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I Don’t Work In Politics

When I go home to Michigan or Chicago, I get some common questions from family and friends. The most frequent is: How do you like working in politics? 

In the words of Lucille Bluth, “I don’t understand the question and I won’t respond to it.”

I had one job in politics as a legislative assistant for a Michigan state representative. It was a pretty good job, a great one at the time (I was in college). I mostly answered emails from constituents and helped my boss draft legislation. 

When you work for a politician, you help them campaign. You also help them campaign for members of the same party. I had no interest in that. 

Politics is war. Now I don’t mind fighting, but there aren’t many battles worth fighting. As a general rule, politicians are amorphous blobs willing to do whatever it takes to ensure one thing: re-election.

We can talk about the separation of powers, how to interpret the constitution, the proper role of government, but at the end of the day politics is about gaining and wielding power. Nobody exemplifies this better than Donald Trump. Oh, and you’re kidding yourself if you think the Democrats are innocent of this. The weakest political criticisms are those of hypocrisy. People are hypocritical in politics all the time and there is no punishment for it. Political actors do not care about rules and ensuring those rules are followed. They care about promoting those of their political tribe. That matters more than procedural concerns.

I don’t work in politics. So what is it I do?

I have mostly worked at places that deal with ideas. I worked at a think tank, a student leadership network, and am now at an academic institute. The exact vision and strategy of each organization has been distinct. They all share the goal of fighting the battle of ideas and shifting the intellectual conversation which, in turn, would change the behavior of politicians.

If you have asked me this question and I have responded angrily, I apologize. I know you mean well. And I understand for most people, there is no difference between politicians debating policy and eggheads at think tanks doing the same thing.

Politicians have a seat at the decision-making table. Their power to create change is, in theory, vast. But they are so constrained by interest groups, public opinion, and political alliances their votes are often predetermined for them. 

Us eggheads admittedly don’t have that seat at the decision-making table. But it’s overrated.

Ideas matter. And breathtaking ideas, like those of Adam Smith or Ayn Rand, have amazing staying power. 

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Our discourse is broken. Signaling ate it.

Our discourse is broken. We can’t talk to one another anymore. Tribalism reigns supreme. How many times have you heard a variation of this?

For the record, I think this is exaggerated. I’m perfectly able to communicate with family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, strangers. This is largely about politics, one domain of life that doesn’t matter for most people on a daily basis.

But there is truth to it. What’s driving this trend is that somehow, a noble lie has been spoiled. Everything is signaling.

Signaling is an economics concept that explains how parties credibly communicate information to one another. I learned about this concept because the signaling theory of education has gained attention recently. Put simply, a college degree is not necessarily valuable because one acquires knowledge during college. It is valuable because it is a signal to employers (possibly a signal of intelligence, but likely also of work ethic, social IQ, willingness to follow direction, and other attributes).

Imagine you have been in college for three and a half years, only to drop out before your final semester. Are you only semester less employable than a comparable person with a college degree? Are you seven semesters more employable than someone who didn’t enroll in college?

If you agree with me that a college dropout will be judged more closely to someone who didn’t enroll in college than someone who finished college, you hopefully see the plausibility of the signaling theory of education. The value of the degree does not come from the knowledge gained in class. It comes from acquiring the signal.

Back to politics. Discourse is broken because the point of talking is not to talk. It is to signal.

Take the latest example, the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. In economic terms, to any random individual the costs of determining the validity of the accusation are relatively costly (time and effort to wade through the evidence, which you don’t have direct access to) and the benefits are relatively low (most people can’t affect the proceedings in a meaningful way). Meanwhile, the benefits of signaling your tribal allegiance are relatively high (being alone in politics is meaningless, power comes in numbers) and the costs are relatively low (all it takes is a tweet).

There are (a small number of) people who are seriously attempting to assess the validity of the allegations and determine how they should affect Kavanaugh’s nomination. For a vast majority of folks, it is an opportunity to signal which political tribe you support. Without knowing their previous stances on similar allegations of sexual assault, you can accurately guess their stance on Kavanaugh if you know how they vote. It’s amazing!

It seems to me that subconsciously, more and more people are clued in to the fact that the point of political discourse is to signal which tribe you support. This is even more maddening as politics creeps and eats into more and more realms of life.

I think this is pretty clear. I’m not so confident on how we got here and if there’s a way out. That would be my personal preference, but I also am curious what the costs and benefits of such a culture of discourse.