Ignorance Is This

I don’t know much about the health-care debate.

It feels good to get that off my chest.

My mystification persists despite the countless blog posts and articles I’ve read on the subject. Thanks to my good-faith attempts to learn something about the issue, I’m familiar with the problem of asymmetric information and the meaning of terms like “rationing” and “end-of-life counseling.” I could write you a list of countries that have a single-payer health-care system or drop a casual reference to the “Baucus bill.”

But I could not tell you very much about an HSA or an HMO. In the process of researching this article, I had to look up the meaning of “community rating” and “guaranteed carry,” which are apparently incredibly important aspects of the reforms currently being considered. I have not read a single word of any of the bills or proposals being considered—and I would not be too surprised if you hadn’t either.

I think that’s OK. Life is too short for us all to spend our time becoming experts on health-care reform. In fact, it looks like democracy might survive our tremendous dimwittedness. A famous result in political science shows that, under certain conditions, even widespread political ignorance in the populace has zero effect on the resulting policy, as long as the ignorance—to glibly oversimplify—is evenly distributed on both sides of an issue. After all, if the same number of people exist who are wrongly convinced that healthcare reform is dangerous as are wrongly convinced that it is a good idea, the tie will be broken by the informed. And no matter what each side may say, neither left nor right has a monopoly on political ignorance.

But one cannot deny that politics has become too complex for the non-specialist. The difference between a successful and an unsuccessful health-care reform bill may lie in a few paragraphs buried deep in a thousand-page text, paragraphs that even an intelligent, motivated, and honest citizen might miss or misunderstand. It has gotten to the point that even politicians cannot be expected to read the bills that come before them, so that they farm the work out to aides and advisors who have more time and a greater inclination to develop an informed opinion.

Yet everyone—not just those who have pored over the texts—seems to have an opinion. Students not much better versed than myself in matters of policy seem utterly committed to one or the other side of the debate. When I am confronted regarding my views on health care, admitting my moderate ignorance is taken as conceding the correctness of my challenger. Some people even see my lack of knowledge on the issue as a moral affront.

This problem is mirrored at the national level. The modern pundit is expected to be able to opine on any development, at any moment, regarding any issue. While some scholars make a career out of studying the details of a particular policy area, the most influential public intellectuals are those that take the broadest view. The same columnists currently writing about health care in The New York Times were writing about the stimulus bill last winter and will continue to write about whatever next occupies the national consciousness.

Most people, of course, do not make their decisions based on extensive research into the area, but rather by following their party or their favorite politicians. Taking a strong position on more than a few issues requires either making a snap judgment based more on ideology than on reasoned analysis or trusting someone else—an expert or a leader—to do the hard work of forming your opinion for you. Necessary as this is, it is sobering to think that our democracy has become too complex for its citizens to handle alone.

Daniel P. Robinson ’10, a Crimson editorial writer, is a government concentrator in Kirkland House.