Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is September 23rd, 2019, and I guess is economist and author, Arnold Kling.

This is his 16th appearance on econtalk. He was last hearing July of 2018 talking about morality, culture, and tribalism. Arnold, welcome back to econtalk.

Thanks, Russ. This episode's a bit unusual. We're going to talk about your book, The Three Languages of Politics,

which we've already talked about on the program back in June of 2013.

There's a new edition of the book, which is available at Amazon, in the Hardcover paperback, on a Kindle for a mere $3.99,

and it's also available as an ebook, PDF, etc. at no charge at libertarianism.org, and we will link to all of those.

The other reason besides this new edition, the reason we're revisiting the Three Languages is that a lot has happened since 2013.

There's plenty to talk about, and I finally want to say that we are recording this in front of a live audience at the Kato Institute.

So you guys can applaud now. Thank you.

It's about 600 people here, I'd say. Just, I couldn't know if you could tell from the applause at home.

So a quick review. What are the Three Languages of Politics?

I'm going to back you up and start with sort of why I wrote the book, which was I noticed that the expression of political opinions in the traditional media and the social media was not constructive.

And the way I put it at the time is people are not trying to express themselves in a way that would change the minds of the other side.

They're not trying to open the minds of their own side. They're just trying to close the minds of their own side.

And so the big question is, how did this happen? How does this work? How to re-end up talking past each other than why?

Now I can go to the Three Languages, which is sort of my explanation of how tactically people manage to talk past each other, sort of dog whistle to their own side and not talk to the other side.

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