I downloaded and read it. It’s brilliant. It seems to explain everything. Maybe it explains too much. Regardless, Kuran has given us a language to describe a remarkable feature of our times.
How is it that only a few months ago, people were afraid to wear MAGA hats, and then Trump, having survived multiple assassination attempts, won not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote, sweeping the House and Senate in with him?
How can it be that during this transition time, people widely assume that the president and vice president are already not Biden–Harris but Trump–Vance?
How can it be that foreign leaders are making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago while royals praise Trump as a great leader?
It all changed in an instant. Or seemed to. Maybe the preference for regime change was already in the air but just not revealed. It took a fair election with secret ballots to show the truth.
Kuran spoke of preference falsification, which is “the act of misrepresenting one’s genuine wants under perceived social pressures.” It is different from self-censorship because it involves people outright lying about what they really think. When the lie persists long enough, people begin to believe the lie and essentially live fake lives, proclaiming fealty to one idea while holding another one in their heart of hearts.
Kuran started the book with the most mundane example of wall paint. Suppose you are invited to a friend’s house where the walls have been repainted in fashionable starkness, of which the owner is very proud. Your opinion is solicited. Instead of saying what you think, you simply go along and proclaim it to be just great.
You have falsified your preferences.
“Preference falsification aims specifically at manipulating the perceptions others hold about one’s motivations or dispositions,” Kuran wrote, “as when you complimented your host to make him think that you shared his taste.”
It’s a tiny case, but the problem is ubiquitous. It’s all about social pressure, peer expectations, the desire to not stick out, and the drive to conform. It’s the problem of the emperor’s new clothes. Everyone says they are beautiful even though he is naked. The story sounds rarified, but, in fact, it is a driving feature of current society and probably all of human history.
Such books rarely garner professional praise because that is not how we “do science” today, but they can end up sticking in popular culture.
The preference falsification of the economics profession holds that such books are not really discussing economics. The author of this one rejected his own tendency to write as his profession expects and instead wrote a book of huge meaning.
He closely examined India’s caste system, the rise and fall of communism, and affirmative action in the United States. In each case, the establishment was on one side and everyone knew how to fit in and falsify preferences.
In either event, public opinion was solidly on the side of the regime. But in each case, something changed and the mood changed. The hidden truth became exposed. The esoteric became exoteric. People started speaking their minds and acting according to their actual views. In each case, the regime lost control and the prevailing orthodoxy collapsed.
This is what Kuran called the moment of the preference cascade. It can happen all at once. Seemingly out of nowhere, people rejected the caste system; communism; and diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring, behaving as if each system was always awful and had to go immediately.
A good example is the collapse of the Berlin Wall. One day it was heavily enforced, essential to national security and national identity, guarded with killer weaponry, and approved of by everyone on one side. The next day, it was like no one really cared anymore and the cars raced through and the thing was torn down while the soldiers watched and then joined in.
That is a great example of falsified preferences turning suddenly into a preference cascade.
In the Kuhnian view, science progresses only with the funerals of the old guard, but in the Kuranian view, it happens all at once because people simply decide to stop lying.
The lying in this model is necessarily public and shaped by social pressure. When you go to the store, you buy only what you want or decline to buy at all. But when you are at a group banquet or at someone’s house for dinner, you are more inclined to go with the crowd. This, of course, is reinforced by many social psychology experiments from the 1960s that repeatedly proved the power of the crowd and peer pressure.
We don’t usually think of this as applying to whole societies, much less all political systems in the world at once. But that seems to be happening. When I recently read a headline announcing that the German government had collapsed, I had to do a double take. The story could have been written about Canada, France, Spain, Brazil, Israel, and innumerable other countries that are quaking with pressures from within.
The themes are the same: people versus the establishment.
As one must, let’s speak of the preference falsifications around COVID-19. A mucky cloth mask at six feet was going to stop you from getting a medically insignificant respiratory virus? Did anyone really believe this?
A sterilizing vaccine that had never before existed for this kind of infection was invented in no time? Really? And there were even more absurd examples: banning singing, playing instruments only in sealed tents, dousing yourself with sanitizer, banning skateboarding and surfing, quarantining on either side of the state line for two weeks, and so on.
It was all outrageous, and people were willing to put up with the Kabuki dance for a time. But at some uncertain point, and maybe in various iterative rounds, the people grew incredulous. Nearly five years later, we know that they were lying, as we’ve argued in great detail in a thousand articles for four years. The Brownstone Institute played a crucial role in making this happen.
And then we ask that telling question: What else have they been lying about and for how long?
That’s the salient issue of our time. The desire to pretend to believe seems to have been shattered. Falsification has turned into a truth cascade, one that might just barely have started and certainly has an uncertain end.
May the preference cascade continue until all that is worth knowing is known.
