The Structural Advantages of Being a Known Political Liar

I have written before about why a known liar making a claim should lower your confidence in it. That is the epistemics. This post is about something else: why, given how our political system is built, being widely known as a liar is an advantage to a politician rather than a cost.

Not a survivable defect. An advantage. Three mechanisms produce it.

1. The Same Sentence Serves Two Audiences

Consider a populist facing a housing crisis. He announces that he will solve it — aggressively increasing the supply of land and housing, bringing prices down.

Most of the public takes this at face value. Not because they are stupid, but because seeing through it requires a specific analysis: you would have to know that he sits inside a hierarchy pressured by construction firms and banks, that those firms and banks are substantial donors, and that none of them want a fall in prices. That is not general knowledge, and acquiring it is not worth an ordinary person's afternoon.

The contractors and the bankers, meanwhile, have exactly that analysis. Working out the motivations of government is their daily business. They know he will not dare engineer a housing crash, they know what the statement is for, and they treat it as positioning rather than policy.

So one sentence reaches two audiences and does opposite work in each. The public hears a commitment. The interested parties hear noise. Both are satisfied by the same words, and the reputation for lying is precisely what allows the second group to relax.

A politician known to be sincere could not do this. Sincerity would frighten the donors.

2. Contradictory Promises Become Available

The second advantage is simpler and more mechanical.

If you are not bound to consistency, you can promise farmers higher tariffs on grain in the morning and promise consumers cheaper bread in the afternoon. These are incompatible: the tariff raises the price of the input that becomes the bread.

Incompatibility only costs you if somebody aggregates your claims and checks them against each other. Who would? The public does not have the attention for it — there are hundreds of statements across dozens of issues, and following them all is a full-time job that pays nothing. And journalists, who nominally have that job, are in practice no better at it than the politicians, because the incentives of the news cycle reward covering today's statement rather than reconciling it with one from six weeks ago.

So the set of promises a liar can make is strictly larger than the set an honest politician can make, and the larger set covers more constituencies.

3. The Lying Is Load-Bearing

The third mechanism is the one I find genuinely unsettling, because it means the dishonesty is not merely tolerated by the system — it is holding the system up.

Sowell makes the observation that starts it off: politicians operate on short horizons and are pushed toward promising quick fixes, especially when an opponent is promising them. Economic processes that need years to work themselves out are interrupted, because nobody facing election in thirty months can afford to let a painful adjustment run its course.

Now put the two facts together. Politicians are pushed to promise interventions that would damage the economy — and they do not carry them out.

We are, therefore, fortunate that they are lying. The promises are vacuous, and their vacuity is protective. The gap between what is said to win the election and what is done in office is the mechanism that spares us the consequences of what was said.

That is a remarkable state of affairs to arrive at. It means the system's tolerable outcomes depend on its participants' insincerity. If politicians suddenly became honest — if they meant what they said and implemented it — the results would be worse, not better.

What Follows

The usual response to all this is to demand better people: candidates with integrity, who mean what they say. But notice that every one of the three mechanisms is structural. The two-audience problem comes from an information asymmetry the system creates. The contradictory-promises problem comes from the absence of any aggregation step. The load-bearing-lie problem comes from election cycles being shorter than economic adjustments.

None of these is fixed by better candidates. An honest politician inside this structure is simply less effective — he cannot reassure the donors, cannot cover as many constituencies, and if elected would implement the damaging promises everyone else has the good sense to abandon.

When a system rewards a vice that reliably, the vice is not the problem. The reward is.