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A thousand years ago, around the year 1080, the Middle East was as economically developed
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They had similar commercial institutions and similar commerce.
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And yet, over the next few centuries, Europe and the rest of the world shot ahead, while
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the Middle East remained mired in old ways of doing things.
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Around the middle of the 19th century, these countries started to claw their way back,
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but the question remained, why had they fallen back in the first place?
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Your guesses might well align with the common explanations that are offered.
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One line of thinking says that the region was hostile to commerce.
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Another line of thinking says that Islam discourages innovation.
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A third line of thinking, championed by the historian Bernard Lewis, is that Islam lacked
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curiosity about the West.
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All of these are untrue.
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For the real reason, turn back to the year 1000.
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Not only is the Middle East doing well economically, but its society is actually more progressive
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than Europe at the time.
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For example, in Europe, daughters inherited nothing when their father died, and in much
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of Europe, the older sons got everything and no one else did.
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In the Middle East, the wealth was spread out more equitably, and though daughters got
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less than sons, they did get a share.
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The Middle East also came up with another great innovation.
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Institutions called WACs, which amounted to a voluntary private provision of public goods.
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Let me say that again, a voluntary private provision of public goods.
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Sounds fantastic, doesn't it?
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But through a series of unintended consequences, which can only make sense in hindsight, these
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progressive inheritance laws and these innovative institutions became the unexpected reason
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that the Middle East fell behind.
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This is an incredible story and is a reason you ought to listen to this full conversation
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and read all of Timur Koran's books.
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I know I sound like Buzzfeed when I say this, but hey, this will blow your mind.
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Welcome to The Scene And The Unseen.
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My guest today is Timur Koran, a great scholar whose name you've surely heard if you're
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a regular listener of the show.
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Time and again over the years, I've referred to his phrase, preference falsification.
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He's been a useful frame for me to understand the world.
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Well, I got a pleasant surprise a few weeks ago when I launched my new video podcast,
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Everything is Everything, co-hosted by Ajay Shah.
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Ajay used to be a student of Timur and after our first episode went on air, Timur sent
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me a Twitter DM, a long Twitter DM where he generously praised our show and the kind of
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Well, I took the chance, invited him on The Scene And The Unseen and here he is.
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And I'm so glad I did so not only because I got to have this conversation, but because
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it drove me to read two of his other books, The Long Divergence and Freedom Delayed.
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They're both masterpieces, full of sharp and nuanced insight about the Middle East and
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You'll hear a lot about those books in the second half of the show.
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And before that, we spoke about Timur's life as a scholar, his great book Private Truths
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Public Lies and his love for stamps.
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That's right, he's passionate about ancient postage stamps.
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And that alone indicates that this is a man driven by love and curiosity in equal measure.
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But before we start the conversation, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Timur, welcome to The Scene And The Unseen.
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Thank you very much for inviting me.
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It's a great honor to have you on the show partly because, you know, for a long, long
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In fact, this podcast is seven years old.
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And even before this, I have been sort of talking about preference falsification in
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your book, Private Truths Public Lies, to people as a way of explaining a lot of what
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has happened in India, not just the historical stuff that you've written about in the book,
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but current politics and as a frame, I've just found it so useful.
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So I'm really looking kind of forward to learning much more from this conversation.
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But before we start, I'm really sort of curious about what there is of you outside of academics
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and the things that you study, all of which we'll speak about.
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But I will go on to ask you about your childhood and where you grew up and all that.
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But first of all, I was fascinated to learn that you've co-authored volume one of a three-volume
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micro-history of the Turkish postal stamps and collecting stamps is one of your passions.
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Tell me a little bit about that.
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You know, how did that start?
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Well, it started when I was five years old.
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I started collecting these colorful labels that were on envelopes.
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I hadn't even learned to read and write, and I was sorting them by color at the time, you
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know, the red stamps and green stamps and so on that quickly developed as I learned
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how to read and write into a worldwide stamp collection.
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And I remained a collector of postal stamps through, I would say, graduate school, though
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it slowed down considerably during as when I was studying university and then went to
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But after I got my PhD, the hobby for me broadened into collecting cards with impressed
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Very soon after that, I got interested in revenue stamps, which are stamps that countries
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all over the world, including India, issued as a means of taxation.
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There were stamps for liquor taxes, for court taxes, you name it.
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There were there were different kinds of stamps.
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I started collecting these for the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey.
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And by the time I was in my early 30s, I was looking for documents with these revenue
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stamps and also collecting postal stationery, which are these cards with impressed stamps.
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That book you mentioned is the first volume of a trilogy that I prepared with a fellow
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collector of just one of my 40 plus collections, my postal stationery collection, which is
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a world class collection.
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But I have now about 40 volumes, 40 different collections, all involving the Ottoman Empire
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and Republic of Turkey, mostly document, legal documents and commercial documents going back
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to the early 19th century and roughly to about 2015, which is where I where I stop.
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And it is I'm told by collectors of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire that my my collections
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in the aggregate form the largest collection existing now of this kind and that it is
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probably the largest ever put together.
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And I'm considering donating this this entire collection.
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I'm very actively building on it right now, and I'm hoping that it will that I can place
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it at some major university library so that it survives, it gets digitized for scholars
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and for people who are interested generally, and that the documents themselves survive
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I find it so mind blowing because when I was a kid, I knew stamp collectors.
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And you know, one would see stamps all the time because you lived in an age where you're
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But I'm just thinking more than half the people in the world today have perhaps never used
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an actual stamp in their life.
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And that makes it so fascinating.
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I want to ask you a question.
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You know, in one of the early chapters of private truth, public law is you talk about
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differences in generalities at one point in a completely different context.
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But I want to talk about it in this one.
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And you say, quote, where differences fascinate, say Stephen Jay Gould, generalities instruct
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anyone who has seen a tiger and a leopard knows that one is striped and the other spotted.
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It is a general theory, the theory of natural evolution, that accounts for the origins and
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stability of this intriguing difference, top quote.
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And as you were talking, I was thinking that, you know, many people collect many things.
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It is your particular collection of a particular kind of what would almost now be an artifact
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of the past, supposed stamps and revenue stamps that sets you apart.
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But that instinct for collection is often there.
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People will collect playing cards or they'll collect coins or whatever.
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And what is your general theory behind this?
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Because at one level, it feels incredibly irrational that you can do so many, you know,
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quote unquote, productive things with your time.
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But one collects things and I will also do extremely irrational things and go down on
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which have no practical purpose for me.
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So, you know, where do you think that it comes from and, you know, is it that once you collect,
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you get interested and you like doing something, but and once you do it to a certain extent,
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it has a momentum of its own and you kind of keep going and, you know, it's a combination
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of the sunk cost fallacy, I've spent so much time doing this, and you become more in love
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as you know more and more.
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So I'm interested in just a general theory of what can make some of us so obsessive.
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I think that there are two factors.
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One of them is the one you mentioned, which is that it is an obsession.
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You start seeing things as you start collecting, you start seeing things that other people
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You see patterns that people are unaware of, the uninitiated are unaware of, that you were
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not aware of when you started collecting.
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You start noticing that in your legal documents or in your commercial documents that certain
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families are very dominant at a certain time.
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You can see that certain families disappear once the founder of a big business dies or
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retires, the business disappears, you also see dynasties.
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And so a particular document that you find that has, that perhaps gives you information
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about a new member of a family may be immensely valuable to you at an auction, you might be
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willing to bid a great deal for it, even though it will look meaningless, just an ordinary
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receipt or an ordinary contract of which thousands, tens of thousands can be found.
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And the deeper you go, the more patterns you recognize, the more information, interesting
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So part of it is that another part of it, which is, I think, which comes into play with
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serious collectors and for collectors with intellectual interests and are also learning
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about history, learning about the present by looking at documents, as is the case with
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Another important factor is that it feeds information into our research and some of
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it is reflected in works that I've published, including The Long Divergence and Freedoms
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And there is so much more information in the collections that I have that I could write
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many more books solely based on information in these collections.
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One of the reasons why I don't want this collection to get sold and divided is that if I cannot
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write these books, which I probably won't unless I live to age 300, I would like other
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people to use this information.
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And knowing that these documents were not just collected randomly, there were all sorts
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of things that I saw in them that they do collectively give us an enormous amount of
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But these things, of course, feed on each other.
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When I buy documents, I learn things from them and the new things that I have learned
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and the connections I have made to patterns I learned about from the literature just make
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me want to expand the collection in a new direction.
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So I've had many collections that have been spawned by another collection.
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This is how I got from two, three collections to 40 right now.
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I have a huge collection on the insurance market, the very early insurance contracts in the
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Ottoman Empire, the first foreign companies that came in, the insurance policies they issued,
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the correspondence concerning insurance, the religious communications by religious officials
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on the acceptability of insurance and whether it constitutes gambling and all sorts of things,
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which are immensely interesting to me.
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If I had the time, I could write a book on insurance, the emergence of the insurance
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industry in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, which shed enormous light on how the concepts
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came to the region, to the Middle East, and what were some of the reasons why some communities
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started using formal insurance earlier than others and similar questions.
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In a sense, even if your collection stays together, whoever you give it to, I feel that for you in
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bringing it up, there are all these stories and narratives that have built up in your head that
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are associated with perhaps each individual item of the collection. I just feel it's kind of
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heartbreaking that there's no way to, you know, just take maybe a download of your brain and kind
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of collect all of those. I was fascinated reading one of the books, probably The Long Divergence,
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you spoke about how you read thousands of old documents, you know, figuring out how partnerships
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worked in the years 1000 to 1100 to, you know, that period of time. And I was just thinking that,
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like, my God, you know, there's so much concrete material that must be making the lives of people
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real for you. And that brought me to a question that I've kind of wondered about as the years
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pass in my own life, that, you know, when we are young, when we are 20, like time seems, you know,
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appears to us in a very different way. Someone who's 40 seems really old when we are 20 years old,
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a 50 year period of time seems like an enormously long period of time and an era itself. But over
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time, as we age ourselves, and especially as we study history, as you've done in such depth,
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I would imagine that all of it compresses that you realize that events that seem to be in the
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distant past aren't really that far away, that time does pass really quickly. And so much of what
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happens was never meant to be there were just accidents and contingencies. And I wonder if
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that also makes you look at the current time differently, where not only can you
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better understand your correct times, but you also know how so many of the things that we take so
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seriously are kind of so fleeting. So the broader question here is just your perspective on the
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passing of time itself. You're an economist or a political scientist, I would consider you
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a historian as well, you know, and we'll talk about the multidisciplinary nature of what you do.
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But you know, does all of this study of history, a change that you know, and does it change your
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approach to the world? And, you know, when you look back 40 years, when you know, you were a
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young scholar, what has changed between the way you look to the world then and you know,
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what you've learned since? So what studying history has has done to me and how it has
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changed my perspective and how I interpret the present, it's a wonderful question.
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It definitely has had an effect in that I tend to even looking at
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current phenomena, such as the polarization in the United States, the wokeness at universities,
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I tend to see these as phenomena that are going to have long term impacts, and that they will
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generate reactions that will prove many current initiatives to have been counterproductive.
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In the case of wokeness, maybe I'll use this as an example because it's close to my heart.
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I work at a university, I see this around me, I see this in journals and anything that touches
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higher education. There is a great deal of discontent, and I would say the discontent
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I sense that it exists even with people who are quite far to the left in terms of their politics.
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I know people who have retired early because they feel they can no longer
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write honestly, they can no longer teach honestly, say the philosophy department or
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in a subject that just requires supposing things that are perhaps vile, but let's discuss why we
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consider it violent. Could there be, is there, can we construct an argument that would justify
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it? Of course, these are the kinds of things that in philosophy classes is done routinely.
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I took philosophy when I was in college, and the professor would put on the board some crazy
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concept and ask us to discuss it. It's not possible to do this with many controversial
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issues. You would get cancelled, you would cause a big scandal the moment you put
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something, a vile comment on the board. These kinds of excesses are generating resentments,
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widespread resentments that will generate a reaction, and the reaction may take the form
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of state governments or the federal government imposing all sorts of rules on academia
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to curb these excesses that will destroy the American university system as we know it.
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Another problem with universities that I see is this is the lack of what many people call
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viewpoint diversity or intellectual diversity, even though 50% of the population, roughly
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depending on the election, somewhere around that supports the conservative party, the Republican
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party, they are very highly unrepresented in the ranks of faculty. Their ideas are not
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are not taught. This will probably have a long-term impact. It is reducing the legitimacy
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of American universities, the whole higher education system in the eyes of half the
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population. This is not good in terms of the long-term viability of the universities.
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I think that many people who sincerely believe in one part or another part or maybe in its entirety
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of the woke agenda are not thinking in terms of the long-term impact of what they are doing.
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They are not willing to compromise at all at the moment. In the process, they are probably doing
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great harm to their own causes. It would be a terrible development if states start imposing
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even more rules on higher education, if they started to regulate state universities and private
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universities more tightly because professors would lose their intellectual freedoms,
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their academic freedoms generally. Knowing history and seeing how over periods of 10, 20, 30, 40
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years, maybe longer, pressures can build up and then lead to a major transformation.
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This gives you a longer perspective. You cannot help but see what is happening
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in terms of the impact it is going to have, not just on an upcoming election.
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Not just on how a particular search at a university is going to
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end up or what the composition of next year's class is going to be. You start seeing the longer
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term effects of all of these policies that are generating resentments very broadly.
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Yeah, and how these can play out in the long run is one gets a sense of that in both
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the long divergence and freedoms related in terms of how little institutional differences
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can have such a massive impact on societies. I have a two-part question for you. One of them
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is this. Private truths, public lives came out in 95, and yet in it, one could find so many
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glimpses of the present. For example, at one point you write about college campuses, you say,
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many free speech advocates who were quick to condemn the McCarthyism of the 1950s were
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promoting efforts to deny a public forum to speakers whose views they found offensive,
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such as eugenicists and representatives of the PLO. And similarly, there is sort of a drift to
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extremism that we see today. And I have two questions. And question number one is that the
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entire American university system and academia seems to always have been in the sway of a leftward
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tilt. Of course, there is that old cliche about how if you're not a communist at 18, you don't
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have a heart. If you're not a capitalist at 25, you don't have a brain. Something to that effect.
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So there has always been that left foot tilt. And to some extent, I get why, because that is where
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you want to feel virtuous. You are attracted by rhetoric of social justice and all of that.
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And you haven't yet intellectually groped how the world really works and how intention doesn't
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always translate to particular kinds of outcome. But that's sort of my first question. Why do we
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have this kind of tilt? And my other second related question is that, do you think that there is a
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greater attraction towards extremism? I think today it is certainly one of the mechanics of
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social media, the way it polarizes and allows you to create echo chambers and incentivizes
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signaling games within those echo chambers where you're getting more and more extreme to win more
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and more brownie points from your ideological tribe. I can see why that might drive you towards
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extremism. But equally, you've pointed out in your books that even when you look at the schisms
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within Islam itself, you know, the recent ones were all sort of schisms that took it in a more
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extreme direction towards more strictness. And there wasn't a schism that brought about a more
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liberal, in the sense that we understand it, a classical liberal freedom oriented kind of strain.
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Though those interpretations definitely exist. So is there a natural drift always towards something
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stricter and more extreme? So I think there will be a movement toward the extremes when checks
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and balances don't exist. And we well functioning political systems have checks and balances
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that disrupt this process and allow more moderate voices to be heard, to exist, to
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develop coalitions with others. When we start dismantling checks and balances,
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it becomes easier to move to extremes. So I think this is one factor. You're absolutely right that
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universities have always had a leftward tilt. And I think this has a lot to do with the fact that
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most people at universities are young and it's before I myself was a leftist as a college
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student. And I realized that I had some of the reasons I had for admiring leftist movements
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were very naive. I didn't understand how markets worked. I wasn't paying attention,
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maybe the evidence was there. I wasn't paying attention to the various harms they were
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doing to their excesses. But anyway, I think it's natural for young people to be attracted
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to social justice ideas. Of course, no generation finds a perfect world. There are always things
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that can be fixed, things that can be improved. And it's natural when you first start thinking
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about politics as a teenager in your 20s to think that things will get better if only you bring in
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the proper people. And if you bring in the idealists and you change this policy or that
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policy, you realize that it's a lot more complicated as you get older, as you get more educated,
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as you start thinking about issues. So I think that is definitely the case. But there are times
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and places where the student body is dominated by people on the left and even the faculty has a
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leftward tilt, but where moderate voices can speak. I think that when certain checks and balances
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disappear, and these may just be norms that have been followed and reproduced generation after
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generation, when one generation decides that a particular cause is so important and that the
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stakes are so high that you can make an exception to that and you can shut people down. And when you
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start violating that norm, and in the case of universities, when people who shut down a
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particular kind of speaker or a speaker delivering a particular kind of message is shut down,
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you put yourself on a slippery slope. And when administrations go along with this and start
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embracing the idea that there are important microaggressions and that you're not being
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inclusive, if you allow certain ideas to be expressed because certain campus constituencies
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are offended, when you make an exception, you allow other groups to say, well, why aren't my
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feelings as important? And why should you allow a group, a speaker who's going to offend us?
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And of course, the administration then goes along with that. And before you know it,
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lots and lots of speakers are being cancelled. You have groups on campus that get organized to
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effectively wield veto power over who can be accepted, who can be invited and who cannot be
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invited. And it's just a short path from there to one where the objectionable speakers don't even
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get invited. Nobody dreams in a department meeting we're discussing who to invite.
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Nobody even dreams of recommending a particular speaker because that would tarnish the reputation
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of the person recommending it. So you drift toward extremism in this manner. Same with
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microaggressions. When you accept the notion that microaggressions can be so harmful that it can
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paralyze somebody and you take them at their word when you say, you know, I suffered a microaggression
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and often people find it difficult even to define what that aggression was and what the other people,
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what the offenders needed to do not to commit the microaggression. But when you accept that
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notion, you start encouraging other groups to claim that they're victims of microaggression.
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When you start giving groups that claim victimization, when you give them status on
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campus, you encourage victimization mentality. You encourage other groups to groups that perhaps
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don't feel victimized that are perhaps quite privileged to start looking for ways in which
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they actually are victimized. You encourage people in their applications to the university
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in their essays to focus on how they have suffered, how they are victims. So it changes.
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These are all ways in which the culture of the campus starts drifting to an extreme.
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Collectively, when you look at these processes, there's nothing left about it.
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There's nothing left. You essentially move to a situation where the way to get ahead is to perform
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to perform and to invent ways in which to invent ways of convincing others that you are a victimized
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group. You change the entire culture and then that has a momentum of its own. It's difficult to get
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back to a point where the norm of allowing everybody to speak, the norm of interpreting
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actions and body language of others in the most charitable way as opposed to the most horrendous
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way you can think of to interpret a gesture, a word that they have used in the worst possible
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way. It's very difficult to get back to a norm, to get back to a series of norms that effectively
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respected everyone's right to speak, everybody's right to think independently. You get an
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old generation of students who have not seen what it is like to be in an environment where
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lots of views are expressed. There is genuine debate. People do so freely. People do so honestly
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and everybody feels even though they might be politically on the far left or maybe center right
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or maybe center left or maybe they're just confused and they're still searching, they want to learn
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an environment where everybody feels they can learn even from people they disagree with.
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When I was a student in college, I was as I said, I was on the left and many of my friends were on
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the left. We did have people who were on the right and we listened to them. Collectively,
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we would go to hear somebody like William Buckley who was a conservative but he had
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a brilliant mind and we would go just to be exposed to a brilliant mind. It didn't turn us
#
instantly into conservatives but we still learned, we discussed, we examined our reactions
#
and sometimes we changed our point of view. This was part of an education process and we saw it
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that way and our professors encouraged us to be open-minded, most professors I should say.
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I think you're absolutely right about the extremism. I don't think it's inevitable
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but it requires a lot of hard work to put that culture in place and I'm afraid that the path back
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to what I would consider a liberal educational environment and I'm using liberal in the sense of
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freedoms, freedom, intellectual freedoms, academic freedoms, freedom to speak.
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Getting back there is going to be quite difficult and it may involve a big reaction
#
that even would possibly dismantle the system of tenure at American universities,
#
which is a huge source of, has been very beneficial I think in the past in giving professors
#
a sense that they can work on long-term projects without the fear of not performing
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in the next 12 months lest they get a bad report and start a process that would end up in there
#
getting fired, they're not renewed. It's a huge advantage in tenure. It also gives people
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the right to speak, I mean the right to think independently and come up with
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theories that are perhaps not acceptable to the majority but still develop those ideas and teach
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them and discuss them with others. You know what you said about tolerance and a broad diversity
#
of thought being encouraged is very resonant with me like when I enter a conversation with
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anyone my golden rule is always assume goodwill and today it just seems to be the opposite where
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everyone is looking for that gotcha moment and one analog that I find here is you know the blasphemy
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law in Pakistan where in Pakistan if you're accused of blasphemy, if you want to defend someone
#
accused of blasphemy you can't build an argument saying that person didn't really commit blasphemy
#
if you argue at all you are automatically assumed to have blasphemed like that other person right
#
and I find a similar thing happening where you know there's a professor friend of mine in an
#
American university who once said Charles Murray is so alt-right and racist and this and that
#
and I said show me one sentence from any of his works his actual works not what someone has said
#
about him which backs it up and of course he couldn't find anything and but the very fact
#
that somebody should defend Charles Murray immediately puts you in puts you beyond the
#
pale or if you defend JK Rowling for example and say look she's not really transphobic
#
she's not at all transphobic but it is automatically assumed that you are defending her you must be a
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transphobe yourself you know and and I wonder why these sort of extreme ideologies are so
#
appealing despite their extremism being so obvious like I remember Brian Kaplan once had an old post
#
where he said that I can divide people into you know three categories and 80 percent of people
#
are just conformists they'll go along with whatever the dominant strand is and 10 percent
#
of the people are morally good they will think on their own and they'll do whatever they feel is
#
right and 10 percent of the people are just morally vicious and you know they will just sort of you
#
know go the other way and oppose the conformists for the heck of it so the question is in any given
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time you know how do you identify who is really good if the sort of the default trend in a society
#
is that everyone is liberal and tolerant and all of those things then you could say oh 90 percent
#
of people are good the vast majority are great and you know at a time where you know people seem to
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agree with the blasphemy law and cancel culture and people are going to different extremes not
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just on the left also on the right you have people going to all of these mad extremes
#
and and it sort of makes me really despondent because you begin to realize how few people
#
are actually thinking for themselves and taking those stands and even out of that vast majority
#
80 90 percent of people who are conforming there are so few who are kind of you know willing to
#
speak up and I was reading your books and I was wondering how you tackle these sort of fraught
#
questions for example you know where everything is becoming more and more black and white
#
and you know just your act of studying islam it seems so fraught with danger to me because on
#
one hand of course you have simplistic islamophobes for whom you cannot say anything good about
#
islamic religion or society or whatever and on the other hand you have people for whom
#
you must not question any aspect of islam because you automatically assume to be an islamophobe
#
and your books are full of such detail and nuance and so on and so forth that did you ever did you
#
ever feel the temptation to self-censor in some way did you ever think to yourself that oh if I
#
make this point this particular camp could use it in this particular way you know did those sort
#
of questions that are outside the study per se did they affect you what has been your experience with
#
ideologies and politics in your time doing this of course the temptation is always there to soften
#
your argument when you the evidence points in one direction to pretend that you haven't seen it of
#
course i've struggled with that i and i and i personally experienced from the moment i actually
#
started writing on islam which was after i graduated after i got my doctorate and i was a
#
first year assistant professor and i wrote my first paper criticizing what i called at the
#
time the islamic doctrine of economics it's i would now use the term islamic economics which is
#
the term they use its proponents use when i submitted this paper to the
#
middle east studies association to present it at their annual conference i went to the conference
#
i was put on a panel with other scholars of of islam and the chair was a professor at the chair
#
of the panel who wasn't presenting herself but she was she was running the the panel
#
she introduced me you know with my name and my affiliation and then said i was the i was the
#
last speaker the last of three speakers and she had not done this with the first two speakers
#
but in in my case she said i want to point out that i don't agree with the interpretation in this
#
in this paper in the interpretation of the paper you're going to hear
#
summarized and that i do not believe that one one can evaluate the merits of an intellectual
#
tradition coming out of another tradition it was of course it came as a as a shock to me this was
#
the very first presentation i was going to make at a professional conference as a first year
#
assistant professor in in the fall and i had been singled out we put down by a senior professor at
#
at berkeley so this was and this was before the paper was uh was published so i was i was aware
#
of what i was facing and as you say i my writings get attacked from from two sides on the one hand
#
that they're they're the uh the islam is the people who believe in in this in this particular
#
case it would be islamic economics and that it has uh you know solutions to various problems that
#
other economic traditions do not but there are also people who criticize me
#
saying that i'm just wasting all my time trying to understand the early advantages of certain
#
institutions that then led the middle east down down a blind alley that caused problems in the
#
long run they say it's just a religion that is that is a conservative that doesn't allow for
#
change that is too rigid etc etc etc and they say you should just you know none of this all of this
#
the things that you're doing are secondary it's just the you know the religion is irredeemable
#
so the people who say that and they and if that's it that is what you believe
#
of course there's nothing to be gained unless you're you're going to you're going to destroy
#
the the religion now of course i feel these these pressures but i have found that by writing
#
in a balanced way and writing honestly and uh not try to disguise uh certain realities using
#
euphemism what's or or arguing that uh that uh somehow you can't understand this or that
#
if your mind works uh in in particular ways if you've been trained in the west etc etc
#
i find that there is a constituency that is looking for serious thoughts that they don't
#
find in mainstream islamic studies or middle east studies and they find that those questions
#
that i deal with questions that people just don't ask and people don't don't talk about and i put
#
exactly the question in in the titles of the of the two books which of course were preceded
#
by many many articles developing uh the you know certain components of these arguments
#
i put my exactly what my thesis is in the title i don't try to i don't it's the the long divergence
#
book was not titled islam and the problem of of economic development say which sort of doesn't
#
doesn't say exactly what your thesis is no i find that islamic law created certain problems that
#
it created in the first volume i i discussed the uh the economic problems it created and uh it
#
caused the middle east to be unprepared for the industrial revolution and in the in the second
#
book i i discuss how it prevented the the middle east from broadening various freedoms and to the
#
point that the middle east is now the least free part of the world that is in the and the role that
#
islamic law played in this situation in this outcome is stated in the in the title so i'm not
#
i'm not hiding anything i find that there is a constituency for this i find that
#
after the long divergence was was published there have been many many many economic historians and
#
legal historians who have entered the field and who have started working on various elements of
#
the of the puzzle when a certain even asking a certain question is is unpopular there will often
#
be if the question is important you will find that there are there are people who are genuinely
#
interested in the reasons who are not islamophobes who are not apologists for a particular point of
#
point of view and the only way you can bring them out is by right doing good work and being very
#
patient because for for many years as i was doing my as i was working on the long divergence and
#
doing the work that that led to it i i was pretty much alone and when i started working on
#
as an economist working on religion at the beginning that was that put me into a very small
#
group one of the leaders were the leading scholars to work on religion and economist
#
as an economist as a trained economist was a professor named larry anacona he started
#
he started explaining how there's churches work and why did united people in the united states
#
are tend to be much more religious than than the peoples of european countries that was the first
#
question he he tackled and then went on to the others and there was a third person who was as a
#
trained economist started working on religion and economics that was deepak lal who passed away a
#
few years ago because of covid unfortunately he started he wrote a book called the hindu equilibrium
#
and was was heavily criticized for for various reasons and was also attacked by people from
#
all from from various sides at the time we were among the only economists trained economists
#
to working on these subjects there was no field of economics and religion i was an assistant
#
professor and was told by other assistant professors that i was committing suicide
#
intellectual suicide academic suicide by working in this this field and creating all sorts of
#
other problems for myself by working on islam and and so on i was at the time i was naive i
#
didn't realize what what this could have meant for my my career fortunately and i realized how
#
fortunate i was now but at the time i didn't quite appreciate this i was at a university that was
#
well before this became fashionable was encouraging interdisciplinary work
#
and there were senior members of my department's economics department at the university of southern
#
california in los angeles senior professors who were very broad-minded and who felt that economics
#
had a great deal to gain by trying to explain religion and to start taking seriously
#
uh links between religion and economics and they encouraged me to do this and things
#
worked out well i got promoted i got i got tenure ultimately i was awarded a
#
chair in this uh in islamic studies at at usc so things went quite well uh for me but they could
#
have turned out terribly my career could have been destroyed early on and if i if i was
#
an assistant professor today there is no chance that i would uh i would make it make it through
#
and probably no chance that i would be hired if they knew the sorts of things that i was going to
#
that i was going to work on so it is you mentioned there's the 10 percent of people who are not
#
conformist and who are who will just speak their minds and follow their their instincts
#
in selecting topics to work on and it perhaps i it has to do with my my personality that i
#
tend to ever since i was a kid i i was somebody who just thought for himself and and expressed
#
it even though it got me into trouble uh sometimes and i just a bit brian kaplan maybe is right that
#
10 percent of us are no i wouldn't uh i think it's a matter of degree of course uh and uh i
#
don't know where you got that uh 10 idea but i think there i think that some people are just
#
naturally more conformist and other people are more resistant to the the pressures they can perhaps
#
live uh they can they can be happy even if the things that they're doing are offending
#
large groups of people and i i think that's just just just who i am so i i don't think
#
it has required a great deal of courage in in my case because uh i wouldn't know how else to be an
#
academic like socrates injured anubruno though they are not around and used to allow so that's
#
a good thing a couple of questions about academics you wrote at one point quote we live in an age of
#
escalating intellectual balkanization a phrase i love intellectual balkanization we live in an
#
age of escalating intellectual balkanization a time where professional scholars can scarcely keep
#
up with developments in their chosen specialties let alone trends in other specialties and
#
discipline for non-scholars the problem is even less manageable the growing integration of the
#
world economy is compounding the need for non-local knowledge yet as individuals we all remain
#
terribly constrained in our capacity to process information there exists an acute need then for
#
broad synthesis for tools of conceptualization for studies that identify hidden patterns top
#
quote and the book was published in 95 but i'm guessing uh you would have written the book before
#
that private roots public lies where you also talk about how for that book you had to synthesize
#
approaches from economics political science sociology and psychology and i have a couple of
#
questions one is this increasing trend in academics to enter narrower and narrower silos
#
to a point where it seems that most academics is really not relevant to the real world anymore it
#
just disappears into this little sort of whole of its own making where you get supremely specialized
#
like you know wind patterns in peru in the year 1876 or whatever i'm just making shit up
#
and that can be one problem and like you said you are trying to be multi-disciplinary
#
and similarly a sort of an orthogonal problem to this is also the problem of intellectual
#
fashions where there are certain fashions like that lady who sort of introduced you so badly
#
at you when you were presenting your first paper which is like so rude and such a horrible thing
#
to do to a young person and i'm presuming she was a relativist and all of that and and those
#
fashions get in the way like what you said just now is absolutely heartbreaking that if you were
#
a young person trying to do this kind of work now you wouldn't get a foot in the door that's
#
heartbreaking and it just makes me think that you know one of your former student ajay shah with
#
you know whom i do that show on youtube which you once wrote to me to say you like which is
#
very kind of you ajay constantly laments that there are so many brilliant minds wasting away
#
in academia you know forced to conform to these ideological straight jackets or be confined to
#
little silos when they could be using their skills to understand the real world better and
#
help the real world better so what you say about sort of being lonely in academia is something i
#
totally get how could you not be when you know that is what it is like what is your sense of
#
this is it has it been getting i mean you wrote those words in 95 has it been getting worse and
#
worse is there any sort of scope for redemption because all of the incentives there point them
#
in that direction which is why it becomes like that so are the scholars of tomorrow going to be
#
independent thinkers who perhaps work outside the academic system if you were 20 today what
#
direction would you be going in would you be an entrepreneur or a gamer you know give me a sense
#
of that i i don't know what i would have been i probably would have tried to make it in in
#
academia but probably i would be more aware of the of the dangers because they are bigger today
#
students or young scholars whether they're phd students writing a dissertation
#
or looking for a dissertation topic or assistant professors they often many have come to me over
#
the years and this year there have been several who have asked to speak to me about
#
their future direction they feel they're in a crisis because they would like to work on this
#
but they feel that they might not be able to get a job or and and they look at my career and they
#
say you know how did you manage can you give us some tips how did it work for you and i tell them
#
that i was just extremely lucky and that i would not have survived at many other departments
#
at the at the time when i was when i had just entered academia in 1982 i started
#
as an assistant professor at at usc i tell them that it just all depends on the circumstances
#
and they have to be true to themselves how well will they be able to tolerate
#
being alone if they truly believe in their ideas and that they will they have something important
#
to say how can they bear being lonely and how will will they be able to continue going when
#
they get rejections from from publishers from journals or or university university presses
#
i i do tell them honestly that the conditions that many of them are facing are considerably worse
#
than than mine that they do have to be careful i do not advise them to simply you know follow
#
their thoughts no matter where it leaves i tell them it's a matter of timing and it's a matter of
#
what they say at at what point what they work on and i i i advise them to have a long-term plan
#
of what they want to do and to start with the least risky parts of the the puzzle knowing
#
themselves that it will fit into a larger larger hole so they can still be true to themselves
#
and satisfy their need to to work freely to express themselves freely to be honest scholars
#
while at the same time maximizing their chances of getting it landing a good job
#
and getting promoted and getting getting published and i i think that the people
#
too might give this advice take this to heart and they follow this and i'm happy to see that some
#
of them are arising in academia and gradually taking on more and more controversial topics
#
before it's too late i would not advise somebody to wait until they're 55 until they've made a big
#
name for themselves to start addressing controversial subjects but there is there are some compromises
#
that can be made while staying true to oneself and if i had to if i went back to the 1980s and
#
was had to do it again i would probably give the same advice to myself i probably would have
#
worked on other components of my puzzle first and delayed the publication of other things
#
what if the senior professors who were very broad-minded had left the university
#
by the time i was coming up for for tenure i was lucky that they were still still there so again
#
i i just think i tremendously lucky i also advise people to keep their keep their eyes open for
#
other people who are in their same situation and form little communities that they can exchange
#
exchange ideas with to reduce the loneliness well it's such a pity that one has to be strategic
#
about the pursuit of truth and you know you know planet in this kind of manner let's let's get
#
back to biography and you know tell me about your childhood you know you were born in nyc what was
#
that like when did you move to turkey what were your parents like tell me about your childhood
#
so i don't know much about new york city because even though i was born there i my parents took me
#
to turkey when i was six months old so they moved to ankara my parents had met in in graduate school
#
and my father was turkish was passed away went to academia after a short stint in in business but
#
he really didn't like his heart was in academia and he didn't want to be didn't like the business
#
culture in in turkey so he became a professor at middle east technical university i grew up
#
in a household that was that was an academic household even though my mother was not an
#
an academic she was highly educated herself we had guests quite frequently who were invariably
#
associated with a university or some or they were they were intellectuals of one sort or another
#
of course at the dinner table topics that intellectuals discuss current politics
#
the big questions of of history of society in turkey of course it was the issue of
#
secularism is secularism going too far is it why isn't why is there so much resistance there are
#
these types of issues would be discussed one of my uncles was a historian also also a professor
#
he would come frequently again they would my father they didn't quite agree with each other
#
politically but they were both quite open and they had very friendly
#
discussions debating things i was exposed to these things from an early age and i think it it
#
it influenced it influenced my my thinking and made me recognize earlier perhaps than i would have
#
the complexity of issues and how you need to have a foot in multiple disciplines to
#
to understand the big big problems of the world the big problems of humanity
#
so my early childhood was spent in in ankara which is where i started collecting stamps
#
and that that hobby by the way developed and became more serious i was i i started
#
i had many stamp catalogs and was known to many dealers and was was collecting quite
#
consciously trying to fill particular gaps and occasionally going to stamp shows and
#
learning from more advanced collectors but i the the best schools in turkey are in istanbul so for
#
for uh by secondary education i went to istanbul started in a boarding school at a french
#
uh boarding school in in istanbul and then went on my family moved to istanbul in uh in 1969 so
#
in 1970 i moved for high school to uh i no longer had to be a boarding student i i moved to an
#
american school uh robert academy which is uh also now known again as as robert robert college
#
and uh i was i was quite fortunate to have many teachers there who uh taught literature
#
and various other fields in in a way to encourage us to think we'd be asked to read
#
books and uh then to interpret the book we would not be given a certain interpretation of a great
#
book and uh essentially be forced to accept that interpretation uh we would uh we would discuss
#
we i i learned there how how uh one can after reading a book see many more things in it by
#
listening to other people's interpretation of the same thing that we've all all read and it
#
this gave me an appreciation not only for uh literature but uh for for listening to people
#
who think differently and that you can you can learn you can fine tune your own interpreter
#
interpretations by listening to uh to others and i think it
#
prepared me when i went to college then in the united states to even though as i said i was on
#
the left uh politically to seek out thinkers who are not on the left including thinkers that were
#
reviled by the by the left to uh to try to learn from them and to expose my own ideas in my own
#
head to the criticism the implicit criticism that i would get by reading their works or by hearing
#
them if they came to the campus anyway to go back to my my time in in turkey istanbul i ended up
#
spending eight years in and even though i've lived far longer in other places like los angeles like
#
durham where i'm living now this is my 17th year i've spent much longer to this day i consider
#
istanbul home it's where
#
i feel that i fit in most more than durham or los angeles i'm probably not alone as somebody who
#
has lived in multiple cultures in feeling that i that i'm not in that i i'm not completely at home
#
anywhere even in istanbul i i feel that
#
in certain respects i like things some things the way they're they're done in the united states
#
i feel more comfortable in the united states and in certain respects but on the whole istanbul is
#
still uh the place i consider consider home i think it's a wonderful uh city and one of the
#
things i like about it is that there's so many layers of civilization and it has been
#
the largest city in in in the world has had you know for hundreds of years at the largest markets
#
in the in the world the heritage the cultural heritage of the city it just fascinates me and
#
i i do quite a lot of research uh on based on archives in in istanbul that deal with the
#
commercial life and the uh and and the political life in the in in the city so uh so that is where
#
i grew up uh then i came to the united states to uh do my undergraduate work at at princeton
#
and i was quite happy with the education i got i feel that it it it allowed me to
#
explore multiple disciplines even though i majored in economics i took quite a lot of courses in
#
in political science and philosophy and sociology apart from mathematics and statistics
#
i had i i got a liberal education and uh cherish it to this to this day and uh i think it prepared
#
me well to to keeping a foot in multiple disciplines even though in graduate school
#
i narrowed graduate a graduate education is something that forces you to uh to narrow to
#
be able to write the dissertation you have to uh you have to focus on something you have to be
#
an expert in a particular field or or a couple of fields to uh to uh get a job there is that
#
narrowing process which did occur to me and i don't think i handled that particularly particularly
#
well in in graduate school but i had enough of a grounding in multiple disciplines earlier
#
and appreciated debate genuine debate and the value of genuine debate to developing your own
#
thinking and maturing intellectually i had enough of a grounding based on my high school education
#
and my my college education that i was able to recover after i got out of graduate school
#
so uh we started in new york now we're uh we're in graduate school but uh
#
by then i was an adult of course i'll i'll uh you know i'll come back to you as an adult but just a
#
question about istanbul you know one of my previous guests on the show was max rodinbeck who was an
#
editor at the economist here and he grew up in another great old city cairo and when i asked him
#
which city is home to him like what is home to him rather he said it's cairo but it's not a
#
cairo that exists anymore it's a cairo of his childhood so when you think of istanbul as home
#
are you thinking of the istanbul where you grew up or are you thinking of you know are there still
#
parts of it today how has it changed and do such incredible old cities with such great histories
#
do they change slower than other cities are there still things in them perhaps
#
which one can articulate which are you know essential so istanbul of course has grown
#
immensely it was when i was there it was growing rapidly because of migration from the
#
uh from the countryside and it probably almost doubled in size during my by the time i left
#
for the uh for the united states for uh for college but it is it is more than doubled perhaps
#
tripled since then and when i go back to istanbul there are entire neighborhoods entire parts of
#
the city with millions of people that did not exist in the past and that have a life of their
#
own i don't feel at home there i feel at home in particular parts of the city that had where i
#
lived where that haven't changed because of their historical character they haven't been
#
nothing has been knocked down those are the parts that that i value a great deal and there's there's
#
a culture of the of the city of the educated people their their social life the the dining
#
scene which is which is more refined i would say than when i was there because now you know when
#
when i was there in the 1980s it was istanbul was just beginning to get ethnic cuisines of various
#
kinds and people in the educated people were just discovering the joys of going out to an
#
indian restaurant or a chinese restaurant or a peruvian restaurant istanbul now is traditionally
#
istanbul at the time of when my father was growing up my grandfather was growing up uh to go to rest
#
there weren't that many restaurants to begin with because people late at home there were there
#
weren't as many as many tourists so there weren't that many restaurants but a restaurant was some
#
place you went and there was there was turkish food and depending on the how expensive the the
#
food was the food would be better or to be or to be worse but what you got at a restaurant was was
#
pretty much pretty much fixed the notion that there would be various kinds of culinary experiences
#
that people would would seek is it was something just developing but it is advanced much more the
#
art scene is much richer than when i was in terms of galleries in terms of art private art museums
#
that have been set up by the wealthy turks this was just again again just developing in the 80s
#
but it is it is in that sense richer and it's that part of istanbul the cosmopolitan
#
istanbul the educated istanbul of the educated people refined people people who have traveled
#
the world people who know the rest of uh turkey who like to see different different cultures
#
this is is uh is still there is it the does it would it represent istanbul for somebody who's
#
growing up there now not everybody because there are people who grow up in parts of istanbul that
#
are very conservative istanbul has in in recent years received huge numbers of refugees from
#
syria from afghanistan from pakistan from iraq now ukraine and russia entire neighborhoods that
#
these various waves of refugees have have set up it's contributing all of this is contributing to
#
the cosmopolitan character of the city but in it but in a different uh different way and i would
#
not necessarily recognize it and not all of it would make me feel at home but there is still an
#
essence of the city that when i when i go there i'm i'm able to find i'm able to feel the the same
#
thing i'm able to uh walking along the bus first pick up the smells that are unique the scents that
#
are unique and walk into a fish market and breathe the the scents that i or smell the the
#
scents that that i remember from my childhood and that i have not picked up anywhere else
#
so yes it has i think i was still considered home even though it's it has been changing
#
and i hear by the way before from times if i could just add one more thing times i've visited india
#
i was told that with india also the restaurant scene was sort of in in recent decades changed
#
so that indians that educated indians are interested in various ethnic cuisines whereas
#
earlier they were not i was i was told that this was the case in delhi that this was the case in
#
in mumbai and i'm just i'm just reporting what i've what i've heard you might correct me no
#
you're absolutely right to the extent that even when we had food from outside or we tried got
#
another cuisine and we made it our own so there is this one sort of cuisine called indian chinese
#
so it's like you know the chinese food that i had growing up is not something anyone in china would
#
even recognize it was just you took some basic things and you indianized it completely and
#
then that's what you kind of had and i was sort of chatting about the concept of home or cities
#
as well with another friend of mine who's been on the show nalanjana roy who had been to the u.s
#
recently for a month-long trip and she lives in delhi and she came back and she called me and she
#
said that i suddenly feel that i have so much more fondness for delhi now after spending some
#
time away and i was just thinking about like i've lived for 28 years in bombay and i was just thinking
#
that when i think of bombay i don't know the city at all but i know a part of it which is which i
#
can plug into anytime really intimately like i think none of us lives in a city we all live
#
in this microgeography so you know a lot of the time i'll be in my room or i'll be working or
#
i'll be whatever there'll be typical places where i go and in transit i'll be you know everything
#
apart from the normal is sort of unseen to me and the cities are so kind of vast and so on and so
#
forth but let's sort of let's kind of get to adulthood or you know further down the journey
#
to adulthood where you're studying and what i like reading about your influences every time
#
you've named someone as your influence i have recognized the name of a hero of mine so you know
#
in private truths public lies early on you uh i think in the acknowledgement so wherever you
#
spoke about james woucan and albert hershman manker olson thomas schelling elsewhere i learned that
#
you know at stanford you got your doctorate under the supervision of kenneth arrow and uh and these
#
are all just great minds who've done such legendary things and i want to ask you know what were your
#
influences both in terms of people and in terms of ideas like you pointed out about how you were
#
at one point a standard issue leftist of a sort i guess when you get into college one has vague
#
notions of you know what the world should look like and how the right people will design it that
#
way and all of that and then you say you kind of changed and i so tell me about who were the people
#
who influenced you what were they like what were your interactions like what were the ideas that
#
were like light bulb moments or that completely changed the way you look at the world
#
so there are the the people i named all had enormous influence on my thinking
#
initially through their through their books and i went and sought them out
#
out later because i their way of thinking appealed to me so much and i learned from them
#
and these all of these individuals you named were very good to me in encouraging me at a time when i
#
was quite vulnerable i was a non-tenured uh professor working on very controversial
#
subjects i think that they recognized the huge risks that i was taking and they appreciated this
#
and they pushed me along and wrote recommendation letters for me i greatly appreciate that i didn't
#
at the time realize what a huge favor they were doing and of course they were very busy
#
people who had very crowded schedules they took time to write letters to help me
#
along to get grants to to get invited to various places they invited me to to give me various
#
opportunities i have been trying to give forward and help young scholars who are who i think are
#
doing very promising work or taking certain risks to help them both by giving them advice
#
and being an intellectual sounding board so and helping them as best i can through
#
various editorships that i have and giving them opportunities to to publish now each of these
#
individuals were made like a light bulb suddenly start shining in my head and and in a way that it
#
was it was it was a moment when i felt that many other connections that i had not made
#
suddenly with that light bulb shining suddenly certain connections things that i had not really
#
understood suddenly the connections that that one reading just explained not just what they
#
were trying to it gave me not just the message that they were trying to give through the book
#
but filled a void and so the impact for me and i told this to each of them and in using perhaps
#
different different words but i did tell them of the huge impact they had on my on my thinking
#
in the case of mancer also i'm not sure whether he was among the scholars you mentioned but his
#
logic of collective action which i had not read in in graduate school because i wasn't exposed to it
#
in in any of my classes i don't think it was being taught in any of the classes but the idea that the
#
the insight various inefficiencies that occurred just because a large majority wants something
#
it will not necessarily be achieved demand for it will not necessarily emerge certainly was a gave
#
me one of the building blocks of my my own thinking the thinking that went into private
#
truth public lives alston and hershman's interest in long-term development and the interactions
#
between ideas and institutions this this was very very valuable to me i had not been exposed to
#
anything of the sort in the economic development classes that i had taken even though i had taken
#
many courses on economic development they were focused on the 20th century and they were focused
#
on central planning or or the effect of the effect of migration to the to the city's more narrow
#
processes that accompany a development rather than the big question of why some parts of the
#
world developed earlier than the others some parts of the world like the middle east like india like
#
china that were quite advanced uh certainly more advanced by europe advanced by global standards
#
a few centuries ago why they fell behind why they have had such difficulty all of them
#
to the present they've had difficulty catching up to to the west and why they've had difficulty
#
changing their their norms their beliefs and so on all of these i i i found hershman's and and
#
alston's thinking about this in the case of ken arrow he was he had more influence on me after
#
i graduated and he signed my dissertation than after because he was a friend until he passed away
#
a few years ago he was a true friend and we talked about many fields and he encouraged me
#
to work on the topics i ultimately worked on the the the he encouraged me to do the work that went
#
into the the the preference falsification book but also the long divergence freedoms
#
delayed and in fact he he told me after i graduated and i was quite frequently because
#
i'm a stanford graduate i was frequently invited to stanford to give talks arrow would always drop
#
whatever he was doing and still come to my talks even though he was no longer my advisor we would
#
always have a meal together sometimes he would invite me to his uh his home and we would talk
#
about my new topics and he told me once he said why he said i have a question for you it's been
#
on my mind for a while and i said what and he said why didn't you work on these topics when
#
you were my student and i said because i didn't know they were spinning in my mind but i didn't
#
feel they would they fit into economics and i didn't know exactly how to articulate them
#
i was and uh the idea of preference falsification was there but it went contrary to economics the
#
theory of revealed preference that that were taught in so many classes and i thought that i
#
would just you know the concept would be just laughed at and and and in any case it didn't
#
quite not articulate he said you know we faculty when at the time that you were in in school you
#
were my student at faculty meetings we would sometimes uh talk among ourselves and say
#
you know why do so many of our students pick boring these topics what can we do to get them
#
to work on more interesting more innovative revolutionary uh ideas they said you know i
#
would have jumped at this and i would have far enjoyed far more working with you on one of these
#
topics than on the topic you uh you chose which i wrote a dissertation on the micro foundations of
#
of uh inflation which is not particularly good work even though at the time it was quite
#
faddish it was it was the fad the the work that i did produced uh papers that went to the top
#
journals even while i was before i had finished my dissertation one of the papers one of the
#
chapters was on its way to being published in the flagship journal of the field the american
#
economic review so i was doing well by standards of the discipline but what the arrow told me was
#
that there was a sense within the discipline among at least or at least in some quarters of the
#
discipline that the discipline was was uh could be more exciting and they wished that students
#
would would work in in other fields so anyway he was arrow was was tremendously supportive
#
and have uh such a such a distinguished person consider the ideas that i'm working important
#
was enough to you know reduce some of the loneliness to give me some some courage again
#
i have in my as a senior professor myself i have tried to give give forward and i
#
do this by keeping in touch with my old my former students and help them as best i can
#
serving as a sounding board so i think this this answers your question about the influences
#
of the people i i named the ones the i think that i did not jim buchanan i didn't i haven't
#
touched on let me say something about his works on how good intentions in that that result in
#
more government regulation or new government departments do not necessarily yield the
#
benefits that they are they're expected to and that the incentive system within government
#
matters a great deal and and will will influence how policies are implemented regardless of the
#
intentions behind them that idea opened my it contributed to my awareness of various counter
#
productive initiatives that are are taken and to and it it i learned from him how very common it is
#
for intentions to result in it lead to outcomes that are precisely the opposite of what
#
what is intending and so but he Buchanan also of course he was a great scholar who won a Nobel
#
Prize later this was much about a decade and a half after i i met him but he was also quite
#
encouraging and he invited me to various panels and to speak at various places even though my
#
work was not exactly in his pursuing one of his themes he did appreciate risk taking and was
#
was quite supportive so that's among the reasons i singled them out along with these other people i
#
mentioned for special praise and appreciation wonderful stories you know while reading the
#
logic of collective action one of the frames that was a light bulb for me was reading about the
#
frame of roving bandits and stationary bandits and you you you mentioned that you know in your
#
interactions with them there were all these different light bulbs which made you look at
#
things in a completely different way can you give me some specific concrete examples of some of
#
those i'd love that so tom shelling i i didn't say anything specifically about him he was also
#
one of these senior scholars who was extremely when i got to know through his writings but then
#
met and he was he was quite supportive i was quite influenced by his book micromotives and
#
macro behavior that small the the idea that small interactions small actions can combine
#
to generate something that is much greater than the some of the some of the parts this was an idea
#
that that fed into my preference falsification book and so that was that i think is is is an
#
example is a concrete example of a direct influence into my work albert hershman's book
#
exit voice and loyalty was very influential now in that it led me to ask a question that again
#
became part of the framework of private truth public lies he talks in in albert hershman's
#
exit force and loyalty individuals who are upset with the way let us say a company is being operated
#
can either can either express stay with with the company and express themselves or they can leave
#
now i and and if they leave and if the people who are who have the ideas that would
#
improve the company all leave then the company of course doesn't improve and it it loses market
#
share and eventually you know the company goes out of out of business this was a story he he
#
told us he applied this to neighborhoods that start that start disintegrating and if the if the
#
people with the ideas to improve the neighborhood to stop the process of of disintegration all
#
leave to another neighborhood well the disintegration just just continues well this gave me the the idea
#
of of refining that framework by exploring the decision of people who stay
#
with regard to what they actually say if you stay in the neighborhood and there are certain
#
processes that are leading to that are causing its disintegration you can if there are people
#
that are benefiting from the disintegration and they are giving you a story that the whole
#
problem is that there is you know this kind of bias or that kind of bias so that you know
#
the government is responsible for this reason or that reason you can sit because that view is
#
popular you can endorse that view or if you have an alternative if if perhaps the people who are
#
spreading this interpretation are the source of the problem you can take them on
#
at a risk to yourself this is a this decision is one that is not taken up in exit force and
#
loyalty and that second choice that people have that is the the choice that private truth public
#
lies focuses on so here I benefited from a book not because its framework became my own framework
#
but because a limitation of that framework caused the light bulb to go off and I asked the question
#
that Hirschman hadn't asked in this specific specific case is there a sense that that everything
#
that one does is part of a longer dialogue and there's something that came before and there will
#
be something that came later like in a sense it could be argued therefore that your book is in
#
dialogue with exit voice and loyalty that it is sort of taking it forward you know so maybe not
#
always in a direct sense like Nozick writing anarchy state and utopia in response to Rawls
#
but in general is there a sense that while at one level you know many may focus on the sprint that
#
single book may represent that there is a longer marathon discussion that is going on and there
#
are chains and there are threads and all of that and over time do you get that sense as well
#
yes definitely nobody writes a book just without drawing on previous work every book
#
every idea rests on previous ideas and one can sometimes it's difficult to pick up the influences
#
where there is such an influence I try to in my own works to bring it out either by by discussing
#
in making references to the works that influenced me or by including a segment of the discussion
#
that relates the argument to the book there is I forget to spend a long time exactly where in the
#
book it is but there are references in the in the book to exit voice and loyalty and to and
#
specifically to how private truths public lies complements exit voice and loyalty and how it
#
it enables us to explain phenomena that exit force and loyalty cannot fully explain for example
#
the long persistence of soviet communism and its sudden sudden fall so yes it did disintegrate
#
but not exactly because the thinking people were leaving Russia that wasn't they weren't allowed to
#
leave a few people did escape of course but most people stayed there but when they stayed there
#
they still didn't improve if there were a lot of thinking people in the eastern block the soviet
#
satellites as well as the soviet union who saw exactly what's happening saw the inefficiencies
#
of the system the the hypocrisy but they stayed silent or worse they supported the system even
#
though they didn't believe in this and they did all the things that were expected of themselves
#
including ostracizing and demonizing the people who did have the few people who did have the courage
#
to to speak out so this is so i did discuss how the work complemented exit voice and loyalty
#
but but also took it took it forward and you know there's this old saying about how paradigms change
#
one funeral at a time and that sounds dreadfully slow but what i feel more and more also is that
#
the progress of ideas and the progress of knowledge also happens at glacial pace and this kind of feeds
#
into that it's one book at a time one thinker at a time and when we are young there is that
#
enthusiasm that we're always playing what i might call a short game you want to get a book out you
#
want to get a paper out it's one thing at a time and then later one kind of settles into perhaps
#
settles into a realization that we're all really playing the long game and uh you know it's going
#
to go on long after us and have you also made that kind of sort of journey where you think along a
#
wider arc longer arc where your sense of purpose has changed
#
uh yes i i but i would say that i started feeling that way after my mid-40s i was not uh i
#
until then i i didn't see i didn't recognize how long it could take
#
for ideas to catch on the concept of preference falsification did not immediately catch on
#
and people would use the the term preference falsification i mean it took took a long time
#
10 years or so for people to start using preference falsification and they used to use it in put it in
#
quotes or say what timur quran calls preference falsification now it is used widely and not just
#
in academia and people understand what the what the term means most intellectuals at least people
#
familiar with economics political science sociology they're familiar with with the term
#
and people don't put it in quotes anymore and they don't necessarily attribute even the concept
#
to to me so i didn't at the time i did not appreciate this i thought that when i wrote
#
the preference falsification book that because i had i had devoted many years to it and thought
#
deeply about it and and uh and uh sought feedback from from many many different different people
#
and spent a great deal of time working on the the flow the sentence structure and so on not that
#
it turned out to be a perfect book no it it uh certainly didn't and i there were there are
#
certain things that i would shorten perhaps take out that that if i was uh producing the book uh
#
now but i i felt that just because it was a powerful idea that it explained a great deal
#
that it would catch on immediately but it took a long time and i think it has to do with the
#
with changes in the way americans who play an important disproportionate role in the shaping
#
of intellectual discourses the way that americans have have changed the way they see their own
#
country the first time i presented a paper with the idea with the concept of preference
#
falsification in it this was 10 years before private truth public lives was published it was
#
a presentation i made at in in california uh somebody the audience i presented this a paper
#
that that showed how preference falsification could lead to persistent inefficiency
#
so everybody is worse off but nobody is you know is coming forward to demand
#
change so the audience listened to what what i was saying and somebody after i finished speaking
#
someone a famous economic theorist put up his his hand and said you know what you are the
#
mechanism that you are describing i can see how it applies to the middle east i can see how it
#
applies to india because i'd use the caste system as as an example but what does this have to do
#
with the united states we have a speech is guaranteed by the constitution here and there
#
is no reason why this mechanism should be at play here and i don't get that kind of reaction
#
at all everyone recognizes even if the example i give has to do with india or the or the middle
#
east recently it's been mostly the middle east or eastern europe people can see parallels
#
in their own environment in the united states everywhere uh that is something that is that has
#
so the i think that influence the the popularity of the uh the changes in the in the united states
#
people no longer think of the united states as it is in practice as the land of the free people
#
whether people are the left or the right they feel that books are being banned that uh people
#
are being cancelled people are being that there is a cost to be uh that there is a cost to expressing
#
certain ideas that's something that no one will uh no one uh you know who is who follows follows
#
the the news will disagree with that has made it far easier to explain preference falsification
#
and it's and i think it's it accounts for the spread perhaps this is a us-centric interpretation
#
of what is uh what has happened but in my own experience i found that from the time i coined
#
the the term i had no trouble getting indians or middle easterners or chinese or or for that matter
#
europeans to take this seriously germans instantly understood that the same kind of
#
process happened in in nazi germany indians though this was before the the recent developments in
#
and in india but they they they understood that the that persistence of the caste system did have
#
something to do with preference social whether i got every element correct or whether i exaggerated
#
that's you know that's for others to to judge but they could they could they could incident they
#
could they could feel that i was dealing with something uh something important and something
#
that explained patterns in their own uh in their own uh own lives that was not the case with
#
with americans who felt that there was something unusual about the united states that that made it
#
immune to these kinds of pressures that mobs would not lead ideas to get cancelled that
#
universities were places where where everything could be discussed freely even at the time that
#
i was a student and when i was and later when i was writing private truths uh public lives
#
there were issues that you could not discuss and there were types of speakers that you could not
#
invite now that's the the range of speakers who are no longer welcome on university campuses has
#
you know expanded uh massively but it was ever anyone who cared to look uh it existed then
#
as well but people were not aware of of this or yeah you know i want to talk a lot more about
#
reference falsification and your book and all your books in fact after the break but before we
#
go into the break of a quick question i first about heard about preference falsification in
#
an american context uh glenn reynolds also known as insta pandit famous blogger back in the day
#
had written a piece talking about it in the context of the rise of trump and you know and
#
glenn reynolds of course was one of the early bloggers he was known as insta pandit and i'm
#
sort of thinking about how public discourse changed because of technology and uh blogging
#
and so on and so forth where earlier journalism had to journalists were generalists a lot of the
#
time they would stay at a very surface level never get too deep with anything and what you had in
#
in this age of new media is you had specialists all over the place coming out there and writing
#
about their fields my favorite examples of course being tyler covin and alex tabarroco marginal
#
revolution uh such a great blog and uh you know they enrich the discourse so much and i'm wondering
#
how you feel about this new expanded role that now exists of being a public intellectual right
#
you mentioned how when you were a student you would go to see william buckley talk now there's
#
a classic public intellectual who's talking about ideas but there are very few people like him in
#
that sense who have platforms and stages and whatever and today the discourse is broader
#
the means of production are open to anyone anyone in a sense can you know have a certain kind of
#
voice i would imagine you know you've been on podcasts and stuff but you're possibly reaching
#
a much broader audience and you once would in these times uh and which is you know so great and
#
it's good for the world so what do you feel about that that you know earlier i asked about the sense
#
of purpose and playing the long game do you also feel that being a public intellectual getting
#
your ideas out there speaking out more speaking up more because so many young people in academics
#
like you pointed out can't really speak up there's too much at stake whereas you can speak a little
#
bit more about a certain thing so what is your sense of you know do you find that your sense of
#
what you want to do has kind of expanded to kind of include that as well yes absolutely i think
#
social media generally has had the negative effects that we touched on that it
#
favors the people with extreme views and if you want to get more more clicks you have to take an
#
extreme you have to express an extreme view nuanced tweets do not get the play generally
#
than well that tweets involving the demonization of a person or demonization of a movement
#
do we see this in it's not limited to the united states for issues of any any country this is
#
uh the case so but it has also enabled thinkers to use many more platforms like this
#
your own uh your own uh podcast which reaches so many people and gives so many intellectuals
#
an opportunity to uh to reach out to audiences that they wouldn't otherwise uh be able to uh to
#
speak to i think it gives us also access each of us access to many different
#
thinkers to read them in their own words on particular issues either through tweets or
#
through blogs or listen to them through through podcasts watch them on through uh at various
#
shows so it provides a lot more information to anybody who is looking for it and information
#
that that will go against dominant narratives and give more nuanced perspectives expose them
#
to facts that various groups in society are trying to trying to hide from them this is one of the
#
huge benefits of social media and the tweets whether it's tweets or other social media posts
#
or podcasts these are there to stay they will remain there long after the people are are gone
#
and that is a huge huge advantage for thinkers of all kinds and you don't have to be
#
an academic to contribute to academic discourses that is another advantage there was no way that
#
people with interesting ideas who were not within academia who who did not write and hadn't been
#
taught how to write articles that would go into particular kinds of of journals they were not
#
part of when in the early part of my career they were not part of uh the discussion now when i'm
#
writing a book like freedoms delayed or or i'm i'm at the early stages of another preference
#
falsification book focused on on polarization and i am benefiting of course from journal articles
#
of course some books written by professors published by university presses but i'm also
#
daily benefiting from intellectuals sometimes that i've never heard of but the uh a link to
#
a particular podcast is sent by somebody i really uh really trust and i decide to start listening
#
to it or i read the uh read the sub stack piece and it influences my thinking so i get as an
#
academic i i benefit tremendously from shows like uh like your or your own show uh the seen
#
and the unseen the shows of others from various uh podcasts i learned from uh barry weiss for for
#
example and i i think that that she is writing more freely than she would if she was still part
#
of the new york times which you know limits uh that pushes certain uh certain narratives
#
she brings on to uh uh on to uh her own uh shows or she interviews uh people who would
#
would not have gotten a platform either from the left or the right in in some cases
#
i think this is a tremendous uh tremendous uh benefit so i think we need to uh we wish that
#
the extremism we see on social media didn't exist it certainly has uh has uh negative effects but
#
we should recognize also the uh the tremendous benefits to academic research and the benefits
#
of course to the wider intellectual community not just to academics because it gives access
#
to intellectuals through uh leaders like uh like you opinion shapers like uh like you
#
when you interview academics the wider or intellectuals who are not necessarily working
#
in academia thinkers good thinkers you reach a very broad uh audience and that contributes to
#
refining public discourse to uh generating ideas uh i think it's a very valuable uh process one of
#
the things that you know doing this show has sort of taught me over the years is that earlier i would
#
kind of lament what social media has done to us and i would say okay people have short attention
#
spans they want to go shallow they don't want to go deep today i notice completely false like what
#
you see on social media is really a vocal minority screaming its lungs out but there's a silent
#
majority out there which appreciates nuance and which uh loves depth you know which is why i can
#
have a five-hour conversation with an academic and there'll be enough listeners because nobody
#
else gives you that so you know on that note let's take a quick break and on the other side
#
of the break we'll talk about your books have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite
#
gotten down to it well i'd love to help you since april 2020 i've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts of my
#
online course the art of clear writing and an online community has now sprung up before my
#
past students we have workshops a newsletter to showcase the work of students and vibrant
#
community interaction in the course itself through four webinars spread over four weekends i share
#
all i know about the craft and practice of clear writing there are many exercises much interaction
#
and a lovely and lively community at the end of it the course cost rupees 10 000 plus gst or about
#
150 dollars if you're interested head on over to register at indiancar.com slash clear writing
#
that's indiancar.com slash clear writing being a good writer doesn't require god-given talent
#
just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills i
#
can help you welcome back to the scene on the unseen i'm chatting with timur kuran on his
#
interesting life his wonderful work you know before we start before we get to privatize public
#
truths what i also want to touch upon is you know you mentioned earlier that a lot of your early
#
work was risky work that if you were to advise yourself you might have you know gone for low
#
hanging fruit first or you know tried something a little safer so tell me a little bit about that
#
you know quote unquote the risky work that you were doing and give me a sense of the trajectory
#
of interests and work that took you towards privatized public truths
#
so the the idea came to me
#
gradually i would say as i was learning neoclassical economics as a graduate student
#
of course i'd been exposed to neoclassical economics as an undergraduate student but i hadn't
#
been aware of the of the centrality of revealed preference to the notion of revealed preference
#
that people's behaviors we can't really know what what individuals utility functions are and
#
therefore we cannot we cannot measure their preferences but we can infer them from their
#
from their actions well this as as a graduate student it started i i felt uncomfortable by
#
this like even though in exams when i was asked you know questions that required applying this
#
this theory of course i i applied it so to pass my exams and so on but i was i was uncomfortable
#
with it and i gradually realized this was a flaw in neoclassical economics because in many societies
#
and i began by thinking of cases in the in the middle east where what people reveal is not what
#
they are really what they really want because they are responding also to social pressures
#
they they feed they they feel there's something to gain by revealing something else either to
#
their behaviors who they who they express admirations for who they condemn what what
#
books they praise etc and i i could think of cases and it really dawned on me this this notion of
#
preference false creation when during a turbulent period in in turkey i one of my visits during that
#
that time when when youths were divided were were polarized and they were part of right-wing
#
movements or left-wing movements that were fighting each other my uh one of my cousins
#
happened to be studying at istanbul university in studying business administration and he was a
#
free market uh an admirer of free markets he ultimately founded a stock he went he became a
#
stockbroker and founded his own company became very very successful he was very early on he was
#
uh free markets he was against uh socialism but he had when i went to visit him once i saw
#
that among the papers that were delivered to his house there were two papers one was uh one was
#
consistent with ideology i knew that uh he had and another was far left paper and i said i as
#
this is a paper uh known as jumriet it's a paper founded in the in the 1920s has always had a left
#
uh left tilt and i said i'm quite surprised to see that you read jumriet and he said oh that's for
#
that's for show and i said what do you mean that's for show and he said when i
#
go to the university or when i go to a part of the city where leftists are are dominant i i keep it
#
in my bag and if necessary if i'm getting onto a bus i'm walking in the street i stick it
#
under my under my arm with this with the to signal that i am a leftist and he said
#
this way they leave me alone and i learned the hard way that when i was once reading
#
the paper where i get my information a pro market as a right of center uh paper it got me in a lot
#
of trouble i was i was pushed around the people took they took my paper they tore it up and told
#
me never to read it and so on i use this for security now i saw this at at that moment
#
and again a light bulb went off and i saw that people were deliberately
#
communicating a preference that they did not have that went against their own interests they put
#
resources into it because after all my uh my cousin was was paying money for a subscription
#
to a paper he wasn't going to read he was simply using it for signaling and that many other people
#
were doing this of course i asked my how you know how common is this he said oh this is so all my
#
friends uh do this and we use the same newspaper we we signal it and i and i i realized that this
#
was that then that with all of them doing this they were making it even harder for people reading
#
the other paper the paper they were all they were all actually reading that they were making it even
#
harder to read that in public they had to read it secretly and have the you know the thing delivered
#
to them uh to their home and read it in the safety of their other homes i there i this phenomenon
#
that i i discuss in detail in private truth public lives that's when things fell together i just
#
needed to come up with a term to describe it and i again i was inspired by the notion of preference
#
preference revelation through one's behaviors and i coined the term preference falsification
#
um so uh this was uh this was when that idea gelled in my mind and i saw the potential
#
to develop develop a general theory and i started once you develop such a concept you start seeing
#
it everywhere i started seeing preference falsification in my social interactions with
#
things that people would would say a colleague would say at a dinner when with our wives we
#
were having we were having a pleasant dinner and they would you know i'm just horrified by
#
this thing that is going on in the department and and i would joke we had both been at the
#
same department meeting he hadn't spoken up and in fact you know he had gone along with the
#
majority i started seeing it everywhere and i started seeing this as a universal phenomenon
#
and i started seeing i had i had learned about the caste system by reading vs night pole
#
you must be aware of his his works and suddenly i saw it it occurred to me that what he was talking
#
about was preference falsification in my own terminology and i started connecting all sorts
#
of phenomena that i was aware of i started seeing them as manifestations of the same
#
universal process and that's when i i was this was very early in my career as an assistant
#
professor and that's when i thought i could do something that would ultimately lead to
#
a book when the ideas matured so it wasn't developed suddenly because i needed a topic
#
to work on it was it was a longer process of being confused and then by the concept of revealed
#
preference being disturbed by big literatures that use this this concept and eventually
#
seeing concrete examples and once i had concrete examples i saw additional manifestations elsewhere
#
yeah and i i see it all around me all the time as we were discussing in the break and
#
that example of your friend carrying the left-wing newspaper under his arm is such
#
a great example because cousin my cousin your cousin is such a great example because number
#
one your cousin and his friends who are doing that might be doing it you know deliberately they know
#
what they're doing but they a there will be others who will pick that up and think that is a newspaper
#
with which to gain acceptance and they may not know better and then they will actually start reading
#
only that newspaper and that influences how they think and that you know puts them in that little
#
bubble and equally what then happens is that you know if all of these people instead had the bravery
#
to just carry the newspaper that they actually read maybe more people would take that newspaper
#
seriously and also pick it up and say hey that must also be worth checking out so it's playing
#
at so many sort of different levels i want to you know in your book early in your book you write
#
quote this book offers a theory that synthesizes approaches and findings from social scientific
#
traditions that have developed more or less separately in the tradition of economics the
#
theory incorporates the concepts of optimization and equilibrium like political science it assigns
#
to political pressure groups a key role in collective decision making as in sociology it
#
treats humans as social beings creatures who learn from one another care about others and worry what
#
others think of them finally along with various branches of psychology it recognizes that the
#
mind has limitations and that it is a seat of tensions in keeping with its hybrid origins the
#
theory yields propositions embodying observations now sequestered in different fields of inquiry
#
right and my my sort of question about this is that was this interdisciplinary approach
#
forced upon you by the realization that this concept applies to everything and therefore
#
to do it justice you have to go into all these different areas or were you interdisciplinary
#
and a person of varied interests to begin with and you know it fell naturally into place from there
#
the latter i was i was quite interested in various disciplines i had never taken a course in
#
psychology but i was led to psychology by works of economists like thomas schelling
#
and people that schelling had had cited to to recognize that there was something to learn from
#
psychology and people's immense need for social acceptance is something that
#
economists and political scientists had not appreciated enough and that sociologists appreciated
#
it but were not uh had not done the sorts of experiments that psychologists had done
#
that would and that i found that in psychology various various thinkers had done experiments
#
that very clearly demonstrated the power of how the need for acceptance the need to
#
the drive to avoid criticism of the crowd or criticism by authority figures can make people
#
deny the evidence of their own senses and once i once i saw this the the milgram experiments the
#
ash experiments which were very striking of course there were many refinements and i found myself in
#
in a literature that was very very useful so it was because i was inclined because i think
#
my liberal education had already prepared me for treating various disciplines as having
#
their limitations but also having something to uh to teach us and with the universal phenomenon
#
that i was exploring uh in other words preference falsification one can't get the full picture
#
without drawing on all of these uh literatures i naturally gravitated toward particular sub
#
literatures within these different disciplines yeah and the and the solomon ash experiment which
#
you described is particularly fascinating in it essentially or what happened and this happened
#
decades ago is that within the experiment subjects were shown a line and they were shown
#
three other lines and they were told okay the length of this line is equal to which of these
#
three lines and there was one obvious answer and the other two were completely wrong but this person
#
first saw many many many other people consistently pick the same wrong line and 34 percent of them
#
also picked that same wrong line rather than you know pick the correct line and if that didn't
#
happen you know less than one percent got it wrong so it's a sort of a striking you know
#
experimentational example of sort of preference falsification and i want to read out a couple
#
of paras by you because it's such a beautiful example and it's i love the writing so i don't
#
know why you were saying you would write it differently what would you write different
#
about it it's perfect i'll read these couple of paras out to kind of illustrate uh the different
#
levels at which preference falsification plays out you're right imagine that a person in a position
#
to alter your career invites you to a party at his home when you arrive at the party the talk of
#
the moment seems to be about the living room's pale neutral colors the latest trend in interior
#
decoration the look does not appeal to you but you would rather not say so lest your host be hurt
#
feeling pressured to say something you complement his sophisticated taste a while later you find
#
yourself in a conversation on wasteful development projects in latin america someone pompously
#
asserts that under socialism there would be no waste although you find the claim preposterous
#
you let it go unchallenged to avoid sparking a divisive debate with the advancing hour you
#
get bored and start itching to leave a voice inside objects that it would be imprudent to
#
be the first to make a move so you stay on hoping that somebody else will comment on the late hour
#
and signal a readiness to depart giving you an opportunity to slip out without becoming the
#
focus of attention at long last someone stands up to leave and to your secret delight the party
#
unravels thanking your host for a marvelous evening you head for the door grateful that it was you
#
that it was not you who initiated the exodus your evening contained several instances of
#
preference falsification the act of misrepresenting one's genuine wants under perceived social
#
pressures and this is also a beautiful example that illustrates so i will ask you to illustrate
#
it again for my listeners why preference falsification is different from lying or
#
self-censorship or insincerity or hypocrisy you know all of these common terms would seem to apply
#
but no it's a category of its own so you know tell me about that so self-censorship is very
#
commonly used it isn't self-censorship would be if in the first of the series of examples of
#
preference falsification in that evening if i had simply stayed quiet but i went beyond that that
#
would be self-censorship and of course anybody staying quiet would be might be interpreted as
#
having no opinion or they might be interpreted as you know going along with going along with the
#
with the dominant opinion which is that the decor is is sophisticated but by saying actually
#
articulating that it is sophisticated i go beyond self-censorship and i
#
communicate a preference that is the opposite of what i actually feel so it goes beyond
#
self-censorship and therefore in a broader context that not much harm is done in this
#
particular case but if we go back to the example of my cousin what my cousin was doing he was not
#
simply hiding the newspaper that he uses in those days people got their information not from social
#
media and online but they got their information from from newspapers just if he had just hidden
#
his kept his the newspaper that he was actually going to read he if he kept it in his briefcase
#
that would be that would be simply self-censorship he went beyond that and he signaled that he read
#
he got his information from a paper that he did not read and this has all of the the downsides
#
that you mentioned that it communicates to other people that this is a valuable source
#
of information that they might use when they read it they get information that you think
#
is is not correct that is that is driving down and turning them down the wrong path
#
having gotten information from that paper day after day they start interpreting other events
#
in the light of what they've learned and so on so it does preference falsification is much more
#
pernicious than self-censorship unfortunately still we use self-censorship much more often in
#
contexts where what is really happening is preference falsification and knowledge falsification
#
where people are actually communicating facts that they that they know are wrong
#
and they're doing this because the correct facts stating the correct facts would as they see them
#
would get would possibly get them into trouble lying is not right because there are contexts
#
in which our goal is specifically not to be criticized but to make somebody feel good if
#
somebody is on their deathbed and you know that in fact there isn't much hope but you see no reason
#
to communicate that to the the your sick friend and you think that they will get some hope and
#
spend their last weeks their last months perhaps in somewhat more in greater comfort because they
#
have hope that you might say knowing that it's not true that you know i'm hoping that this treatment
#
will work will work i know of lots of people who have gotten well i believe that you're going to
#
get get well hang on even though you've heard from from the doctor that that's not the case
#
this is not preference falsification this is exactly you have decided what you are doing there
#
is it's not knowledge falsification even though it is lying of course it is lying for a purpose
#
that you believe is is noble and that it will serve a good purpose and delivering bad news to the
#
to an individual that is suffering already that is probably feeling quite pessimistic about their
#
chances anyway would not serve any any purpose so preference falsification is is is something that
#
is done deliberately to avoid social pressure or or in response to perceived social pressures the
#
pressures may not be may may may not be there you might just be imagining it but you would
#
deliberately mislead your audience about what you know what you want because you want certain
#
rewards you want to be promoted you want to be accepted or you want to avoid certain certain
#
punishments like people you know taking your paper away and people harassing you and spreading the
#
reputation that you're a you're a capitalist roader and you know you're a minister society
#
you just don't want to draw attention or draw attention on a bus or or something that is that
#
is a case of preference falsification or knowledge falsification and at a psychological level does
#
the burden of committing preference falsification also affect you and change you like at one point
#
you write about this burden and you say quote the source of the burden could be the guilt one
#
suffers for having avoided social responsibility or the anger one experiences for having failed
#
to live up to one's personal standards or the resentment one feels for having been induced to
#
suppress one's individuality whatever the nature of the discomfort it shows persistence top court
#
and i'm just thinking of the psychological impact of this that at one level the preference
#
falsification is i'm at someone's house i don't like the decor but i say something silly like hey
#
you know what refined taste you have but at another level there is a regime that is doing
#
truly horrible things and not only do i stay silent i might actually say something to support
#
that regime and that is that is corrosive to an extent that i imagine at some point the mass
#
becomes the face whatever shred of conscious or principles they were essentially vanishes so tell
#
me a little bit about this so so here you've pointed to a part of the book where if i was
#
writing today i would go further and say that when you falsify your preferences and falsify your
#
your knowledge you also implicate yourself in the perpetuation of the system that you
#
abhor now that of course changes you and of course it makes you feel guilty but it also makes you
#
resistant to changing your position because if you've been falsifying your preferences
#
and therefore supporting a regime for 20 years what does it mean to move to the other side publicly
#
it means that for 20 years you have it means accepting that you have done something that is
#
cowardly that that you are not proud of and so for that reason i think there is a psychological
#
mechanism that that additionally makes people who have falsified their preferences more resistant
#
to changing their preferences and more angered perhaps
#
when somebody else reminds them of what courage really means and reminds one does something
#
says something that reminds one of one's own cowardice of one's own reluctance to
#
speak speak one's mind and to say what one believes to be to be true and so the more you
#
the more that a society lives a lie the harder it gets to extricate oneself from that from that lie
#
and that is that that psychological mechanism i would add perhaps i would add a chapter to
#
the theoretical part of of the book if i was writing it today so that's the sort of thing i'm
#
i meant when i said there are things that i would do differently there's also a
#
a technical chapter i believe it was chapter five that you know was not really necessary that other
#
sorts of diagrams that sort of distracted more people than that illuminate i would probably take
#
that out and and is there a risk that persistent preference falsification quite apart from the
#
social effects which we'll discuss that persistent preference falsification can also change the way
#
you actually feel like you give a couple of examples of this one you talk about how the
#
sunni caliphs of the umayyad dynasty in damascus in the seventh century had this edict out that
#
everyone had to say bad things about the shia you know icons and people who were shia would
#
say that publicly they would say what they had to say but they would you know secretly perhaps
#
believe whatever they believed and and and i think there is a sense there that if you're
#
publicly forced to say something time after time it changes you as well i mean this was also a
#
debate a few centuries later as you point out when protestantism came to england and and there was a
#
debate about you know whether catholics should go and pretend to sort of be part of those congregations
#
that can they successfully pretend to be part of that congregation and retain what they were
#
before it came or will they automatically change just by being part of it and i'm thinking that
#
there is that natural human tendency there that you will change because how else can you justify
#
to yourself what you're doing rather than say that no no i really did change my mind and
#
this is who i really am and that can i think in modern social media i can even see that taking
#
us into what i could call you know maybe a false preference amplification whereas not only due to
#
preference falsification but you amplify it in strident tones to gain brownie points in your
#
ideological tribe so is that sort of a you know something you've come across yes and i think
#
you're absolutely right that this is what social media does and it trains you to communicate your
#
ideas that way it trains you to be more extreme more pure more pure and it leads to what one
#
might call purity spirals that people try to be purer than they actually are to avoid nuances you
#
start treating nuances as as a defect as opposed to just the truth that the truth is more more
#
complex and to start treating people who have nuances as somehow too soft and lacking lacking
#
courage and if you start doing it in one sphere of your life you start doing it in others as well
#
now this is where again psychology has has in psychology there have been experiments that show
#
that if you make people play a game in a particular way and if you you train them to
#
to make certain compromises they will make those compromises in other spheres
#
as as well there are behavioral spillovers so it becomes a way of of life and i believe this is
#
this is something that that happens in societies that where preference falsification
#
is common on big issues it bleeds then into smaller issues as well and so it it ends up
#
you you get from a society where people are accustomed to speaking their minds to one where
#
people are start are accustomed to as you say amplifying their preferences and not expressing
#
the nuances the doubts that they they have and so this can have a corrosive effect on
#
society some of the east european dissidents talked about this about how the the corrosive effect of
#
the all the performances people had to participate in under under communism how this affected
#
thinking across the board and i think they were on onto something and perhaps that is something
#
that needs to be that could one could one could develop as as one of the long-term effects of
#
preference falsification how it changes the way people operate and this might the the
#
effects across generations might be greater so in it if if you started as a as a shia who could
#
express this and then an edict comes down and you have to pretend that you're a you're a sunni you
#
may be able to go on with your life still believing that the people the shia icons being
#
demonized are are still still icons you don't believe what you say what about your children
#
what about the next generation if they hear all their elders always demonizing these people how
#
you might in your home try to raise them as as shia but if they say every see everybody
#
demonizing them they're less likely to accept that and if they can't read literature that
#
that praises them if they can't if they're never part of discussions that that mention
#
these shia icons in a positive light you're you may just scroll up as a sunni and that's i think
#
part of the part of the the motive behind the edict in the first place
#
you know you've got plenty of sort of political examples in your book you know the fall of
#
communism the soviet union is an obvious one there is a 1979 referendum in should iran be an
#
islamic republic where you know people were scared that the secret ballot may not be so secret so
#
you just play it safe and it you know i think it was a 98 vote out there and there was clearly
#
preference falsification at play and we've you know there are older examples like nazism for example
#
or we've discussed modern examples during the break like trump and modi i was really sort of
#
fascinated by a lot of the social examples of preference falsification because most individuals
#
would say that other people falsify i don't falsify i am who i am but that's not really how
#
it works like for example one of the examples that you brought up which is still you know which still
#
has resonances even though the book was written so long ago was wailing you know wearing the veil
#
where you point out that you know there was a strange contradictory thing happening that civil
#
libertarians who don't believe in coercion otherwise wanted wailing to be prohibited
#
and fundamentalists who have no issue with prohibition were suddenly saying human rights
#
every woman should have the right to wear a veil and you explained this contradiction beautifully
#
using the frame of preference falsification so tell me a bit more about that
#
so the libertarians who were saying and that their libertarians who still say this
#
today that veiling should be banned are operating under the assumption that most of the women who
#
are veiling are doing so because of social pressures because they're just born into
#
a fundamentalist family and they and their marriage prospects in their community
#
requires them to retain that to develop a certain image an image as a pious woman and
#
whether they veil is is treated as a as a measure of one's piety so the libertarians believe
#
that there are many people who are falsifying their preferences and that this is hurting them
#
this is hurting them in many ways through throughout their their life they're not they
#
their marriage prospects are limited to men who are looking for women who are veiled and
#
they would have broader marriage prospects if they if they did not veil they see a ban on veiling
#
as freedom enhancing as a liberalizing measure while at the same time the people who are trying
#
to force who are through social pressures of the kind that i that i mentioned who are participating
#
in those social pressures who are making these women wear the veil when they while they are
#
minors and then after their their adults wear them out of their own towards choosing to wear a veil
#
because of these these social pressures they advocate the freedom to veil because they believe
#
that more women than will veil and that this will increase the pressures and it will it will allow
#
the social pressures to produce the outcome that they desire and that the social pressures then
#
will will feed on themselves and more and more women will will veil so this is why both sides
#
are acting out of out of character when we speak about the general sort of the phenomenon that is
#
going on you know it strikes me that it could tip either way that you know you could have a society
#
which is relatively modern and everyone's having fun and you know etc etc and people who will
#
have that pressure to not will but equally you could have a different kind of society which is
#
fairly traditional and people who don't will have the social pressure to will because others are
#
and i'm imagining at some point there are tipping points and the danger is that this can become
#
either a vicious cycle or a virtuous cycle where you know the causation can go other way like the
#
chicken and the egg but it can get more and more traditional till everyone's veiled up or it can go
#
get more and more modern where nobody is veiled up and even that can be an issue because somebody
#
may want to veil up but you know feel forced not to veil up so is there your sense that these are
#
just accidents of history which determine this or would you say that there is a tendency for things
#
to slide towards illiberalism because those who are illiberal are more likely to be virulent and
#
vehement about their preferences as opposed to liberal people who are you know just chilling and
#
let everybody do whatever they do until it's too late so there are i think there are pressures
#
leading to extremism in one direction or the other in the absence of checks and balances
#
and so freedoms delayed is is devoted to exploring the absence of these checks and balances
#
in in the middle east and exploring the the reasons why they didn't emerge or they haven't
#
or the process of their emergence is is taking taking a long time now with with regard to veiling
#
now in in the middle east we're concerned with the the concern of many people is with pressures
#
to to veil that make people who don't want to veil put on put on a veil either government
#
regulations as in as in iran where all women are required to veil in in public or in countries
#
where the there's no law that requires it various social pressures of which can be to which political
#
actors can can contribute now in parts of the middle east in places like turkey like iran
#
like tunisia iraq and syria that had secular regimes for many decades the preference
#
falsification with regard to veiling was working in the other direction that to people who they
#
to advance in in business or in certainly in government or in education one have to be
#
unveiled that even if one wanted to veil one it was in one's interest in one's professional
#
interest in one's social interest it was economic interest ultimately to to not fail so preference
#
falsification worked for many decades in turkey and and iran in the opposite direction and this
#
generated a lot of resentments perhaps if this had if if the pressures had lasted for six seven
#
generations maybe you know no woman would would would think of a veiling and the issue would be
#
moved this was in fact part of the logic of of the the ban some of the supporters of assertive
#
what i call assertive secularism in the in freedoms delayed why some quite liberal people
#
supported it because under the influence of modernization theory they believed that religion
#
would go away was wasn't in the process of was weakening and it would ultimately go away and the
#
issue wouldn't that would be moved eventually if they could simply you know go through two or three
#
generations with the with the ban now it turned out that in fact veiling became a symbol of defiance
#
and there were enough people who were still veiling who were not in polite circles who
#
wouldn't be seen in in the in the posh neighborhoods of of istanbul or ankara or or tehran
#
who nonetheless continued to veil operated in circles where everybody veiled they didn't enjoy
#
the advantages state-connected advantages that unveiled women did but they their communities
#
nonetheless their large communities continued to perpetuate the the norm that women should
#
should veil in in public and they turned it into a symbol of defiance that got picked up by people
#
in tehran in the posh places in tehran in in istanbul and and other places who were still
#
unveiled even though they would they preferred to be to be veiled so ultimately it perhaps by
#
by turning the veil into a symbol of defiance and to a symbol into a symbol of liberation
#
they perhaps in the long run made more people veil than it was that if it was simply something
#
that was something that was not politicized so so preference falsification can have this this
#
effect that counterproductive that it can be counterproductive that it can in the long run
#
generate trends that are the opposite of what you're trying to generate it's so fascinating
#
would you say and i'm just thinking aloud here but would you say that in a general you know in
#
a general sense women have to do much more preference falsification than men all their
#
lives because they've sort of constantly i guess got to misrepresent you know their sexual desires
#
or their feelings and so on especially in you know more quote and quote traditional societies
#
they've got to hide what they really feel about men especially the men who are with them they've
#
perhaps got to hide what they really desire and the things that they would really like to do
#
and i would imagine that a women do much more of it and b therefore the stress on them would
#
simply be enormous i think that's the case and i think the sexual liberation movement that started
#
in the 1960s was partly a reaction to that that women did not want to be want to that wanted to
#
be freer to express their sexual desires to just as men did it was considered normal for men to
#
express their sexual desires or that women are women were supposed to be quiet about this and
#
in in public this would did the norm was reflected in how women dressed and of course the
#
more revealing fashions in in clothing that emerged in the 1960s and of course that
#
continue was was part of this this movement express one's sexuality and express one's
#
availability and and not pretend that one is actually you know not interested in in sex and
#
so on so i think that this is that this has traditionally affected women more in social
#
circles i think in politics probably historically it affected men more because men were more
#
traditionally at when when families were large they had many children because few few survived
#
and women were all over the world spending more time at the at the home and not involved with
#
with politics i think it probably political preference association probably affected
#
men more but you absolutely right the social preference association probably affected women
#
more now i think with that with the movement with the trans activism in in the united states and
#
i think it's it's probably that there are pressures on on men as well as women to
#
not hide their sexuality but also to to falsify their sexuality and pretend that they have
#
that they're binary when they're not when they feel heterosexual or or that they are actually
#
there they're born into the wrong type of body when they're actually gay or lesbian in the right
#
body but just with the wrong sexual preference it's something quite different to start saying
#
that you are in the wrong body and that you want to you want to transition this is something that
#
that is it is becoming so it has become socially cool so that we're seeing huge numbers of
#
especially girls in in high schools say that they're actually they feel masculine and they
#
want to they want to be given puberty blockers so that they can transition to being being a man
#
so that there's a great deal of preference falsification there i have no hard data to
#
back this up i haven't explored it myself but it but it is that i am sure absolutely sure the area
#
that we are going to see the we're going to see interpretations of the phenomena underway that
#
that are that show that preference falsification is playing a huge role abhigal shriar or shriar i
#
don't know how to pronounce the name sorry has a great book on this called irreversible damage
#
and i guess if you're you know playing the victimhood olympics you just claim as many
#
different kinds of victimhood as you can let's talk about sort of those you know the different
#
kinds of consequences of preference falsification social political economic and so on and let's
#
let's begin with the social consequences you know what are the social consequences of persistent
#
preference falsification so one of the social consequences is widespread ignorance and
#
misinformation if people are not expressing their preferences correctly they are misinforming
#
the world everyone who comes in contact with their with their preferences with their expressions
#
they're misinforming people about what policies are the ranking of policies in terms of whatever
#
metric is is relevant metric of efficiency metric of goodness so people are being misinformed about
#
that people are being misinformed about who the villains of society are in society and who the
#
heroes are so people who are actually doing great damage to society get put on a pedestal they win
#
all sorts of medals and so on preference false fires contribute to that contribute to all of
#
the honors that those people receive and by the same token they contribute to the demonization
#
of other people they miscommunicate information on the processes that matter to the efficiency
#
of the social system of getting solving problems efficiently they miscommunicate how
#
certain outcomes are certain outcomes emerge if there's sustained policy if there's sustained
#
poverty in a particular area is it just because there are certain villains who are doing bad
#
things to this community or that are stealing from this community or are there certain things
#
or now those they might be true but another factor might be things that the community is doing
#
to itself and is identifying those processes that the community is responsible for is it a reflection
#
of animosity toward the community hatred of the community is it is it a form of hate speech
#
or is it necessary speech to expose a process that has an easy solution that we can we can
#
actually put we can actually adopt policies that would stop that process and benefit the
#
the community that is suffering from persistent the persistent poverty so
#
so preference falsification can can do a lot of damage to particular people and not necessarily
#
the people the opinion makers the people who are who have a huge influence today on social media
#
or through their writings there is this concept of luxury beliefs that has been
#
that has emerged in in recent years beliefs that are held by people who are not influenced by the
#
consequences of of the beliefs i think it's many woke many elements of wokeism fall into this
#
category i would argue the people who are promoting wokeness are not themselves affected
#
by this there are in the united states there is a movement a large largely coming from the
#
the left against private schools and charter schools and in favor of public schools you look
#
at the the leaders of these movements and they send their kids invariably to private schools
#
now so they are promoting public schools and denying and or working against
#
people who don't have enough resources to send their kids to private schools
#
to to have the same choices through charter schools that compete with one another
#
that that wealthy people have and this does a great deal limiting the number of charter schools
#
and working toward reducing the resources that go to charter schools working against school choice
#
for people who are who are economically disadvantaged actually hurts
#
the disadvantaged people the poor people and and not the the people who are
#
who are promoting these these ideas in the united states many people on the left are surprised that
#
in every election including the election the 2016 election that brought trump to power
#
and every election since the share of minorities including blacks and hispanics who are voting for
#
the republican party is increasing and there are people on the left who
#
characterize this as false consciousness rising false consciousness because of fake news
#
i would argue that it is partly if not largely because the minorities are recognizing
#
that the left is advocating certain positions and pushing certain positions that is against
#
their interests i'll just end with with one other remark defund the police you know this became
#
this became popular well the defunding the police never reduced that that movement never reduced the
#
police protection for wealthy neighborhoods it the reduction happened in poor neighborhoods
#
which are suffering from much higher crime rates the people pushing and marching in favor of
#
defunding the police were not affected by the consequences of their their own policy proposals
#
yeah this is a brilliant point and the point that you made about education also resonates with me
#
here i've had episodes on education and i've spoken a lot about school choice and for those
#
of my listeners who may not really know what it is essentially the idea behind school choice is that
#
what we have in india is a government spending a lot of money on schools where the teachers don't
#
turn up where the quality of education is terrible and the idea behind school vouchers is that you
#
don't fund the schools you fund the education so parents get education vouchers they decide
#
because they are best placed to decide their care they care more most about their kid not some
#
random bureaucrat in delhi they decide where their kid goes to school which is obviously
#
based on the quality of education the kid will get and then different schools have to compete
#
to get those vouchers and therefore to get funded so that is one aspect of it where in principle it
#
is not some centralized bureaucrat who decides where your kid goes to school but the parents do
#
and the state continues funding that so it's it's not even privatization of any kind and the other
#
aspect again is that in india there are all kinds of disincentives for private education
#
and time and again james truly has a great book on this called a beautiful tree and different
#
studies have shown in our different cities that there will be these budget private schools for
#
really which take like tiny fees but which are still a lot for your auto drivers or your domestic
#
help and they would prefer to send their kids to those private schools spending what is for them a
#
decent chunk of income even though they might be operating out of slums or whatever so they're
#
relatively for us they're nothing rather than to a free government school because they really care
#
about their kid and constantly these regulations are made that put these schools out of business
#
like if you have a certain number of students you've got to have a playground this size
#
or you've got to have x number of toilets which really beyond the point doesn't make sense and
#
everybody making these laws opposing school choice you know putting these regulations in place their
#
kids are all going to fancy private schools you know their kids are not quite going there you know
#
reveal preferences much as you you know yeah so you know so yeah i had to get that little rant
#
out of the way what i was also really impressed by where you written in your book is the circular
#
causality of preference falsification where you write express preferences of social consequences
#
as when women choosing to wail induce conformist responses from someone who would rather stay
#
unveiled second the social climate fostered by preference falsification may transform the
#
preferences people are trying to hide an example would be the eventual disappearance of a religion
#
that is practiced only in secret stop quote and you know so one you have social stagnation and
#
two you have public opinion the public discourse being completely distorted you don't have a sense
#
of how people really feel and because paradigms change one funeral at a time people stop feeling
#
that way because no one is expressing it and has it have you come across examples where this is
#
reversed where this has changed dramatically where you know there has been a cascade in in a social
#
sense so she hasn't made a comeback in in some places in sunni-ruled communities
#
uh beneshiya were uh generation after generation uh prevented from uh expressing
#
their true religious beliefs and they practice shiism in in hiding in some of the communities
#
shiism did disappear they turned into sunni communities but in some others
#
they shiism survived and in these in all of these cases there were uh group sub communities
#
that that met and kept the religion alive in in secret and they reemerged the religion
#
uh resurfaced in this case shiism resurfaced and shia communities were reborn
#
when the sunni dominance uh disappeared or when the pressures with the pressures were uh limited
#
there are cases also of uh in spain during the spanish inquisition of course being a
#
uh being a jew or a or a muslim in public was was very risky so people went underground they
#
they started practicing mostly judaism in practice because most of the uh muslims want to remain
#
muslim and didn't convert to to christianity didn't want to convert to christianity just moved to
#
uh across the mediterranean to uh to north africa where they could continue practicing their
#
religion but jews had some jews had no place to go they practiced judaism secretly and several
#
generations later when uh the pressures had diminished they resurfaced as jews in some
#
cases in some other country so that's another case of a belief system surviving underground
#
and resurfacing resurfacing later yeah so the economic consequences again are something you've
#
written about in your book market signals get distorted and all that but i'm interested in
#
the political consequences of preference falsification also like at one level is fairly
#
obvious that an authoritarian regime can just survive much longer than it otherwise would
#
because nobody knows that everyone's against it and we've seen so many examples of that
#
but i'd like you to even in non-extreme conditions where there isn't exactly a
#
dictatorship in charge what are the ways in which preference falsification plays out
#
what are the implications for democracy and most importantly you know you you've spoken about
#
checks and balances a bunch of times what kind of specific checks and balances could prevent
#
whatever negative impact preference falsification does have on democracies and what would you know
#
what are the sort of incentives either for standing for or against politicians actually
#
getting putting these checks and balances in place so the the most critical checks and balances i
#
think involves civil society associations of people who come together to promote a particular
#
agenda and because they are organized they are resistant to the and because their members draw
#
strength from each other they are resistant to the pressures that make many other people falsify
#
their preferences and ideally you know in a democracy if you get a great deal of preference
#
falsification among members of the legislature within the executive branch perhaps judicial
#
branch this can only last until the next election when people can will be alerted by
#
by civil society by various organizations that the majority of the people actually want certain
#
policies to be changed and that politicians are falsifying their their preferences people because
#
and and the voters because they are falsifying preferences and they know it they can continue
#
falsifying their preferences but then go to the go on election day and vote for politicians who
#
are not playing this this game who are honest and you get a new set of politicians and the
#
preference falsification has done damage to society but it has been contained so there are
#
these checks and balances in the form of organizations established
#
generated from below and and operated by people who join the organization of their
#
of their free will so if you as long as you have a system that allows freedom of association
#
and that does not suppress these associations allow them to communicate freely to gather
#
information freely you have certain checks and balances in in in the system now the problem
#
arises when you when the no candidate can come forward can can gather enough resources to run
#
uh to become a candidate of either party in the u.s system or of any party in the any party
#
with a reasonable chance of gaining gaining power can actually advocate a certain position
#
and upset the equilibrium so that when voters go to go to the ballot box they don't have a a
#
realistic choice of bringing the power even if they are a majority and even if various
#
associations have have shown that a majority of people are opposed to a particular policy
#
nobody will will advocate abolishing that policy and replacing it so this may so just having civil
#
society by itself may not be enough if the system if the if the political systems becomes corrupted
#
or if the or if the parties essentially become indistinguishable on particular policies where
#
the where reform is just off the table it is considered beyond the pale that nobody
#
who is seriously a candidate for power would advocate reform so civil society is may not be
#
enough but it is absolutely vital to short circuit the process and to reduce the damages from from
#
preference falsification so another thing that you need is actually meaningful competition at the
#
at the top and so in latin american countries where there is democracy nobody will seriously
#
commit themselves in some some countries to disrupting the drug trade there's too much money
#
and the drug dealers have bought off politicians of of various kinds except some fringe politicians
#
who have no chance of getting elected or if they do get elected of having achieving meaningful
#
power so another thing that is necessary to ensure that ensure that the damage from preference
#
falsification is is contained is is limited is political competition and preventing the the
#
political system from being controlled by oligarchs who will who will block any any of the
#
major parties from advocating particular reforms or meaningful
#
reforms so this is also needed and of course you do need it helps to have a judicial system that is
#
independent that is not politicized that will will prevent the the power holders
#
from from weakening civil society when you start weakening civil society or even
#
groups advocating particular positions cannot get formed except perhaps on the very fringes
#
of of society then you can't the civil society cannot cannot play this balancing
#
role this is what we have in in the case of pakistan with all the the sectarian violence
#
i imagine this is happening in india as well that civil society is weakening part of the trouble
#
part of the problem is is that or civil society in certain areas this is the case in pakistan
#
wasn't strong to begin with and you know i i think in an indian context also there is the additional
#
twist that what if civil society is illiberal to begin with and pushes you in the wrong direction
#
you know earlier we were talking about examples of preference falsification in the indian context
#
and i mentioned the rise of modi you know for the listeners the column i wrote and that will be
#
linked from the show notes but i have another example for you when you you know spoke about
#
political parties and competition which is that every political party in india more or less has
#
pretty much taken it for granted that there is something called a hindu vote and they have to
#
seem religious so they will all go out of their way to seem religious in different ways there will
#
be you know visible visits to temples or there will be you know all kinds of antics by the main
#
opposition parties as well well you know it's almost like a default assumption that this is
#
kind of what we want to do and i'm sure the people in charge of those parties are not religious i'm
#
sure even the people in charge of our main party may not be religious at all but that's a falsification
#
that you have to do and i wonder if that falsification is necessary in the u.s as well
#
i remember when you know barack obama became u.s president i said great they've got their first
#
african-american president someday soon they'll have their first woman president is going to
#
happen they'll never have an atheist president right because i just think that it's almost
#
become the rigor for every candidate to profess some kind of religiosity and whether it is
#
you know because that really plays well in the political marketplace or whether they think it
#
plays well in the political marketplace because of the preference falsification of the voters
#
we don't know but it feels like that's preference falsification and play but the important point
#
like you said is freedom of association even if there is a time where civil society is happens
#
to be illiberal nevertheless as long as you have freedom of association you still have some hope
#
there and you still can have some bottom-up change happening yes and i i would on the observation
#
that the united states cannot have an atheist president i think that's spot on for the present
#
and it's for during my entire lifetime it's been the case that every presidential candidate
#
including obama himself has to make a point that they are religious obama who is not particularly
#
religious nevertheless went to while he was on the campaign trail went to church on some sundays and
#
hillary clinton did the same thing and every you know democratic uh democratic candidates will
#
do this the uh now many republican candidates do it as well some of them are genuinely
#
religious so there's no preference falsification there but i i think that the whether this will
#
continue is in doubt because religiosity has been declining in the united states united states was
#
always much more religious or still is much more religious than europe or or australia or
#
or the rest of the anglosphere and this was attributed always to the competition religious
#
competition and uh in the united states that people could find their whatever their religious
#
beliefs however liberal they were however conservative they were they could find a religion
#
that uh served their uh their taste well it turns out now that people are nonetheless
#
moving away from uh religion and uh one might say that they are just they are practicing
#
secular forms of religion including uh wokeism and malgayism but many of the uh yes the evangelical
#
churches perhaps the majority are part of the the trump coalition but many of his followers
#
including the people who who stormed the stormed capitol hill on january 6th right after the election
#
20 the 2020 election many of them are not particularly religious but and their religion
#
is trumpism and and magism so perhaps we're seeing the replacement of a transition from
#
from traditional religions to secular religions that have their own icons and their own
#
holy works and their own beliefs that cannot be a challenge that are being taken taken for granted
#
now so it may well be that the united states within several more voting cycles will actually
#
have an openly atheist candidate who feels no need to to hide that to to make compromises
#
and in fact it may well go in the opposite direction that it that that preference falsification
#
with regard to religiosity starts working in the opposite direction that religious candidates feel
#
a need to hide their religiosity this actually happened in in turkey during from after 1923
#
when uh an extreme form of assertive secularism uh was uh promoted and it was you could not
#
you could not get elected or or rise in the in the bureaucracy if you had a religious persona
#
we have many biographies some of them uh autobiographies some of them that were published
#
explicitly after the death of the person they wrote it and they they uh provided instructions
#
to the executors of their their estate that uh the book you know this would be unsealed
#
and published they actually say how they served in autoturk's cabinet and practiced the religion
#
they were devout muslims and they went along with all of autoturk's policies including his
#
his assertively secularist agenda and uh did not show their religion pretended to be irreligious
#
but still practiced their religion at home secretly and transmitted their religious values to their
#
their children and the fact that they did not want this published in their lifetime even when they
#
were no longer in public service speaks speaks volumes and turkey has gotten to a point now
#
where uh every religious candidate except those on the very far left but those in this but but
#
including candidates for a center-left party or social social democratic party they feel a need
#
to express religiosity and this is this is required for them to even become a candidate from
#
that party's list and the party plays pays lip service leftist parties pay
#
lip service to religious agendas to the watering down of turkish secularism
#
they they don't they don't object to increasing the numbers of hours that students in public
#
schools have to take religion they they don't want to take a position and the reason is that
#
they will be treated as as enemies of islam and because they're on the left because they have
#
from a because they come from a secularist tradition they're they're suspect anyway and
#
they're trying to erase that image they're trying to appear religious of all sorts of policies that
#
a majority of turks object to uh go through because even parties that are are full of people
#
who are naturally opposed to them and associations civil associations and
#
uh business associations that are opposed to uh the policies again don't don't speak up so
#
so this is preference falsification in the opposite direction yeah it's just fascinating how times
#
change from you know from one end of the pendulum to the other and normally i have no sympathy for
#
people who flaunt their religiosity but in in the case of these gentlemen in adatox cabinet who were
#
you know being religious secretly my full sympathy is with them because i'm against any kind of
#
coercion and it shows how even you know secularism can become a religion and you spoke of other
#
secular religions of the modern time and i wonder that as mainstreams crumble everywhere and you
#
have a splintering and a decentralization happening everywhere whether there will one day be a long
#
tale of religions and we can all you know go for a religion that has maybe just a thousand true
#
adherents as it were let's let's move on to your other two books really because a long divergence
#
in freedoms delayed are essentially just you know one large book it's the same theme and i
#
found it incredibly fascinating in terms of a the myths that it busts and b you know the deep insight
#
that it gives into those societies and there's a very small version of a similar myth being busted
#
that i experienced on my show when i invited the economist mukulika banerjee on the show and she
#
written a great book called the patan unarmed and the patan unarmed really looked at this
#
resistance movement before india's independent independence it was for india's independence
#
which happened in the northwest frontier provinces these guys were called the khudai khidmatgar or
#
servants of god and the leader was a man called khan abdul ghaffar khan and it was non-violent
#
resistance and they disappeared and they were put down by independent pakistan as soon as
#
um they got independence and the central question that mukulika asked was that patans are supposed
#
to be a violent people that's a stereotype you know they're tribal they're violent etc etc
#
where did the non-violence come from and what she found and i love the result of this is that
#
the non-violence was not a western import it wasn't an inspiration from gandhi but it was
#
inherent to their life and their culture and it came from within islam which is such you know
#
a delightful conclusion that goes against the typical stereotypes and what you've done is in
#
your examination and to begin with in the long divergence you examine why economies in the
#
middle east never really took off around the year 1000 ad they're doing as well or perhaps better
#
than europe everything seems to be in place institutions seem to be in place but then they
#
simply never take off and i love the way that you know you bust all the traditional explanations
#
about this and i'm going to ask you to sort of bust them again for my listeners the traditional
#
explanations of course is a the religion is hostile to commerce b that islam discourages
#
innovation and the third one which as you point out bernard louis the great historian has propagated
#
is that there was a lack of curiosity about the west and as you point out none of these are true
#
right so tell me a little bit more about this and did you believe any of these to start with or
#
was it in the process of writing the book that you realized that all of these stereotypes were
#
just completely wrong in in some cases i never believed them in the first place the i in other
#
cases i felt that as the case of bernard louis's argument that there was a lack of curiosity
#
that it's an oversimplification and that the lack of curiosity that that he observes
#
is a result of deeper processes and i think that louis had a certain bias that is common to
#
intellectuals particularly intellectual historians who think that all ideas all new ideas
#
must come from intellectuals so if you find that if you find intellectual stagnation
#
at the very top that means that you know the society is going to lack new ideas well new ideas
#
sometimes come from merchants from commerce that you know that they innovate themselves
#
and they they change the way commerce is done and the ideology follows it perhaps the ideology
#
perhaps the the top intellectuals play a role in developing the ideology and to putting it in you
#
know articulating a coherent ideology but the initial ideas actually come from below
#
innovations can come from anywhere curiosity can emerge from any part of the society so i felt
#
he wasn't explaining the whole thing he was certainly he was he certainly is right about
#
the lack of curiosity and the madrasas the the people who the professors and the
#
islamic colleges they they certainly stagnated in the 18th century they were still you know stuck in
#
ideas that ideas that were new in the 11th century 12th century but you know were not
#
were not relevant to their own time but that really didn't explain that you needed to look
#
at the the the entire system to see to identify the lack of innovation and you had to in in this
#
particular case look at why starting in the in the around the year 1000 when the middle east has
#
advanced commercial institutions why it doesn't generate even more advanced institutions and
#
where the west takes similar institutions and and use uses them as a basis for
#
developing more advanced institutions that then beget even more advanced institutions and
#
new markets and new types of organizations and so on and then they start gaining power
#
they affect the whole political system why did this not happen in the middle east so i
#
had to look at the incentives in in in place the the incentives of merchants in the middle ages
#
and compare the the incentives of merchants in the middle east operating under islamic law
#
using islamic contractual forms with those their their counterparts in in europe and what happened
#
is that the commerce that was atomistic in europe gradually became less atomistic as businesses
#
started scaling up and this scaling up process took place in many many stages stages generating
#
new organizational forms this scaling up process did not take place in the the middle east so the
#
people in the in the 19th century early 19th century were still operating using were still
#
using in commerce and finance organizational forms that could not be scaled up and that were quite
#
appropriate to a medieval economy but were not suited to taking advantage of the new technologies
#
that had emerged from from europe and were that were available for being transplanted to
#
the middle east so identifying those incentives why the incentives were different in the
#
differed between the middle east and and europe was the the challenge so it wasn't my what i
#
ultimately came up with the argument that i came up with is not one that says okay
#
in islam generated the following rules and those rules were because the system because
#
islam is a conservative religion because the ulama the muslim clerics were naturally were
#
naturally conservative opposed to innovation so therefore you know innovations didn't take place
#
no absolutely absolutely not many innovations did take place at every stage you you see innovations
#
that took place but the innovations were were limited and the innovate and they were not
#
suited to the the challenges of the 19th century too many prerequisites were were missing and in
#
the 19th century when a need emerged to transplant european institutions in a hurry to be able to
#
take advantage of the of new technologies there was very little resistance from from clerics
#
it was the religion did not stand in in the way and if you look at the religion early on
#
many of the institutions identified with with islam that became part of islamic law
#
that were promoted in the name of islam actually were not generated or did not
#
were not mentioned in the in the quran or defined in the quran they they were borrowed later from
#
the romans and the persians the islamic civilization became so successful because it was actually
#
very open very open early on to to change now eventually as this can happen to any system no
#
matter how efficient initially it can become resistant to change it can become it can get
#
captured by people with a particular agenda and of course this happened and in madrasas people
#
who had received an education that didn't prepare them for the world in in 1600 well they taught
#
what they learned and they resisted new ideas because new people with new ideas would displace
#
them as in fact happened to them in the in the 20th century at the turk shot all shut down all
#
of these institutions and you got modern modern universities and there was a little resistance
#
there was by that time there were very few people who actually would would protect them
#
so eventually this this did happen but it's possible for organizations to get
#
to get captured and this certainly happened so just to sum up the sort of misconceptions
#
you've already cleared people have said that the religion is hostile to commerce but you've
#
pointed out that middle eastern muslims actually dominated trade emporia in the middle ages whether
#
it's east africa middle east central asia indian ocean you know sharia institutions were actually
#
advanced for the time to the speculation that islam discourages innovation you've said that
#
there was lots of innovation in the middle ages government organizations tax systems
#
but not in a bunch of other places and to bernard louis's claim of lack of curiosity about the west
#
you've pointed out that you know they were curious enough about advances in weaponry and
#
medicine you know they translated military manuals but no books of economic content another common
#
misconception that comes up and this is a misconception that comes up a lot in the
#
indian context as well is about about colonialism where they'll say that oh european imperialism
#
kept them poor and you know they sucked all the blood out and their economy suffered and that is
#
also something they say about india and the truth is much more complex it is not that this is
#
completely false but the truth is incredibly complex and so on and so forth but in the
#
context of the middle east what's been your response to this well of course the same argument
#
is made with respect to middle east to explain the middle east under development and all sorts
#
of problems of the region it is said that european colonizers distorted various incentives they
#
monopolized various markets and so on i think this is the the balance sheet of colonialism is
#
mixed of course colonizers were interested in their own in enriching those who finance
#
a colonization they didn't come there for for charity just to do do good they were interested
#
in in advancing their own interests but that is consistent with the with the notion that the
#
colonizers are so introduced all over the world and more so in some places than others they
#
introduced various new institutions they created markets that didn't exist before they created an
#
example through the example of their own lifestyles that they stimulated the emergence of new
#
sectors new ways of doing business new ways of of learning and they have through their presence
#
through their examples they have done a lot of good to many places including i would say india
#
including the the middle east the many innovations that they played a role
#
in bringing to the middle east and and india have not been discarded after the colonizers
#
left this is true for india this is true for for the middle east the stock markets that were set up
#
by with the help of europeans have have survived the their departures and the
#
new stock markets have been opened this has enabled the accumulation of capital the provision
#
of capital to large organizations the law of corporations law of business corporations as
#
well as the law of charitable corporations this was borrowed from the from the west and has done
#
a lot of good and enabled development in these societies so when when it's easy to identify
#
harms that they did and resources that they took and the turks will point out the all the
#
antiquities that they stole and that are in or that they took or and they will say that they
#
tricked the sultan into into giving them priceless antiquities that are now in in berlin in in the
#
british museum in paris at the met and so on well the truth is is more complex these antiquities
#
were not being protected and the reason the sultan said okay you can take it is because
#
that they were not valued this is not to say that they didn't that colonizers didn't take all all
#
sorts of things without the sultan's permission they smuggled out all sorts of of things that
#
and and they have continued to do that in in recent times and the turkish government like
#
the egyptian government not to mention the government of greece the government of italy
#
have been suing various museums to get back certain pieces sometimes successfully so this
#
is just one example of transfer of resources to the to the west was done without permission
#
where theft outright theft was involved but it's not the case that all of their business operations
#
did harm to the region they started various sectors established the first manufacturing
#
enterprises of of certain certain kinds they many locals learned how to operate them from
#
foreigners these sectors are now entirely in the hands of middle easterners and but they didn't
#
middle easterners didn't learn all the necessary technologies and the necessary know-how financial
#
know-how and and technological know-how and commercial know-how and organizational know-how
#
on their own they learned they learned a great deal from westerners and that and then they
#
transmitted what what they learned to other generations so there are positive
#
there are contributions that the colonizers made to the societies that they that they colonized
#
this is not widely recognized or i should say that it's not articulated as commonly as it
#
as it should people who people recognize this but it's not fashionable to say and it's it's
#
blaming the colonizers often provides a cheap alternative to exploring deeply
#
what is what was wrong to begin with with the colonized societies where they actually fell
#
behind what mechanisms played played a role in causing these societies to fall behind when
#
they weren't behind initially these these sorts of questions are not pursued honestly in these
#
societies and the colonialism or the colonial harm explanation plays a role in preventing
#
the exploration of these societies and the the and in that sense this notion that colonial harm
#
harms these societies not that it not there isn't a grain of truth i love the pity where you put it
#
in the book where you wrote observing that the middle east fell prey to european imperialism
#
pinpoints a late symptom of underdevelopment without accounting for the economic inertia
#
that resulted in political subjugation and i like that formulation also the economic inertia that
#
resulted in political subjugation you know in a modern context my friend nathan paul likes to say
#
that a rising gdp is the best foreign policy and i guess that is true across times but i want to
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talk about that inertia now where you've pinpointed that one of the key reasons that that economic
#
inertia existed in the first place that that long divergence took place it was rooted in
#
islamic law and and i found that section really fascinating where you talk about the inheritance
#
law and the marriage laws which kind of changed the incentives of the region completely so tell
#
me more about that so to develop commercial organizations to develop advanced organizational
#
forms that allow many people to pool resources with many many workers and within indefinitely
#
living organizations which is what is needed to exploit modern technologies efficiently you need
#
to have the incentive to move from simpler organizational forms to advanced forms so the
#
in in the middle east the two laws that you mentioned both part of islamic law the islamic
#
inheritance system and the islamic law of of partnerships together they limited the
#
accumulation of capital and limited the ability to maintain successful businesses across generations
#
and the these limitations denied the middle east the incentives or middle east merchants the
#
incentives to create more advanced organizational forms so in this sense islamic commercial
#
regulations were not designed to limit growth they were quite well suited to conditions of the
#
middle ages where you were operating through technologies that did not require the pooling
#
of huge amounts of capital for long periods but when this became necessary the absence of
#
incentives to generate more advanced organizational forms conducive to pooling resources on a large
#
scale for long time periods this started to to bite and so what was the the law of partnerships
#
was a law of contracts that allowed you and me if you had capital and i was i was willing to provide
#
labor i had particular skills that are valuable to you we could form a partnership to to do
#
commerce and we could renew the we could renew the contract again and again if we're both
#
satisfied with the outcome we're both both profiting but we if we for our partnership
#
once we go or we retire from business that partnership is is is gone now another thing is
#
if in spite of the contract law we do establish together an organization you as the capital
#
provider the an organization that employs lots and lots of people okay and it's a successful
#
business neither of us is able to pass that business on to the next generation and there we
#
we come to the islamic law of inheritance which was quite egalitarian for the middle ages it was
#
that wasn't it wasn't completely egalitarian it gave half share to women in the family as opposed
#
to the men of the same status so the daughter got half as much as a son mother got half as much as
#
father and so on now what what matters here is that everybody did get a share and it was impossible
#
for a successful businessman to disinherit anyone or to designate a particular person
#
as the recipient as was possible in in europe europe had a quite in egalitarian or there were
#
many inheritance systems in europe but one that became very popular in places that did lead the
#
industrial revolution the low countries england northern northern germany parts of parts of france
#
that industrialized first these places had had primogenitor so the the business went in its
#
entirety to a single person now this is not a just perhaps if they're if they're five five sons
#
four of them don't get any part of the business daughters don't get get anything it's not fair to
#
them but it does have one advantage in terms of economic development which is that it gives the
#
son to develop the skills to continue the business knowing i'm talking about the oldest son to knowing
#
that the business will fall to him and he and he inherits a business that he knows how to operate
#
and steps in his father's shoes and he can take that business and grow it grow it some more a
#
successful business doesn't disappear now when you have successful businesses that are continuing
#
across generations and it's going to grow more it's natural for people to want a legal system
#
that is going to allow this to happen smoothly this is the sort of thing that happened precisely
#
because a need arose precisely because you had long living and growing businesses and as businesses
#
grow you have information problems information acquisition problems communication problems
#
emerge and so moving to a different organizational form becomes advantageous to solve problems that
#
didn't arise when your business was much smaller this sort of thing did not happen in the middle
#
east this dynamic did not get started in the in the middle east because capital was being
#
dissipated you have not not a single example of a business dynasty that that continued several
#
generations with each generation adding to the adding to the business and expanding it in one
#
direction or another the way we had in in in italy already in the 1100s 1200s like the not to
#
mention in later times there are all sorts of business families like the medichis that are
#
that stay in business numerous generations and grow into grow great this does not uh this does
#
not happen so these laws that were well suited to the middle ages and perhaps were more egalitarian
#
than the counterparts elsewhere and in this case i'm i'm referring to the inheritance system
#
did have unintended and unanticipated consequences
#
because they didn't incentivize they were not created with a particular dynamic in mind they
#
were not created in order to limit economic growth but they did have that effect so the
#
institutions that did not emerge organically from below through innovations not by intellectuals
#
but innovations by merchants and and financiers these added to the legal framework
#
the necessary legal framework had to be transplanted from abroad and of course when
#
it was transplanted there was a there was a learning process through operating the operating
#
under the new organizational forms you can't from one day to the next move from uh atomistic
#
an atomistic commercial sector to one where you have large players and expect everybody to
#
trust the large players and be comfortable instead of dealing with you know somebody known to the
#
family to dealing with the deal with an impersonal organization this this takes time and this is one
#
of the reasons why uh catching the catching up process in india in in the middle east and
#
various other places is taking many generations so i found it really fascinating how islamic law
#
per se you know does not have an issue with the number of partners or the duration of a company
#
recontracting as possible all of that is there but indirectly their inheritance laws play such
#
a big part and you know at that time in the thousands you look at the economic at circa
#
1080 you look at the economic institutions are pretty much equal and it would seem that in the
#
middle east you have you know more egalitarian laws but the inheritance laws as you point out
#
you know two-thirds of the entire estate of a man is a reserve for extended relatives female share
#
is one half of male share it's just messy and what this does is that you know the property doesn't
#
stay intact over generations and therefore as you've pointed out in the book a lot of partnership
#
will really be a question of if i supply something to you for one particular shipment we make a
#
partnership but for the next shipment we make another partnership and that's just crazy you
#
know you've got a great phrase small and simple and ephemeral companies you know so as you've
#
pointed out all the way to the 17th century your typical partnership is just two people 90 percent
#
of partnerships are just two people maybe three maybe four the largest you point out was a 23
#
percent partnership that lasted three months but there are very few people involved you don't have
#
joint stock companies they don't last and because they don't last and you know you've got limited
#
partners you you can't accumulate capital you can't aim for scale because of that a legal system
#
that would support that doesn't evolve because of that initiatives that would come into play
#
like you know modern accounting double entry bookkeeping etc they don't happen and it seems
#
that they are just kind of stuck there and imperialism as you say happens much later you
#
know it's it's like you know a symptom of their weakness rather than a cause of their poverty so
#
tell me a bit about how this then begins to change like first of all you know you point out how
#
innovations always come from below and i completely agree with that where innovations happen for the
#
right incentive so of course they will happen from below from merchants from traders and
#
inventors and so on and so forth but what is the discourse of the time for example within the
#
middle east like are there people who realize that there are these institutional problems
#
is it cautious to you know did anyone else before you blame islamic law for this you know and how
#
does change eventually happen so there are some changes that actually occur that certain innovations
#
are actually made but they don't resonate with anyone so nothing happens so you mentioned
#
accounting which modern accounting double entry bookkeeping arrives to you know becomes is widely
#
adopted in the middle east in the 19th century and it it it and it comes from and the borrowing is
#
from the west modern accounting now this is not for lack of imagination because there are even before
#
double entry bookkeeping spreads in europe there is there's at least one
#
merchant in the middle east who writes a manual describing a new very useful accounting system
#
and he ends up using it in his own businesses and he writes a book so this and the book is
#
available in in numerous libraries that has been passed come down to the present in numerous
#
libraries and baghdad and in egypt in in istanbul so it was available but it it was not perceived
#
as useful because if we are dealing with ephemeral partnerships involving few people
#
we don't need a standardized system because we are not our uh we are not going to be
#
we're not establishing a company with with with a changing workforce with the new
#
people coming in needing to understand what the earlier people had done and so if it's just two
#
people who know each other well who trust each other well they can develop whatever accounting
#
system they uh they want and and you know and they they can keep records in a well that is
#
intelligible to to both now so for that reason even though double entry bookkeeping was developed
#
it wasn't adopted widely and in fact people were not until accounting historians
#
pointed out that double entry bookkeeping had been invented in the middle east independently
#
of the west middle easterners were not aware that this was actually something
#
you know an accounting system that was actually present in their own culture it came to the
#
came to the middle east as i said as a western western innovation so some innovations had already
#
taken place but they hadn't really taken taken root in the commercial culture or the financial
#
culture other innovations had took place but were not granted legitimacy in the sense of
#
becoming part of the law that is taught through judges uh so they can adjudicate cases conflicts
#
involving the new ways of doing business so there were reforms that took place a very rudimentary
#
decentralized stock market emerged in the middle east already in the 1600 1700s that was not like
#
the stock markets that emerged that had already emerged in london and amsterdam that involved a
#
building where all stock transactions were recorded you could check to see whether the
#
stocks that are being were being sold to you by mr a actually belonged to mr a and that there
#
wasn't any fraud or you could go back and look at the history of the uh the stock which is what
#
stock markets do also stock markets uh ensure that you don't pay much too much for the shares
#
that you're buying because they're all shares are being traded at the same time there's a market
#
that an arbitrage is is taking place so so it wasn't a stock market in that sense but company
#
shares were being were were bought and sold quite widely in various cities but and judges were
#
recording these but not dealing with disputes involving them merchants had to resolve this on
#
their own and not providing any centralized registry so this was open to fraud i could
#
sell you shares in my other company that i have in one court and then i could find somebody else
#
and five minutes later at that other court sell the same shares so now this is not something that
#
could happen in the london exchange and of course when eventually when modern stock market opened
#
in istanbul and alexandria and cairo the traditional stock market disappeared because
#
the the western innovation was superior so there were some innovations that did take place but
#
because of the limitations of the various other limitations they didn't they weren't as advanced
#
as alternatives developed elsewhere but many innovations many necessary innovations did
#
not take place because the incentives were not there for example the business corporation
#
wasn't developed the joint stock company didn't develop from from below because there were no
#
incentives to develop it now did people recognize what was you know what was the problems did the
#
reforms that ultimately took place by borrowing all sorts of institutions from from the west just
#
just transplanting them in its entirety borrowing a you know taking a commercial code the french
#
commercial code and and translating it and with minor differences just making it your own commercial
#
system this ultimately did happen which was which happened because the elites of various societies
#
recognized that they had fallen behind recognized that their legal system was was hopelessly
#
inadequate and that the incentives to develop something new were not there and and it made
#
sense just to borrow this this legal system along with legal specialists who could who could
#
interpret it for a while you did have in the middle east foreign judges who initially after
#
a new commercial code was was adopted helped help adjudicate cases and trained new lawyers
#
and eventually of course locals took took over now before that there are people who
#
recognize that something is wrong they recognize that they are falling behind and one reaction is
#
of course to look to the past and say you know we used to be honest and now there's so much
#
corruption and that's the cause that we just need to you know put more emphasis on honesty and we
#
need to enforce islamic law islamic norms more more tightly they're look you know they're looking
#
to to a glorious past and they're trying to revive that but not everyone is there are some people who
#
sense that there is something to learn from the west sultans are and and elites
#
recognize already in the 1700s that there's something to be learned from the west and they
#
send their trusted aids to to the west to go there and live there for six months nine months
#
a year and come back with a report what is it that we could do to give our our own merchants
#
or enable our merchants to compete with the western merchants that are taking over all sorts of
#
markets what is it that we can do to stimulate our financial markets and provide more more capital
#
they do send people to the west the and these people are quite open to things that are different
#
in the west and they do report them the problem is they don't notice some things that are that are
#
critical to western success
#
but that they have no frame to place it in so i'll give you a concrete example
#
one of the an aide who sent in the late 1700s to uh to europe to uh specifically to vienna and
#
some german cities to to observe what it is that can be uh transplanted to uh the middle east goals
#
and is particularly intrigued by the bureaucracy the efficiency of the hobsburg bureaucracy and
#
spend so much time studying how there are various departments divisions things that are
#
and specializations and reports that there are these specializations and that the offers the
#
opinion that the bureaucrats ottoman bureaucrats are not being given the right skills too much
#
emphasis is being placed on a good calligraphy and and things but there are other skills that
#
bureaucrats uh should have that learning foreign languages is important if you're going to understand
#
your rivals in the west some things they uh you know he reports but he doesn't in all the time
#
that he spends in europe he doesn't notice that there's a stock market it doesn't even though
#
there's you know he notices big buildings where a certain type of trade is taking place doesn't know
#
where to place this and what what good is coming of this why would you need it and in fact in the
#
there is no in the atomized economy where you have just small companies that are small ephemeral
#
partnerships that are going to dissolve i mean you don't you don't need this
#
so some innovations are not reported of course by the 100 years later by then people recognize this
#
because you have the companies who have shares traded in amsterdam or london or other stock
#
markets or paris other stock markets in the uh in in europe they had open branches in the middle
#
east people start trading their the stocks of companies that have major branches in their
#
subsidiaries in in the middle east so so people become aware of how capital is is raised and how
#
capital in the middle east is being raised to support these companies that are headquartered
#
elsewhere and it occurs to people that they might might as well use something like a similar
#
organization to raise capital for local companies locally based companies that are going to be
#
that are they're not going to be transferring profits abroad and they realize that if you're
#
going to have a stock market there you have to have a legal system to support companies who
#
see our large companies whose shares will be trained so gradually people recognize the the
#
need for a new commercial system a new commercial code that will replace islamic law that that
#
would and and that would limit initially the reach of islamic law you would essentially be
#
taking commerce out of the uh the scope of islamic courts and you would have
#
you would set up specialized commercial courts which would which would enforce western laws
#
and educate cases disputes involving companies established under islamic laws the need gradually
#
arises and then people who go to europe to make observations in in europe and start and write
#
reports they're much more sophisticated because they start reporting about the european banking
#
system comparing the european banking system to the primitive credit market in atomized credit
#
market in uh credit markets i should say in the in the middle east and they uh now can
#
report and they're interested in the in in the stock markets and of course they're interested
#
in a lot of other aspects of the modern economy so this happens gradually but you cannot move from
#
you cannot even notice everything about a different system
#
at the moment that you recognize you have a problem
#
and transplanting some uh institutions would be would be useful and i'm i'm i'm struck by
#
how you know all of this complexity that developed in european institutions began with
#
something as primitive as primogenitor you know and and and just to define that for my
#
listeners it really means that your eldest son gets all the property so there's no
#
divvying it up one definite person gets a property that changes the incentives you can plan for the
#
future and therefore you can plan for scale and you can pump in money and incentives are
#
completely different and in all the countries where you know this is popular scandinavian
#
countries most of england northern france belgium holland parts of switzerland you know the economy
#
takes off because of this incentive and because companies are getting bigger and firms are not
#
small and simple and ephemeral as you put it you know you've got scale you've got innovations like
#
modern accounting you've eventually got the joint stock company and of course once you have the
#
joint stock company the inheritance laws no longer matter because what difference does it make the
#
company keep surviving and all of that but for it to emerge in the first place you kind of needed
#
this and and that strikes me as such an irony that when you for example state that one reason
#
that you know the middle east remained poor for so long was islamic law people will interpret that
#
as a criticism of islamic law but actually the islamic law in question was pretty progressive
#
for its time much more egalitarian than western law it is just a completely unforeseen consequence
#
that you know this stuff happens tell me also about the other fascinating aspect of it where
#
you point out that outside of commerce institutions with indefinite lives and capital were possible
#
and you talk about wax in particular so tell me a little bit about that about these institutions
#
and you know and again they seem to be magnificent innovations when they first come up with the best
#
intentions and oh this is for the good of society but unintended consequences and etc etc so tell me
#
tell me more about that huge huge unintended consequences and i deal with them both in the
#
long divergence and freedoms delayed with emphasis on politics and one and and economics in in the
#
me both aspects a walk a walk is an islamic trust that is established by a single individual
#
never a group this is important a single individual who specifies in the walk of deed
#
that is filed in in court specifies how the resources that he or she is immobilizing
#
is making part of the walks endowment will be used in perpetuity
#
what services will be provided who will you know what groups will will benefit now
#
this is not the the walk was not part of the initial islamic institutional complex it's not
#
mentioned in in the quran there is no no trusted recollection of the prophet's life
#
that involves a walk now as far as we we know the earliest walk was established in the 8th century
#
about 100 years after the rise of islam in response to the insecurity of top elites
#
the top elites were apart from the the ruler the the sultan were typically at in that period
#
military officials who had who had participated in the conquest of
#
iraq and syria and other places they were given large land grants the problem that the reason
#
they felt insecure is that the land that of course made them very wealthy wealthy people
#
the land could be taken away from them during their lifetime so that though it couldn't be they
#
couldn't leave it then to their to their children so it made them not only themselves insecure but
#
their their children insecure and so the the sultans realized that to earn the loyalty of
#
their top elites they needed to give them a way of gaining security but the sultan wanted in giving
#
them the ability to establish walks that would that could be used partly or largely for their
#
own benefit in perpetuity and that could be used to transfer to circumvent the islamic inheritance
#
system and transfer large resources like huge plots of productive land to descendants the sultan
#
then realized that in in giving this right to his top elites he was earning their loyalty
#
but in return for that loyalty you get get something in return so the quid pro quo was that
#
they would their walks had to provide some charitable services services that would benefit
#
people other than their their own family and so this served the sultans well because the social
#
services that would were provided by walks increased their legitimacy they often were
#
established in strategic areas in in the cities which were especially important to secure sultans
#
were afraid of riots in in cities that could they could diminish their authority they could
#
they could topple them so norm got established whereby wealthy people set up walks that could
#
be used partly to provide them security and provide wealth that they could leave to their
#
descendants simply by appointing an older son for example as the next executor and appoint other
#
members of the family to various positions to provide services with a handsome salary so they
#
could take care of their family give them give them security at the same time contribute to the
#
legitimacy building the legitimacy of their empire or or their their state now the population
#
at large people who were not elites which was the vast majority of the population also benefited
#
because these walks provided all sorts of services as charity for free they there were bath houses
#
there were hospitals that they built soup kitchens roads bridges parks mosques you you name it schools
#
that benefited people and people saw the walk system as something that was was giving them all
#
sorts of things for free so this was a win win win for everybody in society and the sultan of course
#
didn't have had less to worry about in terms of providing social services as you know needs arose
#
these were communicated among the among the top elites what was needed and invariably there was
#
there was somebody a rising commander who or rising bureaucrat who made enough money to be
#
able to establish a walk finish started looking for security and of course he didn't establish
#
just a random service he established a service that was particularly needed which also kept him
#
in the good graces of the of the sultans this was a magnificent system at one level a win win win
#
system that allowed empires to to prosper to receive all sorts of all sorts of services
#
it lifted many burdens from the shoulders of sultans they didn't have to worry about
#
providing services themselves local elites built the necessary services and travelers to the region
#
would in their travel books comment on how well served the locals were how many services they
#
were and they marveled at the fact that these services were for for free so this was a system
#
that and and urbanization was higher in the middle east for for many centuries after the rise of
#
the walk and the spread of spread of walks and part of the reason was
#
is the walk and then all the services that they provided they enabled cities to to grow now
#
for all these benefits and advantages the walk had a serious economic drawback it also had a
#
political drawback in terms of political development which i will come to next but let me start with
#
economic drawback which is that the not even the founder of a walk was entitled under the law
#
to change the deed the deed was once the deed was established you couldn't accept by using
#
through corruption you could not alter the way the resources were were used so this had the effect
#
of the fact that walks the use of resources placed in walks could not be redirected
#
had the effect that over long periods of time especially if technologies were were changing
#
and needs were changing relative prices were were changing it kept the prevented the reallocation
#
of resources it denied resources to new sectors that would be beneficial to to develop now i
#
should point out that resources placed in a walk immobilized within a walk for considered sacred
#
so this made the walks quite safe expropriation was quite common in the
#
middle east up to modern times but it was but whereas private property could be expropriated
#
by sultans and was of course and more in some periods than than others more in some places than
#
others walks were rarely touched so as you can imagine a lot of resources flowed into these
#
walks that that locked resources into particular uses and prevented the reallocation of resources
#
depending on the part of the middle east depending on the city up to 40 50 even 60 percent of all
#
private resources could be immobilized in in walks now this wasn't a huge problem
#
although it was a problem even in the 1500s 1600s but it wasn't a huge problem in that through
#
corruption you know there could be leakages and resources could be released and over time and
#
eventually redeployed in a different different way it became a huge problem when technology
#
started changing dramatically and and providing making a city have a proper proper water supply
#
water was no longer a matter of establishing 600 water fountains each by a different walk
#
each with its own own endowment it was a matter now of providing you know developing a utility
#
or a government agency or municipal agency that would provide that would supply water piped water
#
to businesses and to the homes well when it was when the technology was available to do this
#
connect pipes from a dam to provide running water throughout a city the resources that would be
#
needed for such a system existed the walks had a lot of wealth controlled a lot of wealth but they
#
financed an out-of-date
#
form of supplying a method for supplying water through two fountains those resources could not
#
be used under the law those resources could not be used to fund now a new water system
#
and so and i could give you many many other such examples and so what happened is that
#
the resources could not be reallocated rapidly enough without dismantling the the walk system
#
and this ultimately through particle corruption through various privatizations that should never
#
have occurred under the law with clerics signing off on them allowing these allowing walks to be
#
all the valuable resources in walks to be privatized leaving them with their less productive
#
resources so they couldn't provide the services and eventually you know just went bankrupt
#
but states also started using one excuse or the other to effectively nationalize these walks so
#
the old walk system is is gone throughout the the middle east but this took took a long time
#
reallocating the resources took two centuries two and a half centuries where if if the resources
#
had not been frozen within walks the resources could have been reallocated
#
more quickly so this became a factor this magnificent system walk system that allowed
#
the provision of high quality social services by standards of the time to huge cities in a
#
decentralized way that would that libertarians would would love within autonomous organizations
#
this became a handicap later so again an organ a system that is working quite well
#
an islamic system that is working quite well becomes a handicap later now there's also a
#
political effect which is that the walks are apolitical set up as apolitical organizations
#
one of the reasons why groups are not allowed to establish walks and only individuals is to
#
avoid empowering collectivities because of five people establish it then you know why not 10 why
#
not 50 why not 500 and you can have people immobilizing resources within organizations
#
collective organizations that can challenge the rulers authority but these are these organizations
#
these walks did not could have served in principle these walks could have served as the
#
starting points for civil society but that didn't didn't happen we don't have any example of walks
#
serving as the collective voice of the constituency that was receiving services
#
walks also the authority to run the walk was given to a single individual the caretaker of
#
the walk initially that was the founder and then they were you know they were usually it was the
#
the founder's son or relative or somebody eventually appointed by a by clerics it was
#
always a single person the the constituents the the the beneficiaries the intended beneficiaries
#
of the service the intended beneficiaries of a hospital of a school had absolutely no say
#
in operating it they could not put pressure on the walks management the caretaker to modernize
#
something to improve the efficiency of the delivery of of services they had no right to do this
#
the walk caretaker was under no obligation to share any information about the resources about
#
or to consult the beneficiaries about how services could be improved improved in under
#
the law he just followed the the deed and and that was it and it was ultimately his interpretation of
#
of the deed if he wildly misinterpreted the in in principle the courts could come after him
#
and the courts could could remove a caretaker who was abusing his his authority and occasionally
#
this did happen but often clerics just became the partners in crime and for a cut they just let the
#
the caretaker a dishonest caretaker embezzle money so beneficiaries could not have had no
#
power over the walk they even many beneficiaries could not use the resources of the walk to project
#
power they could not the walk did not provide them any forum for discussing their common
#
needs and therefore to cut long story short this is developed in much greater detail and in freedoms
#
delayed they did not establish the the elements of a civil society there isn't a single example
#
from the middle east of a movement a reform movement that started through that was based
#
in in walks there isn't a single ideology or or new belief system about what is needed
#
to solve society's problems that emerged through through walks that was channeled through multiple
#
walks cooperating there isn't a single example of a of a coalition of rocks that there is no
#
association of fountain walks or hospital walks was was formed to solve the shared problems of
#
hospitals or the shared problems of fountains what's what to lobby the government for services
#
that they the government could provide to make their services more efficient nothing like this
#
emerges so the even though huge resources were controlled by walks they were politically impotent
#
and so this is among the reasons why freedoms individual freedoms didn't develop in the middle
#
east why the middle east lacks even a single democracy now why it is the least democratic
#
part of the world why it is the most unfree or the least free region of of the of the world
#
it has a lot to do with the uh with the walk once again the walk system was not developed
#
in order to prevent the uh in order to reduce political development in the long run and block
#
democracies the when walk law was developed the sultan of course was wanted to
#
had an interest in preventing walks being used for establishing coalitions but the the sultan
#
couldn't have imagined the economic harm that this would do the uh the absence of uh political
#
power held by what would it would do in the in the long run but this was among the unintended
#
unanticipated consequences of the middle east is that apart from being economically
#
underdeveloped it's also among the it's also the least free part of the the world
#
it's just so fascinating that something that starts out so well can go in such unexpected
#
directions like what can be a better institutional innovation at the time than the voluntary private
#
provision of public goods it just seems absolutely mind-blowing but then you know when it comes to
#
those public goods like water supply that's such a great example you gave the tech changes the
#
youth changes the scale changes and suddenly you have a hundred whoops which have been told
#
okay build a water fountain a year but you know no one needs water fountains anymore you also
#
in one of your talks gave a great example of this caravan sarai of zaza din set up in 1237 80 where
#
the idea is that this is a place where tourists and travelers arrests are taken care of and this
#
is what the money has to be spent for but around 1600 the silk route loses its importance and that
#
is no longer a trade route so it is almost there like a ghost caravan sarai no one comes there
#
nothing is happening but you can't do anything you can't divert the money elsewhere so a lot
#
of that money just becoming what herando de soto would probably call debt capital like it literally
#
kinda is like that it's not being put to any use it's just debt capital there's such a huge
#
opportunity cost to that and something that starts out as a great innovation goes to hell like this
#
and you talk about the voluntary private provision of public goods but then the point is when it
#
and they're doing this like way before the west has come up with municipalities and all that
#
but the point is municipalities are at least notionally accountable to the people these guys
#
aren't even accountable to the people so the people won't get what they want these guys have
#
their capital stuck everything is dysfunctional nothing is working and you know it's such a kind
#
of a crazy story but as you point out it sort of begins to change in the middle of the 19th
#
century in the ottoman empire you talk about sultan abdul majeed one who you know sets up
#
the first joint stock company of the time and various other innovations i was looking through
#
a list of them and it kind of seems that you know and as you point out it coincides with the
#
fact that many foreigners many westerners are coming there they're doing business and they are
#
so well off and you know the locals are not well off at all so obviously they will start copying
#
perhaps at first the external mannerisms and trappings but then eventually go deeper look at
#
the institutions and all of that so tell me a little bit about how the change kind of begins
#
to happen because even though that you know joint stock company is set up in
#
1851 it's only in the early 19th century that that you know process really gets regularized
#
so early 20th century yes early 20th century that's what i meant sorry early 1900s i meant
#
so so great so so tell me more about those processes of change then because what then
#
happens is from that point on the middle east is actually growing at pretty much the same pace
#
as the west but except starting from a much lower base so what do you do so it's not it's
#
not really catching up it's just yeah so the joint stock company example is is quite quite
#
significant the sultan the fact that he establishes a joint stock company and then establishes others
#
indicates that the sultan recognizes and and of course the elites around the the sultan is
#
aids by now by the middle of the 19th century they recognize that scale of of business scaling
#
up is is critical that the businesses established under islamic law cannot use modern technologies
#
they will not contribute to the catch-up process and he sets up the his first first joint stock
#
company as as a prototype now it is it's a marine transportation successful marine
#
transportation company that outlasts abdulmejid and and provides useful services
#
into the well into the 20th century so it's a very good prototype and people admire it
#
the people use the the boats of this company to cross from one side of istanbul to the other the
#
asianic to the european and any other way way around they admire the company but the explosion
#
of joint stock companies that abdulmejid is hoping to stimulate through this company it doesn't
#
happen and it doesn't happen because various prerequisites are are missing for one thing you
#
don't have yet a legal system that is capable of even registering these these companies you
#
need that and this company was established under under his patronage with him being the largest
#
shareholder and people bought stock in it under the presumption which which turned out to be
#
reasonable that the sultan had so much riding and the success of this maritime transportation
#
company that he would make sure that these these shares in the in the company were remained
#
valuable and in fact they did the investors in it did make make money and the sultan made sure that
#
everybody heard about this and so that to encourage people to establish joint stock companies and to
#
to issue shares now why didn't other people establish well before long there was a legal
#
framework for for establishing these people were still reluctant to establish joint stock companies
#
under ottoman law they established that they were to establish a joint stock company it was
#
headquartered in berlin or london or or paris even if it was set up to do business exclusively
#
in the ottoman ottoman empire because if there was if there was a conflict you could you know you
#
could be fairly certain that you could you could sue somebody in a french court or or a british
#
court that and that the judges would understand the nature of the dispute you could get a fair
#
trial and initially people didn't have much confidence that this would happen
#
the ottoman empire so this was one problem another problem was that people weren't comfortable with
#
the notion locals weren't comfortable with the notion of legal personhood the idea that there
#
could be a non-human entity that could sue people or could or that could could be sued
#
this was not something that people were familiar with so they didn't trust these impersonal
#
organizations and initially in dealing with the the first western banks that were established in
#
in the middle east they they were asked to establish branches elsewhere of course
#
because they were so useful they were so popular they people from all over the empire came to
#
let's say the ottoman bank headquarters and said you know establish a a branch here branch there
#
to make personal loans and commercial loans well the branching activity was initially went
#
went slowly and part of the reason is that people it took a while for people to understand
#
that when you're dealing with an impersonal organization it you obey rules that can't be
#
bent so if you if you a one-year loan that you take from your cousin can be the one year can be
#
somewhat flexible and you can call up your cousin and say you know could we could i repay you give
#
me another month or something or if i repay a third of it now and you know these these kinds
#
of things typically will happen in in families but that's not the way a bank operates i mean a bank
#
is giving you a loan at a particular interest rate under the assumption that the money is
#
going to come back within a year if you start stretching that the bank is going to have to
#
charge you extra because there's an opportunity cost to the bank of receiving you know having
#
restitution be take a year and three months as opposed to a year and so so the bank is going
#
to be more rigid of course people wouldn't take no from the the bank they they did what they would
#
do in other contexts where they were dealing with an organization dealing with a state let's say a
#
state official if they got no for an answer they looked for somebody they knew they went back home
#
and asked the relative do you know anybody you know who's above the person who said no to me who
#
can who can do a favor for me and they started looking for people they knew in the in the bank
#
and so it took a while for people to to learn how to operate in an economy dominated by
#
impersonal entities and so so this slowed down the the branching process it slowed down the
#
establishment of joint stock companies of large companies and it's why initially going back to
#
your comment about colonization and imperialism it's why initially the British and the French and
#
other Europeans who set up businesses in the Middle East were were successful where locals
#
were not because the locals who worked in a local company were themselves accustomed to doing favors
#
for their for their relatives and and so on they didn't even the people working for the companies
#
were not quite accustomed to dealing with impersonal organizations and so
#
organized so western organizations run by westerners who were accustomed to
#
impersonal organizations had an advantage for a while and it was through westerners that that
#
the Middle East and this would apply I'm sure to India as well they learned how to they learned to
#
transition to from a personal economy where you deal primarily with relatives or to people
#
known to your relatives you operate within a network of people who know each other where you
#
can where you can bend agreements and expect reciprocal favors moving from that type of economy
#
to a predominantly impersonal economy where you don't do such favors and of course the move has
#
not been completed either in India or in Turkey because still in many situations where people have
#
a problem with an organization their first their initial instinct is to find somebody in the
#
organization who they know or who is known to a to a friend to pull some strings and put them at
#
the head of the queue or to make an exception for them and this of course is it's a cost of doing
#
business in these countries there's this corruption and in involving private corporations
#
there and for that reason we in companies set up in the local companies need many more layers of
#
monitors because of the corruption that takes takes place which is of course a cost of business
#
so that and this is an indication of an incomplete transition
#
of an incomplete catch-up process it's if if catch-up is incomplete in terms of
#
living standards it one of the reasons is that it's incomplete in terms of business culture
#
so that's really sort of a fascinating narrative of why the middle east was held back by actually
#
great laws with you know great intentions that just had these unforeseen consequences
#
let's move on from economics to politics right now like you know one of the burning questions
#
of our times is where is islam's reformation in a sense or you know can it be interpreted
#
in liberal ways as we mentioned earlier as you've pointed out in your book we've had schisms within
#
islam in modern times but they have been schisms like the muslim brotherhood and isis coming up
#
and asking for a stricter version of islam and the real question is that you know where are
#
the liberal versions coming from are they even possible and and one interesting sort of cautionary
#
point that you make is that do not confuse liberals with mere secularists you know we
#
spoke about adatok earlier and you know with his love of ballroom dancing you mentioned the
#
pehlavi dynasty the shahs of iran between 1925 and 1979 and their decree to get people to unveil
#
and especially burjiba of tunisia i didn't know about this he was in charge between 57 and 87
#
and he was so against ramadan fasting that during that time he actually went on television
#
in and insulted the people who were fasting by continuously sipping orange juice which the
#
television would then show on loop so it's like an animated gif forever there where the president is
#
sipping orange juice while people are supposed to fast and i found it absolutely hilarious he did
#
this deliberately he deliberately decided even though he was not an orange juice drinker at that
#
time he deliberately drank you know and went on on television to to rub it in now this was and and
#
of course people took it as an insult and as a way of belittling the the fastest so anyway i'm sorry
#
i interrupted yeah yeah no but you you i mean sugar is poison so he was really harming himself
#
while trolling his people but so my question was i wanted you to make that distinction between
#
secularists and liberalizers kind of clear for me so so the secularists were were not necessarily
#
people who wanted to advance religious freedoms some of them wanted
#
some of them interpreted secularism as the freedom to to operate in spheres
#
without having to encounter religion and the farthest that they were willing to go
#
was to allow people to practice religion in the privacy of their homes outside the public sphere
#
as long as they didn't they didn't bring it into the public sphere and as long as government
#
offices were free of religion schools were free of religions or anything that would
#
remind them of religion religious dress the veil that would signal islamic piety they didn't want
#
to see it similar to the french rule against having symbols of a symbol of any religion
#
in in schools such as a cross or the star of david or veil for women so it was freedom from religion
#
but they were not willing to allow the freedom to practice religion as one wanted and wherever one
#
one wanted it it forced people to people who were genuinely religious to disguise their
#
identity and practice religion only in in private now today in the middle east there are still
#
ardent sec assertive secularists who you know do not want religion to be practiced in the public
#
sphere but many secularists now are what i call passive secularists in that they they want the
#
right to be irreligious to be to have nothing to do with religion but and they are they want the
#
freedom to be able to express the reasons why they're they're not religious but at the same
#
time they they don't want to take away the the right to be to practice a religion now so there
#
are liberals liberals in the middle east who want to who are willing to grant
#
pious people the right to interpret islam in rigid ways in ways that that promote
#
the veil and promote what they themselves would would consider antiquated or out of date
#
but but they would if they are religious they would like to interpret religion differently
#
and islam does lend itself to alternative interpretations there's nothing in the quran
#
that requires women to to veil there's the quran can be interpreted from start to finish as
#
allowing free entry as well as free exit from the religion there is nothing to keep in the quran
#
that would keep people from interpreting religion in ways that allow flexibility
#
many flexibilities during ramadan that would allow health concerns health needs to trump the
#
the religious requirement the fast dawn to dusk regardless of where you are whether you're at the
#
equator or as in in northern scandinavia there there there is a constituency for a more modern
#
interpretation liberal interpretation of islam a more tolerant interpretation of islam but they're
#
not organized and there has been no protestant reformation that an analog to the protestant
#
reformation or the an analog to reform judaism which have emerged in in eastern europe in the
#
19th century among people who wanted the freedom to do business on sabbath to interact with
#
with non-jews or gentiles to adopt the lifestyles of gentiles to be able to do business with them
#
to join their their clubs as a means of doing business of learning from them of going to
#
uh attending schools that teach emphasize modern science and modern literature as opposed to
#
as opposed to traditional jewish learning they created they created reform judaism which was a
#
much more much more permissive much more tolerant variant of of judaism so that was a schism within
#
within judaism we haven't seen anything equivalent in islam not and this is it is not for a lack of
#
liberal manifestos by there are in in every language of the middle east or the muslim world
#
there are many many writings by pious people providing an alternative interpretation of the
#
religion they do have some followers admirers but this hasn't translated into a new variant of
#
islam in the sense of having its own places of worship mosques that are say reform mosques
#
as opposed to traditional mosques that have their own standards of what the requirements in ramadan
#
are their own festivities their own interpretations of of the the punishment for for
#
this or uh or that this is not emerged anywhere even if there are that do exist small communities
#
of people who uh who share these uh these beliefs why why don't we have why haven't they gotten uh
#
come together though they exist millions of such people exist why haven't they come together to
#
to establish new mosques with their own rules and an alternative interpretation of islam because
#
and the reason is that they would be cancelled so so to speak instantly they would be accused of
#
blasphemy they would be accused of uh of apostasy and uh it could lead to mob violence against them
#
and so they're afraid of this and even people with a lot of power and that includes autoturk
#
which who did toy with the idea for for a while of modernizing turkish islam by setting up mosques
#
that would operate differently that would and to change he toyed with the idea of changing the
#
liturgy changing the way islam would be taught changing the way it would be interpreted and to
#
toyed with the idea of training a new cadre of muslim clerics who would who would interpret islam
#
differently he uh but he ultimately gave up the idea for the same reason that people
#
today a hundred years later are afraid to launch a liberal variant of of islam he was afraid that
#
the a reaction even though he was a war hero he was greatly admired he was loved in many
#
respects that this would be a step too far that even he would become become an enemy of the
#
of the people would be treated as an enemy of uh of the religion so he decided to
#
after toying with the idea of trying to modernize the religion he decided simply to suppress it
#
now there's an asymmetry that you pointed out that we do see schisms in the more rigid direction
#
in the stricter direction isis muslim brotherhood that demand people to to spend more time on
#
religion that demand people to take religious requirements more seriously religious constraints
#
more to treat them as binding not make make compromises in the name of uh of modernity
#
and so why have we seen the more rigid reinterpretations and why have they
#
managed to develop large movements of course pakistan has had uh had uh jamati islami and
#
there are various other uh religious movements that have all been in the in the direction of
#
more strictness and accusing people in power of being too lax in enforcing islam why this asymmetry
#
why not a single liberal movement that in that that that makes a break with the with traditional
#
islam and establishes its own places of worship and and uh establishes its own rules it's because
#
liberal uh people liberal people are not willing to use force to achieve their their aims
#
and but the other side is willing to use force and it considers using force
#
to protect islam as entirely legitimate they interpret the religion as allowing you to do
#
that now if you interpret islam as a religion that allows various interpretations uh and
#
prohibits using force to convince others to promote your your own interpretation your own movement
#
potential movement is going to be handicapped it won't get off the the ground so i think this is
#
where this is an uh an asymmetry and uh i think the if if uh if a liberal movement emerges and
#
sooner or later i i think islam will be reinterpreted i think the movement will have to emerge from
#
within traditional islam people who have impeccable credentials
#
islamic credentials will have to will have to make a break with the with the past and
#
reinterpret the religion it it is unlikely to come from from people who are who are recognized today
#
as westernized muslims or nominal uh muslims they will simply be they will easily be labeled as
#
as outsiders who are trying to uh hijack the the religion who are trying to damage the religion
#
so uh it's i just i was i was talking this is not in in the uh in the book but it just occurred to
#
me as i was as i was speaking the protestant reformation was launched by somebody who was
#
a theologian and who had impeccable religious credentials this is something that it wasn't
#
somebody a scientist who started the protestant reformation and of course but there were there
#
were other leaders of the protestant reformation other than luther they were they were religious
#
leaders and so i think that this is this is probably going to come from them but once somebody else
#
somebody from within the religious establishment in egypt or or turkey somebody who is who has
#
impeccable religious credentials makes a break the needed followers are ready so i think that
#
now when exactly this would uh this would happen i cannot predict this it might be 10 years from
#
now but be a hundred years from now but sooner or later there will be a break within uh within
#
islam religiosity interestingly is falling in many countries of the middle east including
#
iran and turkey egypt and saudi arabia these are the the big countries of the of the middle east
#
where uh if a reformation or something like like a liberal variant of islam it emerges it is bound
#
to have shock waves that will be felt elsewhere and it will it will inspire similar movements
#
in other parts of the middle east yeah you know i mean it's it's a sign of hope as you've pointed
#
out that your book is not called freedoms denied it is called freedoms delayed but the question is
#
you haven't specified delayed by how much you know there is a law of truly large numbers given a
#
large enough sample size even the most unlikely things will happen and i see the dilemma at the
#
heart of it and what the secularists were trying to do where the secularists were like let's just
#
push it to another room let's just you know push it to another domain and etc etc whereas the
#
liberal hope is that no it can be reformed the problem is a rigid interpretation of it they can
#
be sort of it can be made more liberal but i i suspect that there there is a little bit of a
#
game theory problem you know like the bell the cat kind of problem the bell the cat problem is
#
basically that there are a bunch of mice and there is a cat which keeps coming and marauding
#
among them and one of them has a great idea that let's put a bell around the neck of the cat so
#
whenever the we hear the bell we can get out of the way but the problem is who's going to be the
#
one to go out there and bell the cat because that poor creature is extremely unlikely to actually
#
survive the task and i suspect this might be a reason why speaking out from within especially
#
the more prominent you already are within the establishment the harder it becomes for you to
#
speak out and i'm just wondering if you know rather than a revolutionary change like the
#
reformation indeed are there gradual shifts possible like you've pointed out that in the
#
context of companies there has been that gradual shift where 1850 onwards till the early 1900s
#
you actually had joint stock corporations set up and you had that particular problem solved and
#
it wasn't a problem that had its basis in islamic law because as you said earlier islamic law had
#
it did not bar any number of people or the duration of a company or anything like that
#
so it was a smooth shift that happened and i would imagine that there are you know are there other
#
smooth shifts possible because like one key smooth shift which might be possible is for example
#
like you've pointed to low-hanging fruit like certain rituals like call to prayers at certain
#
times and all that and people you know moderate muslims can unite behind that behind not having
#
those but also there is you know half the muslims are women right and gender is you know such a big
#
issue is that something that you can one can unite behind or does it then again become a question of
#
who will speak out first who will bell the cat or are there gradual reformations possible
#
so again i think that in the case of of women the movement would have to originate from
#
from conservative societies where they they support the right to the right of women to
#
decide whether they're going to fail or not and they would have to establish that even though
#
they are veiled that the decision is the decision not to wear a veil is not an indicator of piety
#
and it's not an indicator of looseness now we did we we have observed this development
#
in iran during the masa amini protests and we're we're coming to the anniversary of the of the
#
murder of masa amini in iran the quite encouraging development that followed masa amini's tragic
#
death is that the demonstrations took place demonstrations against ayatollahs and in favor
#
of giving women the freedom to veil they occurred not just in areas of iran or in cities of iran
#
that are particularly liberal or particularly westernized but also in very conservative
#
areas areas where that that heavily support have heavily supported
#
the the regime like qom the the religious center of of iran the holy city of qom there were
#
demonstrations there and conservative women wearing veils not just abiding
#
in ways that were to keep the the morality police off their backs and for that it was
#
it's sufficient in iran to cover most of your hair but even if some of it is is
#
showing you can get by but women who who who wore scarves that completely hid their hair that that
#
were quite tight to make sure that none of it would none of the hair would slip out they are
#
are women that would who would continue to veil if the freedom to decide was given to women
#
and and who would do so because they they believe that female modesty is a requirement of the
#
the religion they would do it out of piety but at the same time they recognize the
#
that this should come from within the woman and each woman should be free to interpret
#
islam as they they wish this is quite quite significant because this is a constituency
#
that is not rejecting traditional islam but it is calling for the freedom to exit from it from
#
one interpretation of islam to let people define islam differently and so the ayatollahs the the
#
regime in place managed to put down the masa mini demonstrations
#
evidently the protesters didn't achieve the critical mass necessary to stimulate a division
#
within the regime which will happen if enough people are demonstrating and they they can hold
#
out sufficiently long to paralyze the economy sooner or later the regime will start dividing
#
from splitting from within so they didn't achieve that critical mass but there is an indication
#
that there is that potential in iran and that potential exists in certainly in other countries
#
that exists in in in turkey and egypt and saudi saudi arabia where the shares of of the people
#
who interpret islam differently who don't believe who believe that islam shouldn't be politicized
#
that this this is is is rising and what has happened in iran could happen in these countries
#
as well so i think the potential is is there now how soon this will
#
generate the that will create a schism a liberal schism within islam this cannot be predicted
#
my preference falsification book gives all the reasons why one cannot predict with any any
#
precision the the collapse of a regime or a collapse of a of a social system one can
#
one can track through polls that give people anonymity rising discontent and certainly
#
various polls including polls that i cite that have been that were classified in egypt in in
#
turkey in in uh some other countries in in iran that they show that discontent with islam is
#
rising and that religiosity is is falling and that these are these are in i think would it's
#
it's clear to me at least that there is that uh the potential for an alternative variant of islam
#
uh that is sustainable that is that the breaks it breaks away from from traditional islam
#
this is this is there but knowing that is it doesn't give us the ability to know when
#
when it will happen this is it's similar to the fall of communism we knew that there was discontent
#
and but communists communist system the soviet system survived for many years uh as it was
#
as it's the flaws of the soviet economic system were becoming apparent and discontent was rising
#
disillusionment with the system was rising it it fell apart in 1989 and generated the uh the fall
#
of communism and the in this in the satellites it could have this wasn't inevitable could have
#
gone on for another 10 20 years i think the same is is true with with islam and that people the
#
pessimists who say that islam is a conservative religion it can't change i think they are they are
#
missing the huge changes that have already taken place in in islam the huge transformations the
#
the marginalization of islamic law in many countries it's its domain now is limited to family law
#
and to the inheritance system and to uh but it's it's it no longer plays a role in in business it
#
all sorts of islamic institutions have been dismantled including including the the walk the
#
islamic uh walk the changes that have that have taken place a huge islam is not a static religion
#
muslim societies have not been static over the past uh century islam the interpretation of islam
#
has not been been static but in in certain areas it has changes have not occurred but the
#
fact that they haven't occurred doesn't mean that they the changes are not in store fabulous let me
#
ask you my penultimate question now like you i found the you know the iran protests extremely
#
inspiring and obviously an assertive civil society is you know the first step to a strong civil
#
society and as you point out there is a virtuous cycle at the heart of you know any liberalization
#
that you have a strong civil society and a constrained state and the state gets more
#
constrained and civil society gets stronger and that's what we need but the question is
#
how do we kick it off how do we start and an assertive civil society sometimes isn't enough
#
even if it appears to win like when the arab spring happened you famously wrote about how it's not
#
such a big deal you know don't get too excited by it in a similar way and one could we can talk
#
about the soviet union falling apart but we've got putin to deal with right now so my penultimate
#
question for you is really a two-part question which is when you look ahead to the let's say
#
the next 30 years which is a small span of time for a historian like you uh when we look forward
#
to the next 30 years what gives you hope and what gives you despair so i don't see any hope in the
#
short run i i don't see any country in the middle east transitioning to a stable full-blown
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democracy even i don't think that this is realistic even in the the countries that have had
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flawed democracies but democracies nonetheless turkey tunisia would would lead the lead the list
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i don't think it's possible even uh even there in the long run over the long run i think i i am
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hopeful because civil society does exist even though it is suppressed it maintains an existence
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in social media governments have been unable to uh to extinguish civil society and in social social
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media they've been able to block demonstrations uh perhaps they've they've been able to lock up
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people who are leaders of civil society like osman kavala in uh in turkey on trumped up
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charges or actually ridiculous uh charges but they but but civil society is still developing
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and social media and and various people are are forming common cause more people are buying into
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various causes ideas liberal ideas are are spreading and you know uh the the need to
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constrain the the government is is uh spreading so there is hope that this will eventually develop
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this will eventually lead to liberalization uh i would the reason i'm i'm not hopeful in the short
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run is that the temptation if there is uh an uprising somewhere to that topples let's say
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the adwan regime in in turkey or the uh theocracy in iran the temptation to suppress the other side
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which after all is quite quite organized is going to be is is going to be great and there are lots
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of people who are not liberals in the sense that they want to replace the existing regime with uh
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with a liberal order that would that would respect various freedoms including free speech
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they they will see the possibility of a of a reversion of a counter revolution of that will
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bring back the old regime and they will see the the uh the way to prevent that is to lock up
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their adversaries and to uh and to establish all sorts of
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positive restrictions on their political participation on the road on their their
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expression and so so i don't think for that reason that a quick transition is is possible
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another factor is that we're in right now in the 2020s we're in a period when much of the world
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is undergoing what we might call de-liberalization that would include india which was
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a shining example at one point of a relatively poor country that was nonetheless democratic
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and that respected various uh various freedoms but it includes uh many countries including
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including most of the countries in the west that are becoming less liberal and less supportive also
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of liberalization elsewhere there is a sense that in western capitals that the middle east is
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just as authoritarian regimes and they're going to be authoritarian in the for the foreseeable
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future and you just have to deal with them and and not make it a major goal to promote human
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rights and uh human freedoms and so i think it's an unfortunate time to be in a repressive
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part and in a repressed part of the world because a global public opinion isn't isn't going to give
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you much support and the leading countries of the world the countries of the world that have
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stimulated so much change elsewhere such as britain such as the the united states and france they
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themselves are becoming less liberal and this of course gives autocrats or authoritarian minded
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people in places like the middle east and india an additional reason to promote authoritarian
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solutions if even the west is is uh moving away from liberalism and and democracy and if they're
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making exceptions to various human rights if if free speech is being denied there uh if for one
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reason or another uh there must be reasons and they're the same reasons exist in our societies
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so being a liberal it's it's not a good time to be promoting liberal causes
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well thank you for that note of four pi it's often said of futurists and i uh say of creators that
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they tend to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term and you've not
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committed the risk of overestimating the short term but i hope we are both underestimating the
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longer long run maybe you know keene's could have been right in the long run we are all free
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so my final question for you and i'm so grateful for your time this has been just fantastic my
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final question for you for me and my listeners give us a list of recommendations of books movies
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music which you absolutely love and you love so much you want to share them with the whole world
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so in terms of movies i i just happen to have seen oppenheimer which i highly recommend
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and to anyone interested in preference falsification it's it's a movie that
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gives gives an example of you know the mccarthy eyes the mccarthyism and in full swing and
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so i i recommend that as uh as a as a movie i as long as i mentioned openheimer i might mention
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that i also went to see barbie not because i thought i would like it not because it's a movie
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of the type that i would enjoy but because it is a social phenomenon it more people want to see
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barbie than openheimer many people i respect thought that it was a very deep movie so i
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want to see that as well and i might as well point out that i did not uh particularly enjoy it i would
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rather read read books to learn more about the world i think my time that the two hours i spent
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watching barbie would have been better spent reading a book so in terms of in terms of books
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that i would try want to put on people's people's radar a book by molly molly green margaret green
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called censored is a book that came out several years ago and it's about the new forms of
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censorship in the digital era and it's it's quite different from censorship that occurred
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before the rise of social media governments can keep information and companies big companies can
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keep information from reaching the masses by simply by changing the order in which they come
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up in searches by a by tampering with ai algorithms they can also kill information
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or make it inaccessible to people by flooding the social media with other information that will
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attract people's attention and effectively make information go away and this is a book that
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focuses on china but is is about the way governments and big companies that are influenced
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that influence what information we have access to that they that they all use and friction
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and filtering i think is what she she uses are techniques that amount to censorship even though
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they they would not fall under the rubric of censorship traditionally so that is something i
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would want to put on people's radar screen i works by jim scott know if you're familiar with them
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the art of not governing for example and he has other the other the hidden transcript i think is
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is another one of his his works i he he studies how people circumvent the state and state regulations
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and how and powerful actors and i think that in an age when we are so much aware of the power of
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governments and the power of big corporations and where their efforts underway to control
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what big corporations are are doing including social media companies i think it's worth being
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reminded of how of the the limitations of their their powers so let me just leave you with these
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two ideas we've gone on for many hours and i don't want to tax your patience it's late in india and
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the patience of readers or listeners any uh any longer but i've greatly enjoyed this conversation
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and i i deeply appreciate being invited to be on your uh on this uh this show it's truly an
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honor i've listened to many of your shows and you have great taste in selecting people and to be
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included in that that group is truly an honor for me and i hope you will recognize that i am or at
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least treat this as a reflection of my my true feelings uh that you will you will you will take
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this as a as a compliment and not as as an expression of trying to make you feel feel good
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i i truly feel that you are doing a fantastic job with your with your podcasts and i wish you lots
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of luck in the future and i look forward to hearing uh listening to your uh future shows
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thank you so much and not for a moment did i doubt your sincerity because i would never
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suspect you of preference falsification and indeed i shall commit to no preference falsification
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myself and i say that it's an honor and a thrill for me to have this conversation with you i've
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enjoyed myself so much and i'll enjoy you know listening to this conversation and processing
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all the things that you said because i i just think i learned so much from it and will learn
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so much more thank you so much thank you again amit bye bye
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if you enjoyed listening to this conversation check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at
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will i urge you go to your nearest bookstore online or offline and pick up as many of his
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books as you can find i particularly recommend private truths public lies the long divergence
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and freedoms delayed you can follow timur on twitter at timur kuran that's one word you can
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follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene
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and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the
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scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the production of the show you can go
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over to scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this
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podcast alive and kicking thank you
