the world is right now, if we are not on this everyday 24/7, man, i've got to worry about my children. i've got four children. from that standpoint i know that there's work to do and the work that has to be done, you've got to be courageous or get out of the way because if you're not courageous, if you're not willing to stand on the principles that need to be stand on right now, then it's going to be that generation that's going to be, like right now we have a group of children who don't care about life. they have no hope. they have no hope of getting to 20. their mind is if i see jeff on some nice gear, i'm going to jack you. how does that mentality happening? why does that permeate? we can do something about that. i know it can happen. >> host: that's a preview with former nba player craig hodges. his book "long shot: the struggles and triumphs of an nba

freedom fighter." you are watching booktv on c-span2. >> you are watching booktv on on c-span2. this week in revisiting cleveland, ohio, to talk with local authors and tour the city's literary sites. we hear from justin buchler about his research on competitive elections. >> i started thinking about competitive elections long ago, and i started the project thinking that i was writing as the devil's advocate. i saw people assume without question the competitive elections are intensively good and intrinsically healthy. at the thought it was important to have somebody make the argument in the other direction. so i started the project from

the mindset of playing devil's advocate. and as i kept working on the project, i realized i had an easier time constructing arguments against embedded in elections and for them. when we say competitive election back in the a lot of different things. ike and mamie elections in which there are as many candidates on the ballot as possible. beginning an election which we are uncertain about outcome. there are a lot of different meanings of competition. one of the problems with the same we should have more competitive elections is that frequently making elections more competitive by one definition is making them less competitive by another. i think it's important for us to think about exactly what we mean by terms like competitive elections. so part of the basic motivation

for the book is the observation that at the congressional level very few elections are competitive by most definitions. most incumbents went and most do so by large margins. if you listen to political dialogue, that's described as a bad thing and it's described as something that means something is wrong in our democracy. however, if we think about an election as a decision about whether or not to fire an employee company employees are being retained deterministically on a regular basis, that would suggest that you got a well functioning operation. where you see trouble is where you see a company that is regularly firing half of its employees every two years. that's the sign that you've got a badly run company. so it becomes important to understand the distinction is in terms of what good or bad thing that most incumbents win reelection by large margin.

if you think of an election as the market, then that means something has gone wrong because it means we have not competitive markets but monopolies. on the other hand, if you think about elections as hiring and firing mechanisms, the fact that most incumbents are deterministically rehired might mean that everything is actually working okay. so it's important in a hiring and firing mechanism is to have a credible threat to fire employees who don't do their job such that they do their job such that your employees are retain retained. and that means there are two ways that things can go wrong. one is firing employees who should have been retained. the other is retaining employees who should have been fired. either way you have a problem. if we want to know whether or not there is a problem, we have incumbents who are being systematically rehired on a regular basis. that's a problem if it is a case

that the employees should have been fired. to whether or not there's anything wrong then is the question of whether not the specific incumbents who are being rehired shouldn't be rehired. this is where we turn to something that we call in political science scientist paradox. he made observation while most americans will say they were don't like congress, if asked them what they think of their own members of congress to actually like their own members of congress. when you look at approval or disapproval of congress over all, we are sort of missing the point because if i live in district one and you live in district two, in my opinion is the incumbent in district two is irrelevant because that income that doesn't work for me. the only one who works for me is the incumbent in district one. so it doesn't matter what my opinion of the incumbent industry to. what matters is my opinion of

the incumbent in district one. if voters are happy with their own members of congress, then that suggests what to do things is the case. either voters are being systematically tricked about how well their employees are doing, or the system is functioning well. if the system is functioning well in we shouldn't worry that most elections are not competitive. if the problem is that voters are being tricked then we have a much bigger problem than the lack of competitive election. in the assessment of whether or not and incumbent deserves to get the job is a little bit subjective. so it's hard to say whether or not voters are being systematically tricked. there are limitations on what voters know. most voters are not particularly well informed about individual members of congress. but the times voters are best informed about members of

congress is when it is the competitive election resulting from the incumbent usually doing something wrong. usually that means there was a scandal or that the incumbent is systematically behaving in ways that constituents don't like and the campaign calls attention to it. so the instances in which we see voters best informed about incumbents tend to be the instances in which there's a competitive election as some form of punishment for the incumbent doing something wrong. if you read the federalist papers, they were all about checks and balances and trying to keep any one faction from getting too much power and trying to keep public opinion and the winds of public opinion as they shift back and forth from year to year from having dramatic changes on public policy. the purpose of the senate was to serve as a check on the house of representatives. the house of representatives was supposed to be essentially the

people's chamber and the framers expected that the house would respond to the winds of public opinion. and the goal was to the senate place a check on that. there was a bias in the system, built into the system towards inaction based on the premise that no legislation is preferable to bad legislation. and if we look at the political system today, it is pretty gridlocked. the framers wrote the constitution with the objective of creating a bias towards gridlock because it was better than public policy shifting to quickly in response to the winds of public opinion. there's a lot of variation in incumbent members of congress. and if you think about a group of 435 individuals com, any grof

435 individuals is going to have a range of behavior patterns, a range of knowledge and other factors. and one of the things that's interesting when you look at congress through c-span, if you watch the one minute speeches, what you are seeing is that people who choose to give you one minute speeches. and it's important to understand that the people who choose to give the one minute speeches, while frequently entertaining, are not always the most influential members of congress. it's important to understand that a lot of important work that's done in congress is not done on camera your so it's hard

to get a sense of the full picture from just c-span. it's valuable to watch floor debates, and it's important to see what happens in floor debates but it's also important to understand that by the time you get to a floor debate, the outcome is pretty much predetermined because so much of the important work on legislation is done in committees, and so much of the important maneuvering is done in the rules committee. that by the time you get to the floor debate, most of the important work has already been done. it's informative to watch but it's not necessarily the real business being done. it's actually not rational for

most voters to spend a lot of time and formed themselves about politics. because most voters have complicated lives. and informing yourself about politics takes a lot of time for very little reward. i find it rewarding to study politics because i just find it fascinating, but the probability of one voter casting the pivotal vote in an election is pretty much less than the probability of getting struck by lightning. so it's not really rational to invest a lot of time learning about politics unless you enjoy learning about politics for its own sake. and because it's not rational for individual voters to do that, you wind up with a lot of voters who are relatively poorly informed. and the problem is that if the electorate as a whole is poorly informed, then you wind up with the possibility of bad decisions being made, where incumbents who deserve to be fired or retired

and those who deserve to be rehired are fired. competitive elections don't do what you think they do. if a competitive election is an election in which were uncertain about the outcome because it is governed by some sort of random process, in a competitive election within incumbent on the ballot is flipping a coin to decide whether or not to fire somebody, which is a bad idea. i think the of the main idea of what people to take away from it is that elections are not like markets, and i think it's really unhealthy and misleading to draw analogies between elections and markets because they work very differently. ..