Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…But through some subtle way the video seems to matter. I was just in the Faroe Islands, which is a great trip by the way, but one thing they do in the Faroe Islands is they wade out in the water with their long boots, and they club a bunch of whales to death. The world didn’t pay any notice to this, but then at one point this was caught on video, and then it went viral, and now there are massive protests, online protests, over what happens in the Faroe Islands with the whales. You wouldn’t quite call that a political ideology, but maybe known, identifiable victims get a larger voice in some way, even if those victims otherwise — literally, like the whales — have no voice whatsoever. I sometimes tend to think it’s a kind of progressivism which is favored, but there’s another part of me which thinks about libertarian arguments — the seen versus the unseen, the invisible opportunity cost. That very easily gets lost in print, because you’ve got to cite some boring cost-benefit study, but there are ways to show secondary consequences in the narrative of a video that typically would fail on a newspaper page. I think you’re actually somewhat mistaken about the underlying mechanism. The big change from 10 years ago, 15 years ago, in the story you just gave wasn’t really video, it was the possibility of virality. OK, sure.…

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