Democracy When the People Are Thinking | James Fishkin | TEDxDesignTechHighSchool

well thank you it's great to be here and it's an honor to be a to have shared a stage with so many inspiring and visionary young people and a little older people too and now that you've had your deep sleep tutorial I think it's time to wake up because we've got big problems and I'm going to give you a certain angle on those big problems and how I think they should we can deal with it the the theme of this meeting is imagine that so what am I asking you to imagine I'm asking you to imagine and this is the title of my book for which I just got the first copies today actually democracy when the people are thinking now how counterfactual is that and I'll explain what I mean that's I'll learn how to use this technology okay this will sound a little academic at first but I actually have a very simple story to tell because I want to describe a problem describe the solution in my view describe how we've been applying the solution all over the world and maybe even in the United States once in awhile and indeed probably more in the United States in the future but the problem is the same everywhere everywhere democracy is under threat that is the institutions of democracy have low approval ratings they don't seem to get to be delivering the goods there our democracy has competition in that authoritarian regimes like in China and Singapore seem to be operating well in terms of their economies and delivering public policies and people are questioning their commitment to democracy both in practice and even in theory they're questioning whether democracy is such a good idea this is unprecedented in my lifetime and I've lived longer than many of people in this room so my diagnosis is quite different from everybody else and I have something very simple and hopeful to propose but I'm interested in deliberation and a democracy where people are thinking in an evidence-based way communicating with each other and weighing the merits of competing policy proposals about what should be done where the people's deliberations can actually be consequential imagine that well it's not impossible now if you look at the kinds of for a moment and imagine that look at the kinds of democracy we have party competition democracy parties don't want us to think they want to win they want to win the election and they will do whatever they can to win negative attack ads misinformation on social media whatever that's what they are they are machines designed to win elections and that's fine we hope that the competition between parties will somehow bring the issues to the fore but increasingly that doesn't happen our country was actually born in a vision not of competing political parties but if you've read the Federalist Papers you'll know that Madison had the idea that the representatives were supposed to refine and enlarge the public views they were supposed to deliberate about the merits of public policy in the Senate how long has it been since you heard anybody called the Senate the world's greatest deliberative body that's what they used to try to call it right now it's partisanship and deadlock the Constitutional Convention do you know that the Electoral College was originally supposed to be a deliberative body where the electors would meet and deliberate about who was the most qualified person to be President it worked only with one candidate George Washington that worked for two elections and that was the end of that participatory democracy we live in California we have ballot propositions all the time did anybody have any trouble figuring out the the merits of the propositions a few days ago well we got all kinds of ads at all kinds of competing propositions and misleading they we don't even have political party label to help us organize our votes with participatory democracy it's in the new england town meeting maybe it works but studies show it only works in the very very small towns two or three hundred the larger towns nobody shows up to the town meeting and there's very little deliberation now there's one other kind of democracy in the toolkit and my prescription is to take that kind of democracy make it work and insert it at various points in the other decisions I've called it deliberative democracy by the people themselves to distinguish it from Madison's idea of the representatives doing all the thinking for us but how on earth could that work well that's the puzzle I want to pose to you and then I want to show you how it actually works well let's skip that that's direct democracy by the way the brexit buses as you may know bricks it was britain voted to leave the European Union a lot of people attribute the decision to those ads on those buses let's we spend three hundred and fifty million pounds a week we send that to the EU let's fund the NHS that's the National Health Service instead that's based on a technicality Britain does send 350 million pounds a week but you may remember mrs. Thatcher and she negotiated a rebate so most of that money goes back to the UK so there's no pile of money to put in the National Health Service it's just a fiction that all that money went to the EU so people wrongly voted for leave without a factual basis with a that's the kind of misleading propaganda you always get you often get in campaigns and it really has to be answered people need both sides of the issue so I want to ask who is consulted in any public consultation a democratic process and what kind of opinion do they have and you can't just do polls here let me just say something about polling because I do Survey Research the problem is rational ignorance and political economist named Anthony downs back in 1957 coined the term and it's for the fact that if I have one vote in millions why should I spend a lot of time thinking about the complexities of public policy I've got other things to do I've got my poetry business to run I've got my classes to prepare for I've got my job to keep where those things I can make more of a difference than I can in voting on the insurance reform that might be in a ballot proposition or the how to fix the healthcare system which is so complicated that everybody can get lost in the process or the tax reform so it's rational to be ignorant but unfortunately if everybody is acting rationally and ignorant in that way then who's thinking who was doing the thinking people who are trying to influence us are doing the thinking we've undergone a long journey from Madison who had this vision of a republic with deliberation in the public interest to Madison Avenue and those of you who anybody has been to New York knows that Madison Avenue is the home of the advertising industry where people are always trying to influence you to buy cars or cigarettes or whatever it is but this the theorists of democracy fully admit that the same techniques that are used to influence you to buy one brand of soap rather than another are also used to influence you to vote for one candidate or one ballot proposition rather than another I can't stop that I can only point out that we need to supplement that with something else so that we can the second a second point is I call it phantom opinions people if they if you do polling and people offer an opinion if they haven't thought about it they never say they don't know instead they'll randomly pick a solution pick an alternative so George Bishop at the University of Cincinnati asked people about the Public Affairs Act of 1975 people is some people approved it some people didn't but it was fictional there was no Public Affairs Act of 1975 the Washington Post decided to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the non-existent Public Affairs Act of 1975 by asking people what they thought of the repeal of it half were told that the Democrats wanted to repeal it half that the Republicans wanted to repeal and they got completely different answers as to whether it was a good idea but it didn't exist in the first place the third is another problem which has become even more profound I call it selectivity of sources but it's basically people use their freedom to talk to the like-minded people use their social media to consult with people who agree with them people use their choice in the marketplace of ideas to listen to the channels the radio shows the television shows that they already agree with or tend to agree with and they never hear the other side and then they're surprised that they can't understand the people who have different views so I have a simple solution to all of this I call it deliberative polling so what we do is there some issue and we prepare in depth the good materials for discussion on either side that have been vetted by the people who have different points of view and who disagree and we develop that we work very hard to get an evidence-based decision clear enough and simple enough and accessible enough for ordinary citizens to really consider the issues in a you know and diverse discussion groups that are moderated and when diverse groups meet together with moderators they are usually quite civil to each other and one our problems is the tendency for people who disagree just to insult each other but it doesn't happen with us we've even done it in Northern Ireland with Protestants and Catholics even at points where they were close to killing each other but not in our process or in Bulgaria with the Roma that is the gypsies who were in segregated schools and they could actually talk to people from the broader population and the results showed that the public would accept desegregating those schools and that's actually happened but let me I'm jumping ahead we've done this in 28 countries a hundred nine times including Europe although this was before I can't show the video but in Britain we did the first one in 1994 and the issue of crime and on that issue two things to point out one is a random sample has great resources and I didn't think about it but we put the people of Britain all in one room hundreds of people a microcosm of the country divided into small groups for discussion and I was listening to one of the small groups and there was a car thief in the group and I had if you have a have a good sample you'll have criminals in the sample and he was contributing to the discussion about why people commit he added to the discussion he was actually he added something and then there was a woman who was part of that group oh it was the spouse accompanying her husband and she came up to thank me at the party that the because this was a whole weekend these things usually are a whole weekend and she said she wanted to thank me why in 30 years of marriage her husband had never read a newspaper she said but from the moment he was invited to this he started to read every newspaper every day and he was going to be much more interesting to live with in retirement and so then I realised we had a way of overcoming rational ignorance because if you're one person in a group of 15 and one person in a sample of 300 400 500 your voice counts it's not like one person out of millions and millions people particularly since the thing was televised nationally and it was there were important politicians in the dialogue like Tony Blair and others at that first one but it was and now our projects are part of decision processes now that's a photo I took in Athens of the random sampling machine the claret Aryan that they use because the Athenians actually took random samples of 500 to make important decisions I don't have much time oh we brought that back to Athens that's George Papandreou the former prime minister who you we used to do select candidates we've done it big scale that's the Parliament building of the European Union in Brussels Europe the European Union has 500 million people a lot bigger than the US and that's those are the members of our sample for all 27 countries now they're 28 and they are they they spoke to each other in all the languages 22 languages actually 21 because the Irish all insisted on speaking English but they could have spoken Gaelic through the the interpretation mechanisms and we got great results the people could understand each other communicate and we got results about what should be done the same in China I think I'm how much time do I have oh the only god I don't have much time at all Japan was used for the pension system here I want to speed ahead South Korea just used it a few weeks ago to decide whether or not to build continue building two nuclear reactors which the government leans anti-nuclear the public leans anti-nuclear but the previous government had spent a hell of a lot of money building those two nuclear reactors to everyone's surprise the people move to say okay build them don't build anymore but finish building them we need the energy and it's clean energy it's not doesn't have greenhouse gases and so the government accepted that well that's Bulgaria with the Roma with that led in part to the desegregation Northern Ireland in Texas we did a whole series of projects where the question was will the public what kind of energy do you want in each part of Texas in terms of to get your electricity do you want coal natural gas wind power do you want to invest in conservation you want to pipe the energy in from Mexico and the public was willing to pay more from 52 percent to 84 percent and eight different projects the public was willing to pay a little bit more in their bill to support wind power and Texas went as a result of the filings based on this state and related data from at the start it was last in the United States in terms of the amount of wind power now it's the first surpassed California in 2007 the people were willing to pay a little bit more on their monthly bill because the wind power was clean and it was good for the environment and the coal had all kinds of problems in terms of Sox and NOx and you know acid rain and various things so so the people went in thinking I want the cheapest electricity I can get they went out saying this is good for the community I'm willing to pay a little bit more and now the wind power is so cost-effective you don't need to charge any more for it Mongolia has passed a law requiring deliberative polling my term before the country can consider a constitutional amendment that's I'm in that picture in the very back you can't see me but that's the that's the government palace in Alam Betar that big figure there is Genghis Khan who presides over the whole country and what happened is that's an almost perfect sample only two people refused the interview the initial interview there's the sampling government's the government statistic office selected the people and 700 people and they considered proposals to change the way the president is elected the proposals to add a second chamber and most importantly proposals to have a an independent civil service and an independent judiciary beyond corruption some of the proposals I thought were very strange because they came out of a lot of consultation before they went into this one of the proposals was put the names of the government ministries in the Constitution I said what it turned out that what happens is they have it's a democracy it's got two political parties that are at each other's throat all the time the the control of the government goes back and forth between the two parties and when the another new party comes in what they do is they change the name of each of the ministries and then they fire all the people because they say the Ministry of XYZ no longer exists we're now going to call it the Ministry of ABC and so then they put new people in so the people didn't like that they didn't want political appointments we wanted they wanted career civil servants professional appointments who would deliver public services and that's what they'll have with this amendment but there's a bunch of amendments now the Parliament is going to meet in September to consider the results of all this and I believe it's going to pass this and after bricks it there's no more talk of making it a referendum there the Parliament is going to decide I believe I can't go through this except to say you can see all of this in this book democracy when the people are thinking and one of my biggest hopes is to do this at the beginning of the next presidential selection season we've done a lot of projects with PBS over the years on different topics including one in California that provided some input to some at least reasonable and modest changes to the initiative system now it's much easier for you to find out who's paying for an initiative who's opposing it and an initiative can be revised once the signatures have been collected there's a process of doing that and a few other changes modest changes but changes we've been doing this here in California I'd like to do it nationally but and so we're in serious discussions so stay tuned that idea and many others are outlined in the book and I'm out of time thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 16,577

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Social Science, Democracy, Government, Public Policy, Society

Id: 27tVMj6YUNM

Length: 20min 11sec (1211 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 11 2018