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We have evidence in front of us now that we have leaders who barely meet the minimum requirement of Russian
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and now the good fight with Jascha Monk. When I went to graduate school, one of the big fields of study and one of the dominant methodologies was based on the assumption that human beings are rational, that you can use methods of rational choice to predict how human beings in general, and politicians and statesmen in particular, are going to act. This was at the basis of analyzing everything from the likelihood of nuclear war to how a representative in Congress would act. Failure faced with different kinds of political incentives. Now I feel a little bit torn about this subject. I was quite dismissive about it in grad school. I have come to appreciate it more over time. But I also see that it has some very serious limitations. And my guest today, Janice Stein, is one of the most prominent critics of rational choice as a way of trying to understand the social world, and particularly as a way of trying to understand this political moment. Janice is the founder of the Munk School for Public Policy at the University of Toronto and a national treasure in Canada, as I learned when I got to spend a little bit of time with her there a couple of months ago. We also talked about the fundamental issues facing the international order today. I think Janice and I share a political sensibility in which we want to preserve many things of a current order, but also recognize the ways in which it really has failed to live up to its promises, in which attempts to just make a little bit of cosmetic change and otherwise desperately hold onto it are destined to fail because there's reasons why people are upset. How to navigate that tension was another big part of our conversation. Finally, in the last part of this episode, I asked Janice about a bunch of things. I asked her about her view of Europe and whether the European Union is still fit for purpose, what the best institutional incarnation of European ideal is in the 21st century. I asked her to give a little bit of friendly advice to her southern neighbors here in the United States about what opponents of Donald Trump are doing right and what they're doing wrong, how they should act going forward. And we talked about how to stay intellectually engaged. One of the things that I really admire about Janice is that she is deeply insightful about a whole range of subjects, including some that we didn't have a chance to touch on in this podcast. And this seems to me different to her. How many academics approach the world who stay very firmly anchored within one narrow specialization that they learn as a graduate student and then they belabor that field for the rest of their lives, and they can sometimes lose their curiosity about the world. What intellectual virtues should all of us cultivate in order to stay engaged in the world and in the shifting questions that are urgent in each moment? To listen to that part of the episode, to support what we're doing here on the podcast, and to make sure that you get full access to all episodes of the Good Fight, please go to writing.yashamunk.com listen and set up the premium feed of this podcast on your favorite podcasting app. And since I love this episode so much, I really think you should be able to listen to all of it. I am throwing in a special discount today. If you go into writing.com2026 that gives you 30% off your first year of subscription, bringing the price of this podcast down to about a dollar a week, about 50 cents per episode. Go to writing.yashamon.com 2026. Janice Stein welcome to podcast.
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Oh what fun to be with you, Yasha. I'm looking forward to it.
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I so look forward to it. So I've been thinking about a strange way in which my perception of the world has shifted over the last 10 or 15 years. I don't think my values have changed a lot, but I do think that my perception of how rational the world is has shifted. That 10 or 15 years ago I still had some sense that the people who are in charge are adults who make rational decisions, who are responsive to incentives. And there is a certain comfort in that. Obviously, one reason to doubt that is that increasingly erratic and extreme political leaders now lead some of the most important nations in the world. But there's also a subplot here about how political science tends to think about those things, which I know has helped to ground a lot of your fundamental work in political science. The assumption that we can make assumptions about what's in the rational self interest of various actors, whether that's politicians within a state or states within the international system. And that's going to allow us a meaningful way to predict what they're going to do. Have we just been wrong to assume a baseline of rationality all along?
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So yes, you're going to stop me if this answer is in paragraphs rather than in sentences. Because I think you've raised one of the most fundamental questions in post enlightenment philosophy, economics, psychology, political science, it really doesn't matter. In the 20th century, for a whole variety, I think of complex intellectual and sociological reasons we came to believe that we were rational and it serves a lot of purpose. In addition to being a really nice thing. It serves a lot of institutional purposes and individual purposes as well as. And then some foundational work started in clerical science, in economics actually and psychology. That was Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Danny got the Nobel Prize and Amos would have if he had not died, which said, hey, hey, hey, wait a moment, folks. We do experiments in the lab and we are finding systematic departures from Russia. They're systematic. And I'll give you one concrete example which is very interesting one. And we can predict based on that. So what's the example that Danny and almost used? When people are deeply in the domain of loss, they take big risk. You wouldn't expect that they are least conservative when their back is against the wall. To translate that into English. And a second one which is foundational. And you'll see why this matters in a moment. We are not net asset calculators. So when I ask you, Yasha, what the value of your house is if you own one today, you're going to tell me not what it was in comparison to what you paid for when you bought it, but you're probably going to tell me what it is in comparison to the peak of the market, which you've already normalized for. So you're taking yourself out of the world of gain into a world of loss. And that's why that matters. Now, economics, microeconomics did not really account for that. Political philosophy, which is your origin story, did not really account for that. And most of international relations that was focused on strategy, on decision making did not account for that either. So when that stream of thinking, and Bob Jervis was instrumental in bringing this into the field. But when we did that work, it was explosive. And I think the reason it is explosive is when you attack foundations of rationality, how deep is the attack? Are we never rational? Are we rational under some conditions and not under others, which I think is closest to accuracy. And what do we give up when we give up the built in core assumption that human beings are rational? We can go from here to literally every area of politics and into AI. It's all in a sense influenced by this debate about rationality that's super interesting.
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B
I mean, obviously there's a kind of certain injury to human amour propre in saying we're not just super rational beings in the field of international relations. The stakes were particularly high in a way that even readers of Kahneman and Turkey may not have immediately present at the top of their mind, which is that this was the era of a cold war and the Logic of rational choice is a lot of what was reassuring about the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. The reason why the proliferation of nuclear weapons on both sides was supposed not to lead to nuclear war and the annihilation of much of the world was the presence of mutually assured destruction. The knowledge that if I bomb you, you bomb me, I might be able to wipe out all of your cities, but you have nukes hiding in submarines and so on around the world. And so you have a second strike capability. So I have nothing to gain from doing that first strike. And so the idea that every American president and every leader of the Soviet Union were rational agents who were capable of understanding those incentives was also, at the time, the assurance that the world was not going to end in a nuclear blast out.
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So let me take that example because it's so interesting and that will let us, I think, talk a little bit about different understandings of rationality. So in the field of nuclear astrology, that argument, which is the nuclear revolution, mad mutual assured destruction, most people working in the field don't accept it because they were looking for marginal advantage all the time. So what happen if the Soviet Union put multiple missiles, multiple warheads on one missile? Well, then there might be a calculation that they might have enough to over, you know, to overrun the survivable second strike of the United States. And you got into these finely grained calculations, which were still involved into this day. Yeah. So this is what is shaping the debate as all the arms agreements have fallen apart and we have three big nuclear powers. It's called the three body problem. It's all these fine grained calculations. But what do we know from looking at the documents and the archives and from the way leaders actually thought? Khrushchev and Kennedy never thought about who had the marginal advantage as the taunton. They were both terrified of what using even one nuclear weapon would mean. And probably the phrase that has stayed in my mind the longest is by Nikita Khrushchev, who said, don't pull on the thread of war too tightly because it will break. So if you have an evocative, powerful narrative, which was nuclear weapons are unpredictable, despite all the climate scientists and everybody else, we can't actually predict the damage with any precision because we've only used them twice. So don't go near them. If you believe that story, then it's irrational to use them. As soon as you move away from the story and you start to calculate marginal advantages, what economists do and what political scientists who were rational choice theorists did, we started to see that huge buildup of nuclear weapons to retain that marginal advantage. And we're going back to that world again.
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B
So here the concern is actually not that the problem is that world leaders might not act in a rational way. It's that the kind of methodological approach to rational choice in a way instructs people how to act. And it might instruct people to act in ways that actually lead to much worse outcomes. I mean, there's a small story of this which I think is slightly oversimplified, but it's directionally correct, which is that if you have lots of people in naps playing the prisoner's dilemma game, and of course the idea is that if both of them confess, they're going to go to jail for a couple of years. If neither of them confess it, they go free because there's no proof that they did the crime. But the worst world is if you don't rat your friend out, but your friend rats you out, right? Then you go to jail for a long time and they go to jail for not at all. They cut some kind of deal.
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Let's stop over that story for one second. Yes, because when you think about the implications of it, right, they're huge. The implication is that individual rationality will defeat collective rationality. So you're still within the family of understandings of rationality, but they operate very differently. The incentive structure that operates for individuals will trump, will overcome what is the collective good and the collective benefit. That's a powerful insight for the way we structure a lot of institutions. We have to design in protections for the collectively rational outcome that can defeat what's in the individual rational self interest of leaders.
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B
That's a really helpful way of framing what the normative upshot of a person's dilemma is. Because the basic point, as you're saying, and this is just the pointed person's dilemma, is that there's many situations in which some action is individually rational. It is under any circumstance better for you to rat out your friend than not to rat out your friend. That's why that's always a Pareto optimal course of action. But collectively it is the suboptimal outcome for both. It would be better for both of you not to rat each other out. And so institutions and norms can get us out of this world where we're always doing what's individually rational but collectively irrational. But I was getting at a different point, which is that in studies around the world, what's interesting is that there are actually background social norms which allow people to reach the collectively rational decision more often than you might expect. Most people don't read out their friend in Prisoners Dilemma's games except one group that always reads them out or that is among the most likely to rat them out. And that is economics grad students. Right. So you ask economics grad students in a lab, perhaps not in real life, but that of course shows, I think that's an indication of a thesis you were putting earlier at a much more important scale of actual behavior of world leaders and so on, that it's sort of like the practice of rational choice itself can teach people to act in ways that are individually rational but then perhaps collectively irrational.
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Yes. And you know, let's go back for a second, link that to a lot of evolutionary theory. It's always struck me that evolutionary explanations and, you know, psychology is deeply into evolutionary psychology and that moves into politics is always focused on survival. And that's been translated in acting your own self interest to survive, which is, as emphasized, be the first move, first to keep the image. But what we've ignored in that whole story of evolutionary psychology is the huge advantage of cooperation that societies have when clans, for example, work together. Now, there was another up area, it was another clan. But there's a mixed story in era of the incentives to collaborate that you call those background social norms. If we want the economists in the room for this discussion, we'll say incentives, but it doesn't really matter. There are huge advantages, evolutionary advantages to collaboration, which got buried in the literature, frankly.
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And there's a great chapter on this among many other places in Jonathan Hyde's righteous mind. It's I believe, chapter nine, in which he defends both the idea that group selection actually was a real part of evolution, which is something that evolutionary biologists for a number of decades really doubted and connected to a number of important political phenomena. Let me try and make the devil's advocate argument for the ways in which rational choice is useful and helpful. I'm not sure that you disagree with them, but it'll be helpful for you to tell us when to call on this tool and when not to call on this tool. So the way that I try to explain to students, you know, what that method is, and it's not a method I use in my own work, but there are some practitioners of it that I find to be insightful about the world. And one way of doing that is say, what should a map do? Right? If a map, you know, I can say, I look at Google maps and this is a terrible map, right? There's lots of things about the world that it doesn't show. It really simplifies the world. There's ways in which it distorts what's actually in the world. It hides some of the most interesting things about the world. I can stand in the Campo in Siena and it'll give me the shape of the Campo, but it'll completely miss how beautiful the square is. Right? So maps are terrible. And the answer to that is no, no, no. A map serves a particular kind of purpose. Right? If a map always had to be one to one. Right. If a map was exactly at scale, it would be completely useless for the kind of purpose that it's actually serving. It wouldn't help to orient you about the broad outline of a terrain. That makes it easier to say, should I take this highway or that highway in order to get from whatever it is, Ottawa to Toronto? So the loss of detail is in fact part of the point right Now a good rational choice model is one that takes very simple assumptions and it reveals a lot of about how people act. It's never going to reveal 100%, just that as a map doesn't reveal 100% of reality, but it is directionally correct. And it says, oh, you make few little assumptions and something really interesting follows from that. And it's not 100% correct. It doesn't give you everything, but it gives you something about the logic of things that you might otherwise miss. So that's my attempt to sort of represent what the tradition is up to. To what extent do you agree with that? To what extent do you disagree with that? When should we call upon this tool? When should we ignore it?
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A
So you made my task very easy, because you really did. Because your argument is in fact an argument by the value of abstraction and models. Because the world is so complex, if we want to, if we just mirror the complexity of the world, we'd be overwhelmed. We don't have capacity even to process that kind of information. But you put, when you're describing it, you used a set of phrases. Yasha, you may want to take this back, because you made it easy for me and you said it's directionally correct because it tells us more or less most of the time the way people will behave. But what? I guess, but what if the models are not directionally correct? How do we know? So one of the ways to know is to use history as a living laboratory and to go look at the way people actually behaved under a set of conditions. Now, that's not scientifically satisfying. So how do you get out of that trap. Well, you do a lot of cases from history and you look and again and again, if the assumptions violate the empirical pattern, you should, in my view, either limit the assumptions to a set of conditions or revise the assumptions. But that's not what they did. In among the rational choice theorists in politics, the argument came back, well, they're just as if assumptions. So it doesn't matter if they're empirically correct or not. It's an as if exercise. Now, why do I find that a very, very difficult argument to accept? It's for two important reasons. Models are simplified assumptions. They're also stories, and they have narrative power. And if we tell stories over and over where we know the assumptions are not sustained by empirical evidence, or often not, or, and I'm putting some of the qualifiers in, then I think as academics, we have a responsibility to go back and look at the assumptions and say, well, where do we think these assumptions are most likely to hold and where are they not? That's still. It's much, much better. And the world health, right, because we have evidence in front of us now that we have leaders who barely meet the minimum requirement of rationality. And so it becomes a more plausible argument to make. But until that happened, there was a resistance. And you know, it was the Milton Friedman as the Fahdman, I don't really care how people behave. Whereas take Keynes. That was not his argument. Keynes talked about animal spirits that operated in the. You know, he couldn't quantify them, he couldn't measure them. And often in his argument, it was hard to know exactly when the animal spirits would be unleashed, but he knew they were there and that we had to tell a story about the animal spirits just as much as we had to tell a story about disciplined, rational calculators who were always able, through some method which they never specified, by the way. And that's important too, how you made the most optimizing decision. I've spent my life asking people, well, how do you make the big decisions in your life? Who do you want to partner with? Did you calculate relative cost and benefit? No, not really. Which graduate school did you want to go to? Yeah, well, I had a kind of a list. I said, well, how did you measure across the dimensions? How do you compare? I don't know, but I go to an answer. Right. So really, when you think about what risks your rational choice, there are stories where the assumptions are often, sometimes they are upheld, but often not that rely on a method that almost nobody uses other than informal studies. Now, that's a very dangerous model to take into the world of practical politics. And the one that, of course, which is most striking is nuclear politics. But you and I can think of many others.
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Well, I'd love to hear of more examples where you think a rational choice approach goes wrong. And I'm sure there are many, and I'm sure I'll do a few on many of them. Let me share one where I was dismissive of a kind of rational choice approach, and I think that it was somewhat vindicated. So, you know, when Donald Trump won the first presidential election in 2016, the Republican Party was still full of people who really did not share his ideology and who I think were quite depressed. I mean, the easiest task for any decent political journalist in Washington, D.C. was to corner, you know, some senator or some representatives in one of the bars around Capitol Hill and get them to tell you anonymously, of course, how much they hated Donald Trump and how miserable their life was. And it seemed to me at the time that, you know, if they were being honorable, they would quit or criticize the president. They probably would even have gotten a lot of good things out of it. They could have gone and been fellows at the Monk School at the University of Toronto, which you lead, or perhaps at SAIS in Washington D.C. where I teach. And they might have gotten a nice gig as an on air commentator at CNN or msnbc, but they didn't. And the very, very simple model that students of Congress had applied for a long time best predicted their behavior, which is they did whatever they thought was needed in order to get reelected. They prioritized the re election over everything else. Now, of course, that's a specific conception of rationality. And one of the things that puzzles me is why is it that those members of Congress so preferred this particular set of incentives, what it took to get reelected, over these other incentives, like perhaps cashing out in some smart way and having social prestige and having a lot of followers. We clearly care about power as a particular kind of goal rather than a different basket of goals they might have. And that's kind of interesting in itself, but the simple, simple model that I would have laughed at at 2014, 2015, where the legislator is just going to do whatever it takes to get them reelected and do a first approximation that explains 1999 to 5% of a behavior, I feel like that particular model and that particular moment held up better than my prediction, which is, go criticize him and take the job at CNN and be a fellow at a fancy place and join some Corporate board. Right.
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A
So I agree with you. I think the model is indicated, right? Yes. And it's not only from 2016 to 2020. There's still very large and interesting literature, as you know well, on whistleblowers and the huge cost that whistleblowers pay even when they're exposing behavior that is morally reprehensible and people know that they pay these costs, there's going to be isolation, they're going to lose their job, they're going to lose their friends, and they're powerful inhibitors against actually blowing the whistle even when they see things. And so part of this speaks to the power of rationality. You calculate the cost, and sometimes they're emotional. It doesn't matter their cost. And you do exactly what rational choice theorists would tell you they're going to do. You know, another area I see this is, you know, the unwillingness of students to come forward sometimes when there's egregious behavior, either by their peers or by faculty member, but they won't come forward because they're well aware that there are going to be social costs afterwards for doing it. So when we start our conversation, I said to you, the recognition for me, which was a kind of blinding light that is on some of the biggest questions of international security, rational choice wasn't going to get us there, doesn't mean it raised more questions than it answered, because it raises this question that we're talking about right now. When are people rational? And there's a fertile ground for a conversation that crosses almost all our fields, the political philosophy theory. Is it when the costs are so blindingly obvious to that they are rational? Or is it when the costs are so painful for engaging in, they're so painful as they understand it, that they therefore don't take that action? But there's a whole set of categories where people are rational. And where I think the really critical work has to come is in distinguishing those, in separating out the conditions that are likely to promote in optimizing behavior, where the measurement is easy, let me put it that way. It's pretty easy to figure out the cost. That's what Khrushchev was telling us. Really? Oh, boy. Don't pull this thread of war. It's very easy for me. I don't care how many. If you've got more nuclear weapons than I do jfk, it's going to be really bad for you and it's going to be even worse for me. So let's not do this. That again. I come back to narrative and story and Certain kinds of stories will enable rationality and certain kinds of stories will actually move us away from it.
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B
Now one of the problems with a rational choice approach is just about sort of how broadly do you define the incentives and the rational choice that comes in. Right. Very straightforward famous puzzle in political science, which is why does anybody go to vote? The chance of being run over by a car and the weight of a polling station is higher than the chance that your vote is going to swing the election, at least in large scale elections, at the national scale, and so on. So why would you do it? And so one way to say is that, well, clearly voters are not making a rational choice. We're doing it for all kinds of reasons. And rational choice scholars come back and say, well, no, it is a rational choice. It's just one of the things they consider, consider is the kind of nice civic glow they get from voting. But then you might say, well, we're sort of smuggling in this much broader conception of rationality. It's one way of thinking about this simply that human beings are deeply responsive to incentives. But the nature of incentives is much more complicated than a rational choice approach usually explains. And so to go back to the puzzle about why it is that ranking part numbers of Republican party acted the way they did after 2016, the key thing to understand might be Arthur Brooks argued something along those lines. But each human being is driven by one of four different fundamental drivers. I forget the exact list, but I think he's claiming that it's money, power, pleasure and status. And different people are going to maximize some different of these dimensions. And so that's sort of, it's a soft rational choice approach in a way. But the key thing you have to understand is is this person driven by power or by something else? And the reason why these representatives weren't willing to give up being reelected is that yeah, they like money, yeah, they like status, but what they really like is power. And so they're going to maximize for political power over those other things. Is that a more helpful way of thinking about it? Or you worry that that's going to have some of the same flaws?
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A
Yeah, let me tell you why I struggle with that. Right, because you can, and I'm playing a sophisticated trick right now on you in this answer. You can rationalize any outcome by reasoning backwards and constructing a set of incentives that will explain the outcome. And that to me is a trap, it's an intellectual trap. And it actually becomes at some level a normative trap too. And that's why I, I push Back. Right. So you just said, well, they're really motivated by power. But are you going to tell me that one being one of 430 members of the House gives you a lot of power? Well, that's a really difficult argument to make. And then, well, but they didn't break ranks. You end up with a kind of regressive reasoning back and you can explain almost any of them. So if you can't tell me in advance what incentives people are responding to, then what's the value of the whole thing? Right. Then let's just go find better, more complex models that are not so satisfying, but build in at least an additional level of assumptions so that we get a more accurate understanding. I'll tell you how I explain why motors, they're powerful norms that motivate people to vote because they value being a citizen in a democracy. So you, you know, so yes, it's paradoxical if you're using microeconomic reasoning, but it's not paradoxical if you have a larger conception of society that is in part norm driven on certain key issues that matter to people. And that's why I come back and I say, which story you tell has long term consequences for our self understanding in our society.
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B
And I was playing devil's advocate, but as you know, I agree with 90% of what you've said. How do we apply this to this moment? Right. So we're in the situation in which we have, you know, the political leaders we do Donald Trump in the United States, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China. We have, I think, a lot of people losing trust in the idea that their leaders in their institutions are acting in very rational ways. And we had a moment in which many of the norms that have actually governed and constrained the behavior of political leaders seem to be on the way out as well. So what kind of intellectual toolkit should we grasp for, for understanding and analyzing this political moment?
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A
I think that is the question of our times and that should be our vocation. We in the social sciences and philosophy, it's the most fundamental question. Because getting the answers more or less right will explain where we are a decade from now. Yes, again, I think a story about norms that supersede incentives is a fundamental part of what we have to reckon with. And that's an empirical question. It's not a philosophical question only, it's an important empirical one. When do people respond to norms and give priority to norms rather than self interest? And if that's not part of the research agenda, people are not going to hear that. Discussion. I've had conversations with many of my liberal friends. Let me put the hot button issue on the table. I've had many conversations with my liberal friends who have nothing but scorn for people who vote for people who are norm breakers and the exclusionary language that they use about these people. I can't use some of the words because I would offend the sensibilities of some of our listeners. But there's no recognition.
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B
Go ahead.
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A
But there's no recognition, Yasha, that part of the way the liberals behaved beforehand, that's the norm question beforehand, is in part a contributor to the distrust that people have of institutions, to the fact that there was a self righteous superiority where liberals condescended to those they considered the great unwashed who were ignorant and uneducated and drove trucks and only had high school degrees and worked in the industrial economy and really didn't understand these niceties of politics. So just leave those to us because we know better. Now, if you engage in those kinds of conversations, and that's not to claim in any way that that's the sole explanation, but it's one of the streams that feeds into the river. That is not an incentive question. That kind of behavior is a norm driven question. So to say something which is not to condemn her, but for any candidate who says, well, all the voters from my opponent or 50% of the voters from my opponent are deplorables, that's norm breaking behavior for a leader of a democratic society. Right. And people who are labeled deplorable spirit and are unforgiving and are angry and are resentful and then recalibrate what democracy means to them. And it's not who defends their interests, because I think we would have a very difficult case arguing that Trump in any way has advanced the interests of the voters who are his base. So that's not the right question. It's a different question. It's. And that's why I say we need to move beyond rationality. It's not that it's not important, but it's never the whole story. The question becomes who speaks for me, right? Who represents me, who hears me and
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B
who actually likes me and has my interests at their heart. The way I think about this is that in American politics there's times there's a deal of a beer test, which goes back to 2004 when there was a poll which showed that and more people would like to have a beer with George W. Bush than with John Kerry. And I always found that to be a kind of cop Out. I don't think people care about whether they'd enjoy having a beer with a president. But I think there's a kind of inverse beer test that makes a lot more sense to me, which is if a president showed up in my home today and I didn't have time to change the paintings on my wall and I talked to the president the way that I talk to my neighbors, would they like me? Would they think this is a decent person who's interests I share, whose concerns I take seriously? Or would they say, as Gordon Brown said in a hot mic moment during his reelection campaign, what a bigoted woman. I think it's when they feel like, oh, this person would be nice to me to my face, but then go back to the people of their ideological persuasion of their social class and say what a terrible person that they say why should I trust this politician and why should I arrest the institutions run by these politicians?
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Yeah. And that's not a calculation of interest. You just told a profoundly important social and normative story about trust. Right. Which is trust, as we all know, is the glue of all social interaction. Without trust theory, there's no society and no institution survives when members lose trust in it and how it works. But that's a normative story. So it's much more for me then to come back to what we were talking. It's about the limits of rationality. It's not that we are not at times all of us very busy calculating our own self interest, but it's not what we do all the time and it's not what we do on some of the most important issues in society.
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B
I think we share a fundamental intellectual sensibility, possibility and diagnosis of this moment which can feel lonely, I think at this time. And is both to recognize that there are in fact many institutions which are important that we should defend, that universities, especially in the United States, are deeply fraught places at the moment. And some of the most important institutions in our society to recognize that the CDC has acted in some really quite disastrous ways during the pandemic, really failed to live up to its mission. If you think for example, about the catastrophic failure to roll out accurate and widely available tests for Covid early on because of bureaucratic obstacles and so on, and that we need a public health establishment that makes sure that kids are vaccinated against the measles and so on.
- [41:58]
A
I'm going to interrupt you for one second because we had an incident in Canada which just to pin them up is the story I just told. When Covid started being Chief medical officer of health, as every government does. And she came out to do a press conference and she said, don't wear masks. And they said, why? She said, well, there's no evidence that mask, the masks will help against this sort of virus. Except, of course, if you went to the ERs where COVID patients were swamping ERs, there wasn't a single health professional who didn't have a mask on. So afterwards, there are two hypotheses about why she said that, and both of that raised profound difficulties. The less benign hypotheses that we didn't have enough masks in the country. The priority was, was to make sure that the frontline workers had masks, and so you don't tell the truth to the public. Boy, if that's accurate, we are in deep, deep trouble. We are in deep trouble for the future. I don't think that was her motive, because she could have said to everybody, we don't have enough masks. Go home, cut up a pillowcase, make masks for yourselves and your kids until we can get enough masks. And she country second argument. And this is even more troubling to me, there was no evidence that masks worked well. Why was there no evidence that nobody had ever done an RCT on masks? But there's common sense, right, that four years in operating rooms and an infectious environment, healthcare professionals wore masks. And that piece of advice did more to undermine confidence and under Mon Pablo, trust. Here's another way that could have been, and it comes again to how we think about public discourse and public language. She could have said, we don't know much about this virus. It's not for no reason. It's called a novel virus. I'm telling you, I don't know. I'm going to give you advice today, but I'll be back in two weeks because we have an army of people who are saying, and I hope my advice changes because that means we will be learning something. And so I want you to stay in step with me as we learn more over time, and I will share whatever we learn with you. That's, to me, a deep flaw, in a way. Officials who are fearful that they will be pilloried by the public for making a mistake talk to citizens.
- [44:52]
B
And what makes me think is that elites wonder why people don't trust them. But actually we should also wonder why elites don't trust the people. Of course, there's a very similar debate about Anthony Fauci and his advice that masks weren't effective at the same stage of the pandemic. Early on in the United States. So I think this discussion will be familiar to listeners here. I think the dilemma that you pointed out is true on either assumption. So if the point was that they thought, well, we don't have an aspcv, we don't have the best, most rigorous scientific study to prove that master effective and therefore we're going to tell them not effective. There's a mistake of scientific reasoning going on here. But more importantly, it's this inability to communicate in the right way to trust people to say look, this is a fast moving situation. We're going to try and give you the most accurate information we can at every point. But really we don't yet fully know we have the best scientists working on this. We're going to update you as soon as we can. But we trust you. That uncertainty and it's not having the trust that the public can understand that complexity that says no, no, we gotta have a simple message. We have a media trainer over here, we have a PR consultant. It's not that the motivations are nefarious, but it's the lack of trust in people's ability to understand. Now the same thing is true in the other assumption. If you think that what was going on was a noble lie. Again, I think I understand the underlying motivation, right? Like if you feel that the doctors and nurses who are in the ICU desperately need this personal protective equipment and they don't have access to to it. And if we tell people masks are really effective against the virus, everybody's going to try and go out and get masks. So perhaps we should kind of fudge the issue a little bit because I'm speaking to the head of this hospital and they're saying we don't have masks. I don't think that doesn't mean that public health officials are corrupt in the sense of wanting to make money or that they don't think they're dying. No, no, no, I get it's a hard but two things, right? Number one, it is really short sighted about the effect of that because as you're saying, it delayed all of the entrepreneurial spirit that people then developed of saying, well I'll just cut up my pillowcase and turn that into a mask of factories that are producing other things saying perhaps we can start producing masks instead. It's not thinking of order effects of society, but most importantly, it's not trusting people to be public spirited. What a different appeal it would have been to say, hey look, masks are helpful, or at least we think they're helpful. The evidence is not yet completely clear. If you have some way of getting a mask at home, produce your own cloth mask. We're going to try and do everything to produce more masks so we have the best mask to get out, ready to swim. But in the meanwhile, please don't buy them up. The doctors and the nurses who are keeping your friends and relatives safe if they have a serious case of COVID they're the ones that need that. That would be trusting the public and so on. Either of the assumptions, right? Either that they don't trust the public to understand the complexity of evidence available at the time, or they don't trust the public to act in a public spirited way. It's actually a lack of trust in the public that led to that misstep.
- [48:04]
A
That's right. And so we agree entirely. But that itself, I think is a deep flaw. Right. And it's an elite problem. I know more, I'm more sophisticated. I understand the complexity. So I'm not going to trust you, the citizen. Once you, as leaders, you lose trust in the community that you need. It doesn't mean you share complexities, but you're truthful. And the capacity to acknowledge. I don't know. I find with students that is the most trust building statement I commit to a classroom. Oh yes, isn't it? They ask me something and I say, well, you know what, I don't know. I have to go read. I'll be back to you. But honestly, I haven't thought about this. I don't know and I'll be back to you. That creates a kind of shared trust. And I believe it's the lack of a trust in the public that has gotten us to where we are. And you know, if I had a voice in who we select as the next group of leaders in 2028, my highest criteria would be who trusts the public, who does not condescend to voters, who does not believe voters are the ignorant. Let me switch in one sense and tell you why I think this matters so much. Okay. Yes. Because you and I both agree that we are in the middle of a disintegrating international whether you think the next one has not yet been born. But clearly we're at a moment where linear thinking is not very helpful. And if we love history, we can go back, I think, both of us, and have a lot of fun identifying what these mean nonlinear breakpoints in history in which things changed. But just think about what this means if we say this. All our linear probabilistic models will not work. Okay, let me take two sentences to tell you why I feel so strongly about this. And it's the current stuff. And that's an entirely different way of thinking about rationality, because rationality has probability built deeply into it. It's a subjective expected utility. Expected is just a nice word for probability. What's the likelihood? Linear means the future is going to look a lot like the past. Well, you and I don't think that right now. You don't think that about AI, I don't think that about the way our international institutions and practices are going to represent themselves. So that's not a good way to go for it. But there's a second that probability is going to be a very poor guy, because what do we need to really be intellectually honest about probability? We need to have a large, large number of trials and understand the probability distribution. Otherwise we really shouldn't do it if we're being factually honest. But we don't have it for the. We can't. We don't have it about AI, it's too new. We don't have it about this world that we're leaving behind. We don't know yet what we're moving toward. So what do you do? How do you use your analytic tools? And so. Right.
- [51:39]
B
And so, and by the way, just, just, just to set this up in one more way, that's not narrowly a question about rational choice. So rational choice is one way of trying to predict the future. We know roughly what the incentives are here, and so we can kind of build the model and project it forward. A very different way that political scientists try to understand the world, which in some ways is more dominant today than rational choice, is high end statistical reasoning. So you construct databases which show you statistical regularities and then you use them to make predictions about the future. To go back to 2016, one of those was to show the party decides, a very well regarded book in American politics which said that, yes, activists seem to play a role and there's often a sort of crowd favorite who's quite high in the polls early on. But in the end, the thing that really matters is the decisions of donors and party insiders and elected officials. They're the ones who actually decide the party decides who's going to be the nominee. And so throughout 2016, all these political scientists were saying, donald Trump, it's not going to happen. In the end, he's not going to get the Republican nomination. And this is one prominent example of a broader problem where if you're at a moment of paradigm shift, looking back at the statistics of the last 10 years, over the last 50 years, to predict what's going to happen in the next five or 10 years is not going to help. And that's true.
- [53:05]
A
You know, I just asked somebody very knowledgeable who's going to be the nominee in 2028. You just shrugged your shoulders. He's a very experienced political operative. He said, whoever is most closely connected to the big donors, that's what it'll be. Well, I'm not sure that's the right answer. So she said, come back. Well, I've been doing. For the last couple of years, I've been thinking hard about uncertainty, right? And so, first of all, people hate it. It's similar to rational choice. The only one minor but important way rational choice was as powerful as it was because it gave you control, it made the world predictable. Large end databases are as attractive as they are because it gives you control, it allows you to structure things, and you can generate these predictions and thus psychologically very satisfying because you don't feel you're tumbling in a universe which you cannot structure in any way. But those methods are not appropriate to the world that we're moving into because we just. We don't know. That's where I start from. We don't know. So what do we do? Well, we tell stories. You could call them scenarios. That's fine with me. They're structured rights and they're disciplined stories. But you tell them and you ask yourself, what are plausible ways of thinking where we will be in the next 10 years? What makes sense to you, Yasha? But what are three possible worlds, I might ask? And then the next question may be, okay, tell me how you get from your first possible world back to today. Because if you can't imagine a single possible path to get there, it's probably not very possible if you can't reverse engineer your way back. Right. That's also narrative power. And then as you reverse engineer your way back, there are key decisions along that path back or key landmarks, you could call it. And so when you get there, it's like the Turing Test in AI. Well, here's a test. And if we pass this test, we're going one way rather than another way, identifying those markers that will tell us, well, are we moving more directionally here rather than there? And if so, then we adjust, and we adjust our strategies and we adjust the things we do to mitigate the risks. But that is fundamentally based on human capacity to imagine, which right now we have a monopoly on a capacity for structured imagination.
- [56:02]
B
So Help me actually do this right. The question I was going to ask earlier, and it's a mark of a great conversation where there's always four branches and you have to prioritize between branches, like, oh man, I'm sorry, start to let that other branch go. But I do want to return to this branch, which is I think we share the sensibility that there's many things in the old order that we want to rescue in various ways. Right. We don't think we shouldn't have a cdc. We don't think that we shouldn't have NATO. Right. At the same time, it's clear that the order is crumbling and that the people who are simply saying, oh, the order is fine and we need to make some cosmetic changes, but eventually Trump will leave office and leave a political scene and then we can go back to normal. I just deluded. So I think the fundamental challenge is how do we balance those things? How do we recognize that there is fundamental change that is needed, but without throwing the baby out of a bath water. Should we think through scenarios? Tell me how to think about this. What are some of the scenarios, good and bad, for how this is going to go?
- [57:18]
A
So let's say if we were thinking about this and we had a blackboard and we could draw the stories that we were telling so we could think about a world with three or two and a half big powers that are more or less led by thugs. Let me put it bluntly. But what's the underneath layer? How does that underneath layer, self organized. Do we can take differences? Do we put all our eggs in strengthening international institutions that you and I might think. I don't know if you do, but I do. Are less than effective. Long, best, past, you know, they're best before dates. Or do we think differently about standing up a set of institutions just underneath that are smaller, that are nimbler, that don't build in vetoes that you know? Mark Carney spoke about this at Davos to some degree and it's many ways a very misunderstood speech because it had so many dimensions. But one of the things he talked about a world that at just beneath that level was what we would call variable geometry. So you and I are most interested in narrative and stories. I'm going to come and start a project with you to stand up a big research project on how disciplined narrative can help us think through our future. And we could probably think about 10 other colleagues that we would invite from different parts of in the world and we get that project going. We wouldn't worry Too much about the ones who tell this is all going to blow over, don't do anything. So that's one vision of the world that we invest all our effort toward these next 10 years in propping up the UN, propping up NATO and other institutions. And some of these are holy grail. That's one. The second one is, no, we don't do that. There's another world out there. There's still thugs at the top, but right underneath them there's a plethora of small or nimble international institutions. And climate gets thought about that way and nuclear weapons get thought about that way. And they're not the same members in every group. And there's a kind of test of effectiveness that we use for each of those. That's world number two. And world number three is the thug self immolate or two of the thugs self immolate or one of the thugs self immolated. What difference would that make to what we do in level two? And then we start thinking about the paths backward and what would it take? What would we have to do today to get to that, to stage number one, number two, number three, and that's hard work. That's where it is really disciplined thinking. And it requires a knowledge of political institutions, how they work, how you build coalitions, what's doable, how you keep a coalition together. But that's the essence of democratic politics, isn't it? And what norms really matter along the way.
- [60:34]
B
Thank you for listening to this episode of A Good Fight. I told you it would be a good one. Well, if you want to listen to the rest of this conversation about Janice's view of Europe, about her advice to Democrats and other opponents of Donald Trump in the United States, about how to stay intellectually engaged and active and learn more about the world with a requisite intellectual humility. And about a topic I forgot to mention earlier, about the role that middle powers from Canada to France to Germany to the United Kingdom should play in a world in which the great powers are increasingly pressing their advantage in a ruthless manner. Please become a paying subscriber of this podcast. Please support what we do here. Please go to writing.yashamonk.com 2026for 30% off your first year of subscription. That's writing.yashamonk.Com 2026 thank you so much for listening.
- [61:32]
A
It.