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A clear advantage of a democratic government is its responsiveness to the demands of citizens. However, government must also be responsible in its aims and competent in their execution. Something that’s been made clear by the coronavirus epidemic is that, unfortunately, these responsiveness does not inherently go hand in hand with responsibility or competence. Last week, Garett Jones joined me on Political Economy to discuss how he explores this conflict in his new book.

Garett is an associate professor of economics and the BB&T professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Most recently, he is the author of 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, including brief portions that were cut from the original podcast. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: Could you give me a brief introduction to the book, in the context of the coronavirus pandemic? How is government responding to that pandemic? Do you believe it supports your thesis, or does it make you rethink it at all?

Jones: No, I think it gives strong support for the thesis of 10% Less Democracy. One of the things that drew me to the topic was seeing how senators seemed to become cowardly in some way right before an election when I was a Senate staffer long ago.

A variety of evidence that I review in the book shows that by normal standards, politicians are worse at their jobs in election years. And so it’s no surprise that we see the president and Congress making grand political hay over something that should be solved quite quickly and rapidly and aggressively.

My book has a strong message for how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic because it provides the example of central bank independence, which is an excellent model for the following phenomenon: When power is delegated to independent agencies, and the people in charge there have long terms and are separate from the political process, you seem to get good outcomes.

We know this is true with central bank independence. It’s easy to test. So in countries that have central banks like the Fed — where people have these very long terms, they can’t be fired by the president, and they can’t be fired by a member of Congress — they just seem to be better at their jobs. It’s something you might think could be true in theory. It turns out it’s actually true in practice.

And Chapter Four in the book shows how those lessons from central bank independence apply to judicial independence. It’s why we don’t want judges who can be fired by a politician. It probably applies to electricity regulation or telecom regulation.

I didn’t discuss public health independence, but it seems obvious that we could have a public health board that would work like the Federal Reserve: three to five members appointed by the president, confirmed by Congress.

And they could be making long-term decisions. They could be making immediate decisions about public health that no politician could derail. I think that would probably be getting us better results right now, if we had active experts — independent of the political process — with the power to act quickly.

Right. So in a way, you almost couldn’t pick a worst time for something like this to happen than in an election year. There’s a lot of hard decisions that need to be made. They would be difficult at any point. But before seven months before an election, this really crystallizes the problem you’re addressing.

Exactly. This is something that social scientists have studied in a lot of other ways. Economists and political scientists both had seen how politicians act differently right before an election. On Capitol Hill, we say that a senator is “in cycle” when he’s less than two years away.

For instance, economic research shows that senators are less likely to vote for a free trade bill when they’re in cycle — when they’re less than two years away from reelection — even though economists tend to agree that it’s good policy to vote for free trade.

Hillary Clinton actually embodied this perfectly. In her first four years as the senator from New York, she voted for every free trade bill and in her last two years in her first term as senator of New York, she voted against every free trade bill. So politicians seem to become worse at their jobs right before an election.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks at United Nations Headquarters on a panel about including women in the peace process in Afghanistan, in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., March 10, 2020. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

I realize this is an idea that you haven’t thought a lot about, but you mentioned the concept of a public health board. The first thing I thought of is that there’s currently this debate about how long we should have people stay at home versus reopening the economy, and how that influences the designs of economic support measures.

Well, what happens when these independent boards disagree? You can have a public health board saying, “We need to keep people at home, shut down for a long time.” But we could have a fiscal board, or the Federal Reserve, wanting to do something differently.

What happens when the boards would disagree at a time of crisis?

A fair point. And a good question. I mean, the same thing that happens when we have the independent judiciary pushing for some things, and we have the independent central bank pushing for something else, and the somewhat independent Federal Trade Commission pushing for yet a third thing.

So industries are often regulated by the FTC. They’re kind of independent. The Fed is deciding who to make big loans to. They’re quite independent. The Supreme Court decides that certain loans or certain industry regulations are illegal. They are independent.

But in our system, the Supreme Court has the final say on things. So as long as you have some arbiter, some order of operations of who’s the final boss, that’s fine. It can be a hassle, but it’s the same hassle we have whenever the president disagrees with Congress, or whenever the president disagrees with the Supreme Court.

This is something that happens a lot in democracies, and we have tools for solving them. And this could apply to a public health board just as easily as it applies to the Fed.

There’s a lot of debate about how government is currently, in real time, responding. But then there’s a larger issue is that, even though the phrase “black swan” gets talked about a lot with this pandemic, it really doesn’t to me seem like this was a wildly unexpected, low-probability event.

Over the past 15 years or so, we’ve had a number of outbreaks, not of this level, but I can think of SARS, H1N1, and Ebola. These were fairly high-profile outbreaks, even if they didn’t necessarily affect America significantly, maybe except for the H1N1.

Yeah. We seem to be wildly unprepared. People have been saying, “Where are the ventilators? Why don’t we have simply massive stockpiles?”

Do you think that part of the problem here is that not having more expertise and more things outsourced to the experts means more short-sighted thinking and less long-term planning or future-oriented thinking?

I think that’s a great way to phrase it, and I’d even be happier to phrase it as a critique of the voters themselves. Political elites and high-level politicians have been hearing these briefings for years about how a global flu-type pandemic is the big risk for the world.

This is something that the mid-to-high level folks in government have known about for years, right? This is something that people do simulations of. I saw a story in the paper a while ago about how, in the early parts of the Trump administration, they actually did run a simulation about a scenario like this that involved the State Department.

And the problem is that it’s hard to get elected officials to pony up cash for something that might happen 20 years from now. This is a weakness of democracy. Democracies are slow to respond to these problems that are likely to happen over the next 20 to 30 years, or perhaps have a 30 percent chance of happening over the next 20 to 30 years. It’s very hard to get democracies excited about this.

So this is just the kind of place where you want some agency that has independence from the voters, real power, and some kind of budget. And we’d be in a much stronger position if we had been in that situation.

Now, the East Asian countries were ready for this in a way that Europe and North America were not. And it may simply be a matter of the fact that they saw SARS up close. They didn’t see tens of thousands die from SARS, but they saw dozens of hundreds die. And seeing that happen close up gave them at least a medium-run memory. I’m sure the medium-run memory of what’s about to happen to us is going to be well shaped for our voters for 10 to 20 years, and then they’ll just go forget about it.

Would this involve attracting a higher caliber of public servants than what we currently have? We’ve certainly seen some really great examples of some super qualified people. Many of the public health officials that we see when the president gives his press conferences are some of them.

But in the United States, do we attract that kind of person to serve in government to serve in those kinds of roles, and in those kinds of roles where they would have more authority?

That’s a good question, but when I’m thinking about something like the public health board, I’m not talking about just creating a new label for the Centers for Disease Control. I’m talking about creating a new institution that has its own power, where the leaders of it would be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, just like other high-level positions. And so you would get some of these folks, somebody like a Dr. Fauci would be a natural person to be on the public health board with a five- to 10-year term, or somebody like Scott Gottlieb as well.

People walk wearing masks outside The Federal Reserve Bank of New York in New York City, U.S., March 18, 2020. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

But also there are other people, say in academia or people who are university professors — people who’ve served as administrators and also as researchers, a little bit like the folks who wind up at the Federal Reserve. Economists who are working at the Federal Reserve Board tend to be people who have been academic economists who also have managed a staff. They’ve also done some congressional briefings sometimes. They know how the system works on some level. That fusion of something does seem to percolate to the top in the Washington, DC environment.

But this happens in the judiciary as well. The higher you move in the judiciary, there’s a good chance that the reason you got promoted is because you could manage a staff fairly well and move enough decisions out the door. So our system for screening, with all its flaws, seems to let at least a fair amount of cream rise to the top.

I’m sure there are people who think… Just even read the title of your book and think, “This is just purely a contrarian thought exercise.” This book is coming at a time when everyone is been criticizing elites. People are claiming that we don’t need experts anymore because they’ve ruined the US economy, and the last thing we should be doing is giving elites more authority or control. So the book goes completely counter to everything we’ve been hearing, certainly since President Trump’s election.

Yeah. What I do is bring absolutely mainstream evidence that shows that when the choice is between… not current elites versus utopia or current elites versus my favorite person on Twitter… but if instead the choice is current elites versus the current masses, the current elites start looking a lot better.

And so I provide a lot of evidence for that. When I look at the Senate, senators seem to behave better the further they are away from the voters, the more distant they are from reelection. Central bankers seem behave better when they have more independence from the political process. Judges seem to behave better when they’re detached from the voters.

And to bring more extreme examples, more creative examples, countries get good financial advice by having to pay attention to what their bond holders want. All the rich countries borrow money in the global financial markets. Governments keep their eye on what the global financial markets want from them. They try to behave in a way that will keep their interest rates low, that’ll make it easy for them to borrow.

And that kind of discipline is another form of elite influence. And I think it’s one that should be expanded by creating some annual or biannual council where people at the US Treasury meet with the other treasury secretaries and perhaps pass non-binding resolutions on what the path of US government policy should be.

There’s been considerable criticism of the Federal Reserve, especially since the financial crisis. The most recent flavor of that criticism is that the Federal Reserve has been too worried about inflation. And in a way, it seems that the Federal Reserve’s reputation is maybe at a low point. Maybe not the lowest point, but at a low point.

Why are you so confident that the Federal Reserve would provide a real-world model of how experts can do a good job? And what else makes you think that’s exactly the model showing experts cannot do a good job?

Yeah. What people are doing, especially in the world of social media, is they’re comparing the current Federal Reserve to their favorite Twitter fantasy. They’re not comparing things to an actual counterfactual that can be measured in any way. They’re living in a dream world. So I think people should actually have to show evidence for their claims if they want to try to persuade people on them.

And we have a lot of evidence in economics that shows that when you look across countries and you look at the countries that have more independent central banks, ones that are more independent of voters and have ones that are less independent of voters, the ones that are more independent have lower, more stable inflation. They seem to have fewer financial crises. That seems like a good thing.

And this works even with before-and-after comparisons — when you look at countries that switch from having a more political central bank, where the president can fire the head of the bank to one that the president can’t fire them. New Zealand’s the best example of this. They switched from being a very politicized central bank to being a very independent one very quickly. Their inflation rate came down, and their economy got a lot better. You can more or less say they lived happily ever after, at least on that issue. So when we go away from the realms of, “I can fantasize a better world” and we go toward the realm of, “Show me the data,” all of a sudden, independent central banks like the Federal Reserve look pretty good.

So if we’re a big part of the problem, what do you do about that? Should all of us be able to vote? Should only people who can pass a 20-question test be able to vote? Should voters know something about supply and demand or some other basic economic theories? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I have a chapter that’s on this topic and I chose the title of the chapter very specifically. It’s called, “This Chapter Does Not Apply to Your Country.” And that’s where I say that I want people to just think about what politics would be like with more informed or less informed voters. What would happen if you change things?

What I tried to do there is try to show people that A) there are countries around the world — including perhaps the country you live in — where countries do have ways to give more weight to voters with more formal levels of education or have greater levels of cognitive skill.

Via Twenty20

My favorite example comes from Ireland. So the Irish Senate isn’t that strong. It’s a little bit like the House of Lords in Britain, but 10 percent of the seats in the Irish Senate are set aside. And the only people who can vote in the elections for those six seats in the Irish Senate, are people who went to one of Ireland’s two best universities. Since Ireland’s a small country, the equivalent for the US would be people who went to the top 50 or 200 best universities in the US. So Ireland found a way to just give a small weight, a little thumb on the scales, to more informed voters.

A version of this that’s more widely used — controversial but used in over two dozen countries across the European Union — is some restriction on voting rights for people who are intellectually disabled. And this is an important topic to think about. I like to remind people in my book that many of the taboos, many of the things you think would never happen, are actually already happening in your country, or at least a country that you’ve heard of.

So dozens of countries in the European Union have some kind of rule that says: “If you are intellectually disabled and a court decides that you’re not competent to pay your own bills or buy a house, then you are not allowed to vote.” I draw on a European Union legal document that discusses this to point out just how seriously people take this issue.

So we already have restrictions in many rich democracies on who can vote and who can’t vote. And rather than saying it would be terrible if there were any restrictions, I want people to know that these restrictions are already here, and I want them to ask themselves: “Should we have a little bit more or a little bit less?”

Why are you confident that better informed people would not vote for things that just tend to help them and not less informed people? That’s going to be a very self-serving kind of democracy.

Yeah. So that’s definitely a cost. And that’s why I go to some great lengths to show that, for instance, in the US, members of different ethnic groups are graduating from high school, not exactly, but at pretty close to the same rate. So some people might have some stereotypes in mind thinking that, say, perhaps whites graduate from high school at far higher rates than African Americans. Not true at all. The graduation rates are quite close. So if the United States said something like, “You have to have a high school diploma or be at least 30 years old in order to vote,” would that actually change the racial makeup of our electorate?

I’m not proposing that. I don’t support that, but I just want people to know that some of the things that they have heard, or things they might suspect about how education-based voting requirements would work might not work that way at all. So they should think this through, look at some data, and then probably ignore the chapter and think about something else in the book.

Garett, some people want 16-year-olds to vote.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, there’s very clear evidence that 16-year-olds just know a lot less about the world. They do much worse on political knowledge tests. That’s an easy objective test. But this would probably make policy worse.

A point I try to emphasize is that once we stop thinking of voting as purely being a sacred right that cannot be violated and instead, think of it as in part a means to the end of good governance, then we start asking, “Well, which voters actually would help us get good governance?”

Jason Brennan, this philosopher at Georgetown, who’s awesome, says there’s a tension between two kinds of rights. The right to govern yourself and participate in your own government is in tension with the right to be governed competently.

So some people are so poorly informed that they will actually make government worse if they are allowed to participate. So when there’s a tension between rights, we shouldn’t assume that the right answer is going to be all of one or all of the above.

The best way forward, to help to give people their right to competent government, is something I think we can all strive for.

You present Singapore as an example of 50 percent less democracy rather than 10. What did they get right? Where did they go too far?

Well, Singapore is just a fantastic country that has accomplished so much after it starting with so little. A tiny island city state in Southeast Asia, mostly made up of the descendants of Chinese immigrants, but not completely. And they’ve done extreme versions of many of the things I suggest in 10% Less Democracy. They have politicians with fairly long terms. They have a lot of independent agencies with some degree of independence. They have a very well-educated voting public.

But their restrictions on democracy are so extreme that when I tried to do a ballpark estimate, it came out to 50 percent less democracy than that of the rich countries.

And so I don’t think we can recommend that because democracy is extremely valuable. I discuss this with some evidence at the beginning of the book. One great thing about democracies is they almost never kill their own citizens, and they essentially never have famines. This is Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen‘s great finding: At least the last century, there’s never been a famine in a functioning democracy.

Singapore is a great place. It’s a good place to visit. People should consider living there. But most countries that have that low a level of democracy do not get Singapore-style outcomes.

People in protective face masks are seen at a mall, as mall capacity is regulated in a series of social distancing measures to curb the outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Singapore March 27, 2020. REUTERS/Edgar Su

So we can’t say, “If you follow Singapore’s plan, you’ll get Singapore’s results.” That’s like saying, “If I follow LeBron James’ workout pattern, I’ll be a LeBron James-level basketball player.” That’s not going to happen.

What about China? China is like, what, 90 percent less democracy or 95 percent less democracy.

Right. Exactly. So China good things about it and very bad things about it, but Singapore is a more balanced place in a way. It’s obviously more admirable, but I think when we look at the statistical generalizations, the historical patterns we’ve seen, most countries that have Singapore’s level of democracy aren’t getting Singapore-style outcomes.

So they may have just gotten lucky. They may have something else going for them. But all of us who aspire to try to improve governance shouldn’t just be thinking about Denmark, which gets a lot of attention in the West. We should be thinking about many countries, at least a small basket of countries: Denmark, Singapore, Japan, Sweden. These countries all have different styles with some patterns in common and some things that are different. And by looking at a few different models, I think we’ll learn more than just picking one and trying to emulate that.

Finally, is this just an interesting thought experiment, or can you actually see some things in the United States actually happening in the next five to seven years?

Yeah, I don’t know if it will be the US doing this, but at some point, some of the rich democracies with heavy debt burdens will create something like a council of sovereign bond holders, where bond holder representatives meet regularly with the government and issue informal opinions — maybe formal opinions — on how government should change themselves.

Countries already have restrictions on the right to vote based on cognitive skills. It’s easy to imagine those getting dialed up or dialed down. Longer terms for the United States House of Representatives are a hardy perennial among political nerds. That’ll probably never happen, but it’s always worth thinking about.

I think a public health board is something that will get a lot of attention over the next 18 months to two years. And I hope that gets serious attention.

I do, too. My guest has been Garett Jones. Garett, thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me!