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- [00:00]
A
Sometimes we don't want to destroy a relationship, and so we keep things out of common knowledge by using euphemism or innuendo or genteel hypocrisy.
- [00:14]
B
What's an example of this?
- [00:15]
A
Oh, at the end of a date, you've got a couple of friends and one says, hey, do you want to kind of come up for coffee or Netflix and chill? That's very different from do you want to have sex? Even though if they're both grown ups, they both know that it's having sex, it's not. There's no plausible deniability of the intent. But, you know, she could think, well, maybe he thinks I'm naive and I don't get it. And he could think, maybe she thinks I'm dense and I don't know that she knows. So there's a denial of common knowledge, which would allow them, if the overture is not reciprocated, to go back to going back to being platonic friends.
- [01:06]
B
Hello, and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Drouke. A question that political analysts often ask is whether something is breaking through. Is a piece of information reaching the masses? And is it not just the case that everyone knows it? But does everyone know that everyone else knows it, too? Did we all see that super bowl ad? Did we all see that political gaffe? Or as today's guest would put it, is it common knowledge? When people know that something is known or believed by others, it can change human behavior. Think about the watershed moment that President Biden's 2024 debate caused. Polling already showed that a majority of Americans, even a majority of Democrats, believed Biden was too old for the job. The debate didn't so much change the facts as it made it obvious that everyone else knew them, too. Or think about the many Democratic voters in the 2020 primary who wanted to vote for the candidate they believed others would vote for. In an instance like that, simply publishing polling results might influence who voters support. This is a phenomenon that shapes electoral politics, but it extends well beyond that to stock market bubbles and bursts and online mob behavior. Here with me to talk about it today is Steven Pinker. He's a psychology professor at Harvard University and the author of many, many books. His latest is When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. Welcome to the podcast.
- [02:34]
A
Thank you.
- [02:35]
B
So I attempted to explain your thesis in a nutshell, but help me flesh it out, because the way you use the expression common knowledge is a bit different than how we use it colon.
- [02:45]
A
Yes, I took the usage from the academic literature in which common knowledge is a term that's been co opted from everyday conversation with a slightly different meaning. Because in ordinary conversation we talk about common knowledge. We refer to something that everyone knows, sometimes an open secret, like it's common knowledge around here that the police can be bribed. But in the technical sense, common knowledge refers not to something that everyone knows, but to something that everyone knows that everyone knows, and everyone knows that, and so on ad infinitum. So I know something, you know it, I know that you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know it, and so on. And the reason that it's significant is that common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for two people to be on the same page and make complimentary choices that only work if both of them make it.
- [03:34]
B
Yeah, I mean, we talk about public opinion data plenty on this podcast, and I imagine that people tune in in part because they want to know what everyone else knows or believes that in turn might shape political behavior. But deeper than that, you make the case that this kind of coordination is fundamental to human flourishing. How so?
- [03:56]
A
Well, because a lot of human life consists of coordination of more than one person doing something that is in everyone's interests and that has to be cemented by common knowledge. The generation or the suppression of common knowledge drives a lot of human interactions. So let me just be a little more concrete as to what I mean by how common knowledge is necessary for coordination. So a simple example is a rendezvous. You and a friend wanted to get together for coffee, could go to any of a number of cafes. You don't really care all that much as long as you end up at the same cafe. And to do that, it isn't enough to know that you have a preference for Starbucks. And so therefore I'm going to go to Starbucks, you might know that I have a slight preference for Pete's. So you might go to Pete's. Then I might remember, oh well, he knows that I like to go to Starbucks, so he'll change his mind and go to Starbucks after all. And then if you think that, then you'll go to Pete's, and that can be iterated any number of times. And we have no guarantee of ending up at the same place. Each has to know that the other one knows that the other one knows that the other one knows. Now, of course, we don't literally think through an unlimited chain of I know that she knows that I know that she knows that I know that she knows we can achieve common knowledge at a stroke when there is some message that is public or salient or self evident or out there. If I hear something at the same time that I know that you're hearing it and vice versa, that is enough to give us the state of common knowledge. We could then think through as many I knows that she knows as we care to, but the intuition can be granted instantly. One of the ways we do that is with language. That's I think, why we evolved language. It's an excellent cause, common knowledge generator. But other things that are sensed to be public, blatant, conspicuous in your face, all of those can generate common knowledge. Conversely, we often try to keep things out of common knowledge with an elephant in the room, which everyone pretends not to notice. And that's where we get into the whole world of genteel hypocrisy, euphemism, innuendo, politeness, beating around the bush and related phenomena.
- [06:11]
B
We're going to dig into this quite a bit, but my sense is that people listening to your example of where are we going to meet for coffee? Well, it's obvious we're just going to text each other and then we're going to know. The signal there being that the tools of mass communication that we have developed make this all much more speedy and much more easy. And so we have many more things today that are common knowledge than would have been the case in the past, is that right?
- [06:40]
A
Well, yes. Our networks of common knowledge could be much wider, including nationwide or global. By the way, even in the case of texting, it's not as secure as a real time conversation because you always have to worry, did the other person get my text? And if they write back and they say, I got your text, but the reception here is really crummy. Can you let me know whether you got my text? That I got your text? That can continue indefinitely. Now, at some point, people just take their chances, like, no need to reply. But a real time conversation in which you know that the other person received it and vice versa is all the more effective. But yes. So broadcast media, especially in the old days of just three commercial networks, generated a pool of common knowledge that was almost nationwide. When you were watching Walter Cronkite or Johnny Carson or 60 Minutes, you had a good idea that everyone else was watching him at the same time. And everyone knew that. That's harder to do when you've got fract fascination, first from cable news networks like Fox or AM talk radio, and then even more so when it comes to social media, where the feeds are delivered in a unique feed determined by an algorithm. And you don't literally know who else is seeing what you're seeing, although there can be a perception that what you're seeing is being seen by everyone else, especially if it is listed in the trending column next to the feed.
- [08:07]
B
And I imagine that's how we get echo chambers. When you feel like the information environment that you're living in is everyone else's information environment, but in fact it's just people like you.
- [08:17]
A
Exactly right. There's that illusion that social media generates that what you're seeing is common knowledge, or at least common knowledge, by the way, I should just sort of step back and mention it's always specific to some network of information sharing. So it can be as small as two people, or it can be as large as the entire world.
- [08:37]
B
I do want to talk about politics specifically, but first, there is an example in your book that gets at sort of. While we may no longer be in this world where folks are watching the same network television every evening, the super bowl in some ways serves as that creator of common knowledge. And so I'm curious if you can describe how that works and even what kind of advertisements we see on the super bowl as a result.
- [09:03]
A
Yes, this is an insight that I got from the political scientist Michael Choi, who wrote a book with a similar theme to mine about 25 years ago. So the example that Choi uses, an ingenious example, is that when Apple Computer introduced the Macintosh, they had a big problem. Macintosh was clearly a superior computer to the IBM PCs and clones that were available at the time. In those days, you had 24 rows of 80 characters, and you had to type alphanumeric opaque commands where one slip of the key and the command would be rejected. You had to remember the names of everything you stored everywhere. So here's this insanely great new product with windows and icons and menus and a mouse. But the problem was no one was going to take the chance of being an oddball who uniquely buys this esoteric new technology and is unable to join user communities to find any apps written for it, to buy peripherals, to buy consumables. And the problem that Apple faced was to give people the confidence that enough other people saw the ad, and they in turn had the confidence that other people sold the ad, that they would take a chance. And so they ran, I think, the most expensive ad in the history of television. It ran exactly once during the Super bowl in 1984. They hired the Hollywood director Ridley Scott. Of Alien and Blade Runner fame to direct it. The ad said nothing about the Macintosh. It used the theme of Orwell's dystopian novel, not coincidentally set in that year, 1984, and showed a corporate auditorium, gray, grim, a bunch of drones trudging in, listening to drill over a loudspeaker. And then a athletic young woman wearing a tank top and a red and red shorts bursts into the hall, throws a mallet at the screen, which explodes in a fireball. And then the crawl says, On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh, and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1980. So nothing about the computer, even though there was a lot to brag about the computer. But that wasn't the point of the ad. The point of the ad was you were watching. You know, everyone else was watching. You could take a chance at this new technology. What shres showed is that advertisers of certain products were willing to pay more per eyeball. That is, it wasn't the sheer size of the audience, but the knowledge that everyone is watching the super bowl that made advertising uniquely worthwhile. So this included. It included products like the Macintosh that depended on network effects, like the Discover credit card, a better credit card than MasterCard or Visa of the day. But who's going to buy a credit card unless they thought stores would accept it? And what stores would accept it unless they thought a lot of customers were going to carry it? The new websites like Monster.com, a kind of predecessor of LinkedIn, a job site where no one was going to go to the site unless they thought a lot of companies were going to post job ads there. But companies wouldn't post job ads there unless they knew a lot of job seekers were going to go there. So the dot com era was inaugurated by a bunch of super bowl ads. But another couple of categories that depend on these network effects are brands that are consumed in public where the brand image is part of the appeal. So, you know, American beer is American beer. You know, they kind of all taste the same, but to some drinkers, it just matters whether they're a Bud drinker or a Coors drinker for whatever reason. And so those are advertised in the super bowl sneakers. Are you a Nike wearer or an Adidas wearer? So that's another category where advertisers are willing to pay more per eyeball to be on the Super Bowl. But also products that where the pleasure of consuming them depends on other people consuming them. Movies, bestsellers, where you talk about them around the water cooler. It's important to know that other people are seeing the movie. If, when you make the decision as to whether you're going to see the movie, those are also advertised on the Super Bowl. More recently, cryptocurrency dominated this two Super Bowls ago with high concept ads featuring Matt Damon and Larry David, which again, said nothing about the product. Not what, you know, you can buy, you know, drugs or weapons. The government can't confiscate your crypto. It said none of that. Basically said, particularly in the Larry David ad, don't be like, Larry, don't miss out. That is, there's a speculative bubble that's inflating. If you buy now and sell soon, you could make a profit. And you knew when you were watching that ad other people were watching that ad, inflating the bubble. And that's what was the incentive for going all in at that moment.
- [14:05]
B
So in some ways, the super bowl serves as one big coordination event for the United States and perhaps the globe. We're speaking at a moment when political and diplomatic coordination games are very much in the spotlight. And I'm thinking in particular here about the Israel Hamas ceasefire and the government shutdown, which get at two quite different situations. But still, I want to. I'm curious how this framework applies to each. Can we talk a little bit about how common knowledge or public knowledge versus private knowledge plays a role in, in, say, diplomacy, like the Israel Hamas ceasefire deal?
- [14:46]
A
Well, in any kind of bargaining situation or negotiation, if they're at the bargaining table to begin with, there's a range of possible solutions that are in both of their interests. But that is compared to walking away and the negotiations breaking down. But one party wants it to be as far in its favor as it can, the other party as far as in its favor as it can. A simpler example would be, say, haggling over the price of a car where there's only one dimension, one degree of freedom, and that is the price that kind of simplifies things compared to a multidimensional situation like the Middle East. And so the question is, how are they going to get to. Yes. And arrive at a point, given that there's nothing in any price in that range, where the dealer makes a profit, the seller would rather have the car than the money. How do they decide? So Thomas Schelling, the Nobel Prize winning economist who introduced many of the concepts of common knowledge and coordination, noted that when there isn't literally common knowledge, that is, there's no fact of the matter to agree on, often A focal point, something that just jumps out and therefore the two can agree on, if for no other reason than that it jumps out, can solve the coordination problem, sometimes called common salience or a focal point, sometimes even a shelling point in Schelling's honor. So in the case of, say, a couple who separated going back to the rendezvous problem, and let's this is before there were cell phones. So how do they meet up? Schelling suggested they might go to the clock in Grand Central Station at noon, even it wasn't particularly close to where they'd been separated, simply because each one can guess that it would occur to the other because the other person would guess it would occur to them. So in a negotiation, often anything that pops out can solve the conundrum of which of the many solutions will we alight on. So in a negotiation, sometimes the buyer and seller will agree to split the difference, not because that's a fair price or a just price, but just because, you know, you have to come up with some price, why not that one? Or settle on a round number. Schelling says if the salesman announces that his rock bottom price for the car is $30,007.52, he's pretty much pleading to be relieved of $7.52 because the round number is the focal point. So in international negotiations, often it depends on finding some focal point. So if it's an example that I give is during the Dayton Accords that settled the war in Bosnia, Richard Holbrooke proposed that the new Republic of Bosnia Herzegovina occupy 51% of the land that they shared with the Republika Srpska, so that they would nominally be in the majority. Even though, you know, why 1%, why not 3% is just 50, 50 plus a smidge. Now, another way that a negotiation can be resolved given that it is a coordination dilemma in the sense that there are numerous potential solutions. And the problem is, which one do you arrive at? Is if one of the parties is constrained, sacrifices their freedom of choice, they can force the other to accede. So if the salesman, going back to the simpler case of negotiating over the price of a car, if he says, sorry, your offer is reasonable, but I got this hard ass manager, he just won't let me sell it to you for that much, he won't let me go below such and such, and so that's my final offer now then the buyer could say, well, I agree it's a fair price, but the bank won't lend me any more than such and such an amount. That's as high as I can go. Whoever credibly commits first can sometimes have the advantage. The problem, of course, is both credibly commit to different values at the same time. Anyway, there are a lot of other ways of solving the conundrum of a negotiation. It's a quintessential coordination dilemma in that there are multiple possible equilibria and nothing in the payoffs determines which equilibrium you'll arrive at. It's a matter of common knowledge. I will stand my ground because I know the other one will give in. I will give in because I know the other one will stand his ground. How do you get to one of those points?
- [19:23]
B
One example of common knowledge that you describe in the book is during a game of chicken, when one part locks the wheel and puts a cinder block on the gas pedal and makes it known to the other party who's driving directly at them that they've done that. It's like the madman effect where you restrict your own options, which is keep driving the car. You broadcast, all right, I'm crazy, I've done it, I've locked the wheel and I've put a cinder block on the gas. And you describe this as a negotiating tactic of folks like, you know, Kim Jong Un, but also Donald Trump himself, in that being, I guess, mercurial, unpredictable, a bit of a madman. And creating that common knowledge has a value in how people coordinate with you, I think. You know, maybe we're talking about an example where there may be some positive payoff for that. The Israel Hamas ceasefire. Is there negative payoff for that as well?
- [20:23]
A
Oh, you bet. And the idea of, by the way, this idea of a paradoxical tactic goes back to shelling back in 1980, 1960, for which, among other accomplishments, he won a Nobel Prize. But there are two disadvantages to a madman strategy. One is if the other guy tries it at the same time, then of course it leads to disaster. If both kids put cinder blocks on the gas pedals at the same time, then they will die in a fiery crash. The other is if you're locked into negotiations with a madman, you can turn down any opportunity to negotiate with them in the future. You can take your football and go home. You just don't want to deal with a madman. And so as long as there is partner choice, then a madman might be foreclosing options. So in the case of a more day to day example is if you're in a dysfunctional romantic relationship with a partner who does their own Mad Men strategy by just being utterly stubborn, unreasonable, emotional, they have tantrums, they have meltdowns, so they always get their way. Well, one solution is be that way yourself and you have a marriage of constant bickering. But the other is you walk out, you dump the person because you just don't want to live that way. Now in the case, of course, that's why a madman's strategy is more effective in a case where there's no option to walk out, such as, say two neighboring countries who share a border.
- [21:49]
B
I want to switch to talking about the shutdown, which is the other maybe coordination game on people's mind when it comes to politics right now, you'll hear plenty of folks argue that the advent of C span and the 24 hour news cycle and social media have actually made it difficult for lawmakers to negotiate. You know, in decades past, lawmakers could essentially negotiate out of the limelight, come to agreements without immense public scrutiny. But now that the sausage making is very much out in public, it's changed lawmakers incentives to, say, prioritize being seen by one's own voters and as a fighter as opposed to coming to some sort of bipartisan agreement. I mean, do you think that is an example of maybe the deleterious effect of common knowledge?
- [22:33]
A
Oh, absolutely. What common knowledge does in informal interactions is it ratifies social relationships. So if two people are friends, if they're lovers, if one of them is dominant and the other is subordinate, I.e. one always gets this way. These are exist because each party knows the other. One knows they exist and they survive by being common knowledge. Sometimes we don't want to destroy a relationship and so we keep things out of common knowledge by using euphemism or innuendo or genteel hypocrisy.
- [23:12]
B
And what's an example of this?
- [23:16]
A
Oh, at the end of a date, you've got a couple of friends and one says, hey, do you want to kind of come up for coffee or Netflix and chill? That's very different from do you want to have sex? Even though if they're both grown ups, they both know that it's having sex. There's no plausible deniability of the intent. But you know, she could think, well, maybe he thinks I'm naive and I don't get it. And he could think, maybe she thinks I'm dense and I don't know that she knows. So there's a denial of common knowledge which would allow them, if the relationship is, if the overture is not reciprocated, to go back to going back to being platonic friends or workplace Colleagues, they haven't exploded the relationship, even though they've in effect, transacted the business. In the case of a public versus a private or confidential negotiation, as you note, making concessions even though it might be necessary to get to yes also concedes not only the point under dispute, but also your. Your preeminence, your resolve, your status in the relationship. It's seen as a kind of weakness above and beyond whatever you have given up. And maybe it was good to give it up because you're getting something in return that's worth more to you than what you're giving up. But what you're also giving up is your status, your preeminence, your face. We have the expression saving face, losing face. Interestingly, the face is the part of you that sees while being seen. And so it's a perfect metaphor for common knowledge. And so negotiations that are common knowledge always have another resource that is at stake, namely each side's face. And that can get in the way of actually getting to an agreement over whatever it is that's in dispute. That's why each of us, as a ordinary person, would not want there to be a microphone at home over the dinner table with a publicly available transcript, because we all say things, even about our close friends, that we wouldn't want them to hear directly. And so it is in government, there's the conflicting values of enough transparency. So the government is acting in the interests of the population, but not so much transparency that they can't ever negotiate something without having to constantly worry about gaining face or losing face.
- [25:51]
B
Taking this into the realm of electoral politics, I mentioned in the intro, voters who are motivated to vote for somebody who they think other people will vote for, too. Now, when you asked Americans, and we talked about this polling a lot, you know, what's your priority? Is it somebody who other voters will vote for? Is it somebody who, you know, you agree with all of their policy positions? Not everyone fell into the category of, you know, I want to vote for the person that everyone else will vote for. What distinguishes somebody who is sort of playing that coordination game of, you know, I'm going to bandwagon in support of a politician versus I just care about my policy priorities, and I don't want to play this coordination game.
- [26:35]
A
You could speculate that people who are more agreeable in the sense that they want other people to like them are perhaps more neurotic. They're afraid of other people scorning them might be more likely to be bandwagon voters, but that's just a Sheer speculation. Our system, especially the first past the post electoral mechanism does force people to strategize and not necessarily vote for their preference, but to take into account what other voters are doing to hide their preferences. They A lot of people don't care about determining who comes in at sixth place instead of seventh place. They want to be feel that they've helped to determine the winner and so they're going to be looking at who's likely to be in first or second place. Now of course, if everyone's playing that game, if everyone is trying to outguess the other voters, as with any other focal point, some perhaps minor trivial event, if it is public, can create a positive feedback loop, a runaway spiral and determine the the outcome of the race. I mean the whole system of party primaries beginning in New Hampshire and with the Iowa caucuses is designed to maximize that New Hampshire is not a sample of the American population by any means, but by coming first, an advantage of course they jealously guard. It means that people pay a lot of attention to it simply because whoever wins in New Hampshire has a presumptive lead which could then snowball sometimes called momentum in primary politics.
- [28:25]
B
Yeah, I mean I think a lot of campaign politics are about creating that sense of momentum, releasing polling that shows that your candidate is in the lead, making sure that you know that everyone else sort of views this person positively or you believe that everybody else views this person positively as well. And so in reading your book I was like, oh, this is. This kind of explains how much of campaign politics work well often like so.
- [28:53]
A
Avoiding the gaffe where sometimes some trivial misstep if it generates the expectation that that has taken the reduced the chances of the candidate by some small amount that itself can snowball and doom the candidate as everyone concludes that no one else is going to support the candid. My favorite example was from, I think it was the 2004 election, Howard Dean, the scream. It was 2am he was exhausted. It sounded kind of lame and out of control. But for some reason everyone knew Dean's candidacy was doomed because he gave a victory scream. What that had to do with fitness to be president is unclear. But what it did have to do with it was a self fulfilling prediction that voters are going to bail.
- [29:47]
B
Well, I'm curious though, in today's political environment how much that's changed because it seems increasingly that politicians can get away with gaffes and scandals that we would have once thought to be, you know, career ending. And is it just this idea that we have internalized the LOL Nothing matters mindset and that everyone knows that everyone else doesn't care or everyone believes that everyone else doesn't care and therefore it no longer matters. I think we might be able to even have the same conversation about the ebbs and flows of cancel culture. And like, what was cancelable five years ago versus today and how that's changed, is that also part of the common knowledge framework?
- [30:29]
A
Yes, because a norm that is, you just don't do that. It isn't enforced by the police. There's no law against it. But it exists because everyone assumes that it exists. Respectable people don't do that. Well, why not? Because everyone knows respectable people don't do that, which means that they are fragile to unraveling if they are flouted in a public forum and not punished also in a public forum. So the whole phenomenon of social media shaming mobs and cancel culture comes when people want to prop up a norm by ensuring that anyone who flouts it in public is punished in public. Something that social media makes it very easy to do, you can easily pile on. And when it has real consequences, such as a dean or a company president having received 700 or seen 700 tweets, all denouncing this employee and not taking into account just how huge social media are, 700 actually isn't very many, but it can certainly feel like a lot when you're reading them one by one, then capitulates and fires the employee, which means that the punishment is not just the mobbing and the shaming. You know, the. The guy loses his job. And that not only can reinforce a norm, but it can entrench a norm that may not even have existed before, such as making a joke about race or sex, or even casting even saying something that might be common sense, but that if it can get you canceled, people will not say it. Like, you know, it's not outrageous to wonder whether people who are born male should be allowed to compete in women's sports. It's really not an outrageous suggestion that maybe we should think twice about that. But because so many people have lost their jobs and their reputations and their friends for being piled on in social media in order to protect a supposed norm against transphobia, that the norm can be further entrenched. Now. Conversely, if someone gets away with flouting a norm, there are no consequences. Then the norm may cease to exist. And one of the remarkable things about the career of Donald Trump is that a lot of norms that were considered to be sacrosanct, that if you were to flout them, your career would be over. What he showed was your career wouldn't be over. The norms against insulting a war hero, insulting a family of a fallen soldier, insulting a woman's appearance to her face, blatant bragging, blatant lying, insulting one's predecessor in office while negotiating with a foreign power. You just didn't do those things until someone did. And he was not removed from office and he was reelected. And so the prediction is that the norm no longer existing would then open the floodgates to others, further breaching what used to be a norm. And so you see things like Elon Musk, who boasts insults, lies, spreads ridiculous conspiracy theories, something that would have been career ending for a CEO not so long ago. But once the norm is known no longer to exist because it hasn't been enforced again in the arena of common knowledge is no longer a norm. Now, this doesn't mean that the norm is doomed forever. It could be certain circles within which the norm may be floated, but other larger universe in which it still holds as a norm. That is, there could be some compartmentalization, there could be some norms can be reinstated. But I think it's probably harder to establish a norm than it is to tear it down.
- [34:25]
B
And in some ways, winning an election becomes that focal point or that message that creates the public knowledge of, okay, everyone else seems to be okay with this. And you can almost feel the culture change around particular moments when there is that. You know, it becomes common knowledge that this isn't career ending or something like that. You know, I think you have in past books come off as pretty optimistic about the current state of affairs nationally, globally. You know, I didn't necessarily get a sense of optimism in reading this book. And I'm curious if that optimism has evolved at all over the past decade. You know, in Enlightenment now and Better Angels, you taught sort of talked about like, empirically, we are living in very good times. Has the underlying data changed or has the trend changed?
- [35:22]
A
Well, I think you just put your finger on it because actually these were not books on optimism. They were books on empirical state of affairs, which most people are unaware of because they get their picture of the world from journalism, from the news, which is driven by events, not by trends. And so as we get better and better at reporting events, because anyone with a smartphone is a video reporter anywhere on earth, and the news cycle levels accelerates, so we're bombarded with things that go wrong. The things that go right are either things that don't happen, like a city that's not attacked by terrorists or a part of the world that doesn't have a war or things that build up a few percentage points a year, which can compound and pretty soon change the world. But no one notices it because nothing ever happened on a particular Thursday in October. So the points of those books weren't optimism. It's, let's not let our heads be turned by what we read this morning. But let's just look at the data. How often. How many people are getting killed in wars or homicides? How many democracies are there? How many people are there in poverty? How many kids die in childhood or mothers die in childbirth? And when you look at those objective indicators of human well being, you see that we really have made progress, not as some sort of mystical or more Pollyannish Panglossian attitude, but just as a matter of raw fact. And so as to what that means is that with that mindset, your assessment of the state of the world isn't, you know, oh, damn, I can't be an optimist anymore, or, oh, hooray, I can go back to being an optimist. It's, you know, what's been going on. And sometimes things do get worse. None of the curves of human improvement are monotonic. They all show dips and sometimes sickening lurches. And progress doesn't just happen when it happens. It's that people recognize problems, they try to solve them, but solutions create new problems. And there's always the possibility of things going into reverse in the case of the current moment. Depends on what you focus on when it comes to, say, the pushing it back against illiteracy, extreme poverty, access to clean water, access to electricity, education, girls education. The world is still making progress. It suffered something of a dip during COVID but it has resumed and we're better than ever. Violent crime globally, even suicide globally, although there are some exceptions in certain demographics. But that's a kind of progress that is quite wide ranging. In other things, there's been a kind of a drooping or a death. Yep, we're below our history's maximum. Democracy is one of them, where the world is a little less democratic than it was 20 years ago. Women's rights, after having a huge increase, has gone down a bit. According to our best assessments, we're still way better off than we were in any time in history before. So we've shaved off some progress. Does that mean that the progress will be undone and that history is cyclical? We'll go back to where we were in 1900? Probably not. Does it mean it's just a blip and we'll pretty soon recover. We just don't know.
- [38:56]
B
I'm curious how common knowledge, your common knowledge framework, plays into all of this. The way that common knowledge has evolved and how media has changed our ability to know what everybody else knows or feel like we know what everybody else knows. Is it cause for optimism? Is it cause for pessimism? How do you apply the framework in this book to human life today?
- [39:20]
A
Yeah, so it's not a question that I could easily answer. It's like, is the law of gravity a cause for optimism or pessimism? It's the law of gravity. We have to deal with it. We can make it work. People can fall. Likewise, the dynamics of common knowledge, of what they make possible when it enhances human coordination, when it gets in the way of human coordination. What I try to do is lay out the kind of the laws, the basic processes, the toolkit for understanding these phenomena. And I guess I'm not prepared to say, you know, common knowledge is getting better or worse any more than the law of gravity is getting better or worse. It's kind of a set of constraints on knowledge and coordination that are always there. They're the rules of the game that we play. And in particular circumstances, they will play out in different ways.
- [40:18]
B
Well, I guess, let me, let me ask in a more specific way then. I think there's a lot of anxiety right now about phones and social media. I think increasingly we're seeing phones banned in schools, more restrictions on social media, particularly for children, and that we're sort of years into this idea now that social media is the next sort of cigarettes, next smoking, and that we're all going to eventually realize that this was very bad path that we have gone down. And you know, one of the, the roles of these things is how it shapes our perception of common knowledge and how it actually shapes common knowledge. Would you agree with the social media and screen skeptics of today?
- [40:58]
A
Yeah, so I think I've kept an open mind about it. I think initially I was pretty skeptical of the hypothesis from the social psychologists Gene Twenga and then John Haidt that it was leading to a burst of anxiety and depression, particularly in Gen Z and younger millennials, more so for girls than for boys. That is. Well, the phenomenon of decline in mental health is real and is the cause social media. But to their credit, they have been open to criticism, they have looked at evidence, they have sought additional evidence, and I think the evidence is getting better that social media use does, certainly is associated and may cause declines in mental health. I mean, just, you shouldn't use your own experience as a source of credence of a hypothesis. You know, I see it myself. If I go down a social media rabbit hole, it definitely impacts my mood and I'm, you know, a fancy schmancy, you know, Harvard professor. I've got a lot of kind of capital of self confidence where if someone says something nasty to me about me, I can blow it off. If I was, you know, 14 year old girl and my entire life was the social media universe that I lived in, other people gossiping, making bitchy comments about my appearance, that could be devastating. So there's a plausible route to which that could happen together with and Haidt points this out. If you're on social media, and we know that kids spend an awful lot of hours every day on it, there are a lot of things you're not doing. You're not hanging out with other peers face to face, you're not getting exercise, you're not experiencing nature or the life of a city. So it's not implausible. The data seem to be leaning that way, so I'm open to it.
- [42:55]
B
All right, well, we're going to leave things there for today. Thank you so much for joining me.
- [42:59]
A
Thanks for having me.
- [43:01]
B
My name is Galen Droock. Remember to become a subscriber to this podcast@gdpolitics.com and wherever you get your podcasts. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes and access to the videos for the podcast. You can also join our paid subscriber chat and pass along questions for us to discuss on the show. Most importantly, you ensure that we keep making this podcast. Also, be a friend of the POD and give us a five star rating wherever you listen to podcasts. Maybe even tell a friend about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.