A Philosopher at a Business School: An Interview with Prof. Jason Brennan
Dr. Brennan is a professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Arizona, and has 14 published books.
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JIMMY LICON: You’re trained as a philosopher, but teach at a business school. How did that happen?
JASON BRENNAN: Georgetown was hiring a business ethicist. I wasn’t a business ethicist at the time, which oddly is part of why I got the job. The faculty there thought that most people who specialize in business ethics do poor quality work, so they wanted someone who could teach the classes but who specialized in topics that have more rigor. Fortunately, the job hasn’t required me to change my research profile at all or even to constrain my teaching much. Since I got there, we reinvented our methods for teaching business ethics to focus on experiential learning. I get to teach courses on political economy, business-government relations, and moral psychology. I get to publish on whatever I find interesting.
JL: No doubt your most famous book is Against Democracy (2016), where you argue against the idea that democracy is good and moral. What, in your view, is the central problem with democracy?
JB: Democracy performs better than the other systems we’ve tried. When combined with a genuine commitment to liberalism, it does a better job promoting prosperity and protecting people’s rights. Nevertheless, it doesn’t work the way people think it does.
Most of us learn in middle school that democracy works as follows: First, people have their various interests and goals, including altruistic and social goals. Second, they learn how the world works and form an ideology or political preferences, in the form of “I support this policy because it promotes this goal.” Third, voters learn which parties have the best chance of implementing the voters’ preferred goals and vote accordingly. Fourth, since everyone does this, the winning party tends to match the goals of the majority or at least the plurality. Fifth, if the winners do a bad job in office, we punish them by voting them out. So, on this story, democracy ensures that the people in power respond to and promote the interests of most citizens.
The problem is that only the first step of this story turns out to be true. In fact, democracy has perverse incentives—it incentivizes voters to be ignorant, pigheaded, biased, and irrational in how they form their political beliefs. Most voters do not have ideologies or real policy preferences, and they vote largely for social reasons (e.g., voting Democrat fit in with their peers) rather than for reasons based on what various political policies might promote or demote. Politics makes us mean and dumb. What this means, in the end, is that the majority of philosophical arguments for democracy—such as that it empowers us, equalizes us, makes us autonomous, and so on—fail. The only good reason to accept democracy is that it performs better than the tried alternatives. So, we should be open to trying new alternatives that attempt to fix democracy’s built-in flaws.
JL: What is the strongest objection to your thesis in Against Democracy?
JB: The biggest worry is one I put in the book: It’s easy to say in the abstract that certain kinds of weighted voting systems or lottery-based allocations of power can overcome some of the information and reasoning problems democracy faces. But in the real world, if we tried to implement these policies, selfishly-motivated and corrupt political agents—from unions to politicians to corporations—will try to game the rules for their own selfish benefit. Perhaps then the cures will be worse than the disease all things considered.
JL: You defend open borders in your book In Defense of Openness (2018, w/ Bas van der Vossen), citing empirical evidence that open borders makes immigrants and the nations that accept them better off economically. Why then is it so hard to convince people of this?
JB: As Bryan Caplan documents in The Myth of Rational Voter, there is pervasive evidence that people systematically underestimate the benefits of markets and the benefits of interacting with foreigners. My best guess is that the problems have to do with our moral psychology. We evolved to live in small family-based clans of about 100 related individuals, clans which succeeded by having tight amity within the group and suspicion and enmity towards other groups. Almost all of our ancestors over the past million years lived this way. Many of our moral intuitions and our basic moral architecture in our brains evolved to solve the problems our ancestors faced in such living conditions. For maybe 600 generations, we’ve been moving toward ever larger forms of cooperation where we cooperate with distant strangers. Our built-in moral architecture hasn’t caught up. Most people are still suspicious of foreigners and regard them as threats. It was adaptive for our ancestors to think this way but is maladptive now.
JL: Peter Singer objects that open borders aren’t a moral imperative, since ‘the conservatives who get elected on the anti-immigrant bandwagon have been opposed to taking any serious steps to prevent climate change.’ How would you respond to his political backlash worries?
JB: I think he’s misunderstanding the empirics. What we find around the world is not as simple as, “When we let in more immigrants, this creates a massive conservative backlash that makes things even worse.” Instead, what happened in the US, Germany, the UK, and elsewhere where we have data is that the actual towns and places where the immigrants live do not have (much of) a backlash, while the backlash takes place in rural areas where there are not immigrants. It’s not that the people who live with immigrants react badly to them; it’s more that Bob in rural east nowhere who never sees immigrants is pissed of that there are so many immigrants in the cities he never visits. Actual exposure to immigrants makes people more pro-immigrant. So, what this suggests to me—as a good utilitarian—is that the solution is lots more immigration. The empirics say Bob would stop being such a xenophobe if he actual met some immigrants.
In that interview, Singer says global climate change is the bigger issue. That’s probably false too. It’s true that it could be an existential threat, while immigrant isn’t, but instead of focusing on improbable scenarios, let’s look instead at what is likely. Closed border regimes cut world product roughly in half and keep the world’s genuinely poor people poor. If we had open borders, we would conservatively increase world output by 50% per year very quickly. Almost everyone, especially the world’s worst off, would be much better off. In contrast, the Stern Report—which was thought to be very pessimistic—says that the loss to GDP from climate change will be about 20% in 2100 AD. Note: It didn’t say that in 2100, people will on average be 20% worse off than they are today thanks to climate change. It instead says that they will be 20% worse off than they otherwise would have been. But thanks to economic growth, almost everyone in 2100 should be much better off than we are now, even though the problems of climate change they face are worse than the ones we face now. In terms of the economic calculus, open borders dominates climate change. It’s a much, much bigger deal.
JL: In your book, When All Else Fails (2018), you defend the moral parity thesis—the claim that we are morally justified killing a government agent in, say, self-defense under the same condition as we are killing a civilian. What’s the best objection you’ve encountered to that thesis?
JB: People often make an empirical claim that it’s really useful for people to believe that government has special immunity against self-defense, in part because they think if people believed otherwise, they would resist or fight back even when they shouldn’t. The objection here is a bit like saying, “Sure, just war theory says a country can fight under conditions X and Y, but if you tell politicians that, they will frequently rationalize that they are in situations X and Y, even when they aren’t, because it serves their interests.” Or there’s a passage in John Maynard Keynes work where he says, in effect, that even though economists can sometimes identify special cases where free trade is inefficient, we should nevertheless tell politicians it is always efficient, because they will otherwise engage in rent seeking or promote other bad policies and rationalize it’s because we’re in special cases where free trade doesn’t work, though in fact we aren’t. So, one objection is that it’s useful to get people to believe in government special immunity even if they don’t really have it. It’s a noble lie or useful fiction. It makes it more likely people will do the right thing despite having false beliefs about what the right thing is.
JL: You argue in your book, Cracks in the Ivory Tower (2019, w/ Phil Magness), higher education is a moral mess – where, among other things, people often use moral talk to disguise their selfish aims. Is this why we hear so much talk from the academy about diversity, equity, and inclusion, but see little actually done about it, e.g. the university system is still highly meritocratic?
JB: I don’t know how meritocratic the administrative hiring and promotion system is. The system is certainly not perfectly meritocratic in student admittance or faculty hiring. Yale might hire a person with zero quality publications because of political pressures or nepotism. Still, in general, the faculty who get jobs and who get the “good jobs” are more impressive on paper than the ones who don’t.
Still, there are so few jobs and so many good applicants that there is a lot of arbitrariness in who succeeds and who doesn’t. It’s parallel to what we see in admissions at elite schools. Of the 40,000 applicants to Harvard’s undergraduate class, maybe 10,000-15,000 genuinely deserve to be there. Harvard will admit only 2000 of that 40,000. It’s not like Harvard genuinely picks the very best 2000 of the 10,000 that deserve to be there. Instead, you have a lot of arbitrariness at that stage. Something like that happens with faculty hiring, too. When we hire, we get, say, 500 applicants. At least 70 or so are genuinely good enough, while 300 are definitely not. But that fact we picked this one person over the other among those 70 is largely arbitrary.
As for the DEI stuff, there are real concerns here. I don’t want to dismiss those concerns. Nevertheless, what I generally see administrators do is co-opt those concerns in self-serving ways, as mechanism for getting power and resources for themselves. Here’s a way of putting it: Imagine that all university admins are self-serving but smart sociopaths. How might they respond to other people’s legitimate worries about DEI issues to benefit themselves? Now compare that to what they actually do. It kind of looks the same, doesn’t it? For instance, both my current and former employer somehow turned the fact that they had benefited from slavery into…wait for it…fundraising opportunities. Seriously: “We owned slaves, and to say sorry about that, we will acquire another $125 million in donations which we will use to fund new professorships.” If you care about DEI concerns, giving $125 million to Brown has got to be a low priority and a poor use of the money. Anyone reading this should quickly be able to think of better ways to use that money to help promote DEI.
JL: If you only had a few minutes to explain to someone left-leaning why there’s nothing morally wrong with wanting to be rich, what arguments and reasons would you give?
JB: I would show them that they are rich by current global standards, let alone historical standards. I would then point out that if wanting to be rich is evil, they can easily reform themselves right now by giving their money away to GiveWell.org charities. I would ask them why they haven’t done so. And then I would say that most of reasons they have, but perhaps don’t want to say out loud in front of people they are trying to impress with their pretend virtue, are the reasons it’s OK to want to be rich.
Money buys us freedom, leisure, time, longer lives, security, knowledge, health, tolerance, and even love. What’s not to love about being rich?
I want everyone to be rich. I want to live in a world where everyone is a trillionaire.
JL: Talk about a time, either in your personal or professional life, where you failed spectacularly. What did you learn from that failure, and how did it improve your life?
JB: My junior year of college, I ran out of money and had to quit for a while. I had to work full-time in a microchip factory to make as much money as possible to go back. Going back really meant transferring, and thus losing most of friends and relationships I’d made. (Sure, I keep in touch with some of those people, but it wasn’t the same.) In retrospect, had I been more deliberate, I could have finished in 3 years, since I came in with so much college credit. So, I think I learned to engage in backwards induction better, to be more careful in planning on what I need to do given my constraints to get what I want.
JL: What do you want people to say about your work a hundred years hence? What do you want written on your tombstone?
JB: I hope that 100 years from now, people see my work as helping to ensure political philosophers stay away from high-falutin’ nonsense and instead focus on what really matters and what the evidence really shows. As for my tombstone, nah, burn the corpse and throw my ashes out.