically, I could do it. If, however, you’re playing on a crowded field where there are many different variables influencing public perceptions, you can’t take such measurements accurately. All you can do is construct what you believe to be a persuasive message based on data, theory, and gut perceptions. You can develop messages that you believe will persuade the target audiences you care about, and then measure whether you have successfully driven those messages, repeatedly, to those audiences. Keep in mind that to absorb the message, the members of your audience need to hear it a minimum of seven times. Consistent repetition is the key to message penetration. Let me say that again. Consistent repetition is the key to message penetration. When you are sick of repeating a message on TV, on radio, or in print, that is usually when your audience is beginning to hear it. What trips up too many communications programs is boredom and fatigue. People get tired of their own messages. They think that everybody knows it and everybody has accepted it. They abandon those messages too early in favor of something new and more exciting—a move that spells disaster for some campaigns. In sum, I’ll give you a few random thoughts about which I don’t have time to say more than a few words, but that I think are worth bringing to your attention. First, transfer the battle to enemy territory.

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Remember that in any battle, whoever is explaining is probably losing. So make your adversaries do it. Play the victim. Americans have developed a very bad habit of loving victims too much. Liberals love to play the victims. Conservatives hate to do that. But it’s a powerful strategy that you ignore at your peril. The media hates to see symbols of power. For example, for years we’ve been seeing on TV Israeli tanks on the one hand, and Palestinian kids throwing stones on the other. Israelis cannot win that battle of images, even though everyone should know that tanks are not being used to fight kids but to fight terrorists who routinely blow up kids. The media loves victims, but they particularly love bad news. In the April 9, 2003 edition of The Washington Post, there was a picture of Iraqis wildly celebrating with coalition forces, and they were just so thrilled, you could see it in their faces. The headline under the picture read, “Many in Basra resent British failure to control theft.” That was the headline on this picture. That was probably also an example of anti-war copy editors refusing to give credit where credit was due. But they love those stories. The media love allegations. This is very much a Nichols-Dezenhall concept. Allegations are easy to use to construct a story. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry alleged the CIA was poisoning Iraqi children, a charge that the U.S. Government denied. But the media want allegations. It’s a story. As soon as you make an allegation, it’s a story. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. So whoever makes the first allegation forces the other side to explain, and that side will generally lose that battle unless they can launch a destructive salvo in return. Usually, the best way to do this is not to explain and answer the allegation, but to say, “I can’t believe my opponent is resorting to such tactics and mudslinging.” When Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was in a race against James Buckley, Buckley initially referred to him as Professor Moynihan, and Moynihan responded by saying, “Ahh, the mudslinging has begun.” So, keep in mind that to get your point across, you must start with a simple, effective message and a way to deliver it. If you follow the steps I’ve outlined above, you will be well on your way to winning.

Page 30 5 Message Crafting

Roger Bate & Rick Otis

This chapter will explore the creation of an effective message by drawing on survey research, the identified values, and the strategic plan that’s been outlined. This chapter will highlight two case studies—the DDT/ Save the Children from Malaria and American Plastics Council’s successful campaigns.

The Save the Children from Malaria Campaign Roger Bate

When I was a kid, my trumpet teacher told me, “An amateur practices until he gets something right; a professional practices until he doesn’t get it wrong.” Looking at the other chapters in this book, I’ve learned that I’m very much in the amateur category. I’m kind of a “serial think tanker.” I work on many different issues. I don’t consider myself an expert when it comes to crafting messages. I’m going to discuss the Save Children from Malaria campaign that

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FIG. 5.1 was run from CEI by me and other staffers. It also involved numerous think tanks from around the world and one or two health groups, including Africa Fighting Malaria, of which I’m a director (See Figure 5.1). The campaign was really about stopping the United Nations from banning the pesticide DDT. After all, that was what we were actually trying to do, and we had a considerable degree of success. Although DDT is listed in the Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) Convention, it is not banned for use in malaria control. We had one key point that we needed to get across: there was a huge difference between DDT for use in agriculture and DDT for medical use. We were, however, going against a totem of the green movement. At the time, it was thirty-eight years since Rachel Carson wrote her book Silent Spring, which launched environmental awareness both in this country and across Europe. We were never going to be able to convince anybody who wasn’t already a scientist that DDT was not particularly harmful to the environment. If used in excess—and this would require tons of DDT as opposed to the pounds and ounces I am speaking of—it might cause harm. Again, however, I am speaking about the small amounts that are used medically in public health. The dose makes the poison—that was the key point we needed to get across to the hierarchy at the UN. I’m going to share briefly some of the facts as we presented them to the United Nations, and then go on to the more nuanced aspects of the campaign. The reason I am going to present some of the facts first is that while I know there are lots of policy wonks here who probably know this stuff forward and backward, there are probably other people who don’t. Most people think of malaria as a tropical disease. Well, it is today. But it wasn’t until 1964 that Europe was declared malaria-free. Indeed, there were many outbreaks, even as far north as the Arctic Circle. Rus-

Page 32 Message Crafting | 59 sia in the 1920s and 30s experienced significant outbreaks. Also, in the southern United States and even Michigan there were sizeable outbreaks in the 40s and 50s. Malaria was eradicated by vector control. The vector of malaria is the anopheles mosquito. So, we’re talking about spraying a substance that kills a lot of mosquitoes. The original means of inoculation were pesticides like pyrethrum, which were replaced after the Second World War with DDT that was sprayed on walls to deter mosquitoes from entering dwellings. Malarial areas in South Africa were reduced by four-fifths when they used DDT, and DDT remained in the program until 1996, when environmental groups, which are especially strong in this country and in Europe, lob- bied hard against it. Also, when you spray DDT on walls, it leaves a stain. People don’t like that aesthetically, and it increases bed bug activity. These facts might bother people initially, but they soon change their minds when their children stop dying from malaria. Well, when they stopped using DDT in 1996, malaria increased six- fold. This happens wherever DDT use is dropped. (See Figure 5.2). Sri Lanka is a great example. There were 3 million cases of malaria after the second World War, twenty-seven cases in 1963, and then back up to 2 million cases when they stopped using DDT because of environmental pressure. South Africa, however, is the country about which I know the most. We had a successful campaign in South Africa. Indeed, from the end of 2001, the numbers began to drop drastically. They’re even better this year (See Figure 5.3). So, there is a great deal of scientific evidence backing up our case. Facts are very important when you’re dealing with people who like scientific information, but that scientific information has been around for a very long time. Everybody knew that it worked. Yet the ban, at least in certain countries, is coming into force.

Vector Control in South Africa • Paris Green, Pyrethrum – then DDT; • Malarial areas reduced by 4/5th; • DDT remains part of program until 1996; • Environmental pressure, staining, bed bugs forces removal of DDT; • Malaria cases increase 6 fold.

FIG. 5.2: Vector Control

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Deaths Cases 450 70000

400 Deaths 60000 350 Cases 50000 300 250 40000 200 30000 150 20000 100 10000 50 0 0 1971 1981 1991 2001 FIG. 5.3: Malaria Cases and Deaths, 1971 - 2001, South Africa

For the most part, what South Africa does often the rest of Africa will do. So, DDT has been reintroduced. The South African Department of Health explained that it’s the most important factor in reducing malaria. Other African countries have learned from South Africa and have started using DDT again. Because the bans are falling, we are seeing reductions in deaths and massive reductions in case numbers, leading to huge economic implications. A group of free-market think tanks and one or two health groups were involved in this campaign. The first point we made was that none of the groups had any obvious economic interest in the campaign. The point I want to come back to is that I tried, at considerable length, to get the business community interested in this. I was making the point, “Why don’t you make a stand on principle?” No one in this country makes DDT anymore. The only countries that still do are China, India, and possibly Russia—presenting a perfect opportunity for businesses to stand on principle and say that toxicology of this chemical is not bad. It should still be used. Unfortunately, I couldn’t persuade them to do that. Thankfully, think tanks involved did not get any money from the Indian or Chinese governments. Consequently, The Washington Post grilled me for about an hour

Page 34 Message Crafting | 61 and a quarter in two separate interviews. They never ran a piece. In the end, all they were trying to do was to find out whether we were funded by pesticide manufacturers, which wasn’t the case. It was useful that the ad hominem attacks from the most sophisticated opponents were not likely to be successful, something that is not necessarily going to happen in every case. One example that we used was the number of children who die from malaria every day. It’s the equivalent of seven Boeing 747’s crash- ing into the ground, an image that the media picked up and ran with, especially in South Africa. But again, we’re talking about numbers. The technical medical community joined the campaign. We had people from Harvard University, universities in Africa and Britain, and elsewhere being very proactive on this issue because they were scared that they were actually going to lose a means to control a disease that affects 300 – 500 million people, mainly children. Malaria kills more than 2 million young people per year. That data encouraged the medical community to get behind us. We had country delegate support at the POPs Convention of the UN Environment Program. We had countries like South Africa, Zambia, and one or two countries in South America that weren’t antagonistic. But you have to remember there were more representatives of environmental organizations at this convention than there were delegates for the whole of South America, the whole of Africa, and virtually every other country combined. The only country that had more delegates than any one environmental group was the United States. That’s how much this mattered to the environmental movement. They didn’t want to lose this campaign. So what did we do? Well, we produced a personalized story in glossy format, Save Children from Malaria – A Global Health Initiative. The personalized story is of a domestic servant in Johannesburg, Jocho- nia Gumede, or Jockey as he’s known to his friends. He has worked as a butler to a wealthy family in Johannesburg. He has lost at least three relatives to malaria because his family comes from Jozani, which is one of the poorest regions in Kwazulu-Natal, the region of South Africa most affected by malaria. We worked with a PR firm in the United States to craft an effective message that we could get across. As Clifford May pointed out earlier today, we made the other side explain themselves. So rather than asking, “How can anyone condone the use of DDT, doesn’t it destroy the environment?” the question we asked was, “Why are you allowing one

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brown baby to die every fifteen seconds, because you’re not allowing DDT to be used, when DDT eradicated malaria from the rich world forty years ago?” Of course, it was phrased better than that. So the pressure was put on the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, and other groups to respond. It proved to be a most successful approach. There is a television program in South Africa, a bit like one of the news programs here on a Sunday evening, which lasts an hour. The show devoted a five-minute segment to Jochonia and his story. He was pictured with the one grandchild that’s still living. He was bouncing her on his knee, and she was laughing. He said, “Thank God that DDT has been reintroduced because at least this grandchild isn’t going to die.” With that imagery, we effectively pushed our second objective— changing the messenger. There have been a lot of people in the academic community who have been saying that we need this chemical. What Jochonia did in a wonderful setting was emotionally relaying the egalitarian point. He emotionally explained the human cost of a ban on DDT. Now, this aspect of unfairness of how western countries have eradicated malaria with DDT in the 40s, 50s and 60s played very, very well with a lot of left-leaning papers. USA Today covered it very positively. The Guardian, which is Britain’s superior left-wing newspaper, devoted a front-page story to this topic. Newspapers and TV shows that would normally not even get into health issues—The Financial Times, for example—carried major stories on it. I would say that, when it came to getting policy in place on the ground, it was very important to have the medical community with us. Three Noble Laureates and 400 malaria specialists signed a letter origi- nated by the Malaria Foundation International and Malaria Project. We had a significant impact there. We’re still trying to build on that by using the trust that was built up on malaria to work on other issues such as AIDS and tuberculosis. Nevertheless, we’re finding that trust is what is needed to build health community support. The two sticking points there are access to drugs for AIDS and agricultural subsidies. It’s going to be easy for the U.S. trade negotiators to cave on the access to drugs initiative because they want agricultural markets opened up, as do we. They will probably cave on drug patents as a quid pro quo for a deal on agriculture. President Bush wants to combat AIDS, spending 2 billion dollars of new money every year. After the war in Iraq, the President needs to show that the mighty United States can be compassionate—a war on

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AIDS could be spun very well. I mean that in the most positive terms in using the word “spin.” I think there are problems with that, however. The problem is that the money is going to go through the U.S. Agency for International De- velopment, which has been derelict in its duty on malaria, and well may be derelict on AIDS. One of the things that Africa Fighting Malaria has done is work well with political allies on the document of the UN Convention. Often, free market advocates go to these international meetings and don’t concentrate on “the document.” At any UN meeting, there is always a document that will be approved in the end, and it often makes the rounds during the negotiations. Most of the time, we get sidetracked from our core activity, which is to change the language of the document. Now, there are times when there are good reasons for this failure to act. What the few of us tried to do during the DDT fight was to concentrate purely on the language in the one clause that we needed in the document. We were closer to the issue than we ever have been, making us pretty successful in the end. The United States and the EPA haven’t been particularly helpful, and all the Agency for International Development is doing on malaria is providing bed nets. Now, bed nets are very, very useful; however, it’s as though the people in charge of these agencies are presenting themselves as academics, working on academic problems. They’re doing studies on how effective one type of bed net may be over another. Meanwhile, we know what can work very well. They, however, just don’t want to do it because it’s politically incorrect to spray pesticides, whether it’s DDT or anything else. Yet, it’s a considerable problem that needs to be overcome. As successful as we were at the public relations and policy levels, we failed to convince the business community to stand on principle. DDT may be today’s target, but it’s not going to be long before chemicals that the industry cares about are added to the POPs Convention and other chemicals regulations. The industry has not taken a principled stand. They’re taking a pragmatic one, which is not a great surprise. It is, I think, a significant problem because they’re going to lose if they continue to ignore principle. I’ll finish by saying that we worked with a lot of people, and we had a lot of help from the medical community and many political activists. We ran our campaign with a budget of only $180,000; $20,000 was for the public relations firm that helped us and then about $160,000 on

Page 37 64 | Field Guide for Effective Communication travel and people. It’s incredible what kind of success you can have on a modest budget if you have the right message. This story is a great example, I think, in which we did have a great case to make. It’s not often you can go out and say that we don’t have an economic interest in an issue. Rather, this disease kills many children every day, and there is an easy solution. By the way, we have the South African government on our side. I know those things are not often replicable, but what is replicable is the trust that we built up with the medical community. Furthermore, we made the change using an egalitarian message. It is the first time I’ve ever been involved in doing something like this, and I do think about it whenever I’m working on any other campaign. I think that a lot of the reason for the success of this campaign was because Fred Smith and I had talked. Fred introduced me to Wildavsky’s form of political cultural analysis, and we thought through how we could present this information. It was a contributing reason to why we won. It’s always nice to win. Unfortunately, every three years the UN will re-evaluate its position. It could, therefore, go from Appendix B, which means it can be used, to Appendix A, which will mean it can’t be used. Any single country can continue to ask for an exemption so they may currently use it, but then you risk getting a great deal of pressure put on the countries indirectly because of aid contracts and loans. We already have the World Bank trying to ban the use of DDT. It means that some of the groups that should be our allies, the aid agencies who have very good people on the ground, often are our foes. We are waging an ongoing battle. I started on this in 1998, and I don’t think this debate is going to be over for a long time. I urge anybody, however, to use it as an example. Perhaps you can emulate our approach to aid your own campaign.

Values-Based Communications Laddering Rick Otis

I’m a regulatory policy creature of Washington, D.C. and I can tell you more than you want to know about how somebody interpreted an eso- teric part of the Safe Drinking Water Act and about the personalities of people involved in influencing the legislation. I do not consider myself to be a communications expert, but I can

Page 38 Message Crafting | 65 tell you what I have gleaned about communications during my years as a regulatory policy practitioner. I use what I’ve learned about public communications in my day-to-day writing and speeches. I also share my knowledge with other people who are trying to advance their cause. I’ll start my presentation with an anecdote. Regulatory reform and the Republican agenda in the 104th Congress were so badly clobbered in part because a lot of the people who were working with us were so absolutely, terribly awful at describing what we were trying to do. The industry lobbyists (myself included) were equally guilty, but at least a few of us had some experience in successfully communicating with the public. Nevertheless, there were many others who were very bad at it. So, a group of us began to take congressional staffs, particularly Repub- licans, off-campus to introduce them to people who had polling data that provided feedback on our regulatory reform agenda. We examined how the public reacted when “regulatory reform” was mentioned. We were also able to show them things like how the public reacts when it hears such words as “environmental Nazis.” Some thirty years ago, when I was in college, I read a book in a course I had on classical rhetoric. I think it was Plato’s Rhetoric. A phrase at the beginning reads, “Rhetoric is the art of persuasion.” Rhetoric, I would add, is also a science because there are some technical things you can do to help phrase the message. I have noticed that some of my friends in places like CEI, Heritage, and Cato do not understand that we are literally in the business of persuading someone to change his mind, or to form an opinion if he doesn’t have one yet. We think we can just put out a paper, put out an idea, and because of its righteousness, people will automatically agree with it. When we put out our ideas in this fashion, we are operating under a flawed assumption and usually do not win converts. I want to give you a little bit of a framework for crafting values- based messages. I want to talk about something called a “values ladder,” from which we derive the actual words that we use in our message. Coming up with a message is not a mysterious, accidental mechanism that you then test with focus groups. There are legitimate ways to help derive your message so you aren’t just guessing. I will also give you a few examples of values laddering, some of which will already be familiar to you (See Figure 5.4). I often watch many folks from public policy think tanks try to communicate a message, but they don’t really have a very specific reason for why they are doing it. If you’re developing a message in a political

Page 39 66 | Field Guide for Effective Communication campaign to elect someone, there’s usually a specific part of the overall strategy that you’re trying to communicate. All too often, when we try to bring new ideas to the American public, the ideas are far too scattered and lack a specific focus. Consequently, I am going to urge you, in some sense, to narrow your message. Have a very specific reason why you’re trying to convince somebody of a certain point. We frequently attempt to differentiate what we’re doing from what someone else is doing. This doesn’t necessarily mean saying why their idea of what we should be doing is wrong. But you should try to say what it is about yours that’s right. You should be able to say why your idea is right in terms that are personally relevant to the person or people you want to influence. Much of what we’ve discussed here has involved coming up with models and mechanisms for characterizing different people in different ways. You can connect with various categories of people by making your message personally relevant to them. When I try to communicate a message, I talk to you about something that’s personally relevant to your life that’s going to happen to you tomorrow or happened to you yesterday. I am not talking to some abstract person while pointing at the ceiling. Also, you need to identify target audiences and their specific attributes. In the American Plastics Council’s case, they spent a considerable amount of time defining exactly whom in the American public they needed to address. They called them “opinion leaders.” That’s their

Message Crafting: Values ladder as message

Values Stable, enduring, cultural

Consequence Emotional, social benefits

Benefits Functional benefits

Attributes Policy position, opinion characteristics (polling data)

FIG. 5.4: Values Ladder

Page 40 Message Crafting | 67 terminology for it, but the Plastics Council knew exactly who they were. They knew a lot of demographic information about them, including what television channels they watched, at what hours of the night. So if you need to speak to people in personally relevant terms, which you do if you want to persuade them, then you need to know an awful lot about exactly who they are. Much of what we have talked about presumes large-scale communications programs. Malaria, mentioned in the prior section, is a small-scale one. The Plastics Council had $25 million a year in television advertising. When I sit down with congressional staffers and others and try to train them in communications basics, I tell them, “It’s the day-to-day stuff. It’s the speech. It’s the press release. It’s the report. It’s the article you write for a magazine.” So I hope what you take from this presentation is that these tools should not only be applied to large-scale efforts, but to your daily efforts as well. Before I get into some of the mechanisms for developing a values-based message, I want to make one point that we have actually heard several times this morning. It’s something that I think our side is absolutely 100 percent guilty of: we assume our potential audience thinks the way we do. Engineers are not poets. If you speak to a poet as if he were an engineer, not only do you lose him forever, but he literally won’t understand what you are saying. You might as well not waste your time. There is a good reason for developing a message that links to a particular core value. Moreover, anyone who has successfully gotten his message across is someone who has learned how to measure his progress and then used that measurement to figure out how to get the message across again. You can do that during a political campaign with polling. In the case of the plastics industry, they segmented the target audiences in various ways and through polling were able to determine month by month where those people were on this particular chart. We re-jiggered the message and the timing of the television advertising, as well as the amount of investment that they were putting in daily, to change the communication results. So never forget about measuring your progress and adjusting your communications strategy accordingly. There are six or so steps that I want to discuss. First, I’d like to talk about the target audience. There is a values-based model for decision making. It’s essentially a mechanism for mapping the thinking process of your target audience. It’s a way of determining how your audience links a very specific attribute of your communication’s subject, your candidate, or your product to a core cultural value.

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From the map comes something called a communications ladder (See Figure 5.4). That ladder actually develops the messages, and I’m going to discuss a couple of case examples so that you can see what I mean. Again, you need to test that message. You can convene focus groups or conduct surveys. Then deliver your reworked message and measure your progress. Very often what I find happens with people is that they take what I call “basic polling data” and manipulate it, guessing at what a likely message is. Then they test the message, and if it doesn’t work, they try another one and test it. If it doesn’t work, they repeat this very expensive and time-consuming process. When you’re going to spend 25 million dollars a year on advertising, that’s also risky. Communications laddering, by contrast, is a mechanism that, up front, almost assures you the message is going to work before you even test it. What you’re testing in this case is only the creative people’s ability to get the message across with whatever media you’ve chosen, not the message itself. The message is almost guaranteed to work when constructed through a communications ladder or map, which is why I want to explain how to craft messages through laddering techniques. Let me give you an example. If I were to ask you, “What are the top ten things that come to your mind when you think of plastics?” one of them is likely to be “They don’t break.” I’ll then inquire, “Well, why is it important to you that plastics don’t break?” You might say, “I don’t want to cut myself.” Then I would ask, “Why is it important that you don’t cut yourself?” You might answer, “Well, I’m a parent, and it’s a little hard to be a good parent changing diapers with something wrapped around my finger.” I would ask, “Why is it important to you that you be a good parent?” You might reply, “It’s one of the things that I’ve always wanted to be in life and gives me a sense of self-realization and is a sign of success to me—that my life has some meaning.” Why is it important that we as parents and individuals in our society have meaning? Well, it’s because the world would be a safer, more secure place if we all had a certain sense of self-realization. What I’ve done here is to uncover the thinking process that you go through that links a specific attribute of plastics—they don’t break—to a core cultural value—self-realization (and success, safety, and security). Well, that’s a lot that I’ve just identified in you, and can actually learn from you. Then I would construct a map that goes from the ten core attributes of plastics (or a political candidate or an environmental issue) and map them in a spider-like fashion up to one or two core cultural values.

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What you’ll find is that, if you try to deliver a message crafted from a laddering analysis, but you miss a link, the audience won’t understand it because you’ve lost them on the logical path down which you were trying to lead them. So when testing your message, you need to ensure that you make all the links that are important to your target audience. One of the things that you may discover in mapping these linkages is that there are some links between various attributes, benefits, consequences, and values that are stronger than others, like a carbon double bond versus a carbon single bond. When you trace linkages through the map, and you get from one attribute to a particular point above it, say a benefit, you may find that benefit has two or more consequences, and you’re not sure which to choose. But in the testing and development of your message, you can figure out which of those links is stronger. In the 1984 Reagan-Mondale campaign, for example, we asked people which of the ten campaign issues they associated with Republicans and which they associated with Democrats. In this way, we were able to discover which consequences like “build individual opportunities” or “inspires confidence” or “secure children’s future” were associated with which political party. If you try taking a ladder from a campaign issue that belongs to your political opponent, you have no credibility to make the case. The public wonders, “Why are they talking about that?” There are techniques to determine the strongest, most successful ladder to use. This is one ladder pulled from a spider web-like map (See Figure 5.5). Can anybody guess what the product is? It’s diet beer. This is actually part of a map used by Miller Lite to develop the message campaign that they had associated with convincing us all to buy lite beer. What was the message for lite beer? “Tastes great; less filling.” Miller didn’t just create that by having a bunch of people sitting around a table throwing things up on the wall. They actually pulled it from this map. In the TV advertisement, you’ll see that “Tastes great, less filling” shows up not only on the screen in words, but also in the audio and the video portions of the advertisements. They tested the creative ad to make sure the target audience actually got the idea of relaxation and social facilitation. The Miller Lite ad shows somebody walking into a bar to meet friends who are already there. When the guy walks in, they pat him on the back and invite him to sit down. Belonging. They’re friends of his. The whole ad touched on these points, while the verbal piece that we all remember is “tastes great, less filling.” These benefits were linked

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Message Crafting Belonging

Friendship

Social Acceptance

Social Enjoyment

Relax/Social Facilitator

Drink More Taste Great Less Filling

FIG. 5.5: Miller Lite message with the social consequences for and values of the target audience. The result was that Miller sold more lite beer than anybody else has ever been able to sell. To give another example of message construction, it’s no surprise that one of the things you heard from Ronald Reagan’s campaign was “peace through strength.” There was a concern in the campaign that the American public felt that he was too quick to pull a trigger and could be untrustworthy in protecting the country because he might just take us to war. Using values mapping, however, Reagan’s pollsters also found that the American public thought that strong defense was a way to achieve world peace, giving them a sense of security and making them feel that future generations would enjoy a safer, better place (See Figure 5.6). Reagan’s pollsters also discovered that the public linked things like Star Wars and MX missiles to strong defense. So if you look at the campaign ad, the bear in the woods that we all remember, the theme behind that is peace through strength. That message phrase came from the values ladder. So this is what I mean when I say that the message isn’t something that you create out of whole cloth. Those words “peace through strength” came, as far as I understand my history lessons, from that ladder. A further example comes from a Clinton speech having to do with tax policies or tax reform (See Figure 5.7). The benefits are improvements in competent leadership, confidence in government, and sanctions

Page 44 Message Crafting | 71 of social consequence. They particularly linked it to a “peace of mind.” I’m not suggesting that his is a successful ladder, but it just happens to be the one that pops out of this speech, as you can see from the phrases to the right. It gives you a sense of how you develop a speech text message as opposed to an advertising message. If you read the quo- tations on the right-hand side, you’ll see that they have pretty much tried to create an increasingly abstract hierarchy from the very concrete tax proposal of some kind of 10 percent tax cut to the concept of renewing America’s future. From what I’ve read, there are about twenty to thirty values that American civilization has. Freedom is only one of our values. Conse- quently, I’m somewhat concerned that we all just assume that freedom is the value to which we should be linking everything. From my point of view, once you’ve decided what your target audience is and why you’re doing this, what your goal is—the value at which you should aim—is the one that emerges from that mapping exercise. Not one that you pre- sume to know is the correct one in the first place. The failure of the Republican response to Clinton’s speech is that it presumes that the audience links tax reform policy to the concept of freedom. In the case of the Plastics Council, the attribute that was most associated with plastics was, believe it or not, peace of mind. You wouldn’t know that unless you did the map. Almost all of the various ladders and the map that the plastics industry has—the environmental and safety concerns over plastics—all track to “peace of mind.” An awful lot of the target audience won’t get that point unless

Message Crafting Future Generations (Better Place)

Preserve World Peace

Strengthen Defense Preparedness

Star Wars MX Missile

FIG. 5.6: Reagan’s peace through strength message

Page 45 72 | Field Guide for Effective Communication you connect the dots for them. So the Clinton speech succeeds, in part, because he actually connects the dots. Now, my understanding of Clin- ton is that you have an intuitively good speaker who also has research work behind him to support his assertions. Meanwhile, the Republican response is probably the result of a speechwriter who was told to com-

President Clinton’s “... Renewing the very idea of Speech America…forging a more perfect Peace of Mind union…balanced budgets as far Personal Value as the eye can see…”

Hope/Optimism “… widening the circle of opportunity, deepening the Psycho-social meaning of our freedom…” consequences “…a government that gives Confidence in Gov’t. people the tools to make the most of their lives…”

Benefit “…government that is leaner, more flexible, a catalyst for Competent Leadership new ideas…”

Issue “…the lowest tax rates in 20 years…targeted to the needs of Tax Reform working families…”

Republican Response Freedom Personal Value “... high taxes mean less freedom overall…limit Psycho-social government and expand consequences personal freedom….”

Benefit

“…we pledge to replace the new Issue Tax Reform tax code with a new system…”

FIG. 5.7: Message Strategy Case Examples

Page 46 Message Crafting | 73 municate values. So, the speechwriter might have just guessed that the value of tax reform is greater freedom that presumed that the audience would understand. I suspect that this is why the Republicans failed, while Clinton’s approach succeeded. If you decide to take on an argument and deliver a message that is in a different place from where your target audience is, they’re not going to listen to you. They’re not going to pay any attention. They’ll be confused. So for example, in the case of climate change, if the American public has decided that climate change is a real problem—and I don’t have the polling data for you—and you want to engage in a discussion over the underlying science, they’re going to ignore you. They have finished that discussion. They’re tired of it. They’ve come to some other point in the policy process that is independent of how you are choosing to develop your message on the subject. Consequently, there is no audience for your message in the American public. Now, you could change the discussion and reverse it by reframing the issues. Change it from “We’re worried that welfare costs too much,” to “We’re now concerned that welfare is harming people. Well, now you can go back and develop the argument of harming people on some of the underlying data, and you’ve shifted it a little bit. So you probably can reverse policy evolution, but perhaps only by reframing the problem that the policy is meant to address.

Think like your target audience, not yourself .

Page 47 Conclusion

For years, the free-market community has struggled to explain itself effectively to the general public. Instead of communicating the egalitarian values of the free-market movement, we have apologized for our beliefs, allowing the left to have the upper hand. Furthermore, we have not communicated at the level of the average, or “rationally ignorant,” person. Rather, we have used lofty, academic language to prove our points—perhaps winning the intellectual battle, but losing the most important battle of all: advancing classical liberal ideas in any sort of meaningful way. What we have seen in this book are effective techniques to dissemi- nate our message to a mass audience and overcome the problems that have handicapped us in the past. We have seen how a values ladder can help us use the right words when relaying our message, as well as how we can best work with the media, both during times of crisis and with a long-term strategic communications plan. We hope that this book has provided you with insight and ideas on how to communicate your messages more effectively.

Page 48

Session III “Communicating to the ‘Elites’”

Hayek, Friedrich A. The Intellectuals and Socialism. Washington, DC: The Institute for Human Studies

Nock, Albert Jay. Isaiah’s Job. From The Atlantic Monthly, 1936

Questions to consider:

Are ideas really transmitted in the way Hayek describes? Why/why not? What kind of implications does this have for strategies to advance the ideas of freedom? What does this mean for the communication tools discussed in the previous session?

If there is only a ‘remnant’, is it worthless to communicate to the “average joe”? Does Nock take an overly cynical view of the world? Overly optimistic? What are the implications for the strategy of communicating freedom if Nock is correct?

Page 49 The Intellectuals and Socialism, by F.A. Hayek

The Intellectuals and Socialism By F.A. Hayek

[Reprinted from The University of Chicago Law Review (Spring 1949), pp. 417-420, 421-423, 425-433, by permission of the author and the publisher, The University of Chicago Press; George B. de Huszar ed., The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait (Glencoe, Illinois: the Free Press, 1960) pp. 371-84. The pagination of this edition corresponds to the Huszar edited volume.]

In all democratic countries, in the United States even more than elsewhere, a strong belief prevails that the influence of the intellectuals on politics is negligible. This is no doubt true of the power of intellectuals to make their peculiar opinions of the moment influence decisions, of the extent to which they can sway the popular vote on questions on which they differ from the current views of the masses. Yet over somewhat longer periods they have probably never exercised so great an influence as they do today in those countries. This power they wield by shaping public opinion.

In the light of recent history it is somewhat curious that this decisive power of the professional secondhand dealers in ideas should not yet be more generally recognized. The political development of the Western World during the last hundred years furnishes the clearest demonstration. Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar; and it required long efforts by the intellectuals before the working classes could be persuaded to adopt it as their program.

In every country that has moved toward socialism, the phase of the development in which socialism becomes a determining influence on politics has been preceded for many years by a period during which socialist ideals governed the thinking of the more active intellectuals. In Germany this stage had been reached toward the end of the last century; in England and France, about the time of the first World War. To the casual observer it would seem as if the United States had reached this phase after World War II and that the attraction of a planned and directed economic system is now as strong among the American intellectuals as it ever was among their German or English fellows. Experience suggests that, once this phase has been reached, it is merely a question of time until the views now held by the intellectuals become the governing force of politics.

Page 50 The character of the process by which the views of the intellectuals influence the politics of tomorrow is therefore of much more than academic interest. Whether we merely wish to foresee or attempt to influence the course of events, it is a factor of much greater importance than is generally understood. What to the contemporary observer appears as the battle of conflicting interests has indeed often been decided long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow circles. Paradoxically enough, however, in general only the parties of the Left have done most to spread the belief that it was the numerical strength of the opposing material interests which decided political issues, whereas in practice these same parties have regularly and successfully acted as if they understood the key position of the intellectuals. Whether by design or driven by the force of circumstances, they have always directed their main effort toward gaining the support of this "elite," while the more conservative groups have acted, as regularly but unsuccessfully, on a more naive view of mass democracy and have usually vainly tried directly to reach and to persuade the individual voter.

The term "intellectuals," however, does not at once convey a true picture of the large class to which we refer, and the fact that we have no better name by which to describe what we have called the secondhand dealers in ideas is not the least of the reasons why their power is not understood. Even persons who use the word "intellectual" mainly as a term of abuse are still inclined to withhold it from many who undoubtedly perform that characteristic function. This is neither that of the original thinker nor that of the scholar or expert in a particular field of thought. The typical intellectual need be neither: he need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write, and a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself.

Until one begins to list all the professions and activities which belong to the class, it is difficult to realize how numerous it is, how the scope for activities constantly increases in modern society, and how dependent on it we all have become. The class does not consist of only journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, and artists all of whom may be masters of the technique of conveying ideas but are usually amateurs so far as the substance of what they convey is concerned. The class also includes many professional men and technicians, such as scientists and doctors, who through their habitual intercourse with the printed word become carriers of new ideas outside their own fields and who, because of their expert knowledge of their own subjects, are listened with respect on most others. There is little that the ordinary man of today learns about events or ideas except through the medium of this class; and outside our special fields of work we are in this respect almost all ordinary men, dependent for our information and instruction on those who make it their job to keep abreast of opinion. It is the intellectuals in this sense who decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are important enough

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Page 51 to be told to us, and in what form and from what angle they are to be presented. Whether we shall ever learn of the results of the work of the expert and the original thinker depends mainly on their decision.

The layman, perhaps, is not fully aware to what extent even the popular reputations of scientists and scholars are made by that class and are inevitably affected by its views on subjects which have little to do with the merits of the real achievements. And it is specially significant for our problem that every scholar can probably name several instances from his field of men who have undeservedly achieved a popular reputation as great scientists solely because they hold what the intellectuals regard as "progressive" political views; but I have yet to come across a single instance where such a scientific pseudo-reputation has been bestowed for political reason on a scholar of more conservative leanings. This creation of reputations by the intellectuals is particularly important in the fields where the results of expert studies are not used by other specialists but depend on the political decision of the public at large. There is indeed scarcely a better illustration of this than the attitude which professional economists have taken to the growth of such doctrines as socialism or protectionism. There was probably at no time a majority of economists, who were recognized as such by their peers, favorable to socialism (or, for that matter, to protection). In all probability it is even true to say that no other similar group of students contains so high a proportion of its members decidedly opposed to socialism (or protection). This is the more significant as in recent times it is as likely as not that it was an early interest in socialist schemes for reform which led a man to choose economics for his profession. Yet it is not the predominant views of the experts but the views of a minority, mostly of rather doubtful standing in their profession, which are taken up and spread by the intellectuals.

The all-pervasive influence of the intellectuals in contemporary society is still further strengthened by the growing importance of "organization." It is a common but probably mistaken belief that the increase of organization increases the influence of the expert or specialist. This may be true of the expert administrator and organizer, if there are such people, but hardly of the expert in any particular field of knowledge. It is rather the person whose general knowledge is supposed to qualify him to appreciate expert testimony, and to judge between the experts from different fields, whose power is enhanced. The point which is important for us, however, is that the scholar who becomes a university president, the scientist who takes charge of an institute or foundation, the scholar who becomes an editor or the active promoter of an organization serving a particular cause, all rapidly cease to be scholars or experts and become intellectuals, solely in the light of certain fashionable general ideas. The number of such institutions which breed intellectuals and increase their number and powers grows every day. Almost all the "experts" in the mere technique of getting knowledge over are, with respect to the subject matter which they handle, intellectuals and not experts.

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Page 52 In the sense in which we are using the term, the intellectuals are in fact a fairly new phenomenon of history. Though nobody will regret that education has ceased to be a privilege of the propertied classes, the fact that the propertied classes are no longer the best educated and the fact that the large number of people who owe their position solely to the their general education do not possess that experience of the working of the economic system which the administration of property gives, are important for understanding the role of the intellectual. Professor Schumpeter, who has devoted an illuminating chapter of his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy to some aspects of our problem, has not unfairly stressed that it is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs and the consequent absence of first hand knowledge of them which distinguishes the typical intellectual from other people who also wield the power of the spoken and written word. It would lead too far, however, to examine here further the development of this class and the curious claim which has recently been advanced by one of its theorists that it was the only one whose views were not decidedly influenced by its own economic interests. One of the important points that would have to be examined in such a discussion would be how far the growth of this class has been artificially stimulated by the law of copyright.

It is not surprising that the real scholar or expert and the practical man of affairs often feel contemptuous about the intellectual, are disinclined to recognize his power, and are resentful when they discover it. Individually they find the intellectuals mostly to be people who understand nothing in particular especially well and whose judgement on matters they themselves understand shows little sign of special wisdom. But it would be a fatal mistake to underestimate their power for this reason. Even though their knowledge may often be superficial and their intelligence limited, this does not alter the fact that it is their judgement which mainly determines the views on which society will act in the not too distant future. It is no exaggeration to say that, once the more active part of the intellectuals has been converted to a set of beliefs, the process by which these become generally accepted is almost automatic and irresistible. These intellectuals are the organs which modern society has developed for spreading knowledge and ideas, and it is their convictions and opinions which operate as the sieve through which all new conceptions must pass before they can reach the masses.

It is of the nature of the intellectual's job that he must use his own knowledge and convictions in performing his daily task. He occupies his position because he possesses, or has had to deal from day to day with, knowledge which his employer in general does not possess, and his activities can therefore be directed by others only to a limited extent. And just because the intellectuals are mostly intellectually honest, it is inevitable that they should follow their own conviction whenever they have discretion and that they should give a corresponding slant to everything that passes through their hands. Even where the direction of policy is in the hands of men of affairs of different views, the execution of policy will in general be in the hands of intellectuals, and it is frequently the decision on the detail which determines the net effect. We find this illustrated in almost all fields of contemporary society. Newspapers in "capitalist"

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Page 53 ownership, universities presided over by "reactionary" governing bodies, broadcasting systems owned by conservative governments, have all been known to influence public opinion in the direction of socialism, because this was the conviction of the personnel. This has often happened not only in spite of, but perhaps even because of, the attempts of those at the top to control opinion and to impose principles of orthodoxy.

The effect of this filtering of ideas through the convictions of a class which is constitutionally disposed to certain views is by no means confined to the masses. Outside his special field the expert is generally no less dependent on this class and scarcely less influenced by their selection. The result of this is that today in most parts of the Western World even the most determined opponents of socialism derive from socialist sources their knowledge on most subjects on which they have no firsthand information. With many of the more general preconceptions of socialist thought, the connection of their more practical proposals is by no means at once obvious; in consequence of that system of thought become in fact effective spreaders of its ideas. Who does not know the practical man who in his own field denounces socialism as "pernicious rot" but, when he steps outside his subject, spouts socialism like any left journalist? In no other field has the predominant influence of the socialist intellectuals been felt more strongly during the last hundred years than in the contacts between different national civilizations. It would go far beyond the limits of this article to trace the causes and significance of the highly important fact that in the modern world the intellectuals provide almost the only approach to an international community. It is this which mainly accounts for the extraordinary spectacle that for generations the supposedly "capitalist" West has been lending its moral and material support almost exclusively to those ideological movements in countries father east which aimed at undermining Western civilization and that, at the same time, the information which the Western public has obtained about events in Central and Eastern Europe has almost inevitably been colored by a socialist bias. Many of the "educational" activities of the American forces of occupation of Germany have furnished clear and recent examples of this tendency.

A proper understanding of the reasons which tend to incline so many of the intellectuals toward socialism is thus most important. The first point here which those who do not share this bias ought to face frankly is that it is neither selfish interests nor evil intentions but mostly honest convictions and good intentions which determine the intellectual's views. In fact, it is necessary to recognize that on the whole the typical intellectual is today more likely to be a socialist the more he his guided by good will and intelligence, and that on the plane of purely intellectual argument he will generally be able to make out a better case than the majority of his opponents within his class. If we still think him wrong, we must recognize that it may be genuine error which leads the well-meaning and intelligent people who occupy those key positions in our society

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Page 54 to spread views which to us appear a threat to our civilization. 1 Nothing could be more important than to try to understand the sources of this error in order that we should be able to counter it. Yet those who are generally regarded as the representatives of the existing order and who believe that they comprehend the dangers of socialism are usually very far from such understanding. They tend to regard the socialist intellectuals as nothing more than a pernicious bunch of highbrow radicals without appreciating their influence and, by their whole attitude to them, tend to drive them even further into opposition to the existing order.

If we are to understand this peculiar bias of a large section of intellectuals, we must be clear about two points. The first is that they generally judge all particular issues exclusively in the light of certain general ideas; the second, that the characteristic errors of any age are frequently derived from some genuine new truths it has discovered, and they are erroneous applications of new generalizations which have proved their value in other fields. The conclusion to which we shall be led by a full consideration of these facts will be that the effective refutation of such errors will frequently require further intellectual advance, and often advance on points which are very abstract and may seem very remote from the practical issues.

It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced. It is through their influence on him and on his choice of opinions on particular issues that the power of ideas for good and evil grows in proportion to their generality, abstractness, and even vagueness. As he knows little about the particular issues, his criterion must be consistency with his other views and suitability for combining into a coherent picture of the world. Yet this selection from the multitude of new ideas presenting themselves at every moment creates the characteristic climate of opinion, the dominant Weltanschauung of a period, which will be favorable to the reception of some opinions and unfavorable to others and which will make the intellectual readily accept one conclusion and reject another without a real understanding of the issues.

In some respects the intellectual is indeed closer to the philosopher than to any specialist, and the philosopher is in more than one sense a sort of prince among the intellectuals. Although his influence is farther removed from practical affairs and correspondingly slower and more difficult to trace than that of the ordinary intellectual, it is of the same kind and in the long run even more powerful than that of the latter. It is the same endeavor toward a synthesis, pursued more methodically, the same judgement of particular views in so far as they fit into a general system of thought rather than by their specific merits, the same striving after a consistent world view, which for both

1 It was therefore not (as has been suggested by one reviewer of The Road to Serfdom, Professor J. Schumpeter), "politeness to a fault" but profound conviction of the importance of this which made me, in Professor Schumpeter's words, "hardly ever attribute to opponents anything beyond intellectual error." 376

Page 55 forms the main basis for accepting or rejecting ideas. For this reason the philosopher has probably a greater influence over the intellectuals than any other scholar or scientist and, more than anyone else, determines the manner in which the intellectuals exercise their censorship function. The popular influence of the scientific specialist begins to rival that of the philosopher only when he ceases to be a specialist and commences to philosophize about the progress of his subject and usually only after he has been taken up by the intellectuals for reasons which have little to do with his scientific eminence.

The "climate of opinion" of any period is thus essentially a set of very general preconceptions by which the intellectual judges the importance of new facts and opinions. These preconceptions are mainly applications to what seem to him the most significant aspects of scientific achievements, a transfer to other fields of what has particularly impressed him in the work of the specialists. One could give a long list of such intellectual fashions and catchwords which in the course of two or three generations have in turn dominated the thinking of the intellectuals. Whether it was the "historical approach" or the theory of evolution, nineteenth century determinism and the belief in the predominant influence of environment as against heredity, the theory of relativity or the belief in the power of the unconscious- every one of these general conceptions has been made the touchstone by which innovations in different fields have been tested. It seems as if the less specific or precise (or the less understood) these ideas are, the wider may be their influence. Sometimes it is no more than a vague impression rarely put into words which thus wields a profound influence. Such beliefs as that deliberate control or conscious organization is also in social affairs always superior to the results of spontaneous processes which are not directed by a human mind, or that any order based on a plan laid down beforehand must be better than one formed by the balancing of opposing forces, have in this way profoundly affected political development.

Only apparently different is the role of the intellectuals where the development of more properly social ideas is concerned. Here their peculiar propensities manifest themselves in making shibboleths of abstractions, in rationalizing and carrying to extremes certain ambitions which spring from the normal intercourse of men. Since democracy is a good thing, the further the democratic principle can be carried, the better it appears to them. The most powerful of these general ideas which have shaped political development in recent times is of course the ideal of material equality. It is, characteristically, not one of the spontaneously grown moral convictions, first applied in the relations between particular individuals, but an intellectual construction originally conceived in the abstract and of doubtful meaning or application in particular instances. Nevertheless, it has operated strongly as a principle of selection among the alternative courses of social policy, exercising a persistent pressure toward an arrangement of social affairs which nobody clearly conceives. That a particular measure tends to bring about greater equality has come to be regarded as so strong a recommendation that little else will be considered. Since on each particular issue it is this one aspect on which

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Page 56 those who guide opinion have a definite conviction, equality has determined social change even more strongly than its advocates intended.

Not only moral ideals act in this manner, however. Sometimes the attitudes of the intellectuals toward the problems of social order may be the consequence of advances in purely scientific knowledge, and it is in these instances that their erroneous views on particular issues may for a time seem to have all the prestige of the latest scientific achievements behind them. It is not in itself surprising that a genuine advance of knowledge should in this manner become on occasion a source of new error. If no false conclusions followed from new generalizations, they would be final truths which would never need revision. Although as a rule such a new generalization will merely share the false consequences which can be drawn from it with the views which were held before, and thus not lead to new error, it is quite likely that a new theory, just as its value is shown by the valid new conclusions to which it leads, will produce other new conclusions to which further advance will show to have been erroneous. But in such an instance a false belief will appear with all the prestige of the latest scientific knowledge supporting it. Although in the particular field to which this belief applies all the scientific evidence may be against it, it will nevertheless, before the tribunal of the intellectuals and in the light of the ideas which govern their thinking, be selected as the view which is best in accord with the spirit of the time. The specialists who will thus achieve public fame and wide influence will thus not be those who have gained recognition by their peers but will often be men whom the other experts regard as cranks, amateurs, or even frauds, but who in the eyes of the general public nevertheless become the best known exponents of their subject.

In particular, there can be little doubt that the manner in which during the last hundred years man has learned to organize the forces of nature has contributed a great deal toward the creation of the belief that a similar control of the forces of society would bring comparable improvements in human conditions. That, with the application of engineering techniques, the direction of all forms of human activity according to a single coherent plan should prove to be as successful in society as it has been in innumerable engineering tasks, is too plausible a conclusion not to seduce most of those who are elated by the achievement of the natural sciences. It must indeed be admitted both that it would require powerful arguments to counter the strong presumption in favor of such a conclusion and that these arguments have not yet been adequately stated. It is not sufficient to point out the defects of particular proposals based on this kind of reasoning. The argument will not lose its force until it has been conclusively shown why what has proved so eminently successful in producing advances in so many fields should have limits to its usefulness and become positively harmful if extended beyond these limits. This is a task which has not yet been satisfactorily performed and which will have to be achieved before this particular impulse toward socialism can be removed.

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Page 57 This, of course, is only one of many instances where further intellectual advance is needed if the harmful ideas at present current are to be refuted and where the course which we shall travel will ultimately be decided by the discussion of very abstract issues. It is not enough for the man of affairs to be sure, from his intimate knowledge of a particular field, that the theories of socialism which are derived from more general ideas will prove impracticable. He may be perfectly right, and yet his resistance will be overwhelmed and all the sorry consequences which he foresees will follow if his is not supported by an effective refutation of the idees meres. So long as the intellectual gets the better of the general argument, the most valid objections of the specific issue will be brushed aside.

This is not the whole story, however. The forces which influence recruitment to the ranks of the intellectuals operate in the same direction and help to explain why so many of the most able among them lean toward socialism. There are of course as many differences of opinion among intellectuals as among other groups of people; but it seems to be true that it is on the whole the more active, intelligent, and original men among the intellectuals who most frequently incline toward socialism, while its opponents are often of an inferior caliber. This is true particularly during the early stages of the infiltration of socialist ideas; later, although outside intellectual circles it may still be an act of courage to profess socialist convictions, the pressure of opinion among intellectuals will often be so strongly in favor of socialism that it requires more strength and independence for a man to resist it than to join in what his fellows regard as modern views. Nobody, for instance, who is familiar with large numbers of university faculties (and from this point of view the majority of university teachers probably have to be classed as intellectuals rather than as experts) can remain oblivious to the fact that the most brilliant and successful teachers are today more likely than not to be socialists, while those who hold more conservative political views are as frequently mediocrities. This is of course by itself an important factor leading the younger generation into the socialist camp.

The socialist will, of course, see in this merely a proof that the more intelligent person is today bound to become a socialist. But this is far from being the necessary or even the most likely explanation. The main reason for this state of affairs is probably that, for the exceptionally able man who accepts the present order of society, a multitude of other avenues to influence and power are open, while to the disaffected and dissatisfied an intellectual career is the most promising path to both influence and the power to contribute to the achievement of his ideals. Even more than that: the more conservatively inclined man of first class ability will in general choose intellectual work (and the sacrifice in material reward which this choice usually entails) only if he enjoys it for its own sake. He is in consequence more likely to become an expert scholar rather than an intellectual in the specific sense of the word; while to the more radically minded the intellectual pursuit is more often than not a means rather than an end, a path to exactly that kind of wide influence which the professional intellectual exercises. It is therefore probably the fact, not that the more intelligent people are generally socialists,

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Page 58 but that a much higher proportion of socialists among the best minds devote themselves to those intellectual pursuits which in modern society give them a decisive influence on public opinion. 2

The selection of the personnel of the intellectuals is also closely connected with the predominant interest which they show in general and abstract ideas. Speculations about the possible entire reconstruction of society give the intellectual a fare much more to his taste than the more practical and short-run considerations of those who aim at a piecemeal improvement of the existing order. In particular, socialist thought owes its appeal to the young largely to its visionary character; the very courage to indulge in Utopian thought is in this respect a source of strength to the socialists which traditional liberalism sadly lacks. This difference operates in favor of socialism, not only because speculation about general principles provides an opportunity for the play of the imagination of those who are unencumbered by much knowledge of the facts of present-day life, but also because it satisfies a legitimate desire for the understanding of the rational basis of any social order and gives scope for the exercise of that constructive urge for which liberalism, after it had won its great victories, left few outlets. The intellectual, by his whole disposition, is uninterested in technical details or practical difficulties. What appeal to him are the broad visions, the spacious comprehension of the social order as a whole which a planned system promises.

This fact that the tastes of the intellectual were better satisfied by the speculations of the socialists proved fatal to the influence of the liberal tradition. Once the basic demands of the liberal programs seemed satisfied, the liberal thinkers turned to problems of detail and tended to neglect the development of the general philosophy of liberalism, which in consequence ceased to be a live issue offering scope for general speculation. Thus for something over half a century it has been only the socialists who have offered anything like an explicit program of social development, a picture of the future society at which they were aiming, and a set of general principles to guide decisions on particular issues. Even though, if I am right, their ideals suffer from inherent contradictions, and any attempt to put them into practice must produce something utterly different from what they expect, this does not alter the fact that their program for change is the only one which has actually influenced the development of social institutions. It is because theirs has become the only explicit general philosophy of social policy held by a large group, the only system or theory which raises new problems and opens new horizons, that they have succeeded in inspiring the imagination of the intellectuals.

2 Related to this is another familiar phenomenon: there is little reason to believe that really first class intellectual ability for original work is any rarer among Gentiles than among Jews. Yet there can be little doubt that men of Jewish stock almost everywhere constitute a disproportionately large number of the intellectuals in our sense, that is of the ranks of the professional interpreters of ideas. This may be their special gift and certainly is their main opportunity in countries where prejudice puts obstacles in their way in other fields. It is probably more because they constitute so large a proportion of the intellectuals than for any other reason that they seem to be so much more receptive of socialist ideas than people of different stocks. 380

Page 59 The actual developments of society during this period were determined, not by a battle of conflicting ideals, but by the contrast between an existing state of affairs and that one ideal of a possible future society which the socialists alone held up before the public. Very few of the other programs which offered themselves provided genuine alternatives. Most of them were mere compromises or half-way houses between the more extreme types of socialism and the existing order. All that was needed to make almost any socialist proposal appear reasonable to these "judicious" minds who were constitutionally convinced that the truth must always lie in the middle between the extremes, was for someone to advocate a sufficiently more extreme proposal. There seemed to exist only one direction in which we could move, and the only question seemed to be how fast and how far the movement should proceed.

The significance of the special appeal to the intellectuals which socialism derives from its speculative character will become clearer if we further contrast the position of the socialist theorist with that of his counterpart who is a liberal in the old sense of the word. This comparison will also lead us to whatever lesson we can draw from an adequate appreciation of the intellectual forces which are undermining the foundations of a free society.

Paradoxically enough, one of the main handicaps which deprives the liberal thinker of popular influence is closely connected with the fact that, until socialism has actually arrived, he has more opportunity of directly influencing decisions on current policy and that in consequence he is not only not tempted into that long-run speculation which is the strength of the socialists, but is actually discouraged from it because any effort of this kind is likely to reduce the immediate good he can do. Whatever power he has to influence practical decisions he owes to his standing with the representatives of the existing order, and this standing he would endanger if he devoted himself to the kind of speculation which would appeal to the intellectuals and which through them could influence developments over longer periods. In order to carry weight with the powers that be, he has to be "practical," "sensible," and "realistic." So long as he concerns himself with the immediate issues, he is rewarded with influence, material success, and popularity with those who up to a point share his general outlook. But these men have little respect for those speculations on general principles which shape the intellectual climate. Indeed, if he seriously indulges in such long-run speculation, he is apt to acquire the reputation of being "unsound" or even half a socialist, because he is unwilling to identify the existing order with the free system at which he aims.3

3 The most glaring recent example of such condemnation of a somewhat unorthodox liberal work as "socialist" has been provided by some comments on the late Henry Simons' Economic Policy for a Free Society (1948). One need not agree with the whole of this work and one may even regard some of the suggestions made in it as incompatible with a free society, and yet recognize it as one of the most important contributions made in recent times to our problem and as just the kind of work which is required to get discussion started on the fundamental issues. Even those who violently disagree with some 381

Page 60 If, in spite of this, his efforts continue in the direction of general speculation, he soon discovers that it is unsafe to associate too closely with those who seem to share most of his convictions, and he is soon driven into isolation. Indeed there can be few more thankless tasks at present than the essential one of developing the philosophical foundation on which the further development of a free society must be based. Since the man who undertakes it must accept much of the framework of the existing order, he will appear to many of the more speculatively minded intellectuals merely as a timid apologist of things as they are; at the same time he will be dismissed by the men of affairs as an impractical theorist. He is not radical enough for those who know only the world where "with ease together dwell the thoughts" and much too radical for those who see only how "hard in space together clash the things." If he takes advantage of such support as he can get from the men of affairs, he will almost certainly discredit himself with those on whom he depends for the spreading of his ideas. At the same time he will need most carefully to avoid anything resembling extravagance or overstatement. While no socialist theorist has ever been known to discredit himself with his fellows even by the silliest of proposals, the old-fashioned liberal will damn himself by an impracticable suggestion. Yet for the intellectuals he will still not be speculative or adventurous enough, and the changes and improvements in the social structure he will have to offer will seem limited in comparison with what their less restrained imagination conceives.

At least in a society in which the main requisites of freedom have already been won and further improvements must concern points of comparative detail, the liberal program can have none of the glamour of a new invention. The appreciation of the improvements it has to offer requires more knowledge of the working of the existing society than the average intellectual possesses. The discussion of these improvements must proceed on a more practical level than that of the more revolutionary programs, thus giving a complexion which has little appeal for the intellectual and tending to bring in elements to whom he feels directly antagonistic. Those who are most familiar with the working of the present society are also usually interested in the preservation of particular features of that society which may not be defensible on general principles. Unlike the person who looks for an entirely new future order and who naturally turns for guidance to the theorist, the men who believe in the existing order also usually think that they understand it much better than any theorist and in consequence are likely to reject whatever is unfamiliar and theoretical.

The difficulty of finding genuine and disinterested support for a systematic policy for freedom is not new. In a passage of which the reception of a recent book of mine has often reminded me, Lord Acton long ago described how "at all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes of its suggestions should welcome it as a contribution which clearly and courageously raises the central problems of our time. 382

Page 61 disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition...."4 More recently, one of the most distinguished living American economists has complained in a similar vein that the main task of those who believe in the basic principles of the capitalist system must frequently be to defend this system against the capitalists--indeed the great liberal economists, from Adam Smith to the present, have always known this.

The most serious obstacle which separates the practical men who have the cause of freedom genuinely at heart from those forces which in the realm of ideas decide the course of development is their deep distrust of theoretical speculation and their tendency to orthodoxy; this, more than anything else, creates an almost impassable barrier between them and those intellectuals who are devoted to the same cause and whose assistance is indispensable if the cause is to prevail. Although this tendency is perhaps natural among men who defend a system because it has justified itself in practice, and to whom its intellectual justification seems immaterial, it is fatal to its survival because it deprives it of the support it most needs. Orthodoxy of any kind, any pretense that a system of ideas is final and must be unquestioningly accepted as a whole, is the one view which of necessity antagonizes all intellectuals, whatever their views on particular issues. Any system which judges men by the completeness of their conformity to a fixed set of opinions, by their "soundness" or the extent to which they can be relied upon to hold approved views on all points, deprives itself of a support without which no set of ideas can maintain its influence in modern society. The ability to criticize accepted views, to explore new vistas and to experience with new conceptions, provides the atmosphere without which the intellectual cannot breathe. A cause which offers no scope for these traits can have no support from him and is thereby doomed in any society which, like ours, rests on his services.

It may be that as a free society as we have known it carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends. There can be little doubt that in countries like the United States the ideal of freedom today has less real appeal for the young than it has in countries where they have learned what its loss means. On the other hand, there is every sign that in Germany and elsewhere, to the young men who have never known a free society, the task of constructing one can become as exciting and fascinating as any socialist scheme which has appeared during the last hundred years. It is an extraordinary fact, though one which many visitors have experienced, that in speaking to German students about the principles of a liberal society one finds a more responsive and even enthusiastic audience than one can hope to find in any of the Western democracies. In Britain also there is already appearing among the young a new interest in the principles of true liberalism which certainly did not exist a few years ago.

4 Acton, The History of Freedom, I (1922). 383

Page 62 Does this mean that freedom is valued only when it is lost, that the world must everywhere go through a dark phase of socialist totalitarianism before the forces of freedom can gather strength anew? It may be so, but I hope it need not be. Yet, so long as the people who over longer periods determine public opinion continue to be attracted by the ideals of socialism, the trend will continue. If we are to avoid such a development, we must be able to offer a new liberal program which appeals to the imagination. We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical, and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote. The practical compromises they must leave to the politicians. Free trade and freedom of opportunity are ideals which still may arouse the imaginations of large numbers, but a mere "reasonable freedom of trade" or a mere "relaxation of controls" is neither intellectually respectable nor likely to inspire any enthusiasm.

The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and therefore an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote. Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this had rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost. The intellectual revival of liberalism is already underway in many parts of the world. Will it be in time?

384

Page 63 Isaiah's Job by Albert Jay Nock by Albert Jay Nock One evening last autumn, I sat long hours with a European acquaintance while he expounded a political-economic doctrine which seemed sound as a nut and in which I could find no defect. At the end, he said with great earnestness: "I have a mission to the masses. I feel that I am called to get the ear of the people. I shall devote the rest of my life to spreading my doctrine far and wide among the population. What do you think?" An embarrassing question in any case, and doubly so under the circumstances, because my acquaintance is a very learned man, one of the three or four really first-class minds that Europe produced in his generation; and naturally I, as one of the unlearned, was inclined to regard his lightest word with reverence amounting to awe. Still, I reflected, even the greatest mind can not possibly know everything, and I was pretty sure he had not had my opportunities for observing the masses of mankind, and that therefore I probably knew them better than he did. So I mustered courage to say that he had no such mission and would do well to get the idea out of his head at once; he would find that the masses would not care two pins for his doctrine, and still less for himself, since in such circumstances the popular favourite is generally some Barabbas. I even went so far as to say (he is a Jew) that his idea seemed to show that he was not very well up on his own native literature. He smiled at my jest, and asked what I meant by it; and I referred him to the story of the prophet Isaiah. It occurred to me then that this story is much worth recalling just now when so many wise men and soothsayers appear to be burdened with a message to the masses. Dr. Townsend has a message, Father Coughlin has one, Mr. Upton Sinclair, Mr. Lippmann, Mr. Chase and the planned economy brethren, Mr. Tugwell and the New Dealers, Mr. Smith and Liberty Leaguers – the list is endless. I can not remember a time when so many energumens were so variously proclaiming the Word to the multitude and telling them what they must do to be saved. This being so, it occurred to me, as I say, that the story of Isaiah might have something in it to steady and compose the human spirit until this tyranny of windiness is overpast. I shall paraphrase the story in our common speech, since it has to be pieced out from various sources; and inasmuch as respectable scholars have thought fit to put out a whole new version of the Bible in the American vernacular, I shall take shelter behind them, if need be, against the charge of dealing irreverently with the Sacred Scriptures. The prophet's career began at the end of King Uzziah's reign, say about 740 B.C. This reign was uncommonly long, almost half a century, and apparently prosperous. It was one of those prosperous reigns, however – like the reign of Marcus Aurelius at Rome, or the

Page 64 administration of Eubulus at Athens, or of Mr. Coolidge at Washington – where at the end the prosperity suddenly peters out and things go by the board with a resounding crash. In the year of Uzziah's death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they are." He said, "Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you," He added, "that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life." Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job – in fact, he had asked for it – but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so – if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start – was there any sense in starting it? "Ah," the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it." II Apparently, then, if the Lord’s word is good for anything – I do not offer any opinion about that, – the only element in Judean society that was particularly worth bothering about was the Remnant. Isaiah seems finally to have got it through his head that this was the case; that nothing was to be expected from the masses, but that if anything substantial were ever to be done in Judea, the Remnant would have to do it. This is a very striking and suggestive idea; but before going on to explore it, we need to be quite clear about our terms. What do we mean by the masses, and what by the Remnant? As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, labouring people, proletarians, and it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are

Page 65 able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either. The picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most unfavorable. In his view, the mass-man – be he high or be he lowly, rich or poor, prince or pauper – gets off very badly. He appears as not only weak-minded and weak-willed, but as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping, dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous. The mass-woman also gets off badly, as sharing all the mass-man’s untoward qualities, and contributing a few of her own in the way of vanity and laziness, extravagance and foible. The list of luxury-products that she patronized is interesting; it calls to mind the women’s page of a Sunday newspaper in 1928, or the display set forth in one of our professedly "smart" periodicals. In another place, Isaiah even recalls the affectations that we used to know by the name "flapper gait" and the "debutante slouch." It may be fair to discount Isaiah’s vivacity a little for prophetic fervour; after all, since his real job was not to convert the masses but to brace and reassure the Remnant, he probably felt that he might lay it on indiscriminately and as thick as he liked – in fact, that he was expected to do so. But even so, the Judean mass-man must have been a most objectionable individual, and the mass- woman utterly odious. If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord’s word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah’s testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz- and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah’s fervency, even comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts. Curiously, too, he applies Isaiah’s own word remnant to the worthier portion of Athenian society; "there is but a very small remnant," he says, of those who possess a saving force of intellect and force of character – too small, preciously as to Judea, to be of any avail against the ignorant and vicious preponderance of the masses. But Isaiah was a preacher and Plato a philosopher; and we tend to regard preachers and philosophers rather as passive observers of the drama of life than as active participants. Hence in a matter of this kind their judgment might be suspected of being a little uncompromising, a little acrid, or as the French say, saugrenu. We may therefore bring forward another witness who was preeminently a man of affairs, and whose judgment can not lie under this suspicion. Marcus Aurelius was ruler of the greatest of empires, and in that capacity he not only had the Roman mass-man under observation, but he had him on his hands twenty-four hours a day for eighteen years. What he did not know about him was not worth knowing and what he thought of him is abundantly attested on almost every page of the little book of jottings which he scribbled offhand from day to day, and which he meant for no eye but his own ever to see.

Page 66 This view of the masses is the one that we find prevailing at large among the ancient authorities whose writings have come down to us. In the eighteenth century, however, certain European philosophers spread the notion that the mass-man, in his natural state, is not at all the kind of person that earlier authorities made him out to be, but on the contrary, that he is a worthy object of interest. His untowardness is the effect of environment, an effect for which "society" is somehow responsible. If only his environment permitted him to live according to his lights, he would undoubtedly show himself to be quite a fellow; and the best way to secure a more favourable environment for him would be to let him arrange it for himself. The French Revolution acted powerfully as a springboard for this idea, projecting its influence in all directions throughout Europe. On this side of the ocean a whole new continent stood ready for a large-scale experiment with this theory. It afforded every conceivable resource whereby the masses might develop a civilization made in their own likeness and after their own image. There was no force of tradition to disturb them in their preponderance, or to check them in a thoroughgoing disparagement of the Remnant. Immense natural wealth, unquestioned predominance, virtual isolation, freedom from external interference and the fear of it, and, finally, a century and a half of time – such are the advantages which the mass-man has had in bringing forth a civilization which should set the earlier preachers and philosophers at naught in their belief that nothing substantial can be expected from the masses, but only from the Remnant. His success is unimpressive. On the evidence so far presented one must say, I think, that the mass-man’s conception of what life has to offer, and his choice of what to ask from life, seem now to be pretty well what they were in the times of Isaiah and Plato; and so too seem the catastrophic social conflicts and convulsions in which his views of life and his demands on life involve him. I do not wish to dwell on this, however, but merely to observe that the monstrously inflated importance of the masses has apparently put all thought of a possible mission to the Remnant out of the modern prophet’s head. This is obviously quite as it should be, provided that the earlier preachers and philosophers were actually wrong, and that all final hope of the human race is actually centred in the masses. If, on the other hand, it should turn out that the Lord and Isaiah and Plato and Marcus Aurelius were right in their estimate of the relative social value of the masses and the Remnant, the case is somewhat different. Moreover, since with everything in their favour the masses have so far given such an extremely discouraging account of themselves, it would seem that the question at issue between these two bodies of opinion might most profitably be reopened.

Page 67 III But without following up this suggestion, I wish only, as I said, to remark the fact that as things now stand Isaiah's job seems rather to go begging. Everyone with a message nowadays is, like my venerable European friend, eager to take it to the masses. His first, last and only thought is of mass-acceptance and mass-approval. His great care is to put his doctrine in such shape as will capture the masses' attention and interest. This attitude towards the masses is so exclusive, so devout, that one is reminded of the troglodytic monster described by Plato, and the assiduous crowd at the entrance to its cave, trying obsequiously to placate it and win its favour, trying to interpret its inarticulate noises, trying to find out what it wants, and eagerly offering it all sorts of things that they think might strike its fancy. The main trouble with all this is its reaction upon the mission itself. It necessitates an opportunist sophistication of one's doctrine, which profoundly alters its character and reduces it to a mere placebo. If, say, you are a preacher, you wish to attract as large a congregation as you can, which means an appeal to the masses; and this, in turn, means adapting the terms of your message to the order of intellect and character that the masses exhibit. If you are an educator, say with a college on your hands, you wish to get as many students as possible, and you whittle down your requirements accordingly. If a writer, you aim at getting many readers; if a publisher, many purchasers; if a philosopher, many disciples; if a reformer, many converts; if a musician, many auditors; and so on. But as we see on all sides, in the realization of these several desires, the prophetic message is so heavily adulterated with trivialities, in every instance, that its effect on the masses is merely to harden them in their sins. Meanwhile, the Remnant, aware of this adulteration and of the desires that prompt it, turn their backs on the prophet and will have nothing to do with him or his message. Isaiah, on the other hand, worked under no such disabilities. He preached to the masses only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen; anyone who liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would listen; and knowing also that nothing was to be expected of the masses under any circumstances, he made no specific appeal to them, did not accommodate his message to their measure in any way, and did not care two straws whether they heeded it or not. As a modern publisher might put it, he was not worrying about circulation or about advertising. Hence, with all such obsessions quite out of the way, he was in a position to do his level best, without fear or favour, and answerable only to his august Boss. If a prophet were not too particular about making money out of his mission or getting a dubious sort of notoriety out of it, the foregoing considerations would lead one to say that serving the Remnant looks like a good job. An assignment that you can really put your back into, and do your best without thinking about results, is a real job; whereas serving

Page 68 the masses is at best only half a job, considering the inexorable conditions that the masses impose upon their servants. They ask you to give them what they want, they insist upon it, and will take nothing else; and following their whims, their irrational changes of fancy, their hot and cold fits, is a tedious business, to say nothing of the fact that what they want at any time makes very little call on one’s resources of prophesy. The Remnant, on the other hand, want only the best you have, whatever that may be. Give them that, and they are satisfied; you have nothing more to worry about. The prophet of the American masses must aim consciously at the lowest common denominator of intellect, taste and character among 120,000,000 people; and this is a distressing task. The prophet of the Remnant, on the contrary, is in the enviable position of Papa Haydn in the household of Prince Esterhazy. All Haydn had to do was keep forking out the very best music he knew how to produce, knowing it would be understood and appreciated by those for whom he produced it, and caring not a button what anyone else thought of it; and that makes a good job. In a sense, nevertheless, as I have said, it is not a rewarding job. If you can tough the fancy of the masses, and have the sagacity to keep always one jump ahead of their vagaries and vacillations, you can get good returns in money from serving the masses, and good returns also in a mouth-to-ear type of notoriety: Digito monstrari et dicier, Hic est! We all know innumerable politicians, journalists, dramatists, novelists and the like, who have done extremely well by themselves in these ways. Taking care of the Remnant, on the contrary, holds little promise of any such rewards. A prophet of the Remnant will not grow purse-proud on the financial returns from his work, nor is it likely that he will get any great renown out of it. Isaiah’s case was exceptional to this second rule, and there are others, but not many. It may be thought, then, that while taking care of the Remnant is no doubt a good job, it is not an especially interesting job because it is as a rule so poorly paid. I have my doubts about this. There are other compensations to be got out of a job besides money and notoriety, and some of them seem substantial enough to be attractive. Many jobs which do not pay well are yet profoundly interesting, as, for instance, the job of research student in the sciences is said to be; and the job of looking after the Remnant seems to me, as I have surveyed it for many years from my seat in the grandstand, to be as interesting as any that can be found in the world. IV What chiefly makes it so, I think, is that in any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them. You can be sure of those – dead sure, as our phrase is – but you will

Page 69 never be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade. The fascination and the despair of the historian, as he looks back upon Isaiah's Jewry, upon Plato's Athens, or upon Rome of the Antonines, is the hope of discovering and laying bare the "substratum of right-thinking and well-doing" which he knows must have existed somewhere in those societies because no kind of collective life can possibly go on without it. He finds tantalizing intimations of it here and there in many places, as in the Greek Anthology, in the scrapbook of Aulus Gellius, in the poems of Ausonius, and in the brief and touching tribute, Bene merenti, bestowed upon the unknown occupants of Roman tombs. But these are vague and fragmentary; they lead him nowhere in his search for some kind of measure on this substratum, but merely testify to what he already knew a priori – that the substratum did somewhere exist. Where it was, how substantial it was, what its power of self-assertion and resistance was – of all this they tell him nothing. Similarly, when the historian of two thousand years hence, or two hundred years, looks over the available testimony to the quality of our civilization and tries to get any kind of clear, competent evidence concerning the substratum of right-thinking and well-doing which he knows must have been here, he will have a devil of a time finding it. When he has assembled all he can and has made even a minimum allowance for speciousness, vagueness, and confusion of motive, he will sadly acknowledge that his net result is simply nothing. A Remnant were here, building a substratum like coral insects; so much he knows, but he will find nothing to put him on the track of who and where and how many they were and what their work was like. Concerning all this, too, the prophet of the present knows precisely as much and as little as the historian of the future; and that, I repeat, is what makes his job seem to me so profoundly interesting. One of the most suggestive episodes recounted in the Bible is that of a prophet's attempt – the only attempt of the kind on the record, I believe – to count up the Remnant. Elijah had fled from persecution into the desert, where the Lord presently overhauled him and asked what he was doing so far away from his job. He said that he was running away, not because he was a coward, but because all the Remnant had been killed off except himself. He had got away only by the skin of his teeth, and, he being now all the Remnant there was, if he were killed the True Faith would go flat. The Lord replied that he need not worry about that, for even without him the True Faith could probably manage to squeeze along somehow if it had to; "and as for your figures on the Remnant," He said, "I don't mind telling you that there are seven thousand of them back

Page 70 there in Israel whom it seems you have not heard of, but you may take My word for it that there they are." At that time, probably the population of Israel could not run to much more than a million or so; and a Remnant of seven thousand out of a million is a highly encouraging percentage for any prophet. With seven thousand of the boys on his side, there was no great reason for Elijah to feel lonesome; and incidentally, that would be something for the modern prophet of the Remnant to think of when he has a touch of the blues. But the main point is that if Elijah the Prophet could not make a closer guess on the number of the Remnant than he made when he missed it by seven thousand, anyone else who tackled the problem would only waste his time. The other certainty which the prophet of the Remnant may always have is that the Remnant will find him. He may rely on that with absolute assurance. They will find him without his doing anything about it; in fact, if he tries to do anything about it, he is pretty sure to put them off. He does not need to advertise for them nor resort to any schemes of publicity to get their attention. If he is a preacher or a public speaker, for example, he may be quite indifferent to going on show at receptions, getting his picture printed in the newspapers, or furnishing autobiographical material for publication on the side of "human interest." If a writer, he need not make a point of attending any pink teas, autographing books at wholesale, nor entering into any specious freemasonry with reviewers. All this and much more of the same order lies in the regular and necessary routine laid down for the prophet of the masses; it is, and must be, part of the great general technique of getting the mass-man's ear – or as our vigorous and excellent publicist, Mr. H. L. Mencken, puts it, the technique of boob-bumping. The prophet of the Remnant is not bound to this technique. He may be quite sure that the Remnant will make their own way to him without any adventitious aids; and not only so, but if they find him employing any such aids, as I said, it is ten to one that they will smell a rat in them and will sheer off. The certainty that the Remnant will find him, however, leaves the prophet as much in the dark as ever, as helpless as ever in the matter of putting any estimate of any kind upon the Remnant; for, as appears in the case of Elijah, he remains ignorant of who they are that have found him or where they are or how many. They did not write in and tell him about it, after the manner of those who admire the vedettes of Hollywood, nor yet do they seek him out and attach themselves to his person. They are not that kind. They take his message much as drivers take the directions on a roadside signboard – that is, with very little thought about the signboard, beyond being gratefully glad that it happened to be there, but with every thought about the directions. This impersonal attitude of the Remnant wonderfully enhances the interest of the imaginative prophet's job. Once in a while, just about often enough to keep his

Page 71 intellectual curiosity in good working order, he will quite accidentally come upon some distinct reflection of his own message in an unsuspected quarter. This enables him to entertain himself in his leisure moments with agreeable speculations about the course his message may have taken in reaching that particular quarter, and about what came of it after it got there. Most interesting of all are those instances, if one could only run them down (but one may always speculate about them), where the recipient himself no longer knows where nor when nor from whom he got the message – or even where, as sometimes happens, he has forgotten that he got it anywhere and imagines that it is all a self-sprung idea of his own. Such instances as these are probably not infrequent, for, without presuming to enroll ourselves among the Remnant, we can all no doubt remember having found ourselves suddenly under the influence of an idea, the source of which we cannot possibly identify. "It came to us afterward," as we say; that is, we are aware of it only after it has shot up full-grown in our minds, leaving us quite ignorant of how and when and by what agency it was planted there and left to germinate. It seems highly probable that the prophet's message often takes some such course with the Remnant. If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the Unbewußtsein of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man's conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do. For these reasons it appears to me that Isaiah’s job is not only good but also extremely interesting; and especially so at the present time when nobody is doing it. If I were young and had the notion of embarking in the prophetical line, I would certainly take up this branch of the business; and therefore I have no hesitation about recommending it as a career for anyone in that position. It offers an open field, with no competition; our civilization so completely neglects and disallows the Remnant that anyone going in with an eye single to their service might pretty well count on getting all the trade there is. Even assuming that there is some social salvage to be screened out of the masses, even assuming that the testimony of history to their social value is a little too sweeping, that it depresses hopelessness a little too far, one must yet perceive, I think, that the masses have prophets enough and to spare. Even admitting that in the teeth of history that hope of the human race may not be quite exclusively centred in the Remnant, one must perceive that they have social value enough to entitle them to some measure of prophetic encouragement and consolation, and that our civilization allows them none whatever. Every prophetic voice is addressed to the masses, and to them alone; the voice of the

Page 72 pulpit, the voice of education, the voice of politics, of literature, drama, journalism – all these are directed towards the masses exclusively, and they marshal the masses in the way that they are going. One might suggest, therefore, that aspiring prophetical talent may well turn to another field. Sat patriae Priamoque datum – whatever obligation of the kind may be due the masses is already monstrously overpaid. So long as the masses are taking up the tabernacle of Moloch and Chiun, their images, and following the star of their god Buncombe, they will have no lack of prophets to point the way that leadeth to the More Abundant Life; and hence a few of those who feel the prophetic afflatus might do better to apply themselves to serving the Remnant. It is a good job, an interesting job, much more interesting than serving the masses; and moreover it is the only job in our whole civilization, as far as I know, that offers a virgin field.

This essay first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1936. See also Jeffrey Tucker on Nock. Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) was an influential American libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic. Murray Rothbard was deeply influenced by him, and so was that whole generation of free-market thinkers. See Nock's The State of the Union.

Page 73

Session IV “Changing the Incentives”

Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson. Three Rivers Press, 1988: Pages 15 – 22 (Part One: The Lesson)

Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1994: Pages 148 – 167 (Chapter 10) *Abridged from original version*

Reed, Lawrence W. “Hayek Was Right: The Worst Do Get to the Top”. Mackinac Center Commentary. September 19, 2006

Caplan, Bryan. “The 4 Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters (And we’re all stupid voters.)”. Reason Magazine. October, 2007

Russel, Nathan J. “An Introduction to The Overton Window of Political Possibilities”. Mackinac Center Commentary. January 4, 2006

Questions to consider:

Does economics pose a unique problem that no other field has in getting people to understand it? Why do anti-market myths persist? How can this be changed?

What might be the problems of relying on politicians, voters, and the political process to enact pro-freedom reform? Is politics useless as a tool to advance freedom? If voters and politicians act irrationally, what hope is there for freedom?

What ways might the incentives on politicians, interest groups and voters be changed to create outcomes amenable to freedom? How does the battle of ideas differ from political battles? What is the role of politics in advancing freedom?

If we desire to spread freedom, where should our focus be?

Page 74 THE LESSON

Chapter One Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousand fold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine-the special pleading of selfish interests. While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. I t will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. I t is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

In this lies almost the whole difference between good such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.

But the tragedy is that, on the contrary, we are already suffering the long-run consequences of the policies of the remote or recent past. Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore. The long-run consequences of some economic policies may become evident in a few months. Others may not become evident for several years. Still others may not become evident for decades. But in every case those long-run consequences are contained in the policy as surely as the hen was in the egg, the flower in the seed.

From this aspect, therefore, the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Nine-tenths of the economic fallacies that are working such dreadful harm in the world today are the result of ignoring this lesson. Those fallacies all stem from one of two central fallacies, or both: that of looking only at the immediate consequences of an act or proposal, and that of looking at the consequences only for a particular group to the neglect of other groups.

Page 75 It is true, of course, that the opposite error is possible. In considering a policy we ought not to concentrate only on its long-run results to the community as a whole. This is the error often made by the classical economists. It resulted in certain callousness toward the fate of groups that were immediately hurt by policies or developments which proved to be beneficial on net balance and in the long run.

But comparatively few people today make this error; and those few consist mainly of professional economists. The most frequent fallacy by far today, the fallacy that emerges again and again in nearly every conversation that touches on economic affairs, the error of a thousand political speeches, the central sophism of the "new" economics, is to concentrate on the short-run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole. The "new" economists flatter themselves that this is a great, almost a revolutionary advance over the methods of the "classical" or "orthodox" economists, because the former take into consideration short-run effects which the latter often ignored. But in themselves ignoring or slighting the l o n g run effects, they are making the far more serious error. They overlook the woods in their precise and minute examination of particular trees. Their methods and conclusions are often profoundly reactionary. They are sometimes surprised to find themselves in accord with seven- twentieth-century mercantilism. They fall, in fact, into all the ancient errors (or would, if they were not so inconsistent) that the classical economists, we had hoped, had once for all got rid of.

It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths. It is often complained that demagogues can he more plausible in putting forward economic nonsense from the platform than the honest men who try to show what is wrong with it. But the basic reason for this ought not to be mysterious. The reason is that the demagogues and bad economists are presenting half-truths. They are speaking only of the immediate effect of a proposed policy or its effect upon a single group. As far as they go they may often be right. In these cases the answer consists in showing that the proposed policy would also have longer and less desirable effects, or that it could benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The answer consists in supplementing and correcting the half-truth with the other half. But to consider all the chief effects of a proposed course on everybody often requires a long, complicated, and dull chain of reasoning. Most of the audience finds this chain of reasoning difficult to follow and soon becomes bored and inattentive. The bad economists rationalize this intellectual debility and laziness by assuring the audience that it need not even attempt to follow the reasoning or judge it on its merits because it is only "classicism" or "laissez faire" or "capitalist apologetics" or whatever other term of abuse may happen to strike them as effective.

We have stalled the nature of the lesson, and of the fallacies that stand in its way, in abstract terms. But t lesson will not be driven home, and the 'fallacies w continue to go unrecognized, unless both are illustrate by examples. Through them examples we can move from the most elementary problems in economics to the most complex and difficult. Through them we can learn to detect and avoid first the crudest and most palpable fallacies and finally some of the most sophisticated and elusive. To that task we shall now proceed.

Page 76 Why the Worst Get on Top

(Abridged from Chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom)

NO DOUBT an American or English "fascist" system would greatly differ from the Italian or German models; no doubt, if the transition were effected without violence, we might expect to get a better type of leader. Yet this does not mean that our fascist system would in the end prove very different or much less intolerable than its prototypes. There are strong reasons for believing that the worst features of the totalitarian systems are phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce.

Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian leader would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism. Who does not see this has not yet grasped the full width of the gulf which separates totalitarianism from the essentially individualist Western civilization.

The totalitarian leader must collect around him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that discipline which they are to impose by force upon the rest of the people. That socialism can be put info practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove is, of course, a lesson learned by many social reformers in the past. The old socialist parties were inhibited by their democratic ideals; they did not possess the ruthlessness required for the performance of their chosen task. It is characteristic that both in Germany and in Italy the success of fascism was preceded by the refusal of the socialist parties to take over the responsibilities of government. They were unwilling wholeheartedly to employ the methods to which they had pointed the way. They still hoped for the miracle of a majority's agreeing on a particular plan for the organization of the whole of society. Others had already learned the lesson that in a planned society the question can no longer be on what do a majority of the people agree but what the largest single group is whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs possible.

There are three main reasons why such a numerous group, with fairly similar views, is not likely to be formed by the best but rather by the worst elements of any society. First, the higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their tastes and views are differentiated. If we wish to find a high degree of uniformity in outlook, we have to descend to the regions of your moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive instincts prevail. This does not mean that the majority of people have low moral standards; it merely means that the largest group of people whose values are very similar are the people with low standards.

Second, since this group is not large enough to give sufficient weight to the leader's endeavors, he will have to increase their numbers by converting more to the same simple creed. He must gain the support of the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are ready to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently. It will be those whose vague and imperfectly

Page 77 formed ideas are easily swayed and whose passions and emotions are readily aroused who will thus swell the ranks of the totalitarian party.

Third, to weld together a closely coherent body of supporters, the leader must appeal to a common human weakness. It seems to be easier for people to agree on a negative program — on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off - than on any positive task. The contrast between the "we" and the "they" is consequently always employed by those who seek the allegiance of huge masses. The enemy may be internal, like the "Jew" in Germany or the "kulak" in Russia, or he may be external. In any case, this technique has the great advantage of leaving the leader greater freedom of action than would almost any positive program.

Advancement within a totalitarian group or party depends largely on a willingness to do immoral things. The principle that the end justifies the means, which in individualist ethics is regarded as the denial of all morals, in collectivist ethics becomes necessarily the supreme rule. There is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves "the good of the whole," because that is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done. Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarianism which horrify us follow of necessity. From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, deception and spying, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual are essential and unavoidable Acts which revolt all our feelings, such as the shooting of hostages or the killing of the old or sick, are treated as mere matters of expediency; the compulsory uprooting and transportation of hundreds of thousands becomes an instrument of policy approved by almost everybody except the victims. To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, therefore, a man must be prepared to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. In the totalitarian machine there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous. Neither the Gestapo nor the administration of a concentration camp, neither the Ministry of Propaganda nor the SA or SS (or their Russian counterparts) are suitable places for the exercise of humanitarian feelings. Yet it is through such positions that the road to the highest positions in the totalitarian state leads. A distinguished American economist, Professor Frank H. Knight, correctly notes that the authorities of a collectivist state "would have to do these things whether they wanted to or not: and the probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tenderhearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation."

A further point should be made here: Collectivism means the end of truth. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the ends selected by those in control; it is essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own. This is brought about by propaganda and by complete control of all sources of information.

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is

Page 78 to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language.

The worst sufferer in this respect is the word "liberty." It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said that wherever liberty as we know it has been destroyed, this has been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. Even among us we have planners who promise us a "collective freedom," which is as misleading as anything said by totalitarian politicians. "Collective freedom" is not the freedom of the members of society but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society that which he pleases. This is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme. It is not difficult to deprive the seat majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced. Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken support of the regime. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb report of the position in every Russian enterprise: "Whilst the work is in progress, any public expression of doubt that the plan will be successful is an act of disloyalty and even of treachery because of its possible effect on the will and efforts of the rest of the staff."

Control extends even to subjects which seem to have no political significance. The theory of relativity, for instance, has been opposed as a "Semitic attack on the foundation of Christian and Nordic physics" and because it is "in conflict with dialectical materialism and Marxist dogma." Every activity must derive its justification from conscious social purpose. There must be no spontaneous, unguided activity, because it might produce results which cannot be foreseen and for which the plan does not provide.

The principle extends even to games and amusements. I leave it to the reader to guess where it was that chess players were officially exhorted that "we must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula 'chess for the sake of chess.' "

Perhaps the most alarming fact is that contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established but can be found everywhere among those who have embraced a collectivist faith. The worst oppression is condoned if it is committed in the name of socialism. Intolerance of opposing ideas is openly extolled; The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason. There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem in Britain and America are precisely those on which Anglo- Saxons justly prided themselves and in which they were generally recognized to excel. These virtues were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one's neighbor and tolerance of the different, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority. Almost all the traditions and institutions which have molded the national character and the whole moral climate of England and America are those which the progress of collectivism and its centralistic tendencies are progressively destroying.

Page 79 Hayek Was Right: The Worst Do Get To The Top

(Note: This week marks the anniversary of the first publication of F. A. Hayek’s "The Road to Serfdom." It was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1944, and remains one of the most powerful critiques of socialism ever written. Hayek won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. In 1991, the year before Hayek died, President George H. W. Bush bestowed upon him the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom for "a lifetime of looking beyond the horizon." The following essay first appeared in the February 1998 edition of "The Freeman," the journal of the Foundation for Economic Education.)

In spite of freedom’s remarkable, global progress in recent years — from the collapse of the Soviet empire to the growth of "privatization" — there is no sign yet of a shortage of statists with goofy and destructive schemes. The best explanation of why and how such people get into positions of power is still found in "Why the Worst Get on Top," which is chapter ten of F. A. Hayek’s immortal masterpiece, "The Road to Serfdom."

When Hayek wrote his best-known book in 1944, the world was captivated by the notion of socialist central planning. While almost everyone in Europe and America decried the brutality of Nazism, fascism and communism, public opinion was being shaped and molded by an intelligentsia which held that these "excesses" of socialism were avoidable exceptions. If only we make sure the right people are in charge, said the statist intellectuals, the iron fist will dissolve into a velvet glove.

Those who, in Hayek’s words, "think that it is not the system which we need fear, but the danger that it might be run by bad men," are naïve utopians who will forever be disappointed by the socialist outcome. Indeed, this is the history of 20th century statism — the endless search for a place where the dream might actually be made to work, settling on a spot until disaster is embarrassingly apparent to all, then blaming persons rather than the system and flitting off to the next inevitable disappointment. Perhaps someday, the dictionary definition of "statist" may read, "Someone who learns nothing from human nature, economics or experience and repeats the same mistakes over and over again without a care for the rights and lives of people he crushes with his good intentions."

Even the worst features of the statist reality, Hayek showed, "are not accidental byproducts" but phenomena which are part and parcel of statism itself. He argued with great insightfulness that "the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful" in any society in which government is seen as the answer to most problems. They are precisely the kind of people who elevate power over persuasion, force over cooperation. Government, possessing by definition a legal and political monopoly of the use of force, attracts them just as surely as dung draws flies. Ultimately, it is the apparatus of government which allows them to wreak their havoc on the rest of us.

Hardly a day goes by that, a half century after Hayek wrote, the newspapers fail to provide new examples of the worst getting to the top. Two recent ones from opposite ends of the globe will permit me to illustrate Hayek’s wisdom.

Page 80 In France on October 10, 1997, the socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin proposed a law to forcibly cut the allowable workweek. Employers would be required by the year 2000 to reduce the hours their employees work from 39 to 35, with no loss of pay. Jospin demagogically promised the French people that the law would create "lots of jobs." Of course, this was not meant to be a friendly request of the nation’s employers; it is to be a requirement, meaning that employers who strike a different deal with their own workers for more than 35 hours will have to be fined, jailed or both. The Prime Minister made no mention of the fact that one of Europe’s most regulated and expensive welfare states had priced French labor out of many markets and produced the high unemployment he now professed an intent to reduce.

In Malaysia during that same week in October, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad lashed out at assorted "rogues," "morons" and "neocolonialists" whom he blamed for the fall in value of the Malaysian currency, the ringgit. Reminiscent of crazed power mongers of the recent past, he even suggested that Malaysia’s economic troubles were the result of a "Jewish agenda." He called not for an end to his government’s policy of cranking out paper ringgits for boondoggles like the world’s tallest building, but rather, for outlawing the trading of currencies as "unnecessary, unproductive and immoral."

Jospin’s belief that job creation will result from making it illegal to work more than 35 hours and forcing employers to pay workers for less output is, of course, ludicrous. It is the sort of thing one would expect from lunatics who seize control of their asylum. It is doomed from the start to produce more unemployment, not less, because it makes every employee more costly to his employer.

Mohamad’s attempt to foist blame on anything but his own previous interventions is just as ludicrous. Perhaps he fancies himself a modern King Canute, commanding the waves of currency trading to stop and thereby solve his problems for him. Of course, the waves will still come for Mohamad, just as they did for Canute, but he may lop off plenty of heads in the process.

These two ignorant characters on the stage of national politics don’t know it, but they are reading from Hayek’s script. In his "Why the Worst Get on Top" chapter, he says of the central planner or "potential dictator," ". . . he will be able to obtain the support of all the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are prepared to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently." At last report, the docile and the gullible are firmly in Jospin’s and Mohamad’s corner.

The statist demagogue, avers Hayek, appeals to "hatred of an enemy" and "the envy of those better off" to gain the "unreserved allegiance of huge masses." For Jospin, it’s the greed of private employers; for Mohamad, it’s the Jews. The worst love to employ bigotry to score political points on the road to accumulating power.

Hayek notes "an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups. To act on behalf of a

Page 81 group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behavior as individuals within the group." Perhaps both prime ministers would personally oppose an individual who forced his boss at gunpoint to raise his pay, or an individual who tarred and feathered a currency trader, but they have no problems with making these activities national policy.

Give government lots of power and silly people who have little tolerance for the lives and views of others will line up to get government jobs. Those who respect others, who leave other people alone and who want to be left alone themselves, apply elsewhere — namely, for productive jobs in the private sector. The bigger government gets, the more the worst get to the top of it, just as Hayek warned us in 1944.

The French and the Malaysians are but two of many peoples at the moment who, if they read chapter ten of The Road to Serfdom, would find F. A. Hayek describing precisely the woeful course they have chosen to take.

______

Postscript: In 2002, Lionel Jospin finished a dismal third in a national election for President of France and prominently retired from politics. In recognition of the economic damage inflicted by the 35-hour workweek, the requirement was effectively abolished by the French National Assembly in March 2005. After nearly 22 years at the top, Mohamad Mahathir departed the office of Prime Minister of Malaysia in October 2003 and is now widely seen as an angry man with a tarnished legacy, carping on the distant sidelines of power. If either Jospin or Mahathir deserve a footnote in history, it should read, "Joined the ranks of the many whose actions testified to the wisdom of F. A. Hayek, whose ideas will forever live in the hearts of all who love liberty."

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Lawrence W. Reed is president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich.

Page 82 The 4 Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters

(And we're all stupid voters.)

Bryan Caplan | October 2007

Almost all the “respectable” economic theories of politics begin by assuming that the typical citizen understands economics and votes accordingly—at least on average. By a “miracle of aggregation,” random errors are supposed to balance themselves out. But this works only if voters’ errors are random, not systematic.

The evidence—most notably, the results of the 1996 Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy—shows that the general public’s views on economics not only are different from those of professional economists but are less accurate, and in predictable ways. The public really does generally hold, for starters, that prices are not governed by supply and demand, that protectionism helps the economy, that saving labor is a bad idea, and that living standards are falling. Economics journals regularly reject theoretical papers that explicitly recognize these biases. In a well-known piece in the Journal of Political Economy in 1995, the economists Stephen Coate and Stephen Morris worry that some of their colleagues are smuggling in the “unreasonable assumptions” that voters “have biased beliefs about the effects of policies” and “could be persistently fooled.” That’s the economist’s standard view of systematic voter bias: that it doesn’t exist.

Or at least, that’s what economists say as researchers. As teachers, curiously, most economists adopt a different approach. When the latest batch of freshmen shows up for Econ 1, textbook authors and instructors still try to separate students from their prejudices. In the words of the famed economist Paul Krugman, they try “to vaccinate the minds of our undergraduates against the misconceptions that are so predominant in educated discussion.”

Out of all the complaints that economists lodge against laymen, four families of beliefs stand out: the anti-market bias, the anti-foreign bias, the make-work bias, and the pessimistic bias.

Anti-Market Bias I first learned about farm price supports in the produce section of the grocery store. I was in kindergarten. My mother explained that price supports seemed to make fruits and vegetables more expensive but assured me that this conclusion was simplistic. If the supports went away, so many farms would go out of business that prices would soon be higher than ever. I accepted what she told me and felt a lingering sense that price competition is bad for buyer and seller alike.

This was one of my first memorable encounters with anti-market bias, a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of the market mechanism. The public has severe

Page 83 doubts about how much it can count on profit-seeking business to produce socially beneficial outcomes. People focus on the motives of business and neglect the discipline imposed by competition. While economists admit that profit maximization plus market imperfections can yield bad results, noneconomists tend to view successful greed as socially harmful per se.

Joseph Schumpeter, arguably the greatest historian of economic thought, matter-of-factly spoke of “the ineradicable prejudice that every action intended to serve the profit interest must be anti-social by this fact alone.” Anti-market bias, he implied, is not a temporary, culturally specific aberration. It is a deeply rooted pattern of human thinking that has frustrated economists for generations.

There are too many variations on anti-market bias to list them all. Probably the most common error of this sort is to equate market payments with transfers, ignoring their incentive properties. (A transfer, in economic jargon, is a no-strings-attached movement of wealth from one person to another.) All that matters, then, is how much you empathize with the transfer’s recipient compared to the transfer’s provider. People tend, for example, to see profits as a gift to the rich. So unless you perversely pity the rich more than the poor, limiting profits seems like common sense.

Yet profits are not a handout but a quid pro quo: If you want to get rich, you have to do something people will pay for. Profits give incentives to reduce production costs, move resources from less-valued to more-valued industries, and dream up new products. This is the central lesson of The Wealth of Nations: The “invisible hand” quietly persuades selfish businessmen to serve the public good. For modern economists, these are truisms, yet teachers of economics keep quoting and requoting this passage. Why? Because Adam Smith’s thesis was counterintuitive to his contemporaries, and it remains counterintuitive today.

A prejudice similar to the one against profit has dogged interest, from ancient Athens to modern Islamabad. Like profit, interest is not a gift but a quid pro quo: The lender earns interest in exchange for delaying his consumption. A government that successfully stamped out interest payments would be no friend to those in need of credit, since that policy would crush lending as well.

Anti-market biases lead people to misunderstand and reject even policies they should, given their preferences for end results, support. For example, the Princeton economist Alan Blinder blames opposition to tradable pollution permits on anti-market bias. Why let people “pay to pollute,” when we can force them to cease and desist?

The textbook answer is that tradable permits get you more pollution abatement for the same cost. The firms able to cut their emissions cheaply do so, selling their excess pollution quotas to less flexible polluters. End result: more abatement bang for your buck. But noneconomists, including relatively sophisticated policy insiders, disagree. In his 1987 book Hard Heads, Soft Hearts, Blinder discusses a fascinating survey of 63

Page 84 environmentalists, congressional staffers, and industry lobbyists. Not one could explain economists’ standard rationale for tradable permits.

The second most prominent avatar of anti-market bias is monopoly theories of price. Economists acknowledge that monopolies exist. But the public habitually makes monopoly a scapegoat for scarcity. The idea that supply and demand usually control prices is hard to accept. Even in industries with many firms, noneconomists treat prices as a function of CEO intentions and conspiracies.

Historically, it has been especially common for the public to pick out middlemen as uniquely vicious “monopolists.” Look at these parasites: They buy products, “mark them up,” and then resell us the “exact same thing.” Economists have a standard response. Transportation, storage, and distribution are valuable services—a fact that becomes obvious whenever you need a cold drink in the middle of nowhere. Like most valuable services, they are not costless. The most that is reasonable to ask, then, is not that middlemen work for free, but that they face the daily test of competition.

One specific price, the price for labor, is often thought to be the result of conspiracy: capitalists joining forces to keep wages at the subsistence level. More literate defenders of this fallacy point out that Adam Smith himself worried about employer conspiracies, overlooking the fact that in Smith’s time high transportation and communication costs left workers with far fewer alternative employers.

In the Third World, of course, the number of employment options is often substantially lower than in developed countries. But if there really were a vast employer conspiracy to hold down wages, the Third World would be an especially profitable place to invest. Query: Does investing your life savings in poor countries seem like a painless way to get rich quick? If not, you at least tacitly accept economists’ sad-but-true theory of Third World poverty: Its workers earn low wages because their productivity is low, due partly to lower skill levels and partly to anti-growth public policies.

Collusion aside, the public’s implicit model of price determination is that businesses are monopolists of variable altruism. If a CEO feels greedy when he wakes up, he raises his price—or puts low-quality merchandise on the shelves. Nice guys charge fair prices for good products; greedy scoundrels gouge with impunity for junk. It is only a short step for market skeptics to add “…and nice guys finish last.”

Where does the public go wrong? For one thing, asking for more can get you less. Giving your boss the ultimatum “Double my pay or I quit” usually ends badly. The same holds in business: Raising prices and cutting quality often lead to lower profits, not higher. Many strategies that work as a one-shot scam backfire as routine policies. It is hard to make a profit if no one sets foot in your store twice. Intelligent greed militates against dishonesty and discourtesy because they damage the seller’s reputation.

An outsider who eavesdrops on economists’ discussions might get the impression that the benefits of markets remain controversial. But economists who debate certain issues about

Page 85 the perfection of markets are not debating, say, whether prices give incentives. Almost all economists recognize the core benefits of the market mechanism; they disagree only at the margin. Widespread bias against market mechanisms as reasonably efficient means of meeting human needs affects politicians’ incentives in almost every decision they make. It is perhaps most relevant today in the debate over whether the American health care system needs more markets and choice or more central control.

Anti-Foreign Bias A shrewd businessman I know has long thought that everything wrong in the American economy could be solved with two expedients: 1) a naval blockade of Japan, and 2) a Berlin Wall at the Mexican border.

Like most noneconomists, he suffers from anti-foreign bias, a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of interaction with foreigners. Popular metaphors equate international trade with racing and warfare, so you might say that anti-foreign views are embedded in our language. Perhaps foreigners are sneakier, craftier, or greedier. Whatever the reason, they supposedly have a special power to exploit us.

There is probably no other popular opinion that economists have found so enduringly objectionable. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith admonishes his countrymen: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in a great kingdom. If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry.”

As far as his peers were concerned, Smith’s arguments won the day. More than a century later, Simon Newcomb could securely observe in the Quarterly Journal of Economics that “one of the most marked points of antagonism between the ideas of the economists since Adam Smith and those which governed the commercial policy of nations before his time is found in the case of foreign trade.” There was a little backsliding during the Great Depression, but economists’ pro-foreign views abide to this day.

Even theorists, such as Paul Krugman, who specialize in exceptions to the optimality of free trade frequently downplay their findings as abstract curiosities. As Krugman wrote in his 1996 book Pop Internationalism: “This innovative stuff is not a priority for today’s undergraduates. In the last decade of the 20th century, the essential things to teach students are still the insights of Hume and Ricardo. That is, we need to teach them that trade deficits are self-correcting and that the benefits of trade do not depend on a country having an absolute advantage over its rivals.”

Economics textbooks teach that total output increases if producers specialize and trade. On an individual level, who could deny it? Imagine how much time it would take to grow your own food, while a few hours’ wages spent at the grocery store can feed you for weeks. Analogies between individual and social behavior are at times misleading, but this is not one of those times. International trade is, as the economic writer Steven Landsburg explains in his 1993 book The Armchair Economist, a technology: “There are two technologies for producing automobiles in America. One is to manufacture them in

Page 86 Detroit, and the other is to grow them in Iowa. Everybody knows about the first technology; let me tell you about the second. First you plant seeds, which are the raw materials from which automobiles are constructed. You wait a few months until wheat appears. Then you harvest the wheat, load it onto ships, and sail the ships westward into the Pacific Ocean. After a few months, the ships reappear with Toyotas on them.”

How can anyone overlook trade’s remarkable benefits? Adam Smith, along with many 18th- and 19th-century economists, identifies the root error as misidentification of money and wealth: “A rich country, in the same manner as a rich man, is supposed to be a country abounding in money; and to heap up gold and silver in any country is supposed to be the best way to enrich it.” It follows that trade is zero sum, since the only way for a country to make its balance more favorable is to make another country’s balance less favorable.

Even in Smith’s day, however, his story was probably too clever by half. The root error behind 18th-century mercantilism was an unreasonable distrust of foreigners. Otherwise, why would people focus on money draining out of “the nation” but not “the region,” “the city,” “the village,” or “the family”? Anyone who consistently equated money with wealth would fear all outflows of precious metals. In practice, human beings then and now commit the balance of trade fallacy only when other countries enter the picture. No one loses sleep about the trade balance between California and Nevada, or me and iTunes. The fallacy is not treating all purchases as a cost but treating foreign purchases as a cost.

Anti-foreign bias is easier to spot nowadays. To take one prominent example, immigration is far more of an issue now than it was in Smith’s time. Economists are predictably quick to see the benefits of immigration. Trade in labor is roughly the same as trade in goods. Specialization and exchange raise output—for instance, by letting skilled American moms return to work by hiring Mexican nannies.

In terms of the balance of payments, immigration is a nonissue. If an immigrant moves from Mexico City to New York and spends all his earnings in his new homeland, the balance of trade does not change. Yet the public still looks on immigration as a bald misfortune: jobs lost, wages reduced, public services consumed. Many in the general public see immigration as a distinct danger, independent of, and more frightening than, an unfavorable balance of trade. People feel all the more vulnerable when they reflect that these foreigners are not just selling us their products. They live among us.

It is misleading to think of “foreignness” as a simple either/or. From the viewpoint of the typical American, Canadians are less foreign than the British, who are in turn less foreign than the Japanese. From 1983 to 1987, 28 percent of Americans in the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey admitted they disliked Japan, but only 8 percent disliked England, and a scant 3 percent disliked Canada.

Objective measures like the volume of trade or the trade deficit are often secondary to physical, linguistic, and cultural similarity. Trade with Canada or Great Britain generates

Page 87 only mild alarm compared to trade with Mexico or Japan. U.S. imports from and trade deficits with Canada exceeded those with Mexico every year from 1985 to 2004. During the anti-Japan hysteria of the 1980s, British foreign direct investment in the U.S. always exceeded that of the Japanese by at least 50 percent. Foreigners who look like us and speak English are hardly foreign at all.

Calm reflection on the international economy reveals much to be thankful for and little to fear. On this point, economists past and present agree. But an important proviso lurks beneath the surface. Yes, there is little to fear about the international economy itself. But modern researchers rarely mention that attitudes about the international economy are another story. Paul Krugman hits the nail on the head: “The conflict among nations that so many policy intellectuals imagine prevails is an illusion; but it is an illusion that can destroy the reality of mutual gains from trade.” We can see this today most vividly in the absurdly overblown political reactions to the immigration issue, from walls to forcing illegal workers currently in America to leave before they can begin an onerous procedure to gain paper legality.

Make-Work Bias I was an undergraduate when the Cold War ended. I still remember talking about military spending cuts with a conservative student. The whole idea made her nervous; she had no idea how a market economy would absorb the discharged soldiers. In her mind, to lay off 100,000 government employees was virtually equivalent to disemploying 100,000 people for life.

If a well-educated individual ideologically opposed to wasteful government spending thinks like this, it is hardly surprising that she is not alone. The public often literally believes that labor is better to use than conserve. Saving labor, producing more goods with fewer man-hours, is widely perceived not as progress but as a danger. I call this the make-work bias, a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of conserving labor. Where noneconomists see the destruction of jobs, economists see the essence of economic growth: the production of more with less.

Economists have been at war with the make-work bias for centuries. The 19th-century economist Frederic Bastiat ridiculed the equation of prosperity with jobs as “Sisyphism,” after the mythological fully employed Greek who was eternally condemned to roll a boulder up a hill.

In the eyes of the public, he wrote, “effort itself constitutes and measures wealth. To progress is to increase the ratio of effort to result. Its ideal may be represented by the toil of Sisyphus, at once barren and eternal.” For the economist, by contrast, wealth “increases proportionately to the increase in the ratio of result to effort. Absolute perfection, whose archetype is God, consists [of] a situation in which no effort at all yields infinite results.”

Nineteenth-century economists believed they had diagnosed enduring economic confusions, not intellectual fads, and they were right. The crudest form of make-work

Page 88 bias is the Luddite fear of the machine. Common sense proclaims that machines make life easier for human beings. The public qualifies this “naive” position by noting that machines also throw people out of work. It forgets that technology also creates new jobs. Without the computer, to give one obvious example, there would be no jobs in computer programming or software development. But the fundamental defense of labor-saving technology is deeper than that. Employing more workers than you need wastes valuable labor.

After technology throws people out of work, they have an incentive to find a new use for their talents. The Dallas Fed economist W. Michael Cox and the journalist Richard Alm illustrate this process in their 1999 book Myths of Rich and Poor, citing history’s most striking example, the drastic decline in agricultural employment: “In 1800, it took nearly 95 of every 100 Americans to feed the country. In 1900, it took 40. Today, it takes just 3.…The workers no longer needed on farms have been put to use providing new homes, furniture, clothing, computers, pharmaceuticals, appliances, medical assistance, movies, financial advice, video games, gourmet meals, and an almost dizzying array of other goods and services.”

Many economists advocate government assistance to cushion the displaced workers’ transition to new jobs and to retain public support for a dynamic economy. Other economists disagree. But almost all economists grant that stopping those transitions has a grave cost.

Exasperating as the Luddite mentality is, countries rarely accede to public anxieties and turn back the clock of technology. But you cannot say the same about another controversy infused with make-work bias: hostility to downsizing.

Inside of a household, everyone understands what Cox and Alm call “the upside of downsizing.” You do not worry about how to spend the hours you save when you buy a washing machine. Make-work confusion can arise only in an exchange economy. If you receive a washing machine as a gift, the benefit is yours; you have more free time and the same income. If you get downsized, the benefit goes to other people; you have more free time, but your income temporarily falls. In both cases, though, society conserves valuable labor.

The danger of the make-work bias is easiest to see in Europe, where labor market regulation to “save jobs” has produced decades of high unemployment. But we can see it in the U.S. as well, especially in our massive employment lawsuit industry. The hard lesson to learn is that giving people “rights to their jobs” is a drain on productivity—and makes employers think twice about hiring people in the first place.

Pessimistic Bias I first encountered anti-drug propaganda in second grade. It was called “drug education,” but it was mostly scary stories. I was told that kids around me were using drugs and that a pusher would soon offer me some too. Teachers warned that more and more kids would become addicts, and that by the time I was in junior high I would be surrounded by them.

Page 89 Authority figures would occasionally speculate about our adulthood, and wonder how a country could function with such a degenerate work force.

I am still waiting to be offered drugs. The junior high dystopia never materialized. By the time I reached adulthood, it was apparent that most people were not going to their jobs high on PCP. Generation X’s entry into the work force accompanied the marvels of the Internet age, not a stupor-induced decline in productivity and innovation.

My teachers’ predictions about America’s economic future fit nicely into a larger pattern. As a general rule, the public believes economic conditions are not as good as they really are. It sees a world going from bad to worse; the economy faces a long list of grim challenges, leaving little room for hope. We can call this the pessimistic bias, a tendency to overestimate the severity of economic problems and underestimate the economy’s performance in the recent past, the present, and the future.

Pessimism about the economy comes in two varieties. You may be pessimistic about symptoms, overblowing the severity of the effects of everything from the deficit to affirmative action. But you can also be pessimistic overall, seeing negative trends in living standards, wages, and inequality. Public opinion is marked by both forms of pessimism. Economists constantly advise the public not to lose sleep over the latest economic threat in the news, pointing out massive gains we’ve made during the last 100 years and now take for granted.

David Hume—economist, philosopher, and Adam Smith’s best friend—blamed popular pessimism on our psychology. “The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature,” he wrote, “and has an influence even on persons endued with the profoundest judgment and most extensive learning.”

But 19th-century economists did little to develop the theme of pessimistic bias. Nineteenth-century socialists who predicted “immiseration” of the working class met intellectual resistance from economists. But the root of the socialists’ forecast was hostility to markets, not pessimism as such. Economists often ridiculed socialists for their wild optimism about the impending socialist utopia.

Pessimistic bias is widely thought to have grown worse in the modern era. In The Idea of Decline in Western History (1997), the historian Arthur Herman of the Smithsonian Institution maintains that it peaked soon after the end of World War I, when “talking about the end of Western civilization had become as natural as breathing. The only subject left to debate was not whether the modern West was doomed but why.”

How can high levels of pessimism coexist with constantly rising standards of living? Although pessimism has abated since World War I, the gap between objective conditions and subjective perceptions is arguably greater than ever. In The Progress Paradox (2003), the journalist Gregg Easterbrook ridicules the “abundance denial” of the developed world: “Our forebears, who worked and sacrificed tirelessly in the hopes their

Page 90 descendants would someday be free, comfortable, healthy, and educated, might be dismayed to observe how acidly we deny we now are these things.”

Not all professional economists are utter optimists about tomorrow. There is an ongoing debate among economists about growth slow-down. This is what relatively pessimistic economists like Paul Krugman mean when they say that “the U.S. economy is doing badly.” Other economists counter that standard numbers inadequately adjust for the rising quality and variety of the consumption basket and the changing composition of the work force. Either way, the worst-case scenario that GDP statistics permit—a lower speed of progress—is no disaster.

The intelligent pessimist’s favorite refuge is to argue that standard statistics such as GDP miss important components of our standard of living. The leading candidate is environmental quality. Pessimists often add that our failure to deal with environmental destruction will soon morph into economic disaster as well. If resources are rapidly vanishing as our numbers multiply, human beings are going to be poor and hungry, not just out of touch with Mother Earth.

A number of economists have met these challenges. The most wide-ranging is the late Julian Simon, who argued that popular “doom-and-gloom” views of resource depletion, overpopulation, and environmental quality are exaggerated and often the opposite of the truth. Past progress does not guarantee future progress, but as Simon explained in his 1995 book The State of Humanity, it does create a strong presumption: “Throughout the long sweep of history, forecasts of resource scarcity have always been heard, and—just as now—the doomsayers have always claimed that the past was no guide to the future because they stood at a turning point in history.”

Simon has been a lightning rod for controversy, but his main theses—that natural resources are getting cheaper, population density is not bad for growth, and air quality is improving—are now almost mainstream in environmental economics. Since the Harvard economist Michael Kremer’s seminal 1993 paper “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990,” even Simon’s “extreme” view that population growth raises living standards has gained wide acceptance.

The UCLA geographer Jared Diamond’s immensely popular 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel links population and innovation in essentially the same way, albeit with little fanfare. The upshot: GDP may not be the best conceivable measurement of our well- being, but refining measures of economic welfare does not revive the case for pessimism. In fact, more inclusive measures cement the case for optimism, because life has also been getting better on the neglected dimensions.

This pessimistic bias is a general-interest prop to political demagoguery of all kinds. It creates a presumption that matters, left uncontrolled, are spiraling to destruction, and that something has to be done, no matter how costly or ultimately counterproductive to wealth or freedom. This mind-set plays a role in almost every modern political controversy, from downsizing to immigration to global warming.

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Bias Against Bias Economists have a love-hate relationship with systematic bias. As theorists, they deny its existence. But when they teach, address the public, or wonder what is wrong with the world, they dip into their own private stash of the stuff. On some level, economists not only recognize that systematically biased beliefs exist; they think they have discovered virulent strains in their own backyard.

You can hardly teach economics without bumping into these biases. Students of economics are not blank slates for their teachers to write on. They arrive with strong prejudices. They underestimate the benefits of markets. They underestimate the benefits of dealing with foreigners. They underestimate the benefits of conserving labor. They underestimate the performance of the economy. And in doing all that underestimating, they overestimate both the need for the government to solve these purported problems and the likely efficacy of its solutions.

Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, is the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton University Press), from which this article is excerpted. © Copyright 2007 by Princeton University Press.

Page 92 An Introduction to the Overton Window of Political Possibilities

(Note: The late, esteemed Joseph P. Overton exerted enormous influence from 1992 to 2003 as a researcher, author and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy’s senior vice president. Key his name into this Web site’s search engine and you’ll see nearly endless references to his work. He was killed in a plane crash on June 30, 2003 but continues to be a source of inspiration to the many around the world who knew him. He would be 46 years of age today — Jan. 4, 2006. On this day we are pleased to publish this essay by Nathan Russell as a further tribute to Joe and his legacy. — Lawrence W. Reed, President)

What does a think tank do? Does it educate? Advocate policy? Should a think tank focus on short-term or long-term goals?

Among Joe Overton’s many contributions, he was instrumental in defining the role of the Mackinac Center in particular and think tanks in general. He understood that, regardless of how persuasive the think tank, lawmakers are constrained by the political climate. Therefore, Overton concluded, to be truly successful, the Mackinac Center should not focus on direct policy advocacy, but instead should focus on educating lawmakers and the public in an attempt to change the political climate.

To answer the inevitable questions about the role of a think tank, Overton developed an explanation that others have since dubbed the "Overton Window of Political Possibilities." Though his theory has roots in complex public choice economics, it boils down quite easily.[1]

Imagine, if you will, a yardstick standing on end. On either end are the extreme policy actions for any political issue. Between the ends lie all gradations of policy from one extreme to the other. The yardstick represents the full political spectrum for a particular issue. The essence of the Overton window is that only a portion of this policy spectrum is within the realm of the politically possible at any time. Regardless of how vigorously a think tank or other group may campaign, only policy initiatives within this window of the politically possible will meet with success. Why is this?

Politicians are constrained by ideas, even if they have no interest in them personally. What they can accomplish, the legislation they can sponsor and support while still achieving political success (i.e. winning reelection or leaving the party strong for their successor), is framed by the set of ideas held by their constituents — the way people think. Politicians have the flexibility to make up their own minds, but negative consequences await the elected officeholder who strays too far. A politician’s success or failure stems from how well they understand and amplify the ideas and ideals held by those who elected them.

Page 93 In addition to being dependent on the ideas that form the boundaries of the political climate, politicians are also known to be self-interested and desirous of obtaining the best political result for themselves.[2] Therefore, they will almost always constrain themselves to taking actions within the "window" of ideas approved of by the electorate. Actions outside of this window, while theoretically possible, and maybe more optimal in terms of sound policy, are politically unsuccessful. Even if a few legislators were willing to stick out their necks for an action outside the window, most would not risk the disfavor of their constituents. They may seek the good of those who elected them, and even the good of the state or nation as a whole, but in pursuing the course they think is best, most will certainly take into account their political future. This is the heart of the Overton window theory.

So, if a think tank’s research and the principles of sound policy suggest a particular idea that lies outside the Overton window, what is to be done? Shift the window. Since commonly held ideas, attitudes and presumptions frame what is politically possible and create the "window," a change in the opinions held by politicians and the people in general will shift it. Move the window of what is politically possible and those policies previously impractical can become the next great popular and legislative rage.

Likewise, policies that were once acceptable become politically infeasible as the window shifts away from them. Think tanks can shape public opinion and shift the Overton window by educating legislators and the public about sound policy, by creating a vision for how things could be done, by conducting research and presenting facts, and by involving people in the exchange of ideas.

The example Joe Overton often used to illustrate his window theory was the Michigan school choice issue during the 1980s and ‘90s. The political spectrum for education ranges from full parental choice on the high end to a complete government monopoly without private schools, home schooling, charter schools or any other school choice on the low end. On this spectrum the politically possible range of options was very limited during the 1980s. Politicians could advocate minor, incremental changes for home schooling, and private schools were part of the status quo, but charter schools were definitely out of bounds for a politician to seriously contemplate.

As citizens became aware of education options and their success in other places, the political climate became more favorable and the window of political possibilities in Michigan began to expand to where politicians could advocate home schooling, school choice and even charter schools without losing at the polls. Not only was the upper limit of the window expanded, but the lower boundary has also moved upwards as well — making it politically unwise to push for restrictions on the education freedoms that have been gained.

Home schooling is here to stay, charter schools are well established, and school choice continues to gain ground. In fact, in some parts of Michigan it is now even possible to run for office on a platform that includes the Universal Tuition Tax Credit — another Overton innovation — a situation that was unthinkable just 10 years ago.

Page 94 Perhaps the Overton window theory is best summed up by a quote from Milton Friedman in his preface to the 1982 edition of Capitalism and Freedom: "That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

A long-term focus on shifting the Overton window allows a think tank to follow its ideals and perform a genuinely positive public service, instead of being constrained to merely advocating those policies that are currently possible. When the window of political possibilities is moved along the political spectrum, the impossible becomes desirable and the simply desirable becomes imperative. This is the true influence of a think tank — shaping the political climate of future legislative and legal debates by researching, educating, involving and inspiring.

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Nathan J. Russell, a 2004 graduate of Hillsdale College, is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program in Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. In 2004 and 2005, Russell served as a summer intern at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center are properly cited.

[1] For a more thorough economic or historical treatment, please see Gordon Tullock’s Politics of Persuasion (1967).

[2] Basic public choice theory, developed by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their 1962 book, The Calculus of Consent, explores the consequences of realizing that politicians are just like us — and therefore are subject to the same motives, weaknesses, desires, and self-interests.

Page 95 "Like you, I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office."

Milton Friedman

Letter to Richard J. Wilcke in 1981, quoted in "An Appropriate Ethical Model for Business and a Critique of Milton Friedman's Thesis," Richard J. Wilcke, The Independent Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, Fall, 2004, pages 187-209.

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