REARRANGING THE DECK CHAIRS?

The sum total of all our proposals might seem modest in the face of what feels like a tsunami of prejudice. But that would be to miss the main point of this chapter, which is that such preferences are as much part of the symptoms of the malaise as its cause, perhaps more.

This has four important implications. First, and most obviously, the expression of contempt for those who express racist sentiments, fraternize with racists, or vote for them (“deplorables”) serves only to reinforce those sentiments, founded in the suspicion the world no longer respects us. Second, prejudice is not an absolute preference; even so-called racist voters care about other things. North India in the 1990s and early 2000s saw a period of mostly caste-based polarization. However, by 2005 this had run its course. The lower castes who had aligned themselves with explicitly caste-based parties (as against the less transparently caste-based BJP, Prime Minister Modi’s party) had begun to question whether they were getting enough from their parties. Mayawati, the leader of one of those parties, decided to rebrand herself as the leader of all poor people, including poor upper castes, and won the 2007 Uttar Pradesh state elections on that basis. She went for broad inclusivity, not narrow sectarianism.

More recently, in the United States we are struck by the curious history of the once much hated Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. As the signal policy initiative of the much despised black Kenyan Muslim Barack Obama, it was something that many Republican governors refused to have anything to do with, and many refused federal subsidies to expand Medicaid, a key mechanism to extend health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

This is related to our third point. The fact that voters put a premium on race or ethnicity or religion, or even the articulation of racist views, does not have to mean they feel very passionately about them. Voters do realize political leaders choose to play the ethnic or race card when convenient. Part of the reason they still vote for those politicians is they are deeply cynical about the political system, having convinced themselves all politicians are more or less alike. Given that, they might as well vote for the guy who looks or sounds like them. In other words, ethnic or bigotted voting is often just an expression of indifference. But that means it is surprisingly easy to make them change their minds by highlighting what is at stake in an election. In 2007, in Uttar Pradesh, an Indian state famous for its caste-based politics, Abhijit and his colleagues managed to make 10 percent of voters move their vote away from their own caste-party using only a combination of songs, a puppet show, and some street theater—all carrying the simple message “Vote on development issues, not on caste.”⁹⁰

Which leads us to our final and perhaps most important point. The most effective way to combat prejudice may not be to directly engage with people’s views, natural as that might seem. Instead, it may be to convince citizens it is worth their while to engage with other policy issues.

This, as we explained in chapter 1, is the journey we started in this book. We started with the issues where the most is known and understood: immigration and trade. Even there, there is a strong tendency for economists to pronounce on these issues with categorical answers (“immigration is good,” “free trade is better”) without accompanying detailed explanations and necessary caveats, which massively undermines credibility. We now turn to issues that are much more contentious, even among economists: the future of growth, the causes of inequality, the challenge of climate change.

We will attempt to do the same exercise of demystification for these topics, while recognizing that what we have to say will occasionally be based on more abstract arguments than the ones we have made so far, and somewhat less well grounded in evidence. These issues are nonetheless so central to our view of the future (and the present) that there is no way to talk about how to do better economic policy without embracing them.

In all of this the role of preferences is crucial. It is obviously impossible to talk about growth and inequality and the environment without thinking of needs and wants, and therefore preferences. We have seen that wants may not be needs—people seem to value bottles of wine based on their own social security number rather than the pleasure of drinking—and needs may not be wants—is a television a need or a want? These will of course be central concerns in the coming chapters, implicit and sometimes explicit in the arguments we make and the view of the world we project.