Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [38]
But let me try one last time:
Forget the question of whether the endless campaign funding bought this particularly silly regulatory result.
Ask instead: Does the fact that more than $1 billion was given affect your ability to believe that this insanely important if endlessly complicated area of regulatory policy was regulated sensibly? Does it affect your confidence or trust in the system? Or can you honestly say that the regulatory mistakes of the past three decades were unrelated to this, the largest single sector of campaign and lobbying contributions in our government? Raghuram Rajan writes, “The public has lost faith in a system where the rules of the game seem tilted in favor of a few.”63 Are you in that public? Does this pattern of contributions help put you there?
CHAPTER 8
What the “Tells” Tell Us
When my colleagues and I tested whether apparent conflicts in the interests of professionals affected trust in the work of those doctors, researchers, and politicians, we didn’t say that the apparent conflict was actually a conflict. We didn’t tell the subjects that it actually affected the results, or that it was even reasonable to believe that it affected the results. People assumed it, and their confidence collapsed because of what they assumed.
When I described the conflict in research about the safety of BPA and cell phones, and linked that conflict to the source of funding, I didn’t tell you that we had any good reason to believe this correlation proved anything. You assumed it, at least enough to weaken whatever confidence you had about whether those two products were safe.
In both cases, I needed only to point to the money—money in (what was perceived to be) the wrong place—for confidence to weaken. Not “money,” but “money in the wrong place.” Describe the architecture of incentives, and people will infer the causation. With no good reason, perhaps. But with a reliable regularity that cannot be denied, and certainly should not be ignored.
This same dynamic is true with each example of government policy that I have just described. Each is framed in a similar way: Given a fairly obvious public policy bias, actual policy was bent differently. Against free markets. Against efficient markets. Against effective education. Against safe financial markets. Why the policy was so bent, I didn’t say. But after I round the story off in each case with an account of lobbying and campaign cash, you have a view about why. Or, at a minimum, you are less confident that the why has much to do with what makes good public policy sense.
These four examples are not small issues. Together, they have an effect. They confirm the view already held by the vast majority of Americans. In a poll commissioned for this book, 75 percent of Americans believe “campaign contributions buy results in Congress.” Three to one, with Republicans (71 percent) just as convinced of this as Democrats (81 percent).1 Puzzles plus money produce the view that the money explains the puzzles.
In a line: We don’t trust our government. And until we create the conditions under which trust is possible—when, in other words, the presence of money in the wrong places doesn’t inevitably make us doubt—this skepticism will remain. We can’t help it. It will follow psychologically even if it doesn’t follow logically.
But is the problem more than a problem of perception? Granted, the public reads the money as corruption. Is it corruption? Does it actually bend any results? If it doesn’t, then maybe the problem is the perceiver and not what is perceived. Maybe the solution is a better understanding of the mechanisms of government, and why they ought to be trusted, rather than a radical change in how government gets funded. Maybe we, the people, are just confused?
PART III
BEYOND SUSPICION
Congress’s Corruption
We have good reason