Lying in states: fibbing politicians

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In 1979, some intrepid explorers set off on the Trans Globe expedition, circling the planet and crossing both poles. The plan left two of the adventurers overwintering in Antarctica in mostly dark for months. Luckily, there were plenty of books around and lots of companies would like you to give genetic test kits to your friends and family. This holiday season, we take a look at the risks to consumers and the benefits to science that these tests present. But first, as 2019 draws to a close, our top story takes a step away from the news to examine a trend that's dominated the year. The world is accustomed to hearing the lies of dictators, that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is a demigod, that America caused Venezuela's economic mess, or that nothing much happened on June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square. In democracies too, politicians have always massaged or even mangled the truth.

I'm going to say this again.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

But there's something different about the age we live in today.

What's different now is that there's more brazen and open and repeated political lying in democracies.

John Parker is the Economist's editor at large.

So the best example of this, of the sort of misleader of the Western world, is Trump himself. Trump keeps saying that we're building the wall. We're building a wall on the border of New Mexico and we're building a wall in Colorado. We're building a beautiful wall. He keeps saying that the economy has never been better. Nobody's ever been president that has the greatest economy in the history of our country. This is the greatest economy in the history of our country. These are the greatest unemployment and employment numbers. Trump lies so frequently that there are several websites devoted to his misleading information. And the one kept by the Washington Post says that he's made 13,500 lies or false or misleading statements in the course of his presidency. That's running at about 20 a day. That's an enormous number. And Trump lies more brazenly than most. But he's certainly not the only one. But Boris Johnson, British Prime Minister, has a long record of telling lies. He got fired from a newspaper job for making up a quote, he misled the Queen, which is a fairly unusual thing to do. So there have been a surprising number of politicians who haven't just sort of bent the truth a bit. They've told flat out whoppers.

And how easy is it for voters, do you think, to detect when politicians are lying, be they whoppers or the more subtle kind of people find it.

Difficult even in the ordinary course of their lives to distinguish when somebody is lying. Now, there have been tests of this, and it seems like we are, to use the word of the main tester, a guy called Tim Levine at the University of Alabama, we're hardwired to believe what people tell us simply in order to make communication possible. If everybody were having to justify everything that they say from first principles, communication would become almost impossible. So we default to believing that what we're told is true so that communication can keep going between people.

And viewed through that lens, it might seem that those who would want to tell untruths are essentially sort of exploiting that hardwired nature. I mean, having seen that play out, why don't we disrespect that in the politicians?

There is a curiosity about Trump and Johnson and others, which is that, to put it bluntly, people tend to support politicians even though they're lying.

Why is that, though? Why wouldn't voters be bothered by dishonesty in, you know, what should be example setting leaders?

One very important consideration here is that political decision making isn't dominated by rational thought. And somebody, amazingly enough, tested this out by putting people inside an MRI scanner and looking at which bits of their brain lit up when they were told things that supported what they believed anyway and things which contradicted what they believed anyway. The one bit of the brain that never lit up was the part most commonly associated with rational thought. So political decision making is intuitive. One's not so worried whether something is true or not. Related to this, everybody has what's called confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out the kind of information that confirms what you think anyway. A nice example of this from America is the tendency of Democrats and Republicans to consume totally different types of news. You know, Republicans Watch Fox News. Democrats read the New York Times, and in those two places they're basically told what they think anyway. In addition to all that, there's a very interesting perception by a guy at Cornell called Thomas Gilovich. If you're faced with something that challenges your point of view, your reaction is, must I believe that? And if you're faced with something which confirms your point of view, you say, may I believe that? Not must I believe that. Let me give an example on this one. You don't really believe that climate change is real, so you ask, may I believe, as it were, that climate change isn't real. All you need is one self proclaimed climate scientist to say no, no, you can continue to believe that climate change isn't really happening, and you will believe that people aren't looking at the balance of judgment and coming to an impartial view of something. They're not like either the jury or the judge. They're much more like the prosecutor. And so in this case, I think identifying lies, that's just not important to the way people make political decisions.

I mean, if these are the biases that are evolutionarily baked into humans and the exigencies of political decision making having always been the way that they are, and the sort of flexibility with the truth that's required sometimes in such positions, it makes you wonder, how did the truth ever have a chance?

Yes, I agree with that. People have always complained about politicians distorting the truth or telling outright lies, but it's made possible by some more recent developments, of which I think the most important is fake news. There's much, much more fake news around. And of course, fake news is a product of people's willingness to tell lies, but it's a cause of it too. There's just so much fake news that it exaggerates the confirmation bias that exists anyway. And there were some tests published in Science magazine last year which showed that actually fake political news spread more quickly than any other kind of fake news. So it was. Mark Twain and Winston Churchill are credited with the notion that lies run two or three times around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots. But that turns out to be almost literally true.

John, thank you very much for that very real news discussion.

But you don't know, it might have all been fake. Actually, everything I just said is supported by sort of psychological testing and rigorous fact checking. Exactly.

Great. John, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks, Jason.

Bye bye. 40 years ago, a group of British explorers set out on a seemingly impossible mission.

Sir Ranulph Fynes, probably the great explorer of our age. His first real expedition was seemingly insane, which was a circumpolar navigation of the globe, going across both the South Pole and the North Pole.

Alex Preston is a novelist who writes about books and arts for the Economist.

No one had ever done it before. It was actually his wife's idea, his wife Ginny, and she just drew a line on a school atlas. They said that for five years now.

They'Ve wanted a unique challenge.

And this double polar route, so far.

Unconquered, was all that's left for them now to do.

After seven years of planning, Sir Ranulph, his wife Ginny, and two former members of Britain's Special Forces set off on what was called the Transglobe Expedition in the autumn of 1979.

They basically walked down through Africa. They crossed the Southern Ocean to Antarctica. They overwintered in Antarctica, made their way across the Antarctic continent, up the west coast of South America and North America, and then across the North Pole just in time, three years later to get back to Greenwich. Having carried out the first circumpolar navigation.

Of the world for three years, the explorers would face high seas, hungry polar bears, insurmountable sand dunes and forbidding jungles. But there was another, more insidious danger that would threaten the boredom. And that was to be particularly acute at the South Pole, where the group spent months in icy darkness.

They set up a series of camps, one up on the Antarctic plateau. They also set up a kind of landing station on the ocean coastline there. And what the explorers had to do was basically bed down for an Antarctic winter, which is just under eight months long.

While the main expedition crew anticipated the polar crossing from the Antarctic plateau, two additional travelers set up camp at the landing station. They were Anto Burbeck and Simon Grimes, two young men tasked with guarding the fuel and food supplies that would be airlifted to Sir Ranulph and his party when the winter was over. Anto was not a seasoned explorer, So.

I was 23, I think, just graduated and was not sure what I'd do next. And I met through my mum, Ran Fiennes, who was looking for people to pack boxes in London. And I went and packed a few boxes, and after about a month, he said, actually, your face fits and we need another guy. Do you want to come? So it was pure accident. It's staggeringly beautiful. One thinks of it as a white environment and actually the play of light on it makes it a blue, yellow, red, every color of the rainbow, really astonishing colors and where our camp was down on the ice shelf, so about 150 miles from land. Simon and I were in a hut about this size of a caravan, just with ice beneath ice in every direction and sea ice out beyond. So an extraordinary sort of bubble. It's easy to wonder whether you are in a paper bag.

Anto and Simon had never met before, but they spent February till November together, crammed into the hut with two desks, two bunks and over 200 books. Penguin, the publisher, had offered to sponsor them.

I knew I would be there without a heck of a lot to do over winter, so I set myself the task of reading a heck of a lot. I guess I alternated between philosophy, literature and poetry. It was a very eclectic mix. So a lot of the Russians, sort of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgeneville, Major Brits, Eliot and Hardy and Dickens, and then Plato and Aristotle and Hume and Kant and so on.

I was just really astonished by the depth and breadth of the reading that they did. Having been given this opportunity, which actually sounds kind of blissful to me, to shut themselves away with books and pretty much nothing else to disturb them. They got through an enormous amount of the great literature of many civilizations. Books are a form of escape. We travel when we read. And actually, if you think about the necessity of escape in a landscape where you cannot often step outside of the door because of the strength of the winds, because of the temperature, because of the real risks of not coming back, then you have to find other ways of escaping.

I was quite young, reasonably naive. I think it was a great introduction to a whole field of thinking. I guess I set out looking for good or God or purpose, and became more and more taken with Nietzsche and existentialism by the end of the year, and rather darker and bleaker and more introspective. I guess it was completely extraordinary because we were like a couple of rats in a cage and didn't really talk much. Simon and I avoided each other like the plague through the winter and got more and more on each other's nerves. It's taken years to unpack it. I think we probably both went a little mad. Small things would get on one's nerves. I had a habit of putting a pot on the stove and forgetting it was there. And it would start rattling and he would storm across and take it off and slam it on the floor. And that might have been the only sort of action in the day. And so we had this extraordinary months of mainly silence in quite a small space surrounded by ice, just reading. And so you get completely absorbed in whatever it is that you're involved with because there are no distractions. I am marked by an experience that I have difficulty knowing how real it was as time has elapsed. I had got very involved in Crime and Punishment and been festering in Raskolnikov's mind. And he then kills the moneylender, bludgeons her to death with an axe. And I remember one walking behind Simon as I'd finished the book with an ice axe in my hand and I can still sort of see the back of his head. I don't know how close he came to death, but that's fairly well imprinted on my mind.

I know it's a tough question, but looking back on the entirety of the experience now with the benefit of the the passage of time, how do you.

View was the most amazing experience for me to have the time to completely travel in my head in books and thoughts. It was a wonderful boy's own adventure at the same time. And so, yes, we had this crossing of the Antarctic and living out on the plateau and getting to South Pole and all of that, and it was great fun. But I think the thing that was really formative and interesting was in my head sitting still.

And so thank you very much for your time. Pleasure. Everyone's accustomed to receiving books, booze or boring socks over the holidays, but in recent years, a new present has started appearing under Christmas trees.

At this time of year, sales of genetic testing kits are going up. And as you know, the holidays are all about your family.

Natasha Loder is the Economist health policy editor.

One of the leading firms, 23andMe, says the holiday period is one of their busiest times of year.

Customers can order a kit, spit in.

A tube, send it back to the lab, and we will look at your DNA at a few hundred thousand specific points in your genome. And then we use that information to tell you about different things relating to your ancestry and your health.

Joyce Tongue is vice president of research at 23andMe.

What continents your ancestors might have come.

From, what your genetic risk for type 2 diabetes is.

Do you carry things that you might.

Pass on to your children, things like that?

There has been talk of these kinds of kits for years. I have spat into one myself. I mean, how have they kind of come on and what they do, what they can tell you since they first hit the market?

For one thing, we have a lot more data about ancestry, so they can be a little bit more accurate about where you came from and who your relatives are. And secondly, the tests have passed through FDA approval. So when you get a result back, perhaps diabetes risk or late onset Alzheimer, you can be more confident that the results you're getting are reliable. So certainly as time's gone by, more people have been tested this way and the accuracy has improved.

And what about the question that has sort of plagued this industry from the very start, which is it's very, very intimate information that you're kind of handing over to a company, signing over, indeed to a company.

If you go and get tested, the data essentially remains yours unless you wish to share it. And so you may be surprised to learn that most people actually do choose to share the data for research reasons. And so we might be less worried about privacy than we ought to be, perhaps. I guess one of the concerns is that once that data is in a database, you know, it could be subpoenaed. For example, law enforcement might demand from a company that they have access to this data. It's not so far fetched, actually. We've seen that happen. In one instance, we've seen law enforcement using a genetic database. But many people feel that the risk is worth it.

And so what about the companies that are simply aiming to kind of map out a family tree? I mean, how is that effort paying off these days?

Well, it's certainly helping people identify lost relatives, perhaps half brothers, half sisters. If you're adopted, it's managed to help people find their birth mothers. Of course, if you give one of these kits for Christmas, you also need to be aware that you may find some unpleasant surprises and you may find that you're not related to the people who you thought you were. Purely very anecdotally, there is obviously a concern among geneticists that these kits might be given by fathers to children whom they suspect of not being their children. Whether this is true or not, I don't know. But what I'm saying is that while you can find out some wonderful things about these testing kits, you do need to be aware that there are some unpleasant things that you may find out.

So it does seem like the downsides are potentially big in terms of finding out information you didn't have and didn't want, or finding out that you are at greater risk of something that perhaps is entirely outside your control or your data may be used against you in some nefarious way. I mean, why do these tests at all?

Everyone wants to find out more about themselves. And, you know, the appeal is just simply that you can unlock a little sort of secret about yourself that you didn't know. That said, yeah, there's the potential for unpleasant surprises. You don't have to choose to find out about your risk of Alzheimer's. So that's an option. It's a very individual decision. I'm not suggesting that you necessarily all go out and get them from Christmas. I'm just saying that you may find one under your Christmas tree.

Natasha, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow, Sam.