Trust me, I’m a politician.
Six years on from Nick Clegg and his tuition fees pledge, why do we still trust any of these self-serving persons of Westminster?
Within hours of Brexit victory, Nigel Farage backtracks on the NHS pledge and Daniel Hannan clarifies what he meant by taking back control of our borders.
Naturally, these clarifications couldn’t have happened before the UK made one of the most pivotal decisions in post-war history.
Talk is cheap. If the incentives of the politicians are aligned with the voters, the information they say is valuable. What happens when they aren’t aligned? Thursday.
Cheap talk, formally defined is:
costless,
non-binding,
and unverifiable by third parties
These are all a little bit abstract and extreme, but the intuition flows through to some similar, milder conclusions.
The main takeaways from Crawford and Sobel:
Separating, ie complete and accurate information, is not a Nash (optimal for both parties, such that no party has an incentive to deviate) equilibrium.
Babbling, ie Hannan, Clegg and Farage, is always an equilibrium outcome.
A partially separating equilibrium is the pleasant and less extreme middle ground which makes this whole model less binary and prescriptive; it’s a spectrum of equilibria as opposed to just one! It involves some useful information transfer, albeit a little vague and wishy washy, which is more often than not the case in the real world.
When interests are aligned, the words politicians say should be trusted, because our end goals are the same.
If we have different aims to, say BoJo or Cameron, well we probably shouldn’t be taking all the things they say at face value.
Well this seems easy enough, we should just not trust people if we think they are aiming for something different. Where’s the problem?
Problem: identifying if politicians goals are aligned with ours as voters
Solution: filtering through more cheap talk from the same mouths
Dismissing all information is cynical, accepting all information is naïve. A healthy balance of acceptance with a sceptical mind is our most powerful weapon.
Sometimes we make mistakes, we should learn from them. Let’s update with the information we have gained since Thursday and be more prudent in assessing reliability.
There is no real way of overcoming cheap talk, but we can ensure nothing as damaging as this happens again. Not all politicians are bad, but this has shown us they shouldn’t all be trusted.
We can and hopefully will overcome ‘Independence Day’. I turn to the chaos of the next few weeks and hope it nurtures a strong leader. I no longer care what their policies are, as long as they stabilise us. I will accept this unwanted change, but not yet defeat.
