Lex Fridman: preference

Transcript context

…Sure. So, the thing I should say here is that you can define the left in different ways. I think the left has a couple fundamental views. One is that life is unfair. We are born with different talents. We are born into different nations. The luck of being born into America is very different than the luck of being born into Venezuela. We are born into different families. We have luck operating as an omnipresence across our entire lives. And as such, the people for whom it works out well, we don’t deserve all of that. We got lucky. I mean we also worked hard, and we also had talent and we also applied that talent. But at a very fundamental level that we are sitting here is unfair, and that so many other people are in conditions that are much worse, much more precarious, much more exploited is unfair. And one of the fundamental roles of government should not necessarily be to turn that unfairness into perfect equality, but to rectify that unfairness into a kind of universal dignity so people can have lives of flourishing. So, I’d say that’s one thing. The left is fundamentally more skeptical of capitalism and particularly unchecked forms of capitalism than the right. I always think this is hard to talk about because what we call unchecked capitalism is nevertheless very much supported by government. So, I think in a way, you have both. Markets are things that are enforced by government. How you set the rules of them is what ends up differing between the left and the right. But the left tends to be more worried about the fact that you could get rich building coal-fired power plants, belching pollution into the air, and you could get rich laying down solar panels. And the market doesn’t know the difference between the two. And so, there’s a set of goals about regulating the unchecked potential of capitalism that also relates to exploitation of workers. There’s very fundamental questions about how much people get paid, how much power they have. Again, the rectification of economic and other forms of power is very fundamental to the left when you think about what the minimum wage is. I am a successful podcast host when I go into a negotiation with the New York Times, I have a certain amount of market power in that negotiation because other firms want to hire me. When you are a minimum wage worker, the reason we have a minimum wage is in part to rectify a power problem. A lot of workers do not have market power. They do not have a bunch of job opportunities. They’re not working with firms. And by the way, without certain kinds of regulation, those firms would cartelize and make it so they can hold down wages anyway. So, trying to rectify power imbalances is, I think, another thing folks on the left take more seriously. That would be a start of things that I think broadly unite the… maybe let’s call it the intuitions. I want to say that’s a podcast answer, not a book. I’m sure I left a million things out here, but I’ll start there. I mean there’s a lot of fascinating things there on the unfairness of life that could be the inter-person unfairness, so one person getting more money than another person, or more skills or more natural abilities and another person. And then there’s just the general unfairness of the environment, the luck of the draw, the things that happen. All of a sudden you cross a street, and the car runs a red light, and runs you over and you’re in the hospital. So, that unfairness of life. And in general, I guess the left sees there’s some role or a lot of role for government to help you when that unfairness strikes. And then maybe there’s also a general notion of the size of government. I think the left is more comfortable with larger government as long as it’s effective and efficient, at least in its idea. That’s certainly true in the last 200 years. It was new deal liberals who enlarged the government in the 1930s. It was Republicans who acquiesced to that larger government in the 1950s. And then starting the 1970s, 1980s, it’s typically been conservatives who’ve tried to constrict governments. Sometimes they failed while liberals have typically tried to expand, certainly taxing and spending. But one thing that I was thinking as Ezra was talking, and I was just writing this down because I thought Ezra’s answer was really lovely, but at a really high level, I thought… maybe you disagree with this. I thought about distinguishing between liberals and conservatives based on three factors, what each side fears, what each side values and what each side tolerates. I think liberals fear injustice, and conservatives often fear cultural radicalism or the destruction of society. And as a result they value different things. Liberals I think tend to value change. And at the level of government that can mean change in terms of creating new programs that don’t previously exist. It’s typically been liberals, for example, who’ve been trying to expand health coverage, while conservatives have tried to cut it back. Just in the last few years, it was Biden who tried to add a bunch of programs, whether it was infrastructure, the Chips and Science Act, the IRA, and then Trump comes into office and is unwinding it. And then I also think they tolerate different things. I think liberals are more likely to tolerate a little bit of overreach, a little bit of radicalism in terms of trying to push society into a world where it hasn’t been. Well, I conservatives are more likely to tolerate injustice. They’re more likely to say there’s a kind of natural inequality in the nature of the world and we’re not going to try to overcorrect forward with our policies. And so, I think that even at a layer above what Ezra was articulating with the policy differences between liberals and conservatives, there’s almost like an archetypal difference between what they fear, and value and tolerate. Liberals fearing injustice, seeking change, tolerating sometimes a bit of what people might think of as overreach, while conservatives fear that overreach, value tradition and often tolerate injustice. The only thing I would say is that I do think this sort of the left likes big government, the right like small government oversimplifies. The left is pretty comfortable with an expansive government that is trying to correct for some of the imbalances of power and injustices and imbalances of luck I talked about earlier. The right is very comfortable with a very powerful police and surveillance in national security state.…

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