It's more complicated than "it's more complicated than that"

Politics, premises, populism and the public

Tim Harford had an interesting piece in the FT about populism last week. He quotes from Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath who argues that the difference between, crudely, ‘elite’ and populist arguments is cognitive effort. Here’s an illustrative excerpt:

[P]opulism is a movement that appeals to people who trust their gut, rather than those who rely on some too-clever-by-half argument. There is a lot that rings true about this suggestion. Consider the following intuitive, common sense ideas: if we let immigrants come here and work, they’ll take our jobs; we should levy taxes on imports to help protect our economy from foreign competition; crime can only be controlled by getting tough on criminals. These ideas may be true or false, but the point is that they all have populist appeal, and they all seem kind of obvious. The elite consensus is that these ideas are also wrong. But to reach that conclusion requires considerable time and effort to sift through the evidence or work through the theory. To make the case without sounding self-satisfied and superior is almost impossible. Nobody likes a smart-arse; populists loathe them. But as Heath argues, this is more than just the difference between simple and complex, or uneducated and educated. It’s about cognitive effort. Is the right thing to do and say straightforward and obvious? Or is it intricate and counter-intuitive?

There is something useful here about the hard work of thinking, but I would push back on the idea that this necessarily splits along elite / populist lines. This is not least because, whilst thinking is hard work, it is hard work for everyone.

I think the real gap emerges in relation to the premises involved in different political arguments. So this isn’t necessarily a difference in complexity, but in starting points. ‘Elite’ arguments tend to rely on previous ‘layers’ of argument. The key mechanism here is the layering of premises.

This is something I’ve been turning over for a while, and it reminds me of a fairly well-known comment Wittgenstein makes about the way that his propositions can be used as a ‘ladder’ to gain greater insight and then thrown away.

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

I’m not going to use the ladder analogy in exactly the way Wittgenstein does, but it useful in clarifying the process of shifting between beliefs, or from one set of premises to another.

I’ve seen ‘Wittgenstein’s ladder’ used as a way to describe the use and embedding of abstractions. Models utilise abstraction - they are wrong but helpful – to gain perspective. Similarly to the ladder, they enable the user to see things differently and they become part of the mental furniture. Inevitably our models of the world embed abstractions and assumptions.

In finance and economics those models are obviously mathematical in nature, though the maths essentially expresses propositions. Further complexity might involve building models on top of models, abstraction upon abstraction. Often economic models in turn form the bedrock for a cluster of policy beliefs.

So a policymaker or politician, for example, might say “We must do X because Y”, where Y is a model based on propositions. So our policymaker or politician may believe Y, but Y in turn rests upon A, and A upon B, and B upon C and so on.

We must do X because Y.

Y because A.

A because B.

B because C.

At each stage there are assumptions – which might be accurate, or not.

The implicit models that are used to guide thinking are understood by those within the system. But they rarely go back to argue the premises lower down the ladder. In fact the incentives and information environment of politics and policymaking tend to push inhabitants of this world further ‘up’. Politics is replete with second-order thinking, but the environment that encourages it does not exist for the wider public.

My sense is that people in finance are generally more wary of mistaking the map for the terrain but even they don’t really go back to the underlying assumptions unless something goes wrong. In politics there seems to be a real aversion to dropping down a few rungs.

To go back and argue the premises of one or two prior stages of argumentation means putting in the hard yards, cognitively speaking. Which is exactly what models are used to avoid, whether you’re part of the elite or not. Here’s a bit I’ve quoted before from Models. Behaving. Badly by quant manager Emanuel Derman:

Thinking for yourself is hard work, and models save mental labour. Like the vacuum cleaner and washing machine that promised to liberate suburban housewives of the 1950s from drudgery, models provide easy and automated ways of letting other people do the thinking for you… If you eschew the help of the mental machines or models created by your intellectual forebears, you have to think through everything for yourself, every time.

So models save us hard mental effort by allowing us to avoid working through premises.

What the hell has this got to do with populism, you might be thinking. Well, if models save us effort, they also close off discussion. Perhaps we could contest “Y because A”, certainly in terms of political decisions. And revisiting the lower rungs of the ladder might be both politically difficult and rhetorically awkward.

But the failure to do so can create a gap.

While the models that operate in ‘elite’ politics are well understood by those within its network, those outside the system may not have taken even the first step on the ladder. This means that what makes sense to those operating with/within the model can look radically wrong / incomprehensible to those outside/without the model.

“We must do X because Y” might sound deeply strange if you have not climbed the rungs necessary to believe Y. The public might still be at “B because C”.

Policymakers might argue that the public doesn’t understand issues and that often “it’s more complicated than that”. But this is partly because the public has not adopted the same models and the abstractions / assumptions embedded within them. Politicians and policymakers in turn may not have taken the time to walk them through the logic.

The result is that the claims politicians make about why things must happen can sound like gobbledegook to the public.

This widening gap is not just conceptual, it has real consequences for democratic comprehension, as described powerfully by Wolfgang Streeck:

The national labour markets of the 1970s, with the manifold opportunities they offered for corporatist political mobilisation and inter-class coalitions, or the politics of public spending in the 1980s, were not necessarily beyond the grasp or strategic reach of the ‘man in the street’. Since then, the battlefields on which the contradictions of democratic capitalism are fought out have become ever more complex, making it exceedingly difficult for anyone outside the political and financial elites to recognize the underlying interests and identify their own.

Streeck’s words echo in my ears when I hear Labour politicians publicly invoke the potential reaction of the bond market – like some spectral economic force – as a reason for their ‘tough decisions’, without unpacking the premises that make this seem inevitable to insiders.

The assumptions in models used to inform political decisions might be legitimately contestable, since they seem likely to include trade-offs. They might also be faulty, or embed a judgment call - for example, assumptions about policymaking freedom of movement in a globalised economy and/or need to placate bond markets.

Across important issues there are models and assumptions shared by most politicians and policymakers that have never really involved popular discussion or consent. This inevitably leads to disjunction between politicians and the electorate.

Politicians and policymakers criticise populists for offering simplistic solutions that may not work. This might be true. It might also be true that some of the models/assumptions employed by politicians are wrong. Or things could have changed since some of the lower rungs on the ladder were put in place. This could leave politicians in positions that they believe are valid but that are also very far removed from the public’s views.

It is not surprising that populists find cracks to exploit. Simply by talking on the basis of premises that the public shares but that mainstream politicians do not, they can make the latter look alien. All they need to do is assert things that the public thinks are obviously true but that mainstream politicians can no longer acknowledge without violating other propositions that enabled them to climb the ladder. Surfacing earlier, widely shared assumptions challenges those in power who cannot endorse them without contradicting the higher-order commitments embedded in their own models.

This seems to be quite a fair view of the disconnect that does not require us to believe either that ‘the elite’ holds views that simply suit their interests or that the public is ignorant (though either or both of those things may still be true).

Nor does it require us to believe that populism is helped along by a lack of cognitive effort, which seems a bit of a cop out when we can see that populists are legitimately hitting the target in some of their claims. Populists undoubtedly exploit the gap between elites and the public that has emerged, but they did not create it.

If this view is right, the gap is not principally about knowledge or intelligence but about the hidden or forgotten premises that structure political positioning and rhetoric. Populists step into the space created and speak to premises the public still recognises. The task is not to make politics either simpler or more technocratic, but to surface and interrogate the foundational assumptions that have become detached from public understanding. Without that, the ladder stays hidden, the gap widens, and legitimacy further erodes. To put this right, we might need politics to drop back down and engage with the public once again on more fundamental premises.

To put it in familiar terms, it’s more complicated than “it’s more complicated than that”.