Knowledge, Power and Politics

Benjamin Jesty

Our story begins in 1774, a year before the American Revolution, in Dorset county, England, with a dairy farmer named Benjamin Jesty.

A wave of smallpox was running across England that year. Jesty himself was in no danger - he had previously contracted cowpox. The cowpox was contracted by milking infected cows, and was well known among dairy farmers to convey immunity against smallpox.

Unfortunately, neither Jesty’s wife nor his two children had any such advantage. When smallpox began to pop up in Dorset, Jesty decided to take drastic action. He took his family to a nearby farm with a cowpox-infected cow, scratched their arms, and wiped pus from the infected cow on the scratches. Over the next few days, their arms grew somewhat inflamed and they suffered the mild symptoms of cowpox - but it quickly passed. As the wave of smallpox passed through the town, none of the three were infected. Throughout the rest of their lives, through multiple waves of smallpox, they were immune.

The same technique would be popularized twenty years later by Edward Jenner, marking the first vaccine and the beginning of modern medicine.

Power vs Knowledge

The same wave of smallpox which ran across England in 1774 also made its way across Europe. In May, it reached Louis XV, King of France. Despite the wealth of a major government and the talents of Europe’s most respected doctors, Louis XV died of smallpox on May 10, 1774.

Academics in the study of politics typically define “power” as the ability to influence or control the actions of other people - a slight generalization of “authority”. I want to discuss a somewhat more general notion of power - a kind of power which Benjamin Jesty possessed, and Louis XV lacked. I want to discuss power as the ability to influence or control the world around you, in whatever manner is relevant to you.

Louis XV had no shortage of authority. He had money, and his word was law. Louis XV could give orders, and they would be followed. But no orders he could give would conjure up the cure for smallpox. Jesty, on the other hand, had the means of a farmer and no authority to speak of. But Jesty had a power which Louis XV lacked - Jesty knew how to prevent smallpox. Jesty did not need money or authority; he had knowledge.

They say that knowledge is power, but the relationship is more fundamental than that. Knowledge is… the first power. The base power. The foundation upon which any other form of power must sit.

Without knowledge, any other kind of power is worthless. Without knowledge, no amount of money or authority could stop smallpox. With knowledge, it was trivial. For Jesty, immunizing his family against smallpox was a day’s errand. It was a thing-he-could-do in much the same way as walking into town to buy some salt.

What if we extend this same idea to politics?

Politics Today: Total Spending

I propose that, in the sense that I’ve been using the word, our political figureheads possess little-to-no power.

Let’s take a relatively simple problem: suppose you’re the Republican party, and you want to dramatically scale back government spending as a share of GDP. The GOP controls most state governments, both houses of congress, the presidency, and the supreme court. They’re the Louis XV of this story; they have the authority to do whatever they want. And paring down the scale of federal government has been a major plank in the conservative platform for decades. And yet… there doesn’t seem to be much paring underway.

Some people take the cynical view, that Republican figureheads don’t actually care about cutting spending. But a theory like that could explain any behavior - and besides, honest stupidity always has a higher prior than malevolence. Here’s my theory: Republicans lack the power to prevent government spending growth in much the same way that Louis XV lacked the power to prevent smallpox.

To see why, we’ll need to briefly dive into the numbers on government spending.

Let’s start with the main graph:

As the graph shows, pretty much all the growth in government spending over the past few decades has come from entitlements - primarily social security, medicare and medicaid. Everything else has been squeezed in an attempt to keep the budget in check as entitlement spending soars.

Within entitlements, growth is driven mainly by social security and medicare. The math is pretty straightforward: old people are expensive, the population is getting older very quickly, carry the two, spending goes up.

There is no path to stop the growth of government spending without cutting off old people. But this is counterintuitive to a lot of people on the right - the government didn’t used to spend so much, so why the hell must it spend so much now? Oh, we’re spending on healthcare? The problem must be that healthcare has become less efficient! We need to let the market do its job!

At some point, I will write a blog post entirely digging into data on healthcare costs. Suffice to say, efficiency is not the limiting factor. (For those on the left: no, price gouging by insurance/pharma/other companies is not the main driver either.) The main driver is people getting older, and people consuming lots of healthcare (e.g. high nursing home usage).

But if the Republican party is the Louis XV of this scenario, who’s the Benjamin Jesty?

Let’s view reduction of government spending as a knowledge problem. Imagine you want to make reduction of government spending a thing-you-could-do, in the same way that going to the store to buy some milk is a thing-you-could-do. What knowledge would make that possible?

It’s obvious once you see it: antiaging. If and when antiaging technology hits the market, medicare spending will evaporate. The expensive health problems of the elderly will disappear, and with them the growth of government spending.

Generalizing the Concept: A Different Approach to Politics

When smallpox died, it didn’t fight back.

If someone were to introduce cheap, credible antiaging technology to the market today, government spending would drop like insurance stocks during hurricane season. It would happen entirely automatically: demand for healthcare would fall, causing medicare claims to fall, causing spending to fall. Congress would be left arguing over what to do with their giant budget surplus.

This wouldn’t take some great social movement or political campaign. It wouldn’t require arguing or fighting or convincing or converting. It would just take knowledge, an idea and a little elbow grease. It could be done by a small team, or possibly even one person. Heck, it would probably even be profitable.

Technology and economics lead inexorably to an equilibrium. Try to change the equilibrium by politics, and you’ll be fighting gravity all the way. But if you change the technology, then gravity is on your side. Political movements take millions of people, but a technological change takes just a handful of researchers and/or entrepreneurs. The rest is gravity.

But there’s a trade-off: effecting social change through technology requires knowledge. It requires an in-depth understanding of the underlying causes of the equilibrium we wish to change. Usually, that means economics and game theory, plus a bunch of domain-specific research, plus whatever skills are needed to implement the new technology.

Political movements make it easy to try, but rare to succeed. A technological approach requires far more work and knowledge to even attempt, but offers a much shorter path to success.