(I’m temporarily suspending my hiatus status)
Over the past two weeks I have been having troubling conversations with many of my colleagues south of the border. The US is currently cannibalizing the institutions where my colleagues work. I don’t know how far the current administration will go, but I am deeply worried about our collective future. I say collective, as what happens down south will affect us here in Canada. We live in a highly connected world where we all depend on the trade of goods, services and ideas. Moreover, some of these institutions are global and are highly tied to what goes on in the US (think of the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, NGOS, international science organizations and even science publishers).
So why should you care about societal institutions?
We citizens of Western nations do not owe our prosperity to religion, strong men, or unregulated capitalism, as many would claim, but to societal institutions. This past fall, the Nobel Prize in Economics was given to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson whose research showed that wealthy countries differ from poor countries precisely because they have strong institutions (for more on their work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P60TX-dwd4s). Professional institutions protect citizens from corruption, grifters and charlatans. They give people the tools they need to build a life based on merit (or as close as we can get to a meritocracy). They establish facts. They promote science and technology by performing and funding fundamental research. They regulate and provide confidence in our free markets. They educate the populace. They train, regulate and vouch for the credentials of experts, who are extremely valuable members of a proper functioning society.
This is our best understanding of what makes a society prosperous.
Importantly we (as in the entire world) are currently killing one of our most important institutions, free independent journalism. No kid of my son’s age would ever want to go to journalism school. Newspapers and broadcast news are no longer financially viable as advertisement and subscription revenues have migrated to new online social media. Fewer individuals get their news from traditional news sources. This is to all of our detriment. Journalists are professionals who value their credibility. They have professional standards. We may not always agree with them, but they try to be objective and balanced. You may take the postmodern stance that it is impossible to provide true objective information, but when the goal is to be trusted (as imposed by institutional norms), that incentive is enough to make most actors behave.
The new social media doesn’t care about credibility, they only care about eyeballs and clicks. The public does not know how to assess the credibility of many actors in the new media landscape, and rarely punish those actors who lie, cheat or distort the facts. The incentives for establishing trust and credibility are gone, and actors in this domain have other incentives that would normally be countered by strong institutional norms.
As a result of these societal shifts in how we consume information, and the ongoing destruction of just one institution (free independent journalism), we can see that things are unravelling quickly as the average citizen makes decisions that are less and less influenced by facts, as established by journalism and science, and more and more based on ignorance, superstition and bias, as established by con artists, grifters and charlatans. These same con artists have taken advantage in the changing media landscape to win elections and seize the reins of power in the US. Those grifters are now ransacking all of the other American Institutions. This includes academia, especially government-funded science, intelligence services, law enforcement, regulatory bodies, the foreign service, the courts and almost all other institutions. Even non-government institutions are cowering and bowing down, as they are afraid of being the targets of a mob-style shakedown. This will cause irreparable damage that will take decades to repair. But we are not headed towards a world where we can repair our institutions, we are heading towards a world where they will become even more fragile. If cracks in journalism kick started this, imagine what happens when our other institutions fail?
On the right (and in certain segments of the center-left) I hear a disturbing justification for the sledgehammer approach to “fixing” our institutions. They say “institutions are wasteful and inefficient”. These criticisms are to a certain extent valid. But they are also widely exaggerated. Given this problem, why don’t we try to fix our institutions? Some of the right go further than this. They say that our institutions are corrupt (“the deep state”). They say that institutions no longer function. That they are “woke” and intolerant of differing views. They claim that institutions can’t be fixed. These criticisms point to some kernels of truth. But again they are widely exaggerated.
And this leads us to the real issue. Regardless of whether you are on the right or the left, both sides believe that we should strive towards a meritocratic society. There are myths on both ends of the political spectrum with respect to how we get there. Both right wingers and left wingers point the other side’s myths and are blissfully unaware of their own sacred cows. Unfortunately, the grifters, con artists and charlatans have taken over the debate. They infiltrated the right (with the aid of social media and other anti-institutional establishments) and justify their current actions by exaggerating the excesses of the left. Their goal is to use these “arguments” to destroy our institutions. But these are precisely society’s instruments that promote meritocracy. The grifters shout that they are destroying institutions to make society more meritocratic, all the while lining their pockets.
This is what is currently going on south of the border.