>> good afternoon everyone. my name is michael. i am resident fellow here at american enterprise institute. it is my pleasure today to welcome to aei, the professor. he is the university professor at law school. he was formally professor at university of chicago for many years. he was the administrator of regulatory affairs, commonly known. [inaudible] he worked for the obama ministration. he has written more than a dozen books and i'm happy to say he has spoken a number of times and we consider him a good friend. he is here today to talk about his latest book which is # republic. i think the reader would not have pronounced the words that way 20 years ago, but it is an important and interesting book. please welcome him to aei. >> it is a thrill to be back here. you all do amazing work. i have learned so much from what is produced here on legal and regulatory matters and i really think you on behalf of many people who you will never meet who have read what you have produced. i will tell you the unlikely origins of this book. i was blessed or cursed for the past several years to live in the waldorf towers which is pretty heavy stuff for a country boy from massachusetts. i lived there because my wife was u.s. ambassador to the united nations. the people would greet me in the morning by saying hello, good evening, how are you. that was fine except one of them had become quite a good friend after several months in the sense that i knew them and talk to them everyday, and it was a little awkward that he was calling me by name other than my own so i said to him after a few months of some embarrassment, you can call me cass but my name is katzenstein. he looked at me and he said, that's unbelievable. he said that's amazing. you look exactly like mr. power. [laughter] that was intriguing to me in the sense that he was not an irrational person, he was updating his beliefs based on the new information and he believed it was more likely there were two people who looked exactly the same walking around his building them that the ambassadors husband had a different name from her. given his prior beliefs, that was not irrational. it turned out to be wrong but it was not irrational. here's the united states of america in many respects today where people are asserting their correctness and the falsehood emanating from the other side. this has implications not only for our capacity to handle problems. there is a phenomenon party is him which isn't as ugly as racism but which in some respects is larger. the number of people who would be unhappy if their child married someone of the opposing clinical party is higher than the percentage of people who would be unhappy if their child marry someone of a different race. amazed by this finding, a few years ago i tried to find out whether people would be more unhappy if their child married someone of a different lyrical priority and if their child married someone of the same. we are not there yet but we are getting there. it's a bunch and suggest that the party is him is growing rapidly, and as of 2013 it is immensely higher than it was a couple years ago. couple decades ago people didn't care if their child married someone of a different political party. this is showing up in a different way so that people actually discriminate against peoples whose political party is different from their own here are some examples where party is him is causing problems. whatever you think should be done, chances are good something should be done about infrastructure and the intensity of disagreement between republicans and democrats is actually relatively modest on that issue and yet nothing has happened yet. a ums is technical talk for authorizations for the use of military force. to get an authorization for the use of military force where the level of consensus across republicans is pretty high is really difficult. with respect to immigration and judges, we could have much more agreement than we are observing. the nuclear option taken is testimony to the difficulty of moving beyond party affiliation to present generally agreeable results. i noticed in my job in washington a fairly sharp disagreement between their privately expressed moderation and their publicly expressed in moderation, and i should say i observed that between both political parties with a kind of poignantly that our privately expressed toleration, if publicly expressed would not cost us our jobs. the extent to which people complaining of that risk were also complaining of the effective social media on their capacity to retain their jobs is very visible to them. okay. now i'm going to tell you about three empirical studies which are not involving the internet precisely but which are replicating what is happening every hour of every day on twitter and facebook. the first experiment comes from colorado. they will discuss climate change and same-sex union they have to make sure that our precipitants were right and not amazingly, they were. we recorded their anonymous views privately to deliberate together. what interested me as one of three authors was only one question, how would their views shift to their anonymous post deliberations and how they would record their judgments in a way that no one would ever see except the experiment is. people got more unified than they were before they started to talk. before they started to talk there were some people who thought were worried about climate change and maybe we should have an international agreement. not after the discussion. some thought affirmative action has some problems and they thought it was a form of race discrimination. there was diversity. after they talked briefly the group was crushed. the second thing that happened is they got more confident. the people in colorado springs. after they talked, they were sure. the third thing that happened that was disturbing and illuminating is they got more extreme on both sides. people in colorado springs were to the right and the people in boulder were to their last. after our little experiment, they were like here. they were operating in different political universes. what i just described, very artificial experiment is what social media constructs. a capacity to construct the equivalence of our experiment groups. why did this happen? i've seen the tapes to the discussion. we could roll the tapes if you wanted and here's what you would see in real time. first in colorado springs, the place where they started kind of skeptical about a climate change treaty and in the end very skeptical, the number of arguments in their discussion that supported the treaty were few. that's not amazing. that's a statistical inevitability. the peopl the number of arguments that proposed an international treaty were numerous. also inevitable with the distribution of views. they would end up more skeptical about the treaty after they heard the various arguments. in boulder the same thing happened in the mirror on affirmative action, some people didn't like it that much, most people like that plenty, the argument that supported it crushed the arguments that undermined it people thought oh gosh, most of the people are supportive of it. the second thing is slightly more subtle and you could see this in real time. i think each of us can see this in our daily lives, which product to buy, which people to like or what to view. most people don't have a ton of information. they become tentative because of humility. the humility diminishes and they become confident and more extreme. confidence is increased by corroboration and you can see that in both cities and that makes for more intensity to the view. that helps account for the finding. it involves reputation and some think affirmative action is great but they don't want to look like idiots in front of one another or racist and so they end up saying that it would be very awkward to say what they said publicly that they don't actually believe. their par private view lined up with their public view. here's the second of the three studies. this does not involve think tank people. this involves the world. it benefits the study and the possible composition is reagan reagan-bush appointees, obama obama and bush bush clinton appointees, meaning three are appointees, 2d and one ours. that's all that can be possible. here's the headline finding. while the political party of the appointing president is a pretty good predictor of how a judge will vote in a contested case, it's not fantastic but pretty good. the political party of the two other judges on the panel is at least as good and often a better predictor of how that judge will vote. if you want to know how judge acts will vote, don't ask if obama or trump appointed a judge. do ask whether a obama or trump appointed the two other judges with whom he is sitting. here's the other findings. while in the aggregate data there's a difference between the liberal vote between in our d, roughly 13 percentage points which is concerning but not catastrophic from the view of the role of law, the likelihood of a vote on a dvd panel is frequently 30 or 40% higher than the likelihood of a liberal vote from a judge on rr panel. that is to say that the judge on a dvd panel shows phenomenally liberal voting patterns and our judge shows conservative voting patterns where the word phenomenal means just compared how they vote in aggregate. what makes this a startling finding in my view is a d on the panel, the d's have the votes. if it involves whether the greenhouse gas regulation is lawful, they can do what they want. they've got the votes. why is it it's a moderate voting pattern. i think it's about information, at least in part. the d on a dvd panel, that's colorado springs. what makes the statistics not expected is that we are observing legal professional judges who have ordered in the law. even so, the selections are random draw into something like an information cocoon producing systematically more extreme results. i think it understates the magnitude of the phenomenon. we just collected votes. by we i mean me and the team of law students who, if they're not in mental institutions now i'm very relieved because counting thousands of votes is not fun. they have to extreme the relative opinion rather than just the upper down vote. we are asking if a woman one a sex discrimination case. that's what we are asking. were not asking what's the reasoning. there's every reason to think on it dvd panel while. here is one other story of updating. you've heard the waldorf story which is explanatory of something that happened in colorado. the other comes from star wars and i do a book on star wars and there was a debate, one little star wars story. the debate was between loris, a great american screen writer on killing the main characters. george lucas says luke isn't going to die and then he says leah have to die. they said leah is not going to die. you don't go around killing people. then they said will kill yoda. then he gets, in his sole he gets real and he gives a speech and he sang the movie has more emotional wage of someone you love is lost around the way. lucas says very quickly, one sentence, i don't like that and i don't believe that. now notice the beautiful architecture of the sentence. the waldorf story didn't particularly dislike the idea that i had a different name for my wife. he didn't believe it. here it's about the emotional commitment proceeding the belief. here is the last study. how good-looking do you think you are on a scale of one to ten. if you would, think about it. i have some news for you or that you. now what do you think, having heard my news real. let's do a second experiment with the same question. how good-looking you think you are? i have some news for you. that's you. here's what the data suggests that people are asymmetrical updaters in the fact that good news has a greater impact than bad news. if people estimate they are a six on the scale and then some outsider studs urine eight they say i'm a seven or eight. if they say, six and some credible outsider says they are for emma they say no, that's not true i'm still six. people believe the good news not the bad news. if this is true for many personal things, with respect to the risk of having diabetes, insomnia, infertility, being vandalized, being trapped in an elevator, having a mouse or rat in your house, that sounds a little bit like dr. seuss. my apologies for that. the information processing regularity is good news people will update more reliably with them bad news. bad news they will say that's noise. good news they will say oh, okay. we know there is an asymmetry and it turns out to have neurological foundations. it's an identifiable part of the brain's that blocks updating with respect to bad news and if you zap it than the good news bad news affect disappears. what i was interested in is how this works with political information. we've gone onto 300 plus americans, recruited them and sorted them into three groups based on their answers to questions about the environment. week climate change believers and moderate climate change believers. creative names for our three. the data we got is not surprising in terms of their anticipated warning. the only thing that is interesting there is that week believers are not at 1.0, they are at a six here's what we did that's internet relevant and finding out how people process information. we randomly assigned people to one or two conditions. in the good news condition, you're not going to have a mouse in your house. you are better looking than you think. we told people, actually scientists have come in with some terrific news. the situation of the climate is better than they thought. the likely increase is 1 - 5 degrees. stuff like that are on the wall street journal all time. we gave the other half bad news. scientist have tough informatio information, it's worse than we thought and people are getting that on facebook and the new york times all time. getting the good news, their estimate fell from 1.6 to 2.6 and given that the baseline is low, that's very dramatic. they really enjoyed getting the good news. getting the bad news, they were unmoved at all. zero impact. in terms of social science, that's not going to get any prize because it fits with everything you've heard and just applies it to politics. it is politically explosive. there is a bottom tier style who will treat good news as very informative, gun-control and who paid them. these are the strong climate change believers were not panicking and they were moved more by the good news than the bad news. people will be jumping in terms of their level of fear and will be dropping just a little bit when they get good news suggesting the problem is and as large. what you have just heard, i think, is basically a really simplified version of what happens on social media every day in real time where people are getting both versions of our interventions and where people are reacting asymmetrically. what's the explanation for this? we don't know. one possibility is i don't like that and i don't believe that. motivated reasoning. the other explanation is that people are just updating in a rational way. given our prior conviction it will get really odd. i hear science suggesting it's not there are others who see the bad news and believe that where is the good news is more credible to me. almost done. facebook. 2016. our success is built on getting people the stories that matter to them most. if you go through thousands of stories every day and choose the ten most important to you, what would they be. the answer should be your newsfeed is subjective, personal and unique and defines the spirit of what we hope to achieve. really? what they are speaking about is an architecture of control in which algorithms or individual choices are creating. [inaudible] jane jacobs, the hero of my little book wrote a great book on the death of the life of american cities and which he urged that in great cities like washington or new york or berlin but all of them have an architecture of serendipity. you will come across people of different ages and skin colors. what they were urging is that a great city is like an information stream and the beauty of it and it's something that is full of unanticipated, unplanned, unchosen encounters. last bit is from jacobs forerunner, a theorist of liberty and self-government who urged that it's hardly possible to overrate the value in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings of contacts with persons to similar to themselves with thoughts and actions. such communication has always been and is peculiarly in the present age one of the primary sources of progress. thank you. [applause] >> i want to thank the professor for a very interesting and illuminating presentation. you have argued and what you portray is a problem of people being unduly negative in responding in that way to each other, polarizing and isolated and being in silos, if you will. you offer some solutions in the book. what if there are people who don't budge. you don't advocate for regulation of the internet. can you give me an idea -- you say people should be polite to one another. that's a lot of garbage. >> okay, there is a man who would've one the nobel prize if he had not died young but he said if you're a pessimist you suffer twice. first when you are sad about what's can happen in second when the bad thing happens. in terms of hopefulness about the future, absolutely. in terms of solution, the book , it's basically a problem focused book. in terms of what can be done, there are providers of information and individual lives so let's talk about providers first and then culture. if you're running facebook, you saw the passage from 2016. that was written by someone who is extremely intelligent and also who has a value, but it's not the right value or the full value. from facebook's public pronouncements, they are receiving this a bit. you can easily imagine facebook experimenting with let's say a serendipity button where you push something and in your newsfeed comes random draw of things that aren't necessarily an algorithm or your own behavior would've selected. that would be worth experiment in with. or something else that is actually blossoming, not to my knowledge on facebook itself, but through private-sector creativity which is opposing viewpoints where you can click on it. it could make you very unhappy that you like the button. it could make you think these people are even sillier than i thought and it's good to know that or they might think i have some ideas which are not unreasonable and i'm glad to hear them. those of the two things to experiment with. the second is the use of algorithm and that something in which there are about 12 out there right now. some of them are startups and some of them you can download as a nap. facebook, whether it would move, i'm using facebook as a place hold, it looks like the leadership is providing a service to which you have an economic commitment. and they communicate with their children that they haven't done since high school, that's fantastic. there is something that's admiral about that. there also alert to the fact that they have an increasingly large democratic function. they shouldn't play favorites or try to make kings, but they can think that one of the things we are doing is the great news providers of what the 1950s did. >> if they start curating things, they are employment based, can they curate fairly. >> if they curated it in a way that depicts a position, that would be objectionable from number of reasons and not in their economic interest. there are people who curate, facebook almost certainly shouldn't do that. facebook is not the source of ideological polarization but it could be helpful rather than harmful. people are often sorted into information cocoons that get hi hit. some people who are so sorted actually have aspirations that are different from their own behavior. they would like to see other stuff. if there news look like that they were be a little happier with their week. >> certainly websites. [inaudible] people who write about things i don't know a lot about and link to regularity, this doesn't describe the whole universe. you describe the jane jacobs description of greenwich village as a diverse area. you go down hudson street and people are of one political belief and we can describe it with fair accuracy. universities have speech codes. they have restrictions. they are shouting down violently speaking attackers. administration is not doing anything about this except saying how much they hate the speakers too. our universities one of the most closed minded silos going on in america today? i grew up in a 92% and i went to harvard. that's how they voted in the straw poll in the 1960s. our universities part of the problem rather than the solution. >> there's an empirical question here. [inaudible] he has left the center. >> i may think it's safe to say they find civility and openness. >> thank you for that. i do think if any academic identifies himself or herself in a way that is very ideologically describable, they are not doing their job because it would be amazing if your political scientists or your views on 12 of the leading issue with everyone lined up with one of our current political parties, that would be amazing in a bad way. i think in this way and unfree society should be free and it should not treat people in disgrace in that way. also at the university of chicago, the number of people who thought the democratic party's are nonsense and still think that is significant. my current institution, harvard law school, many of the top people there are not left of center there. that 92% number you give is alarming. >> is there an awareness of a problem that needs to be saltier? they've got 3200 billions dollars so the heck with it. >> my general reaction to this, it's undoubtedly a product over the last x years. our country has a number of challenges. 40000 people died on the highways in 2016. our infrastructure isn't great. our employment level, while down remains too high. our gdp growth isn't high enough. the problem of persistent poverty, those remain serious. they have really serious problems. i think academics particularly focused too much on diversity. it's not what's happening at overland. the main problems are people dying prematurely. >> # republic, perhaps even in the title for subsidiary 80 for the principle of deciding decisions to the extent possibl possible, a more local rather than federal or national basis. when you have these does decisions, does it make sense to have washington decide transgender bathroom behavior, or for the state legislature in raleigh or even for the city council in charlotte to decide that issue? can you give us some of your thoughts in what areas that might be helpful to do and other areas where it's not helpful to do. >> that's a great question. there is an old political science paper called gag rules and democracy. the theory is, on issues in which people are kind of locked heads, they might not talk to each other about those issues and just proceed on issues in which they can talk. >> this is the one you hoped uncle bob wouldn't bring up politics. >> exactly. so it's insight and it's closely connected to your point. you might think that the government's going to break down over x or y issues where it's going to inflame everybody, and the argument for having states and localities sorted out their own way is strengthened. the book is in about what level of government should solve various problems, but it's a reasonable and fair inference. it's a point that the idea of where we are inflamed with each other and paralyzing things may be the states and localities. as the last part of your question suggests, whether the point is decisive or just one of seven considerations depends on the area. in the environmental context, if certain states are polluting other states, then there's an argument for national solution to prevent the state crossover so the first mission of the environmental protection agency principle should be not to set ambient air quality standards for each state but to make sure that each state doesn't create adverse environmental impacts on other states. there's actually a rule from the epa called the cross state rule which follows that theory. the environmental issue is probably a good one to think what levels of water pollution , what levels of reduction in aggressive national minimums might make sense given states capacity to handle that themselves, and where do we have a problem that the states can't handle it given that one state is adversely affecting another. it might be that the nationals already have some capacity to figure out environmental i impacts that some states lack but in some context maybe they should be less aggressive than they now are. the transgender one is super interesting. the question would be whether we can think of the transgender issue as sufficiently subject to reasonable doubt that a national solution makes no sense or whether we should think of it in the way that most people now think of race discrimination as one where there is a characteristic which is not legitimately the basis for mistreatment and the transgender issue isn't one i've thought a lot about, but the big question would be, there are areas that even mar march under discrimination where the national government doesn't step in. some people think of a more capacious notion of age discrimination and maybe they can do that in california if they're worried about that, but we don't want a national age discrimination thing that has that degree of provocative miss given the fact that some people think that kind of age discrimination. [inaudible] the fact that it's a moral issue doesn't mean we have a centralized solution. you've got a strong point and if we took some domains where the federal government and just put in the states and localities, then the intensity of central blockage would of course diminish. >> one of justice ginsburg's priestess spring court statements on abortion suggests that in fact if roe v wade had not been a single national standard, this would not have been as great an issue. >> i think marianne who worked in was ambassador and justice ginsburg are correct in saying look roe versus wade was a blunder to national issues on which states, with their diverse values were observed in different ways and involved different thinking. >> i thought maybe these problems aren't new. if you go back in time between a time period where you can see the passage of the radioactive 1930 which began under that state is herbert hoover, begins the federal regulation of electronic communications medium, and the repeal of the fairness doctrine of 1987, which you say in the book was wanted, at least at that time as intelligent policy decision, you can't come in this country, something i call universal medium. you had everybody listen to the radio, just a few stations. everybody went to the movies. 1930, america had 123 million people. the average weekly movie attendance was 100 billion every week. that is a universal medium. television, reagan made his pre-political career and all three of those radio, media and television. he spoke naturally the language of universal media in common values. those things provide a common language. that's technology that has clearly changed that. prior to 1930, we were living in america which is not as connected and did not have as prevalent a universal culture. can you think of any lessons on how to cope with that that might occur to you. >> your question helps explain the status that exists which is gone with the wind beats star wars a new hope as the inflation-adjusted box office winner. you don't look particularly sad to hear that statistic. >> those are things that we really don't like. >> you think it's a really great movie. i love the movie. it's phenomenal and fascinating, but star wars should be number one. still you give the right explanation which is that there was a time when everyone went to the movies and they went to the same movies and while star wars was released at a time when there was less diversity than there is now, there is a neutral reason that gone with the wind beats star wars. is not better or more popular, it was produced in the era of more universal media. that wasn't the answer you are looking for exactly. you are clearly right historically that we have an er era, i like the term universal media, sometimes that providers of information in that era which is receding have been referred to as general interest intermediar intermediaries. that was a short time in history and its weakening. then the question you ask is what can we learn from the prior era. the only thing i would add is that in terms of challenges we face, in a way they are more intense even if the level of universal experience is not lower than it was then because the ability of each of us to find a zillion people who think exactly as we do, that has no precedent. if you think that somebody, name your least favorite politician should be in jail, and it could be somebody who most people lov love, could be michael jordan. most people love make michael jordan. if you think he should be in jail, that might be an exception but you can find a zillion people that agree with you that he should be in jail. the other times where we didn't have data. >> it's like throwing the judge out of town. >> completely. the ability to find a very large number of people who think whatever you think, and to do that in one second, it's great in a way, especially if they don't think exactly what you think, you can learn something from them. to find yourself in the cozy is place in the world of people who will fortify your eccentric view, that's different from when you might find 14 people are 24 who agree with you, but it's a little like the colorado experiment, not with groups of six but with groups of 700. that is the unity, confidence. >> that pre-1930. also featured something called the civil war. we got a national slavery in the territory that people were unwilling to compromise on. you've pointed to a number of on solved or insufficiently addressed public policy areas that i think most people would agree with you on. do you see a threat as big as that, or what are the big threats that you see that might keep you worrying at night? >> one of them, a civil war reference is great because it points out something about lincoln that i think not sufficiently prominent in celebrations with lincoln and that is lincoln was an opponent of slavery for all of his adult life in a kind of uncompromising way, but he was not an opponent of eliminating slavery for today or much of his adult life. he's on no contradiction there. he said the fact that a majority of white people want slavery is highly relevant and whether they are wrong or right actually isn't relevant. >> so that the issue of what to do today. >> the fact is, it wasn't that he thought they might be right, it's that we have to combine clarity on the principle with pragmatism about how to get there in a way that's respectful of what other members of the human species think. with that relationship between pragmatism and principal that defined his thinking of slavery, he wasn't able to avoid a civil war. i don't think were in danger of anything like that. the closest thing to keeping me up at night is thinking that there are human tragedies all around us, probably everyone is listening and can think of one in his or her last 20 years. it might be, in my case, my mother died of a smoking associated illness and that's not the worst. people here have had worse. for a large percentage of those, if we had well-functioning markets or well-functioning processes that didn't fall prey to what i'm describing, the tragedy would've happened. the recent news about 40000 people dying on the highway, that's just daily. if you sell five of those families of those 40000, it probably wouldn't be a draw, and that's what keeps me up at night. there are many problems that republicans and democrats have good solutions to that they could resolve, but their ability to work with one another is compromised, not because they don't want too, because they're afraid they're going to lose her jobs. >> our electoral system is invariably an adversarial system and its built-in to be that way, the competition is in the economic marketplace. >> yes, but there's adversary systems and there's adversary systems. there are systems where, someone i admire, senator hatch is completely willing to work with people, democrats, on, name five issues. the capacity of that people similarly situated to work together without endangering their electoral prospects is much worse than it was in social media as a contributor [applause] what me just leave you with a thought occurred to me while reading the book which is perhaps off point, but it occurs to me that one of the places which america still here is the closing political views is that extended family thanksgiving day, christmas and other holidays. do we know what is happening to those extended family discussions? i have one where we had socialists in a variety of people. my parents were eisenhower, lyndon johnson voters. had i gone the way of everybody going to the same movies every week? >> it's a great question and the data in other domains is consistent with the hypothesis that the degree of diversity's get-together. there's been geographical sorting along the political winds that is way higher than what was found in the decades before. what is unclear from my understanding of the day is whether they have disagreements. if you are republican and democrat, the data is consistent with the hypothesis. >> something that occurred to me that he was a northwestern for many years. he's looking at the 19th century americans lived in primary circles of identity values and associations and goals. they could live together because they lived apart. is that too much of a refined test you get an extreme example of the benedict option where he says the people of religious faith believe he's a roman catholic and should just wall themselves off from this vicious larger society and of a wall themselves and families off anyway where they are not participating and it is regarded as a corrupt and lascivious society. he's an interesting and serious person and his model is the founder of the saint benedict monasteries. >> as someone married in the catholic church, a marriage that was arranged with the help as she helped us get authorized was gracious enough to do that i'm really glad catholics haven't fooled themselves off. they wouldn't be my children at least they wouldn't exist, so i couldn't disagree more strongly with that statement and the reason is there are very few things that are un-american but that is un-american where we understand america to be a nation that celebrates the capacity of people with different foundational commitments to live together with something approaching love. i have a different doctrine. >> let me open this up to the audience for questions. we have people with microphones to go around and i would like to ask you to identify yourself in organizational affiliation which silo you come from. >> i am a big fan of yours and political liberal but a lot of times fights in the cultural wars but i'm working on a book right now and interested in polarizations. did you see the recent study people were talking about in response to your book that talked about how people least likely to use the internet are more polarized and i think the fact that it ended in 2012. >> i have read the paper by two excellent people so the paper finds it's been greatest among older people and young people especially likely to use the internet to show a lower degrees to the degree of polarization in this period. it is a very gross accounts not in the sense there's nothing disgusting about this paper but it operates with real aggregates so the question is what the hypothesis does. those who use social media are more likely to be polarized than those that don't. the paper does falsify that hypothesis but what we don't know from their paper is whether social media use is among those that do use social media in that hypothesis and what is going on with the younger people that have been polarized we don't know. there's something happening there. >> isn't it usually true older people are more likely to have a fixed identification with all those things being equal flex >> older people are shoving more split now than they were. they are more likely to watch cable news. >> there's nothing in the paper that is inconsistent with what the name of this book, hashed out the republic. it urges that social media is a contributor to the political politicization to those that are engaged and the book has a ton of papers not by the author or authors supportive of that thesis so let's call it the gross paper to which we refer and the aggregate data is a very interesting paper but it is nothing at all with the things that you and others are concerned with. >> another question. i'm thinking people used the money as the achievement for the view of what to do next. we need to improve society and that the two-party system instead of the people saying they are politics of religion so the democratic party can improve the society rather than to the extreme i'm a big fan of capitalism. so it is a source of pride. second, in the capitalist system it is never the case that the social value is uniformly associated with how much money people are able to obtain a and people don't have a ton of money or if they do they are admired for their achievement and not for their money. so the view that the people end up at my hearing in the various communities depends on what their characteristics are. some people admire them for their money. that wouldn't be the median person. you built that or you figured that out or you helped people. steve jobs is greatly admired because he built the products. the idea that in the 50s people were more admired for their achievements and in the 2017 more for their money, that is aerobically possible but i don't know of any others that in the 50s joe dimaggio was admired. and even if he made plenty, 56 consecutive games that was an achievement so in terms of what to do, i wouldn't focus on capitalism. i would focus on private practices that are not inevitable. many of them very reasons that are contributors to the problem. in terms of the government macro the subsidiary is one approach that would make sense and another domain, because this is a contest of the view, madison and hamilton's conception is we want it delivered democracy where there would be people whose jobs it would be to figure things out with specialists and experts and they would be accountable to be the people, but that wouldn't be the referendum to the actions day by day. they would be back knowledgeable and virtuous and it is an enduring insight. if we want to do something about problematics to authorize people that actually know something about problematics we will move on it whether it's food safety or traffic safety or infrastructure improvement they wouldn't be the only people. we would be the ultimate arbiters but they would have some space to do stuff. so the fact that in the united states you can be afraid of being sick or you can mostly drive and not be afraid of getting crashed into. that is in part to capitalism and in part attributed to the vision. >> i would like to ask from your perspective of being a renaissance man. but if someone were to ask you what has been your greatest he t not just selling books but being able to exact change that was discernible and people could say you did change my life is there anything that you can think of off the top of your head that you were conscious of that affected someone in that way? >> when i got to work in the government, there were some things that i got to participate in that were helpful but there's the global entry. and there are programs that involve life savings from various problems. >> i would have to say you have probably saved or help save 40 hours of my life so thank you, commissioner, director i guess is the title. >> there is no judicial affiliation. my question is about the judges studjudge'sstudy i don't know id consider this but i wonder if you thought about how the senatorial seat could affect itd so that's been expanded greatly in the last administration so there's some focus on the democratic senators in republican and i believe if you look at the fifth and the first and second which would then make the republican appointees more moderate and democratic senate states and democratic appointees more republican, that would affect the outcome. >> that is a great question. there are two different issues. issue number one come is the judicial voting behavior affected by whether the judges are sitting with people appointed by the president at the same party and the data suggests basically that happens in every circuit, so the patterns that we describe our uniform across the circuits. there was one across the parties, completely uniform not protecting any differences in the extent to which the democratic judge would've voted more liberal with the number of democrats on the panel. so there's almost an iron wall where the percentage of liberal votes grow with the number of democrats on the party come on the panel, and of course for democrats and republicans so that finding his uniform. there was one panel we got some news in the data and as i recall the circuits where the republicans aren't affected by the democrats and democrats are not affected by the republicans and that seems to be because they do not like each other on that panel. >> they hired a food tester. >> your point is a different point which is the courtesy could be an ideological moderator. there is some data that supports what you say in the period of courtesy at one point i compiled the data where you didn't find any ideological differences. that probably has something to do with the senatorial courtesy or the fact that the issues were not sporting people as much as they are now. >> it's in the civil rights period where the strongest federal district in the circuit judges were a republican appointed by eisenhower. so keep in mind you are asking about whether the courtesy could be moderator in the position the answer could be yes, not necessarily but it could be. that would be independent of the question of the social media question are we observing movements when people are in something like an eco- chamber. >> what blogs do the professors read. i pay attention to only two and that is the conspiracy which i think is quite good. it's not a long one but more of a law professor guy. these days i am down on blogs by the way. that is a bad phrase if you have a take on something that chances are you shouldn't say it. i could write the rest of it in my head i'm not going to bother because i already know what they are going to say. most law professors i know spend very little time and it's very much worth reading and it's worth ten times the amount. >> it's got to be a little tricky but let's see, we have other questions here. >> i wanted to ask about the public forum doctrine and the social media in addition to harassment and others, most social media networks have pretty strong write-in codes and measures to combat the so-called hate speech. could that passive potential application to the viewpoint digital requirement in the doctrine? >> you talk about the doctrine of the first amendment. >> let's separate two different ideas. one is about streets and parks or public in that they are open to express the activity even if people don't want a. it's the censorship of speech and providing spaces where people can communicate and any tyrant he or she gets in office and closes the public spaces and that's different from censoring disagreements. if the outlier in the free speech tradition and applies to separate the various ideas not just the restrictions but also content natural. you can't use the word war on a public forum that would be shut down like that. it's to see as viewpoint natural and content base. then under the existing doctrine so if you think of the worst things that could be and then the political person you like best and it's pretty hateful but it's not hate speech. it very narrowly defined anywhere public for him or not. once you expanded from the narrow hate speech to say the ordinary language in the abstract that's good because notwithstanding the concerns we have to ban in several speech would be very civil in a society that treasures robust and often inflamed political discussion. i'm a former researcher i worked for a think tank just wanted to push back on something you talk about serendipity and it seems the event you're talking about is serendipitous in their own way when you get these people they go mainstream even though they are more middle but it's the same thing as this serendipitous project. the more i look at this i'm not sure what the most effective remedy is. >> you are picking up on the serendipity and which remedied with the affected. i mean something a little more particular than the word which is exposure to ideas or the point of view that don't necessarily fit in with your antecedent views, so in fact if you find yourself in a room with people from boulder and it doesn't work out that way that is serendipitous there is an authoritarian crackdown and that could change what you do that day. or it might be a point of view. that might affect your attitude and how you talk to one another which might have policy implications so that's the idea of serendipity. we don't have a word for it but the germans probably do, serendipity. in terms of effectiveness, if you feel adamant that take your preferred issue that the holocaust happened, adamant on that and you've read stuff that says it didn't happen, that's not going to change you and for many people, many political issues are like that. so it's not inconsistent with the data and many americans on a wide range of issues they don't think of them as issues like the holocaust, they might think of it like obamacare and nothing is going to change or i don't like that. but even paired up, i read something about a provision that was causing a problem and no, i don't like that, or you might think the idea of the labels so the effectiveness notion the first approximation answer is where people are not like george lucas with respect to luke skywalker meaning not going to happen, then something might. and notice if you would, you're yoda did die. >> i want to thank you for an interesting presentation. [applause] [inaudible conversations] will not be able to pay all of its benefits out in 17 years unless congress acts. according to a recent government report. thursday the chief actuary of the social security administration talks about his book the swamp washington's murky pool of corruption and cronyism and how trump can drain it. this event was held earlier this summer before he was suspended by fox news. ♪ we will see if i can do this again. good evening.