Businesses rarely miss the chance to advertise “locally grown” or “locally owned” when the label fits. Clearly they believe local messaging will boost sales; certainly they don’t fear it will backfire. The obvious implication — that buying local is either personally advantageous for the customer or else morally virtuous — does not get questioned much. But should I really feel better about trading with my neighbor than with a person in the next town, state, or country?

Below I will consider the reasons commonly given for favoring local merchants over distant ones. I notice two unrelated propositions getting smuggled in together under the “buy local” theme. The first is that buying local is personally advantageous for the customer. This certainly seems plausible in some cases, as I note below. The second proposition is that buying more expensive local goods is morally superior to buying cheaper non-local goods. This is the proposition that generally offends me. Before studying this issue, I assumed the notion that buying local is virtuous was completely bogus, put forward for purely protectionist reasons. After studying, I soften my position some. I see virtue in paying more to buy local in certain specific and temporary cases. I still believe a thick strand of the buy local message depends on the bad assumption that people nearby matter more than people far away. Read and comment below to let me know what I’ve missed.

Reasons Commonly Given to Buy Local

The first several arguments deal mostly with food items; the last few are broader:

1. Superior Quality. Local goods are sometimes fresher, more artfully crafted, or more tuned to local needs and tastes. In these cases, “local” is just a substitute word for “better” in the eyes of the consumer. Buying goods we prefer is just ordinary and rational economic acting, not part of the moral aspect of the “buy local” theme.
2. Less Harm to Environment. Some argue that the environmental cost of long-distance transportation makes buying local a more ethical option. If this is true, the appropriate policy response is to cap whatever pollutants are involved or tax them commensurate with their harm. This way, the final market price of a good will fully reflect its costs to both suppliers and third parties. Once prices are fully loaded in this way, we should welcome all free market activity around these prices. Some research also questions whether local operations really pollute less. In the case of food products, an Environmental Science & Technology paper found that emissions occur primarily during the production phase, not the transportation phase. If large operations are more efficient in the production phase, they may be more environmentally efficient overall. Either way, proper regulation would let a consumer know by simply comparing prices. To whatever extent prices under- or over-account for externalities, I see virtue in customers mentally adjusting the price — but only to the extent of the mispricing.
3. Big Corporations Get Unfair Subsidies. Government farming subsidies typically go to large commercial farms rather than small family farms. Given this political unfairness, it seems virtuous for consumers to protest and offset this wrong by patronizing small farms — for as long as the political favoritism lasts. Ultimately, the best policy response would be to end subsidies altogether, and have a simple redistribution system that meets the minimum basic needs of anyone who loses their livelihood.
4. Food Safety. Some feel more comfortable with the health of food when they know the farmer. I do not personally feel this way — my bias is to trust that systematic quality controls are in place at large corporations to survive regulatory scrutiny and avoid highly embarrassing and costly recalls — but I understand that people feel differently. In any case, buying safer food would be an act of rational personal advantage, not moral virtue.
5. Animal Welfare. Some farms treat animals as well as they can, and others get them to market as cheaply as they can, even if the animals are tortured along the way. I pay more for products that advertise humane treatment, but I don’t care whether the seller is local or not. Vegan-turned-hunter Tovar Cerulli, however, only buys meat from butchers he knows. For him, knowing the butcher personally is part of feeling sure that the animal is well treated. Over time, I expect market forces will motivate more food producers to claim humane treatment of animals, and I hope trust in the truth of these claims can be established among people and entities who live and operate vast distances from each other. Agribusiness, which has made itself untrustworthy with famously secretive operations, can open up itself to transparent inspection to reestablish trust. But in the meantime, I empathize with those like Tovar who believe you can only be sure that moral treatment is taking place if you trade locally with people you know.
6. Support the Local Economy. Buy local, and your money supports jobs in your community, businesses in your community, tax revenue in your community. Buy non-local, and your money leaves town. This argument is the clearest case of an argument that has the veneer of virtue but is ultimately empty. Money spent non-locally doesn’t burn up, it simply supports a different community more directly. How can supporting Community A be morally superior to supporting Community B? Only because of self-interest would someone prefer to support his or her own community over another community. But this is personal advantage, not moral virtue.
7. Local Businesses Create More Jobs Than Large Corporations. I can’t find a workable moral principle within this argument. Certainly one business that operates in ten towns needs fewer employees than ten individual businesses. But if one business per town is better, why not one business per zip code? One business per street? Milton Friedman once asked why the workers at a canal project were digging with shovels instead of tractors. The answer was that shovels meant more jobs. Milton replied, “If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons.” Operational efficiency inevitably costs jobs, but producing greater output with less input is the definition of productivity. By what articulable principle should we slow progress down somewhat, and yet not stop it completely? As I argued above, we should seek a simple redistribution policy that meets the minimum basic needs of those without jobs — perhaps even money for training in new industries — and beyond that we should welcome productivity and continual innovation.

Tentative Conclusion

To sum up, I see cases where buying local can be personally advantageous to the consumer, and specific and temporary cases where paying a premium to buy local is morally virtuous. I do not see any general or permanent basis by which buying local is inherently a virtue. I believe we’d be better off trying to generate some good will toward potential trading partners around the globe, focusing on a few simple policies to capture externalities in market prices and eliminate unfair subsidies, and enact a very simple redistribution mechanism that meets minimum basic needs and then lets free market activity take place.

One final disclaimer: Many of my family members operate local businesses, and I hope they do very well. What I do not say is that trading with my family is morally superior to trading with someone else.

What am I missing? Please add a comment.

Recent tragedies — deaths of black men from what looked to be excessive force by some police officers, retaliatory killings of randomly selected officers, and massive civilian terror attacks worldwide — have brought tense questions back to the top of the news rundown. Are some active police officers unfairly prejudiced against black people? What fuels terrorism? Some controversies are matters of preference. But these questions, though they stir strong emotion, are ultimately questions of fact. A person with perfect knowledge could settle these debates.

In this sense, these questions are similar to other societal impasses, like the causes and consequences of climate change or the effect of raising the minimum wage on unemployment. To each of these questions, objectively correct answers exist.

I will not attempt to add value to the particulars of these individual discussions. I will focus instead on the general issue of societal stalemate: how is it that we disagree so permanently over seemingly solvable, empirical questions? Our information and intelligence are certainly imperfect, and we have different life experiences. But I see three fixable problems that keep us from changing our minds as evidence evolves, as well. (My thinking can surely be improved, so please add your comments.) Here they are:

1. Change-Resistant Thinking (as opposed to Fluid Thinking)

Imagine you are evaluating two competing beliefs, Belief A and Belief B. How do you decide between them? One approach would be to begin with the presumption that Belief A is true, and only change your mind if shown overwhelming evidence in favor of Belief B. I call this change-resistant thinking. Change-resistant thinking sounds ridiculous when described in this way, but we formally and purposefully apply this framework in many contexts.

We apply change-resistant thinking in criminal trials. It is the presumption of innocence. We also codify change-resistant thinking into science. When testing the effectiveness of a new drug, the default presumption or “null hypothesis” is that the drug is no better than preexisting treatments. Only with overwhelming evidence for the drug’s superiority will we reject our initial position and conclude in favor of the new drug. Even if experimental results suggest a 70% or 80% likelihood that the new drug is superior, our default presumption that the drug is no better than alternatives can remain intact. Often a confidence level greater than 95% is required to overturn the null hypothesis in scientific experiments.

The graph below shows the results of change-resistant thinking. As long as the data admit any degree of uncertainty, a person who begins with a commitment to Belief A can review the data and keep her view, as can a person who began with Belief B. Same data, opposite conclusions.

Change-Resistant Thinking

Why is change-resistant thinking appropriate in some contexts? In the criminal justice system, we deem it worse to wrongly convict than to wrongly acquit. In the lab, the environment is so well controlled that any true effect should be definitively observable over a large enough sample. In the chaos of the real world, however, one effect is always entangled with many other contemporaneous and offsetting effects.

Which brings us to the other model of evaluating competing claims or theories, fluid thinking. In a fluid thinking model, we begin from a place of agnosticism or equal consideration between A and B. We move between the beliefs in the direction the evidence indicates, and to the degree that the evidence indicates. If the accumulated body of evidence suggests a 60% probability that Belief B is true, a fluid thinker will lean toward Belief B with 60% confidence, while allowing a 40% chance that she is wrong. Fluid thinking is the decision-making framework we apply in civil trials.

Fluid Thinking

When facing mutually exclusive propositions, the first choice is to decide how we will decide: will we apply a change-resistant model or a fluid model? If our goal is simply to align our beliefs with what the evidence indicates, the fluid-thinking framework serves us best.

If we do decide to apply change-resistant thinking, we should pre-determine the standard of proof we will require in order to reject our default position. I mentioned that scientific researchers often require a 95% confidence level before rejecting their default presumption. My sense is that people often require this type of certainty or even greater before reluctantly revising opinions. We should ask ourselves whether the standard of proof we require of some unfamiliar claim is the same standard we required when we initially accepted our default beliefs.

2. Information Processing Biases

Change-resistant thinking would entrench our ideology even if we were entirely rational in how we processed new information. In reality, we tend to scramble information in order to avoid the mental discomfort of having our preexisting worldview challenged.

A broad term for these biases is motivated reasoning — the use of our brains in service of our emotions. Studies of brain activity show motivated reasoning to be prevalent across the political spectrum. When individuals are given a reasoning task where they have no emotional stake in the conclusion reached, neuroimaging shows that they use different brain regions than when processing information about a political candidate toward whom they have strong feelings. The upshot is that individuals converge on judgments that that minimize negative emotion and maximize positive emotion. Some interesting, specific biases include:

Ad Hoc Hypotheses

An ad hoc hypothesis is a hypothesis “added to a theory to save it from being falsified” by seemingly contradictory evidence. When researchers “adjust for” or “control for” certain factors or “exclude” outliers from their study results, be wary. If the researcher made such adjustments only after being disappointed by the unadjusted study results, these are ad hoc hypotheses. In an Econ Talk episode noting that many psychological effects reported in published research can’t be reliably reproduced, economist Russ Roberts and psychology professor Brian Nosek discuss this concept without using the term. Consider this illustration:

A psychologist hypothesizes that children of divorced parents are less likely to want to marry than children of married parents. She surveys a sample of single adults. To her surprise, 85% of the divorced-parents group say they want to marry someday, while just 70% of the married-parents cohort say the same. She brainstorms explanations for this counterintuitive result. She observes that the married-parents group contains a higher concentration of young adults, a demographic less interested in marriage. She decides to exclude this demographic from her data. With this adjustment, the results are closer to her expectation: 90% of the divorced-parents group now say they want to marry versus 85% of the married-parents group. Still seeking to close the gap, she sees that some of the married-parents respondents noted that their parents fought a lot. She deems these “unhappy marriages,” and reclassifies them into the divorced-parents group. She tabulates the results of the happily-married-parents group versus the divorced-and-unhappily-married parents group. Finally, she gets the result she expected: 90% of the happily-married-parents group want to marry, versus just 75% of the other group. She considers no further adjustments, and declares that her data support her theory. Had she continued to scan the variables, she might have noticed that the happily-married-parents group contained a different concentration of men versus women, or religious backgrounds that emphasize marriage, or other factors that might have swung the outcome.

The point is not that a researcher should not explore the data to refine a theory, but that the data used to generate a theory must be separate from the data used to confirm it. Otherwise, a researcher can keep shaking the dice — adjusting and unadjusting the sample for every plausibly explanatory factor — until the data appear to show the desired result.

Special Pleading

Special Pleading refers to asymmetric scrutiny in search of a particular outcome. In the example of ad hoc hypotheses above, the reclassification of unhappy marriages into the divorce group was special pleading; there was no comparable consideration given to reclassifying any other data.

Cherry Picking

Cherry picking means paying or calling attention to data that support one’s view while consciously or subconsciously avoiding data that conflict. It is a piece of confirmation bias, which I mentioned in an earlier post, Which News Sources Should You Follow?

Overweighting Personal Experience

People tend to overweight their personal experience when estimating probabilities. We do not need to, and should not, consider the personal experiences of the few people we happen to know when evaluating a proposition on which large-scale data exists. Data from a proper, representative sample already reflects the kinds of outcomes of which you are aware, in their proper proportion to all other outcomes which have been observed.

3. Prior Assumptions

Prior assumptions can cause two people to interpret the same statistic to mean opposite things. Consider metrics showing that people of some ethnic groups are more likely to be killed by police than others.

To someone who considers it unlikely that police are racially biased, the only thing these statistics can mean is that police encounter threats warranting lethal force in different frequencies from people of different ethnicities. To someone who believes that people of all ethnicities are equally likely to present police with such threats, the only thing these statistics can mean is that police are racially biased.

In a complicated world, where we cannot isolate variables as in a laboratory, we need to identify and evaluate our own prior assumptions.

What Can Be Done?

The world is not a controlled laboratory. If we are holding out for perfect, absolutely indisputable evidence, we will likely never change our mind about anything. This does not mean that we should quit searching for objective truth, or that both parties to a debate always have equal evidence on their side. We can maximize our chances of seeing things as they are by committing to a fluid-thinking model, resisting information processing biases, and reevaluating our prior assumptions.

Clinton and Trump are both deeply disliked — but one of them will be president. With a smarter (and more democratic) election format, we could elect more satisfying politicians. An initiative on the ballot in Maine this November would bring such a format to that state. I will describe the problem with our current format, as I see it, and argue that ranked-choice voting is a superior and viable alternative. Finally, I will invite you to comment.

We Don’t Always Get The President We Really Want

In U.S. presidential elections we vote for our top choice only — whether the field includes two candidates, three, or everyone with an iPhone 6.

The results can be illogical and anti-democratic. Think about the 2000 election, where Bush ultimately beat Gore won by 537 votes in Florida. Spoiler Ralph Nader received 97,000 votes in Florida, and polls showed Nader voters preferred Gore to Bush by two to one. Hanging chads aside, is there any doubt that more Florida voters preferred Gore to Bush?

When you order at a restaurant and the kitchen has run out of your order, the waiter doesn’t come back and say, “We’re out of that, you don’t get a second choice, come back in four years and make a better order.” But that is the experience of a third-party voter.

Given the existing system of voting for a single candidate, supporters of non-major party candidates face two bad choices:

1. Tactical Voting: You predict which two candidates are likeliest to win and vote for whichever one you can stomach. This has the distorting effect of signaling more support for the major party platforms than really exists, and it starves marginal parties of votes that would signal viability in future elections.
2. Vote your true preference and risk a bad outcome: In the absence of tactical voting, a candidate who is supported by a dedicated plurality, but strongly disliked by the majority, can win the White House.

A Better System (Too Hard in the 1700s, Easy Now)

Ranked-choice voting, as the name suggests, would allow voters to rank-order the candidates. This way, voters make their top preference known without losing their say if the final choice comes down to two other candidates. Suppose the 2016 U.S. presidential election is between three candidates: Hillary Clinton (Democrat), Donald Trump (Republican), and an independent candidate known as Mo the Wise and Ethical. Nearby is an example ballot of a voter whose top choice is Mo the Wise and Ethical, but if forced to choose between Clinton and Trump, would choose Clinton.

There are several ways to determine the winner of a ranked-choice election. An elegantly simple method that satisfies more desirable criteria than any other method is called the Schulze or Condorcet method: you simply evaluate hypothetical head-to-head races between each pair of candidates. There will usually be exactly one candidate who beats all others head-to-head, and this candidate must be the winner of the election. In the rare event that there is no such winner, some tie-breaking method would be needed. (For example, the ballot above would count as a vote for Mo in any head-to-head race involving Mo, but as a vote for Clinton in a Clinton-Trump runoff.)

Who would win between Clinton, Trump, and Mo? Suppose the election results come out as in the table below. (To keep things simple, I’m just talking about the popular vote and ignoring the electoral college, although this same process is what would occur within each state.)

I will assume that the Clinton voters (that is, the 40% of voters for whom Clinton was their first choice) would prefer anyone to Donald Trump, so all Clinton voters select Mo the Wise and Ethical as their second choice. Conversely, every Trump voter also makes Mo their second choice. Mo, the first choice on just 25% of the ballots, is thus second on the remaining 75%. I will further assume that the Mo voters are evenly divided between Hillary and Trump as to their second preference. Hillary, therefore, is the second choice on 12.5% of the ballots and third on the remaining 47.5% of ballots. Trump, likewise, is second on 12.5% of the ballots, and last on 52.5% (all Hillary voters plus half of the Mo voters).

Election Results:

We can generate three hypothetical head-to-head contests from these results:

• Clinton defeats Trump by 5 points, 52.5% to 47.5% (Clinton outranks Trump on 52.5% of the ballots — the 40% who picked her first and the half of the Mo voters who ranked her second).
• Mo defeats Trump by 30 points, 65% to 35% (All Clinton and Mo voters prefer Mo to Trump).
• Mo defeats Clinton by 20 points, 60% to 40% (All Trump and Mo voters prefer Mo to Clinton).

Mo should thus be president. Voters prefer Mo to Clinton and to Trump.

FairVote and Brookings Institution have made additional arguments for a form of ranked-choice voting called instant-runoff voting. I will only point out one more satisfying aspect of ranked-choice voting: there can be no more direct way to “throw the bums out” of office than to rank the offending party dead last on the ballot.

 Where Ranked-Choice Voting is Already Used

Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is used in many national elections (prominently in Australia, India, and Ireland) and in cities within the United States (Oakland, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and St. Paul). It’s widely used in the UK to decide party leaders, and it’s good enough to decide the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Drawbacks of Ranked-Choice Voting

No voting system satisfies every criteria that might be deemed desirable. This has been painstakingly proven in academic papers (See Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem or the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem).

As mentioned previously, the head-to-head method I laid out (a.k.a. the Condorcet or Schulze method) satisfies more criteria than any other method.

Other disadvantages of ranked-choice voting are:

• It requires some degree of sophistication on the part of voters, and
• It requires more computing power than our existing format, and will not always change the election results.

Is Ranked-Choice Voting Constitutional?

The courts say yes, although to be fair, if it weren’t constitutional, I would simply argue to pass an amendment. A very quick aside: to say that unconstitutionality in and of itself is a reason never to do something that we otherwise believe is right, is to say that we must keep doing what we previously thought we must do, merely because we previously thought we must do it.

But anyway, ranked-choice voting has been endorsed by the courts. In Stephenson v. the Ann Arbor Board of City Canvassers, a Michigan Court held that “majority preferential voting” (a form of ranked-choice voting) complies with the Michigan and United States constitutions:

“Under the [Preferential Voting System], no one person or voter has more than one effective vote for one office … The form of majority preferential voting employed in the City of Ann Arbor’s election of its Mayor does not violate the one-man, one-vote mandate nor does it deprive anyone of equal protection rights under the Michigan or United States Constitutions.”

In a concurring opinion in Williams v. Rhodes, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan also suggested instant runoff voting could help decide elections.

What Do You Think?

Is ranked-choice voting a good idea? Could it happen? What have I failed to consider? Please add your voice below and invite others to the conversation who would be interested.

UPDATE TO ORIGINAL POST  (Updated July 9):

One reader emailed to point out that I am implicitly assuming that the campaign strategies and voter turnout would be the same in a ranked-choice election as in our current format. He argued that politicians would change strategies if the voting format changed to ranked-choice. As one example, under a ranked-choice format Hillary Clinton and the Democrats might encourage Bernie Sanders to run as an independent. If we assume (a) Bernie has a passionate support base that might not bother voting if Bernie isn’t the ballot, and (b) if Bernie is on the ballot as an independent, his supporters will show up to vote, and while they’re at it, they’ll choose Clinton as their second choice, then it makes sense for the Democrats to encourage Bernie to run as an independent.

I am very persuaded by this argument, and agree that campaign strategies would change if the election format changed.

I think the best policy response to all this would be to make voting so easy that everyone with any interest at all in the outcome of the election will vote. This would make get-out-the-vote efforts pointless, and we could find better uses for the time and resources that we once poured into such shenanigans.

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback — relative to the humble size of my readership — on my Core Principle #1: Non-Tribalism. According to this principle, I judge international economic policy for its impact on global welfare, where outcomes for each person in every country weigh equally.

“Should a government not try to maximize the welfare of its own citizens (and tax payers)?” readers wrote. And, “Economics requires that each party act in its own self-interest.”

This is a major challenge to my philosophy. On the one hand, I say that tribalism, as I will further define it below, is bad. On the other, I agree that self-interest is a natural force that, in the right context, benefits everyone. In this post, I attempt to navigate definitions that show these beliefs to be mutually compatible. (Of course, I might be fooling myself and rationalizing self-contradicting beliefs. In that case I will have to revise my Core Principle #1, just two posts into my new blog. Let me know.)

Below, I will try to show:

• What “tribalism” means and how it differs from rational self-interest;
• Examples from current events;
• Why tribalism is harmful;
• Finally, for those still reading, I will briefly consider if the Brexit maps onto the concept of tribalism.

What I Mean By Tribalism

If I were a citizen of Country X, comparing my country to Country Y, I could hold several pro-Country X ideas including:

1. My country’s system of governance is more conducive to human flourishing;
2. My country’s people are inherently more valuable;
3. I hope for favorable outcomes for the people of Country X more than for the people of Country Y; or
4. Rules that make favorable outcomes more likely for the people of Country X than County Y are justified.

In his book Moral Tribes, author Joshua Greene describes tribalism as a gut reaction that says “we count more than they do,” which then  justifies policies that weigh “our” interests above “theirs”. Greene argues that this emotion is a limitation of our intuitive morality, which evolved to cooperate with people nearby and fight off others.

Reading back over the list I numbered above with this definition of tribalism in mind, I would say:

• Statement #1 may be supported or not supported by evidence but is not tribalistic.
• Statement #2 is squarely tribalistic.
• Statement #3 may be a symptom of tribalism but is not my practical focus. I might hope that my sister wins a job promotion over the other candidates without believing that a policy that disadvantages the other candidates is justified.
• Statement #4 is tribalistic and is my primary focus in this blog.

In the area of national trade policies, an interesting case exists where the interests of a tax-paying citizen may come up against the interests of a non-citizen, and the citizen may feel entitled to advantages over the non-citizen on the grounds that he has paid for them (in taxes). Setting aside the classic economic arguments on free trade, arguments that have already been well made, I will separately argue that our tax payments do not include the purchase of a non-level playing field in international commerce. (I will lay this out in a separate post about getting what we pay for in taxes, and not less, but not more.)

Tribalism vs. Rational Self-Interest

In a market economy, a self-interested individual will work hard to deliver valued goods and services to others as efficiently as possible, and to respond rapidly to changing preferences. What could be better?

This effort and innovation, the hallmarks of a market economy, are best incentivized when the playing field is level. A level playing field means all participants can come to the market and compete, differentiating themselves according to whatever advantages they can offer, whether that be a lower price or higher quality. (Free competition doesn’t have to mean totally unregulated; environmental rules might limit certain output but still allow immense variety in quality and pricing otherwise.) Is there a better environment for promoting constructive work and innovation on a global scale than a level global playing field?

Tribalism justifies the tilting of the playing field. It justifies the establishment of advantages that protect domestic workers and businesses against international workers and businesses. Self-interest is a force that thrives within a level playing field.

Examples of Tribalism in Current Events

“The Trans Pacific Partnership would force American workers to compete against desperate workers in Vietnam who are paid as little as 56 cents an hour. That would be a disaster.” — Bernie Sanders

“We’re going to start winning.” — Donald Trump

The Bernie quote sounds like a George Costanza line:

GEORGE: Jerry, these Vietnamese workers are earning 56 cents an hour. It’s a disaster!

JERRY: That’s gotta be rough for them.

GEORGE: I’m not talking about them, I’m talking about me! I’ve gotta compete with them!

Bernie’s policy would advantage Americans to the exclusion of the Vietnamese workers he mentions, whose wage is perhaps one-tenth of the U.S. minimum wage. Whatever the marginal utility of an extra dollar to an American union member, it is surely greater to a Vietnamese factory worker.

At least Bernie conveys some empathy for the Vietnamese, however. Trump describes international economic policy in starkly competitive terms, where the U.S. will “win,” and implicitly whoever else he has in mind will lose.

Why Tribalism is Harmful

Three tangible costs of tribalism include:

1. Time and resources poured into setting up barriers is a use of limited resources that does not grow a crop, cure a disease or create art.
2. For those on the weak end of a power imbalance, the act of a more prosperous country keeping out your products and workers could be devastating.
3. For prosperous countries, freezing out products from the developing world still deprives you of the variety and comparative advantages offered by the developing country, as well as the pressure on domestic industries to keep innovating.

The Brexit

I favor market integration over market segregation in general, and would prefer to see the world move closer to one big frictionless market. The Brexit, by those lights, is a step in the wrong direction. But the EU is more than a trade union, so the Brexit is more complicated than that.

Is the Brexit a case of tribalism? To the extent that the Brexit was motivated by voters’ desire to avoid competing with immigrants economically, yes. To the extent that the Brexit was motivated by voters’ intent to dissociate from what they see as bad policy (i.e., harmful to global welfare if rolled out on a global scale), no. How’s that for hedging?

Solutions to Tribalism

If I can think of any, they will come in later posts.

This flow chart recommends news sources based on your existing political views and your desire to confirm versus challenge those views:

Reading contrary viewpoints is much more difficult mentally than reading supporting views, but as the flow chart illustrates, is necessary for overcoming confirmation bias.

Two noteworthy sets of news outlets and commentary that don’t fit into the flow chart above are:

1. Sources that challenge both the mainstream left and the mainstream right:
   • The Economist. Describing its position as the “extreme centre,” the Economist believes in free trade and free markets, opposes capital punishment, and favors gun control and gay marriage. It will be useful to someone who currently holds the opposite views and wants to consider sophisticated contrary arguments.
   • The Atlantic. Novel and nuanced takes on important issues, and true to its claim of being “distinctively unbiased” overall. This piece on The Obama Doctrine challenges both sides.
   • Two lesser-known sources of commentary that don’t fit neatly within the contemporary left or right are The Rubin Report and the Waking Up podcast with Sam Harris. Like the better-known Real Time with Bill Maher, the hosts of these shows self-identify as liberals and will be vigorously challenging to audiences on the right, particularly the religious right. Also like Maher, however, they forcefully criticize the “regressive left” for overlooking illiberal systems when multiculturalism is at stake. Harris and Maher’s clash with Ben Affleck was a seminal moment in this debate.
2. Quasi-Straight News: These outlets, in my view, are closer to straight news than to advocacy, but their broad feel is more left-of-center than right-of-center: CNN, PBS, NPR and BBC.