Misinformation and the Three Languages of Politics (with Arnold Kling)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2024

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

How big a problem is misinformation for a democracy? How do we arrive at the truth? Listen as economist and author Arnold Kling talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about how we should think about truth-seeking. The conversation also revisits Kling's classic work, The Three Languages of Politics, and the relevance of its framework for the current moment.

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 Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done
0:24.5	going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is September 5th, 2024, my guest is economist and author Arnold Kling.
0:41.0	His sub-stack is In My Tribe. This is Arnold's 19th appearance on
0:47.2	Inc. Talk. He was last year in December of 2022 talking about Twitter, FTTS, and chat GPT.
0:54.8	And boy, that seems like a long time ago.
0:57.1	Arnold, welcome back to Econ Talk.
0:59.8	All right, thanks for us.
1:01.3	Our topic for today is misinformation. We'll probably end up talking about
1:05.3	disinformation as well and if we have time we will return to Arnold's essential book,
1:11.6	the three languages of politics which we've spoken about on this
1:14.4	program a number of times. One way to frame the discussion on misinformation is
1:20.0	that a lot of people right now are frustrated
1:24.0	that too many people believe things that aren't true
1:27.6	and we need to fix that somehow
1:30.4	and you recently wrote a brief essay at sub-stack on this question, basically saying, not so fast.
1:37.0	What are the issues and what's your take on it?
1:40.0	I guess I think of I think it's better to think of this in terms of
1:50.4	They're not being a precise outcome of, you know, here's truth and we're going to find it or here's
1:57.3	truth and we're going to articulate it, but that there's a process of searching for truth.
2:04.0	And in that process, lots of things that turn out to be wrong
2:10.0	are going to be in the air and believed.
	...

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