The U.S. is in the final throes of a monumental presidential election. The candidates and their surrogates are spending more than a couple billion dollars to get one or the other elected. You’d imagine that, given such an investment, the American people would be well-informed. Yet, the messages are as muddled as ever. 

My first economic interest was in information. I did my thesis on how information affects market competitiveness and determined that information is what economists call a public good. With so many avenues of modern media, we have the potential to become better and more accurately informed at no additional cost but a modicum of curiosity.

The problem is that entities must gather and distribute the information in the first place. We must wonder. Do they do so for the public good or for their own good? 

The distinction matters. In most of the claims we hear in this crazy political season, there are verifiable facts and unsubstantiated and unchallenged claims. It is difficult to know the difference and whether the messages that bombard us are designed to co-opt or convince us or bring us together around a shared set of indisputable and unspinnable facts. 

Unfortunately, there seems little to monetize by expanding our shared set of indisputable facts. There was a time when we would have to buy an encyclopedia, purchase a book or go to a library, or trust a journalist whom we believe would not lead us astray. Then cable came along. Bruce Springsteen sang “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)” back in 1992, more than thirty years ago. He was correct in many ways. Despite the amount of media that now comes at us from every direction, we seem to share a smaller set of truths as time goes by. 

This is the nature of information gathering and dissemination in our free market world. Services are provided to us, often for free on the t.v. or laptop screens, but, really, nothing is free. The services are given to us in exchange for the data the providers can gather on us so they can sell products to us. Whoever most successfully monetizes their relationship with us has the deepest pockets to convince us of a message they find most convenient and profitable. 

Ask any t.v. news director - if it bleeds, it leads. The modern equivalent of that time-tested tactic is to instill fear upon us. Fear captures our attention and induces us to return to the page often so we may garner a sense of control in understanding and mitigating what made us fearful in the first place. An alternative happy message does not give us the same sense of urgency. We can always find a site with pretty cats and cute dancing babies. But, we return to a source we trust in times of anxiety, even if the site manufactured or fostered our fear in the first place. 

This flips the economic model. Accurate information as a public good is replaced by self-serving information as a private money maker or agenda advancer, just as Gresham’s Law in economics observes bad money forces out good. Advertisers and entire networks compete to convince us not of an ultimate truth but of a circumstance they find convenient or profitable. 

When markets fail to provide the accurate information key to our economic decisions, correction of such a "market failure" often falls to public agencies. We have the Federal Trade Commission to ensure that commercial advertising is accurate, but it appears unwilling to weigh into distortions and outright lies in political advertising. Nor will media outlets themselves police ad accuracy at the risk of their own bottom line in this lucrative time for them.

We’ve reached a point in which such battles to replace ultimate truths with profitable claims has left much diminished the market for accuracy. There are no Walter Cronkites who we all agree to trust. Each of us instead develops our own trusted sources who may well conclude 1+1=2 in one person’s mind while another pundit has convinced another cohort that indeed 1+1=3. Prof. Gottschall, a colleague of mine at SUNY Plattsburgh suggested that we should impose a political ad tax, with the revenue used to produce public service ads that correct the record. 

This is a good idea. The first challenge may be that we must make the information and inaccuracy-debunking public service ads as available and as compelling as the political ads. Will people watch if the public service message does not include menacing people and with ominous music in the background that political parties invariably employ? 

The second problem is that such a tax penalizes equally both deceptive and accurate political ads. Maybe we could instead have an accuracy umpire. There are some information arbitrators out there. The group Politifact rates the accuracy of politicians’ claims, with the worst offenders labeled “pants on fire.” Perhaps we can impose the same tax on all political and lobbyist ads, but rebate some of such revenues to those ads who neutral fact-checkers deem accurate. 

The First Amendment was designed to afford people the right to express their ideas on a soapbox in the middle of the public square. It never anticipated that one can instead pay millions (or billions - Elon) to amplify their idea over all others. Nonetheless, I am sure any institutionalized political fact-finding would meet with fierce opposition, often shrouded in the flag of the First Amendment. A political ad tax may well thus be a non-starter, despite its best intentions. 

There was a time when we trusted public institutions that economists acknowledge serve a purpose for public goods (such as information, highways, the airwaves) and when free markets fail. While most all agree that modern media fails to deliver us an informational consensus that can unite us all, we have become so accustomed to market failures in many forms. That boat has likely irretrievably left the port. 

I don’t know what will allow us to return to a common vision and united set of information. But, if we don’t, we remain divided peoples in divided nations and an increasingly divided world.