Jonathan Rauch on the Constitution of Knowledge

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 August 2021

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

Journalist and author Jonathan Rauch talks about his book The Constitution of Knowledge with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Rauch argues that the constitution of knowledge--the norms and institutions for testing the reliability of new ideas and accumulating knowledge--has been dramatically altered by the internet and social media. Along the way, they discuss epistemology, the parallels between journalism and the sciences, the waning of religion, the value of new ideas, tribalism, and how incentives affect journalists who want to pursue truth.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.8	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover
0:12.6	Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and
0:17.8	find links down there information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives,
0:23.2	but every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd
0:30.3	love to hear from you.
0:37.4	Today's July 15th, 2021, and my guest is journalist and author Jonathan Roush. His latest book
0:43.6	and the topic of today's conversation is the Constitution of Knowledge, a deep look at how we know
0:49.8	what we know, or at least what we think we know, how that's been changed in the internet age and
0:55.3	what might be done to make it better. Jonathan was last here in September of 2008 talking about
1:01.6	the Chevy Volt and corporate culture a long time ago. Jonathan, welcome back to econtalk.
1:06.7	I am happy to be here. One of my favorite shows we should do more often.
1:10.4	Thank you. You got it. I think 13 years is a little long for in between episodes. You're lucky
1:15.7	I'm still around. What do you mean by the Constitution of Knowledge? It's a lovely title. What do you
1:22.4	mean by? It's our system collectively as a society for figuring out what's true and what's not true
1:30.3	and doing that in a way that respects our freedom and keeps us sane and keeps us civil.
1:37.2	Every society large and small needs a way to do that. Many, many societies have broken up over
1:42.4	questions of truth, of fact. Western societies wars rage across Europe and many other places until
1:50.7	we got a Constitution of Knowledge, which says, you know what, instead of having rulers make decisions
1:56.3	about facts, let's have rules to do it and we set up a system to do that. It looks a lot like the US
2:01.9	Constitution in many ways and that's the Constitution of Knowledge. You say we set it up. The Constitution
2:09.6	of the United States was hammered out by a group of people. But as you point out a number of times
	...

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