Ezra Klein on Incentive Structures and Truth
An interesting quote I came cross from Ezra Klein in an interview on his podcast with Ta-nehisi Coates:
“I’ve covered politics for more than 15 years now, and I just don’t believe the things people tell me about their motivations, because they don’t fit…
I think one of the ways political journalism ends up accidentally lying all the time, is that we prize what politicians tell us behind closed doors more than we prize what they say and do in public. So if you’re a political journalist and you’re getting all of this access to senators, and white house staffers, and the president and so on and you’re getting these very rich multidimensional explanations and at the beginning of every policy process there’s a lot of hope . . . you are in a very honest way trying to tell the public this secret information you’re learning and then it keeps not coming true.
It’s because the secret information is wrong, and it’s not wrong because the politicians are lying, the politicians are wrong about what choices they’re ultimately going to make because in that moment they are in the incentive structure of a conversation where you want to be reasonable and thoughtful and not the incentive structure of Mitch McConnell is going to kill your career. At a certain point you have to step back and ask, why is everybody doing it this way?”