Quotes from Arnold Kling

The prescription for better health care is more freedom to innovate, not remote-control surgery from Washington.

When the government pays, health care's lack of affordability becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In health care, as in other things, government is the high-cost producer.

One of my prescriptions for slow political thinking is to try to avoid telling yourself, "I'm reasonable, they're not." Instead, I would suggest the following rule of thumb. The only person you are qualified to pronounce unreasonable is yourself.

Americans today, ideology has become a powerful marker of identity. Ps, Cs, and Ls are now rivalrous, hostile tribes. As such, they have developed linguistic differences and negative stereotypes of one another, which the three-axis model can help to articulate. Within a tribe, political language is used to reassure others of one's loyalty to the tribe, to lift one's status within the tribe, and to whip up hostility against other tribes.

Groups must balance the need to enforce norms with the need to adapt. If the group is unable to enforce social norms, then there will be too much cheating, and cooperation will break down. However, if the group is too rigid in its social norms, then it will fail to adapt to new circumstances.

In politics, I claim that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians are like tribes speaking different languages. The language that resonates with one tribe does not connect with the others. As a result, political discussions do not lead to agreement. Instead, most political commentary serves to increase polarization. The points that people make do not open the minds of people on the other side. They serve to close the minds of the people on one's own side.

Consider three goals that a political pundit might have. One goal might be to open the minds of people on the other side. Another goal might be to open the minds of people on the pundit's own side. A third goal might be to close the minds of people on the pundit's own side. Nearly all the punditry that appears in the various media today serves only the third goal.

I argue that a right of exit is important in order to limit government power. I sometimes think that what kept the U.S. government small in the early 19th century was not so much the Constitution as the fact that people kept leaving the then-current United States for adjacent territories. The option to exit would have made it quite difficult for government to grow large and intrusive.

I think that both camps are guilty of underestimating the challenge of arriving at economic understanding. Those economists who claim the mantle of science are guilty of hubris. Noneconomists who think that their own intuition is superior to economic reasoning are dangerously misguided.

As a social phenomenon, political discussions invite us to position ourselves relative to others. We want to raise our individual status in our own tribe, and we want to reduce the status of other tribes. By framing issues in terms of our preferred axis, we appear to accomplish both of these goals. We impress the people who agree with us, and we delegitimize those who disagree.

What we should be comparing is not the existing market configuration with an ideal based on a simple model but the market process of error correction with the political process of error correction.

Thus, I would view political disagreement as a social phenomenon rather than an individual one. We naturally tend to organize into tribe-like groups. Tribes differentiate in part on the basis of shared beliefs, including political beliefs. Our inclination to seek high status in a tribe leads us to become loyal to the beliefs of our tribe. This results in persistent disagreement.

The only person you are qualified to pronounce unreasonable is yourself.

The three axes allow each tribe to assert moral superiority. The progressive asserts moral superiority by denouncing oppression and accusing others of failing to do so. The conservative asserts moral superiority by denouncing barbarism and accusing others of failing to do so. The libertarian asserts moral superiority by denouncing coercion and accusing others of failing to do so.