The Best You Can Hope For in a Democracy (with John Patty and Elizabeth Penn)

The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

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7M ago 1:05:50

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When I was writing The Loop: How A.I. is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back, I asked everyone around me what I should be reading. My thesis was that we needed to immediately begin resisting the companies trying to sell us A.I., because they were likely to amplify the worst parts of being human, rather than the best parts. (And that’s of course because the worst parts are easier to predict, and easier to sell to, and we just barely understand the best parts anyway.) So I wanted to read anything anyone had ever written about just how little we understood about ourselves running a successful society, now that companies were talking about using A.I. to do it. And over and over again, I heard the same phrase: Patty and Penn.

John Patty and Elizabeth Penn, professors at Emory University, use math to test our assumptions about politics. The political scientists, sociologists, and economists I was speaking to all urged me to check them out, so I fought my way through their groundbreaking 2014 book Social Choice and Legitimacy: The Possibilities of Impossibility and (after calling them up and making them explain it to me) came away with this shorthand understanding of what they’d found.

I grew up believing, as so many have, that on the right day, with the right words, in the right light a Jimmy Stewart or President Bartlett can convince America to come to its senses and do the necessary thing. (There’s now in fact a growing sentiment on the left of irritation with Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, for inspiring a generation of kids to walk directly into the buzzsaw of conservative win-at-all-costs politics believing the right monologue will protect them.) In Social Choice and Legitimacy Patty and Penn punched through centuries of political theory that seemed at its core to believe that democracy was a way to achieve consensus.

Nope, they said. Look at the math. You can’t have consensus. You may not even be able to have majority will. All you can realistically strive for in a functioning democracy is that we avoid capricious and arbitrary behavior well enough that everyone involved continues to believe in the legitimacy of the system. If we can achieve that bare minimum — and it’s hard — we get to live in a system in which tough decisions are made, lots of people don’t get their way, but everyone agrees that the process made sense. Less “of the people, by the people, for the people.” More “you can’t win ‘em all.”

In our hourlong conversation we talk about what it is to now live at a moment when democracy has produced more arbitrariness and capriciousness than ever, and when the core political tactic of the president and his supporters has been to undermine the legitimacy we need to keep going. They also talk about their new research: a look at how algorithms are poised to deepen arbitrariness and capriciousness, even as their makers sell them as being neutral and accurate. We also talk about what it is to work as husband and wife, and to weave that work through every aspect of their lives together as parents and partners — except one.

I hope you enjoy time with this fascinating duo.

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