Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. Today's episode is a little different than usual.
Speaker 1: It's a conversation between me and one of my podcasting gods,
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm is the host of Revisionist History, which
Speaker 1: is produced by the same company that produces this show.
Speaker 1: About a year ago, Malcolm reported a story for Revisionist
Speaker 1: History about a constitutional law professor named Michael Stokes Paulsen
Speaker 1: who has this totally crazy theory the Texas has the
Speaker 1: right to break into five states if it wants all
Speaker 1: because the authors of the United States Constitution used a
Speaker 1: semicolon in a certain way. Here's a clip from that
Speaker 1: episode of Malcolm talking to Michael Paulson. I want to
Speaker 1: find the full thing. By the way you can find
Speaker 1: it in the Revisionist History feed. It's called Divide and Conquer.
Speaker 1: Imagine a governor of Texas reads your law review article
Speaker 1: and said, well, that's a funny enough premise as it is,
Speaker 1: and says, okay, I want to I want to trigger it. Okay,
Speaker 1: so walk me through how triggering might work in the
Speaker 1: real world. Well imagining a real world where people take
Speaker 1: law review articles seriously. It's a it's a good it's
Speaker 1: a better real world. It's a better real world. All
Speaker 1: we know is that Congress has granted its consent for
Speaker 1: the sovereign state of Texas to do what it needs
Speaker 1: to do. But the significant fact here is that given
Speaker 1: that Congress has already granted its permission, the all that
Speaker 1: has to happen is for Texas to get its act together.
Speaker 1: It's up to Texas. So far, Texas has not done
Speaker 1: anything with Michael Paulson's theory, but it still seems to
Speaker 1: have had an impact. About a month ago, an article
Speaker 1: appeared in the Harvard Law Review. It's called a note
Speaker 1: because that's what short student writing is called, and one
Speaker 1: hundred percent confirmed this because everything in the Harvard Larvue
Speaker 1: is anonymous. But it seems pretty clear to me that
Speaker 1: this note was inspired by Malcolm Gladwell's story about Michael Paulson.
Speaker 1: The note is called pack the Union, a Proposal to
Speaker 1: admit new States for the purpose of ensuring equal representation,
Speaker 1: and in it, the author argues that since Washington, DC
Speaker 1: is not a state and is therefore overseen by Congress,
Speaker 1: Congress has the authority to pass legislation that would break
Speaker 1: Washington DC into one hundred and twenty seven states. Yes,
Speaker 1: you heard me right, break Washington DC into one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty seven states. Malcolm seem pretty into this idea.
Speaker 1: So we had a conversation in which I tried my
Speaker 1: best to suggest that practically speaking, it doesn't make any
Speaker 1: sense as a non constitutional scholar. Walk me through how
Speaker 1: this new ideas outlined in the Harvard Larvue works. Well,
Speaker 1: the magic of the idea goes back to your comma
Speaker 1: conversation and your whole analysis in that episode of the
Speaker 1: question of whether states have to consent to being broken
Speaker 1: up into lots of new states. So the person who
Speaker 1: came up with this idea are so far anonymous author
Speaker 1: thought about it and said, well, it's true that under
Speaker 1: the constitutional reading, the most rigorous one states would have
Speaker 1: to agree to be broken up. But the District of
Speaker 1: Columbia is not a state. It's not one of the
Speaker 1: fifty states. It's just a district controlled by Congress. Therefore,
Speaker 1: it should be up to Congress under the Constitution to
Speaker 1: decide if it wants to turn some parts of District
Speaker 1: of Columbia into a state. Now, you might say, but wait,
Speaker 1: the Constitution mentions DC and says that it can't be
Speaker 1: a state, and so the person says, no problem. Preserve
Speaker 1: a few blocks around the White House and the Capitol,
Speaker 1: call those the District of Columbia, treat that as not
Speaker 1: a state, and then take the rest of the district
Speaker 1: and break it up into one hundred and twenty seven
Speaker 1: than states, which is how many it would take to
Speaker 1: assure on this view the constitutionality of future changes. The
Speaker 1: idea is to actually get a situation where those voters
Speaker 1: could control essentially two thirds of the Senate for all
Speaker 1: major future determinations and decisions. And the whole claim of
Speaker 1: the article is you could pull this off within the
Speaker 1: text of the Constitution. You'd need Congress to do it,
Speaker 1: but a majority on they in this theory, a majority
Speaker 1: of Congress with a signature by the President could in
Speaker 1: fact do it. So you would have you create all
Speaker 1: these new states. Each of these states gets two senators.
Speaker 1: The Senate becomes a body with two hundredodd senators, and
Speaker 1: most of them are are residents of the former District
Speaker 1: of Columbia. Presumably the area is hand picked for their democraticness.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't have to do much handpicking in Washington, DC,
Speaker 1: even at that micro level. Not that many Republicans in
Speaker 1: the district yet. But this obviously is open to the
Speaker 1: criticism that the other idea avoids, which this is a
Speaker 1: massive violation of democratic norms, right, exactly, exactly, you know,
Speaker 1: I think you're completely right. And that's why this article,
Speaker 1: you know, shifts from creative to humorous to a too
Speaker 1: absurd because it would it would violate the core idea
Speaker 1: of you know, of the way the framers imagine the Constitution.
Speaker 1: Now there's pushback. I mean, again, to put words in
Speaker 1: the mouth of the anonymous author, we could say, well,
Speaker 1: the Senate itself is a gross violation of democratic norms.
Speaker 1: And that's actually true. You know, Madison thought that Madison
Speaker 1: hated the idea that each state would get two senators,
Speaker 1: the big states like his state, Virginia, where the little
Speaker 1: mini states like Delaware and Rhode Island. He detested the
Speaker 1: very idea of it, and he lost in the Constitutional Convention,
Speaker 1: you know, famously he said no, you know, we're not
Speaker 1: going to do it that way, and the small states
Speaker 1: staged a walk out and they shut down the convention,
Speaker 1: and they basically said, we're not coming back unless you agree,
Speaker 1: and he had no choice, and he actually walked away
Speaker 1: from the convention feeling that his greatest failure there was
Speaker 1: the failure to get a democratic, small, d democratically structured Senate.
Speaker 1: He thought this was a violation of basic principles. You
Speaker 1: can't say one man, one vote, because they didn't treat
Speaker 1: African Americans as full citizens or citizens at all, and
Speaker 1: they had a three fifth compromise, and they didn't let
Speaker 1: women vote. But he thought that among white men there
Speaker 1: should at least be proportionality, and this obviously meant there wasn't.
Speaker 1: But what if someone did a more modest version of
Speaker 1: this and just said it will, let's create a state
Speaker 1: out of one state out of DC using this exact
Speaker 1: same methodology, will conserve the crucial areas, call it DC,
Speaker 1: and we'll take all of you know, the balance of
Speaker 1: the city and create a new state of Columbia. Does
Speaker 1: that make this idea plausible, Well, it does make it plausible.
Speaker 1: It just runs into the political problem that has always
Speaker 1: accompanied the idea of the introduction of new states, where
Speaker 1: it's pretty easy to guess what political party their senators
Speaker 1: and congressmen will be from and the centers are the
Speaker 1: ones that matter, because DC is small enough that it
Speaker 1: wouldn't have that many representatives. And that is just how
Speaker 1: do you get the other party to agree. And that's
Speaker 1: why so many states of the Union have been introduced
Speaker 1: in pairs. You know, this was obviously true before the
Speaker 1: Civil War. In fact, the big problem before the Civil
Speaker 1: War was that if you didn't admit states in pairs
Speaker 1: slave and free slave and free slave and free, they
Speaker 1: were going to throw off the balance in the Senate.
Speaker 1: And people were worried that would lead to a civil war,
Speaker 1: and it kind of did, and then afterwards people said, Okay,
Speaker 1: let's be really cautious about this. Even though no one
Speaker 1: thinks we're on the brink of civil war. The other
Speaker 1: party never wants to allow it in and usually uses
Speaker 1: what he can to block it. But sure the people
Speaker 1: who call for statehood in DC, and there are lots
Speaker 1: of people like that are thinking in those terms. Puerto
Speaker 1: Rico is another really good example. A lot of Puerto
Speaker 1: Ricans want Puerto Rico to become a state, but they
Speaker 1: just need to get the politics of it right. Either.
Speaker 1: They need to make it look like it'll be half
Speaker 1: democratic and half republican, or alternatively, they need to if
Speaker 1: it's going to be mostly democratic, they need to get
Speaker 1: a republican state to come in at the same time.
Speaker 1: Following all along, these two ideas in combination might work.
Speaker 1: What if the trade was in the short term, creating
Speaker 1: new states out of the existing Texas sounds like it's
Speaker 1: a pro republican idea. I mean, the augument about Texas
Speaker 1: is in the long term, Texas is drifting democratic. But
Speaker 1: in the short term would if a deal was created
Speaker 1: which said we will if you let us create a
Speaker 1: side state out of DC, will let you add another
Speaker 1: state to Texas. I think in principle you could get this.
Speaker 1: But here's the circularity. I think you know, the minute
Speaker 1: that you're having a democratic state added and then a
Speaker 1: republican state added, effectively, nobody is winning, right, So the
Speaker 1: deal would then become pointless. I mean, I think this
Speaker 1: goes to my second not pointless, because you're increasing the
Speaker 1: democratic structure of the Senate by you're solving two problems.
Speaker 1: When is you're making Senate more representative by breaking out Texas,
Speaker 1: and two you are long last giving some formal representation
Speaker 1: to the citizens of DC's that strikes me as being
Speaker 1: that initial step strikes me as being very easy to justify.
Speaker 1: Well that I agree with. I mean, I think you
Speaker 1: wouldn't be solving the unrepresentative in this problem, because you'd
Speaker 1: still have New York and California and lots and lots
Speaker 1: of other states, and you still have this huge disparity.
Speaker 1: But I agree you'd be moving it slowly in the
Speaker 1: right direction. I think the question is, you know, it
Speaker 1: takes so much power, so much force to overcome the
Speaker 1: inertia of something like the arrangement of the States, that
Speaker 1: probably you're only going to see it happening if both
Speaker 1: parties think they're going to benefit from it in the
Speaker 1: long run, And since everybody involved is pretty sophisticated, it's
Speaker 1: hard to get them to think that the other side
Speaker 1: is going to con them. You know, I always think
Speaker 1: of this as similar the problem in Israel, where they
Speaker 1: don't have a constitution at all, and every so often
Speaker 1: I get a call saying, will you join this commission.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have a Blue ribon commission. We're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about creating a constitution for Israel. And I always say
Speaker 1: the same thing. The right wing doesn't want to do
Speaker 1: it because they think that it will impose individual rights
Speaker 1: that they won't like. The left doesn't really necessarily want
Speaker 1: to do it because they think the right wing will
Speaker 1: use it to push a more right wing vision of
Speaker 1: what the country should be like. So the only way
Speaker 1: it can happen is if each side is convinced that
Speaker 1: the other side is making a mistake. If each side
Speaker 1: thinks the other side or suckers, then the deal will happen.
Speaker 1: And so I, you know, I worry a little bit
Speaker 1: about that in this political context. And that actually brings
Speaker 1: me to this. Why do you think it's so fascinating
Speaker 1: for everybody to imagine magical technical fixes to deep structural
Speaker 1: problems in something like the Constitution? Well, I just to think, Aha,
Speaker 1: we figured it out. One professor figured it out. It's
Speaker 1: in his notes there. It is, we can fix this problem. Well,
Speaker 1: I would actually state this somewhat differently, which is the reason,
Speaker 1: as an object of such fascination among Americans, is there's
Speaker 1: something weird about the American political system as opposed to
Speaker 1: other democracies, which is in other democracies. This is my
Speaker 1: impression as a Canadian, for example, and as someone who
Speaker 1: knows a lot about the English system as well, that
Speaker 1: there's way more flexibility in those systems. So you want
Speaker 1: to dump your prime minister, you dump your prime minister.
Speaker 1: If Canada decided I didn't want tudo tomorrow both of
Speaker 1: no confidence, he's gone call an election. You want an election,
Speaker 1: We're gon an election next week. You know, you call election.
Speaker 1: It happens within whatever it is, a month or whatever.
Speaker 1: It's consistent with the notion of democracy in many Western
Speaker 1: countries is the idea that you can start over, you
Speaker 1: can rewrite the rules. Canada, in my lifetime gave itself
Speaker 1: a constitution and did all kinds of you know, only
Speaker 1: in America is this notion, Like you literally have people
Speaker 1: in Supreme Court who are wedded to the interpretations of
Speaker 1: the constitution network in place in the middle of the
Speaker 1: eighteenth century. I mean, it's bananas. So no wonder, yeah, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: no wonder where Americas are in love with these ideas
Speaker 1: of technical fixes because we are alone among sophisticated democracies
Speaker 1: in having this weird resistance to any kind of innovation,
Speaker 1: even at the fringches. Does that make sense? It does?
Speaker 1: I mostly agree with that. I mean, on your first point.
Speaker 1: It's true that any presidential system, not just the American
Speaker 1: but any presidential system doesn't have the vote of no
Speaker 1: confidence remove the person function. So that's parliamentary democracies do
Speaker 1: have that, but lots of other constitutional democracies that our
Speaker 1: presidential systems don't. You can't get rid of the president
Speaker 1: of France quite that easily, can get rid of the
Speaker 1: president of Brazil that easily. That's why they actually have
Speaker 1: impeached the president of Brazil recently. That feature is not
Speaker 1: as unique to the United States. But I think you're
Speaker 1: right that the idea that we would still use a
Speaker 1: constitution that's, you know, two hundred and thirty years old,
Speaker 1: and that also have totally failed once. I mean most
Speaker 1: countries after your constitution fails. Our Civil War was a
Speaker 1: failure of our constitution. I mean, that's what it is
Speaker 1: for a constitution to fail. But after it failed, we
Speaker 1: didn't admit that it failed. We just said, well, we're
Speaker 1: going to add these amendments that provide for the end
Speaker 1: of slavery and equal protection and due process of the law,
Speaker 1: and allow African Americans to vote, and we're not going
Speaker 1: to change anything else, which is totally Absurdain and that
Speaker 1: also led to the situation right now, and I think
Speaker 1: where you say that's bananas, you're right. Nobody else does
Speaker 1: it our way, and I guess that leads to this
Speaker 1: idea that maybe, just maybe there's some tricky technical way
Speaker 1: to repair our problems. And that's where you know, the
Speaker 1: concerts lawyer in me wants to say, well, that would
Speaker 1: be great, but that's up to the politicians and they
Speaker 1: have to have the will to do it, And if
Speaker 1: they really had the will to do it, they wouldn't
Speaker 1: need something tricky. We could actually have a constitutional convention
Speaker 1: or we could start again or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let me ask you something else, a related line of questioning,
Speaker 1: and it's this, So, if the academics of America had
Speaker 1: any money, which they don't, or we're organized, which they aren't,
Speaker 1: and they wanted to put together an award for person
Speaker 1: in the country, maybe a person in the world, who's
Speaker 1: done the most for them, the most to popularize their ideas,
Speaker 1: make them seem relevant. You would be the first recipient
Speaker 1: of that award. In fact that you're probably name it
Speaker 1: for you because again and again in your career you
Speaker 1: found fascinating, quirky opinions by scholars, and you've put them
Speaker 1: into public debate, and then people argue about them, and
Speaker 1: then if you change your mind, you quote the scholars
Speaker 1: from the other side. You're scrupulously fair. Yet, and here's
Speaker 1: the Yet, when it comes to the institutions that a
Speaker 1: lot of these professors teaching, the ones that pay their salaries,
Speaker 1: like Fancy Ivy League universities, you seem to really hate
Speaker 1: the universities. You criticize them. You talked about their unfairness,
Speaker 1: their injustice. To tell me about that, first of all,
Speaker 1: am I getting you right? Yes, you're getting me correct.
Speaker 1: I don't hate all of them, I hate the elite ones.
Speaker 1: So yes to my allegiances are very clear. My allegiances are.
Speaker 1: I am a faculty brat myself, and so identify very
Speaker 1: strongly with faculty and identify with the students. But I
Speaker 1: remember come from Canada, where the goals of the educations
Speaker 1: were very clear. Access to higher education was in Canada
Speaker 1: is what the entire system is supposed to be oriented around. Sound,
Speaker 1: And you're willing to make all kinds of sacrifices in
Speaker 1: order to maximize the affordability and access to right. So
Speaker 1: there's two things I'm interested in systems that serve the
Speaker 1: faculty and systems that serve students in form of access.
Speaker 1: To my mind, the American higher ed system has betrayed
Speaker 1: both those things. I think academics are grossly undervalued and underpaid,
Speaker 1: which is weird because the cost of a university education
Speaker 1: has skyrocketed, which is one of those strange puzzles. Whatever
Speaker 1: I hear, like, what's someone teaching like eight classes at
Speaker 1: a state university? What they're making I'm appalled. This is
Speaker 1: one of the central functions of a civilized society is
Speaker 1: the education of its intellectual class. And you know, we're
Speaker 1: paying these people embarrassing wages A but B. And at
Speaker 1: the same time, we're escalating the cost of education to
Speaker 1: the point where people are spending their first ten years
Speaker 1: is post college or more paying off their loans. That's
Speaker 1: also crazy, and I think, what's it? You know, there
Speaker 1: are many things to blame of this, but one of
Speaker 1: them is the example. There's a handful of institutions that
Speaker 1: are at the very top of the food chain that
Speaker 1: are setting an extraordinarily bad example, and they are the
Speaker 1: schools of the Ivy League. My favorite whipping hearts at
Speaker 1: the moment is Princeton. You know, Princeton, Princeton and Harvard
Speaker 1: both should be ten times the size. I mean ten
Speaker 1: times maybe too much, but I don't know. When you
Speaker 1: when you realize that the University of Toronto is seventy
Speaker 1: five thousand students, it becomes really, really really hard to
Speaker 1: justify Princeton, which has resources that are probably ten x
Speaker 1: University of Toronto. Why Princeton is a tenth a size
Speaker 1: that's sentent a size. Everything you're saying is true, and
Speaker 1: I but I want to let me just raise a
Speaker 1: couple of possible count arguments and just hear your thoughts
Speaker 1: about them. So first I hear you. You know, some
Speaker 1: of this is you're seeing it from a Canadian perspective,
Speaker 1: and like a good Canadian, you look at the United States.
Speaker 1: We have a crazy constitution and we have a crazy
Speaker 1: higher educational system. That's fair enough, and I think it's true.
Speaker 1: It does raise, first off, the question of whether the
Speaker 1: putting a lot of resources into a handful of institutions
Speaker 1: actually produces better conditions for the faculty there. So you
Speaker 1: mentioned the terrible under payment of professors who teach at
Speaker 1: state universities, and that's absolutely right. But that's not the
Speaker 1: elite institutions. The elite institutions do much better in terms
Speaker 1: of compensation, and especially when you measure it in terms
Speaker 1: of how much teaching they're doing. So if you teach
Speaker 1: at Princeton, you actually have the chance to write and read,
Speaker 1: or if you're in a lab, do lab research, and
Speaker 1: that's where a huge amount of the scholarship is getting produced.
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone could say with a straight face
Speaker 1: the Princeton professors or underresourced or underpaid. To the contrary,
Speaker 1: they're well resourced, they're fairly paid, and they produce a
Speaker 1: ton of interesting ideas because that takes up a lot
Speaker 1: of time. Whereas the same exact people with the same
Speaker 1: degree of training and skill and creativity were put in
Speaker 1: a state institution where they had to teach four courses
Speaker 1: a semester, they would produce less in the way of
Speaker 1: creative and original ideas, a lot less. And I would
Speaker 1: just add, you know, we can talk about Inversity of
Speaker 1: Toronto in a second. That's an incredible institution. But you know,
Speaker 1: I have a one of my best students ever as
Speaker 1: a professor at University of Toronto in the law school,
Speaker 1: and that's a great great law school. It has some
Speaker 1: private funding for it, but her work requirements are substantially
Speaker 1: greater than they would be at a comparably ranked US
Speaker 1: law school. She just does a lot more work because,
Speaker 1: as you said, there are just so many students, and
Speaker 1: the law school as she isn't that huge. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I mean, the thing about under payment is a critique
Speaker 1: of the the ninetieth percentile on down. It's obviously not
Speaker 1: a critique. And my critique about the second critique, though,
Speaker 1: is a critique of the top. So one is Ones
Speaker 1: a mass critique and Ones an elite critique, but they're
Speaker 1: linked in a sense that one of the one of
Speaker 1: the things that makes it difficult for universities who are
Speaker 1: not elite to pay their fact properly and to preserve
Speaker 1: access is that they are trapped in an arms race
Speaker 1: as being driven by the leading institutions. The problem is
Speaker 1: that the whole system is in the middle of this
Speaker 1: amenity's arms race, which is all being fueled by the
Speaker 1: actions of you know, fifteen schools top which have access
Speaker 1: to disproportionate resources. If I'm a Hio state, i am
Speaker 1: on some level, i am competing for students with private
Speaker 1: elite colleges, and I have to play that game to attractive,
Speaker 1: I got to have a nicer dining hall. I gotta
Speaker 1: have better food. I got to have And what does
Speaker 1: that leave me? Less money left over to pay my
Speaker 1: faculty properly, and less money left over to subsidize the
Speaker 1: cost of providing an education, and more money going into
Speaker 1: things that have no real educational function. There's something a
Speaker 1: little bit screwy about the incentive structure of higher education.
Speaker 1: So I'm not I mean, I'm not saying anything that
Speaker 1: has not been said a found sometimes before. I I
Speaker 1: am just beginning to lose patience with the fetishization of
Speaker 1: private education in this country, right. I mean, look, the
Speaker 1: amenities arms race is completely insane. It's a product not
Speaker 1: just of competition, although that's a big part of it,
Speaker 1: but also of the commercialization of education, where the universities
Speaker 1: and the colleges think of the students as customers, and
Speaker 1: if they're customers, well, then the customer is always right,
Speaker 1: and you have to cultivate the customer, and you you're
Speaker 1: in the business of providing education services for the customer. Ironically,
Speaker 1: the elite institutions worry less about that than the middle
Speaker 1: level institutions, because at the elite institutions, we know that
Speaker 1: the students will come. And although we try to be
Speaker 1: nice about the amenities, because after all, we have the resources,
Speaker 1: why shouldn't we be we're not really doing amenities in
Speaker 1: order to get students to come here who might go
Speaker 1: somewhere else. What's difficult is if you're a middle ranked institution.
Speaker 1: You know, my brother teaches at Connecticut College, which is
Speaker 1: a fantastic liberal arts college in Connecticut, and they have
Speaker 1: to be very aware that they're competing with other small
Speaker 1: liberal arts colleges for the best students, and that if
Speaker 1: they fall behind, they could fall off the cliff. You know,
Speaker 1: if they go on to the second page of the
Speaker 1: US News and World Report, they've seen it happen to
Speaker 1: other colleges. So they have to compete on every ground
Speaker 1: that eighteen year olds care about. And I don't think
Speaker 1: that amenity's race is actually coming from the very top.
Speaker 1: I think it's coming from other colleges in their same
Speaker 1: you know, in their same range. They're competing with similar colleges. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a if I might bring this conversation,
Speaker 1: try and bring it full circle. The reason why to
Speaker 1: go back to Michael Paulson for a moment. The thing
Speaker 1: that is so beautiful, if I might use that word
Speaker 1: about that article he wrote, was he uses a provocative,
Speaker 1: mischievous idea as a vessel for almost tricking you into
Speaker 1: thinking about some pretty weighty, serious subjects. Right. In other words,
Speaker 1: he's doing what a great teacher is supposed to do.
Speaker 1: I am not someone who would normally ever read something
Speaker 1: about constitutional law. He tricked me in the most beautiful,
Speaker 1: lovely way into like spending a month of my life
Speaker 1: thinking about constitutional law because he had this clever way
Speaker 1: in And to my mind, that thing that he did
Speaker 1: in that article is what a university is supposed to do.
Speaker 1: Is lure you into thinking about things that you would
Speaker 1: never have thought about, and at the end of the
Speaker 1: day leave you with a feeling of not just satisfaction
Speaker 1: but joy, like that the whole experience was fun. And
Speaker 1: when I look at what universities are doing now, I
Speaker 1: feel like they are doing everything but that they're trying
Speaker 1: to convince you that they're here. Are nine reasons to
Speaker 1: go to our university, But the idea that you might
Speaker 1: get some kind of intellectual pleasure out of toying with
Speaker 1: a radical idea seems to be not just way down
Speaker 1: the list, but also when they do in counter radical ideas,
Speaker 1: they run for the tall grass screening. It's not gutting there,
Speaker 1: you know. It's like it's such a kind of weird inversion,
Speaker 1: Like it should be enough. If I'm seventeen and I
Speaker 1: read an article, I should say, oh my god, I
Speaker 1: want to go and be taught a course by that guy.
Speaker 1: That should be the reason I go to college. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in a world where seventeen years where already reading large
Speaker 1: few articles, though we'd have no other problems, that would
Speaker 1: be a magic world where everything would already have been solved.
Speaker 1: Everyone would be a little Malcolm Godwell in the making.
Speaker 1: You know, no, no, but but Noah. Think about this.
Speaker 1: Imagine if I said, if I asked you to teach
Speaker 1: a course in an honors class of a public high
Speaker 1: school and senior honors pass in a public high school
Speaker 1: in the Boston area, and your text was that Michael
Speaker 1: Paulson article. Do you think you could hold their interest
Speaker 1: for a semester totally? For sure? Yeah, for sure. I
Speaker 1: don't know about a whole semester, but you could definitely
Speaker 1: get students engaged and interested, no doubt about it. The students.
Speaker 1: And again that's against the backdrop of having, as you say,
Speaker 1: an honors class at a public high school kids. But
Speaker 1: that's the feeding ground for what we're talking about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: those are the kids who are going to go to
Speaker 1: the schools and we're talking about there's a lot there
Speaker 1: are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of kids and honors
Speaker 1: classes in America who potentially could find that article really
Speaker 1: really fun and hilarious and exciting, you know, And that's
Speaker 1: what I that's just a little piece of it that
Speaker 1: seems to me to be absent. That's a super nice
Speaker 1: way of thinking about it. And I agree that in
Speaker 1: the long run, our objectives should be to get those
Speaker 1: teachers who are teaching those kids and who are for
Speaker 1: the most part, are doing a great job to you know,
Speaker 1: to have the opportunity to teach them stuff like that.
Speaker 1: I think that's a very Malcolm perspective and I think
Speaker 1: it's super helpful. Can I ask you just one one
Speaker 1: last question, and it's this, and it's relevant to also
Speaker 1: to you know, to your finding paulse and you're being
Speaker 1: able to get that interview with him, how do you
Speaker 1: find getting the interviews to work so well in a podcast?
Speaker 1: I mean, you're you're spectacular at it. Here, I am
Speaker 1: trying to have my own podcast, trying to and how
Speaker 1: to do it properly. Well, what's what's the secret sauce?
Speaker 1: I'm not talking now about the secret sauce of coming
Speaker 1: up with their ideas. That's unique, and you know there's
Speaker 1: no way to share that. You're you're Malcolm. But when
Speaker 1: it comes to doing the interviews, maybe there you've got
Speaker 1: some secret sauce you can share. Well. The lovely thing
Speaker 1: about if I'm interviewing you for a newspaper article. Having
Speaker 1: been a newspaper reporter for ten years of my life,
Speaker 1: people would often be nervous to talk to you because
Speaker 1: they're aware of how difficult. Not bias necessarily, though biases
Speaker 1: sometimes a problem, just inherently difficult the task is. So,
Speaker 1: I'm writing an article on Deadline that's going to be
Speaker 1: eight hundred words in which I'm tackling a very difficult topic.
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk to you for twenty minutes when
Speaker 1: the conversation should really be an hour and a half,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to extract two sentences that bear on
Speaker 1: the thing I'm writing about that it is almost certainly
Speaker 1: the case that those two sentences that I extract do
Speaker 1: a far less in adequate job of presenting your true position.
Speaker 1: It's just structurally, institutionally, that form is really hard for
Speaker 1: all parties. It's like fracking. You know, you're extracting something
Speaker 1: and that you don't really care what the costs are,
Speaker 1: and you're going to do it and you're going to
Speaker 1: leave them behind afterwards. Yes, under great pressure. Yes, the
Speaker 1: analogy is beautiful, and that's so that's like, that's the
Speaker 1: world I started in, and I was aware of its shortcomings.
Speaker 1: Then I go to the New Yorker, and now you
Speaker 1: have much more space and much more time, but you
Speaker 1: still have the problem that you are extracting the interview
Speaker 1: from its context. In a podcast interview, both parties are
Speaker 1: aware that it's about as safe an interview space as
Speaker 1: is possible, because now the person gets to say it
Speaker 1: in their own words, and so you all of the
Speaker 1: kind of tone of voice, irony, even things like you know,
Speaker 1: the constant thing in print journalism, if that quote was
Speaker 1: taken out a context, why because you left off the
Speaker 1: you know, the clause at the end of the sentence
Speaker 1: or the sentence that came immediately before, which clarified it
Speaker 1: much harder to do in an audio interview. So what
Speaker 1: happens in an audio interview is that people that you're
Speaker 1: interviewing are aware that they're getting a much more accurate
Speaker 1: representation of their ideas, and as a result, they relax.
Speaker 1: And if you can communicate that fact that, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: just going to let this run, you know, you wanted
Speaker 1: to just tell you what's on your mind. And you know,
Speaker 1: they're funnier because they have more time to be funny,
Speaker 1: and they're not as anxious about being misrepresented, and they'll
Speaker 1: say more interesting things because they have this time and
Speaker 1: space to qualify them appropriately. And you know, so that's
Speaker 1: just a it's just a safe space, a safer space
Speaker 1: for this kind of conversation. And I think that's why
Speaker 1: I like this format so much. Thank you for joining
Speaker 1: the safe space of deep background of Malcolm's the first
Speaker 1: time anyone has ever used the word safe space and
Speaker 1: the same sentence with me. But I'll take it, and
Speaker 1: I'm very happy to hear it. Thanks for coming. Okay, wonderful,
Speaker 1: take care. Thanks Now, the name of the Revisionist History
Speaker 1: episode again that Malcolm and I were discussing is Divide
Speaker 1: and Conquer. It's definitely worth a listen. And now it's
Speaker 1: time for our playback segment, where I choose a moment
Speaker 1: in the news and play it back to try to
Speaker 1: make some sense out of it. That was a soil
Speaker 1: Carday have a clipboard with a card on it and
Speaker 1: number has written down the right side of that clipboard.
Speaker 1: That sound of confusion is from the Iowa caucuses about
Speaker 1: ten days ago, and it was recorded by one of
Speaker 1: our producers, Eloise Linton. What's really crazy, of course, is
Speaker 1: that that was ten days ago and we still don't
Speaker 1: really know who won the Iowa caucuses, and it's looking
Speaker 1: like we never will. With all of the votes counted
Speaker 1: quote unquote counted. Pete Buddha Judge was announced by point
Speaker 1: one percent the victor, and the Bernie Sanders campaign has
Speaker 1: not at all conceded that, and they also point out
Speaker 1: that if you count not ultimate allocation of delicates, but
Speaker 1: rather who walked into the room in the first instance
Speaker 1: and said they were going to vote for someone, that
Speaker 1: Bernie Sanders is actually clearly ahead in that number. All
Speaker 1: this makes me want to turn to a question that
Speaker 1: we're going to have to keep on asking about Iowa
Speaker 1: for a long time, and that question is what went wrong? Now,
Speaker 1: let may be clear, there are many ways that you
Speaker 1: could answer this question, and many of them would start
Speaker 1: with the app that failed and the failure of the
Speaker 1: Democratic Committee of Iowa to produce a process that worked.
Speaker 1: I'm not disputing those things. Instead, I want to focus
Speaker 1: on a specific innovation that the Democratic Party made this
Speaker 1: time and how it may have contributed to what went wrong. Specifically,
Speaker 1: for the first time ever, in the Democratic caucuses. Instead
Speaker 1: of just having each person who's running each caucus report
Speaker 1: one number, namely, what were the final allocation of delegates
Speaker 1: at the end of this night, instead the party asked
Speaker 1: to have three numbers reported, which began with the initial
Speaker 1: process of how people wanted to vote when they came in,
Speaker 1: then moved on to include the process of change, and
Speaker 1: then ended up with a final result at the end. Now,
Speaker 1: in principle, introducing this information was a really good idea.
Speaker 1: In fact, it was pushed forward by the Bernie Sanders
Speaker 1: campaign and the aftermath of the twenty sixteen Iowa caucuses
Speaker 1: because they felt that they had been robbed insofar as
Speaker 1: they had more votes from the people who walked in
Speaker 1: the first place than they did ultimately in the process,
Speaker 1: and that information had not been reported. In principle, it's
Speaker 1: always good that we know more information about an election.
Speaker 1: In theory, we always want to know more data. The
Speaker 1: reality is, however, that when you have a complex and
Speaker 1: ramshackle process that relies on individual humans who are not
Speaker 1: professionals recording information, asking them to submit three data points
Speaker 1: instead of one, open the door to a disaster that
Speaker 1: was in fact highly probable in retrospect. Namely, it created
Speaker 1: the distinct probability that some people would not do the
Speaker 1: math right and would report numbers that were internally inconsistent
Speaker 1: with each other. That's just why we only ask most
Speaker 1: of the time for a single number when it comes
Speaker 1: to counting votes, because the deeper you go into the
Speaker 1: details of data, the more possibility for contradiction and error
Speaker 1: inevitably arises. Remember the two thousand Bush v. Gore controversy.
Speaker 1: When Florida officials began a detailed recount of the entirety
Speaker 1: of what had happened there, they immediately discovered hanging chads,
Speaker 1: dimple chads, divergences in counting it turned out it was
Speaker 1: almost impossible to replicate the same outcome more than once
Speaker 1: on the same body of ballots. That's the way things
Speaker 1: actually are in the reality of elections. There's complexity, there's contradiction,
Speaker 1: and boy is there a lot of human error. Requiring
Speaker 1: the reporting of three pieces of data was almost certain
Speaker 1: to reveal the depth and extremity of that human error.
Speaker 1: Now you might say, well, if that's the way it was,
Speaker 1: then the results were never meaningful, and in that case
Speaker 1: it was good that we got that information. I would
Speaker 1: respond to that by saying that, in fact, the problem
Speaker 1: is that all elections, no matter where you will hold them,
Speaker 1: and no matter how you run them, have a significant
Speaker 1: amount of human error in them. Asking for more data
Speaker 1: is a guarantee that you will reveal that human error.
Speaker 1: And here's the punchline, that will also under the legitimacy
Speaker 1: of elections themselves. We tend to forget that elections because
Speaker 1: they're human are messy. Because humans are messy. We aspire
Speaker 1: to perfection, We aspire to cleanliness. We aspire to yes
Speaker 1: an app that has the capacity to do everything we
Speaker 1: think without trouble or mistakes. The reality proves to be otherwise,
Speaker 1: apps break down. Humans break down, math breaks down, the
Speaker 1: elections break down. That's why the simplest is always the
Speaker 1: best when it comes to the democratic process. By only
Speaker 1: announcing one number, the number of votes of who won
Speaker 1: and the number of votes of who lost, we mask
Speaker 1: the ugliness, and that masking turns out to in fact
Speaker 1: be necessary to producing democratic legitimacy. So you think the
Speaker 1: data is always good. You think information is always good.
Speaker 1: It isn't always good if it reveals the ugly human
Speaker 1: messiness and frailty at the base of our democratic system.
Speaker 1: We're better off with elections that just tell you who
Speaker 1: voted and for whom, and that may mean we're better
Speaker 1: off having elections and not having caucuses at all. Deep
Speaker 1: Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer
Speaker 1: is Lydia Gene Coott, with studio recording by Joseph Fridman
Speaker 1: and mastering by Jason Gambrell and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner
Speaker 1: is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gara.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg
Speaker 1: and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background