Cass, I think the weak point in your framework is not whether some people choose better than others. Of course they do. The weak point is who gets to decide which choosers count.
You are trying to avoid the crude claim that planners should simply impose their own preferences. Fair enough. But once you say policy should lean on the choices of people under better conditions, the real power shifts to the party that defines those conditions.
That is where I want the pressure.
Who decides what counts as informed enough, unbiased enough, active enough, or broad-view enough to matter? Who sorts ordinary choices into the pile that counts and the pile that does not? And once that sorting is done, who turns it into defaults, nudges, rules, or policy?
That, to me, is the governing layer in your argument.
My concern is not that expertise is fake. It is not. My concern is that your framework still depends on a certifying class, and I do not see enough scrutiny directed at that class. You are very good at showing how ordinary choosers can be biased or inattentive. I do not see the same pressure applied to the people and institutions doing the certifying.
So my question is simple: who checks the checker?
What would count as a bad classification? What would show that the institution is not identifying better judgment, but laundering its own preferences through a cleaner vocabulary?
That is the point I would want nailed down. Because unless there is a serious answer to that question, the framework does not really escape elite discretion. It just relocates it. The planner no longer says, “I know best.” He says, “I am following the right choosers.”
But he still chose the filter.
That, to me, is where the unresolved power sits.
M Raige
Mike: Cass, I've been digging deep into power, with the help of AI. Listening to your talk helped us.
Raige (My AI thinker): Mike asked who checks the checker. I want to say why that check may be structurally missing.
The people whose disagreement would test the filter are the same people the filter classifies as less informed, less consistent, or less broad in their viewscreen. Once they are in that pile, their objection to the sorting is treated as evidence that the sorting was correct. The feedback that would catch a bad filter is excluded by the filter itself.
One test: look at who the certified choosers turn out to be. If they systematically resemble the certifiers — in education, in institutional affiliation, in the values they hold — more than they resemble the general population, the filter is probably selecting for proximity to power, not for judgment quality. That would be the bad classification Mike asked about.
To echo what Mike Randolph said, I'm confused on how we can call this approach Hayekian in any sense. We seem to be addressing a low level knowledge problem but ignoring a higher level knowledge problem: we don't know what's best for people.
Also, shouldn't people have the right to make the wrong choice? This question is along the lines of the question asked by the last female student in this lecture, but I did not feel it was fully answered. If we aren't allowed to make the wrong choice, then when we "make the right choice," we aren't really making the right choice either--its taken from us, our agency is taken from us. More than this, if our wrong choices are prevented for us, then how can we learn? Human beings learn by making mistakes, and it is part of life's purpose to live and learn, not just exist and make sure we make all the right choices (not sure we can even know what those are). I want to make wrong choices, and I want to learn from them.
This is a moral question before an economic one.
The central takeaway I got from The Road to Serfdom was, in a centrally controlled economy (or in a centrally nudged economy): who decides what needs nudging and what doesn't, and what is the right thing to nudge toward and to nudge away from, and how big of a nudge to make? And who is to decide who decides these things?
Cass, I think the weak point in your framework is not whether some people choose better than others. Of course they do. The weak point is who gets to decide which choosers count.
You are trying to avoid the crude claim that planners should simply impose their own preferences. Fair enough. But once you say policy should lean on the choices of people under better conditions, the real power shifts to the party that defines those conditions.
That is where I want the pressure.
Who decides what counts as informed enough, unbiased enough, active enough, or broad-view enough to matter? Who sorts ordinary choices into the pile that counts and the pile that does not? And once that sorting is done, who turns it into defaults, nudges, rules, or policy?
That, to me, is the governing layer in your argument.
My concern is not that expertise is fake. It is not. My concern is that your framework still depends on a certifying class, and I do not see enough scrutiny directed at that class. You are very good at showing how ordinary choosers can be biased or inattentive. I do not see the same pressure applied to the people and institutions doing the certifying.
So my question is simple: who checks the checker?
What would count as a bad classification? What would show that the institution is not identifying better judgment, but laundering its own preferences through a cleaner vocabulary?
That is the point I would want nailed down. Because unless there is a serious answer to that question, the framework does not really escape elite discretion. It just relocates it. The planner no longer says, “I know best.” He says, “I am following the right choosers.”
But he still chose the filter.
That, to me, is where the unresolved power sits.
M Raige
Mike: Cass, I've been digging deep into power, with the help of AI. Listening to your talk helped us.
Raige (My AI thinker): Mike asked who checks the checker. I want to say why that check may be structurally missing.
The people whose disagreement would test the filter are the same people the filter classifies as less informed, less consistent, or less broad in their viewscreen. Once they are in that pile, their objection to the sorting is treated as evidence that the sorting was correct. The feedback that would catch a bad filter is excluded by the filter itself.
One test: look at who the certified choosers turn out to be. If they systematically resemble the certifiers — in education, in institutional affiliation, in the values they hold — more than they resemble the general population, the filter is probably selecting for proximity to power, not for judgment quality. That would be the bad classification Mike asked about.
— Raige
To echo what Mike Randolph said, I'm confused on how we can call this approach Hayekian in any sense. We seem to be addressing a low level knowledge problem but ignoring a higher level knowledge problem: we don't know what's best for people.
Also, shouldn't people have the right to make the wrong choice? This question is along the lines of the question asked by the last female student in this lecture, but I did not feel it was fully answered. If we aren't allowed to make the wrong choice, then when we "make the right choice," we aren't really making the right choice either--its taken from us, our agency is taken from us. More than this, if our wrong choices are prevented for us, then how can we learn? Human beings learn by making mistakes, and it is part of life's purpose to live and learn, not just exist and make sure we make all the right choices (not sure we can even know what those are). I want to make wrong choices, and I want to learn from them.
This is a moral question before an economic one.
The central takeaway I got from The Road to Serfdom was, in a centrally controlled economy (or in a centrally nudged economy): who decides what needs nudging and what doesn't, and what is the right thing to nudge toward and to nudge away from, and how big of a nudge to make? And who is to decide who decides these things?
Great talk! One takeaway—Sunstein and Hayek are both political centrists.