Something really bothers me about this post; I'm having trouble articulating just what.
It's correct. But it's obvious. Or, should be obvious here in 2022. The grim conformity imposed by socialism is a bog-standard trope of how socialism (esp. in the USSR and Mao's China) is perceived in the West - we see it in Hollywood movies (Hollywood is hardly a bastion of free-market thinking) and video games (think Half-Life and Gordon Freeman). It's in Orwell's 1984. We all know that communist countries ruthlessly suppressed rock and roll, homosexuality, non-standard individual expression of most every type, etc.
And we've known this for a long time. The arguments made here go back at least to Mises in the 1920s (probably further).
So - most everyone reading this blog (Westerners familiar with standard Hollywood tropes, video games, literature, etc.) should find this obvious, or at least not needing much argument.
Yet, somehow, that's not the case. Not only do we have Corey Robin, who might be some crazy outlier, but we also have the editors of the New York Times who must have perceived some plausibility in it.
I don't know what to make of this. The argument made here is a commonplace of economics, familiar to everyone who's taken even a single course in the subject. Has been for at least 70 years. And the conclusion is part of the standard fictional and literary tropes we're all familiar with - even those who know nothing about economics.
Socialism's often very unclearly defined. But I think it's safe to say that the people arguing for it are not arguing for any of the communist regimes that we've seen so far.
I'd add that one person's 'arbitrary domination' is another person's freedom. If I find tattoos disgusting (and usually I do) then I should be free to dine in restaurants where I don't have to see them. Robin would deny me this freedom because, I assume, he believes my preference is invalid. But then socialism is not about freedom at all, but about picking and choosing which preferences the socialist believes are valid, and requiring their indulgence, and which ones aren't valid, and outlawing their indulgence. But the market at least allows for niches due to the plurality of preferences, so the tattooed waiter can still probably find a job at a restaurant that caters to clientele who don't care, but in Robin's socialist society where (I'm assuming, perhaps I'm wrong) rules restricting such policies are enforced society-wide, imposing the values of the central authority on everyone, there is no such plurality of options, and thus there is much less freedom. But the freedom of the consumer is, I gather, less than an afterthought to socialists.
Robin's argument fails on its own terms: Capitalist societies that we know of provide ample opportunities to avoid individually, or collectively, the type of domination that Robin highlights principally.
In this sort of analysis it is important that each voter has limited knowledge of the voting plans of other voters.
In a small group, say 10, you might know the likely voting patterns of each other person. Then you know if your vote is decisive or not. If you are likely be decisive, you vote carefully. If 6 people are going to vote one way, vote whatever you want, it won't matter unless you are wrong in your beliefs. (Whoops.) Generally you can indulge in expressive voting without making a difference, and when you do make a difference it can be entirely by mistake, even being entirely rational.
In a large group, say 100, knowing other peoples' voting likelihoods is very difficult, so you can't easily predict whether your vote will be decisive, and very likely in any vote it won't be. So here you have even less reason to vote instrumentally instead of just expressively.
The argument does toss out a game theoretical solution, but that is largely because game theory breaks down REALLY hard when you have a lot of players. You wind up with dozens of possible solutions at best, and so any kind of certainty is impossible, and in any case doing the math to get through things is far beyond what humans can do.
Nope, marginal reasoning holds a lot better than game theory in this case (and nearly all cases... but that's another discussion.) The assumptions required for game theory to be predictive are massive (and massively overlooked in my opinion), where as marginal behavior theory requires very few.
People still voting on marginal grounds makes sense, because they are voting for different reasons. Voting in large groups is largely expressive, supporting the team, much like cheering "GO GO GO!" when watching football at home in your living room. You don't believe it actually helps the runner go, but it feels good to support the team. Doing it is entirely disconnected from the outcomes, so you just do what feels good.
As to suboptimal outcomes, remember that Alice can only control her behavior: whether or not she votes, and for whom/what. If the outcome of the process provides her with direct feedback based on her behavior, she can adjust for that. If the outcome is largely indifferent to her behavior the adjustment isn't likely to happen. It still can; people sometimes feel "buyer's remorse" when they vote and see what their politician actually does. They can even start to recognize over time "Wait... this whole process is crap." Both are very uncommon, however, as there are effectively millions of places to put blame that aren't "my behaviors and my tribe's traditions", and let's face it, those are the last two places people want to put blame.
Normative has nothing to do with it, by the way. The theory is descriptive of how people behave, not prescriptive of how they should behave. That the theory predicts the very suboptimal results of normal human behavior in this context is a feature.
Sorry, hit post too soon. Game Theory, unlike marginal thinking, is both descriptive and prescriptive, but mostly prescriptive. The promise is that if you model the situation correctly you can figure out what you ought to do, what optimal play looks like. The trouble is that modeling the situation correctly requires more information than you can possibly get, and even if you could get it there might be multiple possible solutions, or even so much complication that the universe will die before you can compute them all. Hence why nearly all game theory boils down to "here are two or three players, and we know what all their pay offs are, we know what all their possible moves are, and we ignore that they might be involved in more than just this game and maybe one other." Game theory is great for coming up with interesting games, but pants for modeling behavior in existing social situations which are hugely complex.
Well, remember that there are two key questions asked about voting:
-Political scientists: Why don't people vote more? It is super important!
-Economists (Public Choice theorists): Why do people vote as much as they do? It hardly matters.
I think the question of why people stand in line to vote at all is important, and hard to square with the observation that people don't think it is very important. (Note that when people forget to vote in an election, or can't for some reason, they don't care much. Certainly not so much as it being super important would imply.)
Plus it isn't exactly tautological, although the existence of something that can be described by utility functions is not exactly falsifiable; it is basically just saying "people have consistent preferences, even if those preferences are really complicated." If you stop assuming rationality you basically are saying everything is possible at all times, which is not terribly useful either.
I am not saying there can't be better paradigms, but I haven't seen any that predict and explain better how people make decisions. It is important to keep in mind the distinction between "how people make decisions in general" and how people make decisions in this particular framework". Public choice theory is applying economic models of thought to non-market group decision making. Economic models of thought work really well in explaining all sorts of non-market decision making, so there is good reason to think it works well here as well.
Do you have a link to any particular organizational theories you think are especially good?
Correct. If this logic applied in the real world, nobody would ever vote on anything, especially in national elections where an individual's vote is vanishingly unlikely to have any effect on the outcome. And yet most people do vote in national elections. Even I do, and I know that the paradox of voting tells me I shouldn't.
Something really bothers me about this post; I'm having trouble articulating just what.
It's correct. But it's obvious. Or, should be obvious here in 2022. The grim conformity imposed by socialism is a bog-standard trope of how socialism (esp. in the USSR and Mao's China) is perceived in the West - we see it in Hollywood movies (Hollywood is hardly a bastion of free-market thinking) and video games (think Half-Life and Gordon Freeman). It's in Orwell's 1984. We all know that communist countries ruthlessly suppressed rock and roll, homosexuality, non-standard individual expression of most every type, etc.
And we've known this for a long time. The arguments made here go back at least to Mises in the 1920s (probably further).
So - most everyone reading this blog (Westerners familiar with standard Hollywood tropes, video games, literature, etc.) should find this obvious, or at least not needing much argument.
Yet, somehow, that's not the case. Not only do we have Corey Robin, who might be some crazy outlier, but we also have the editors of the New York Times who must have perceived some plausibility in it.
I don't know what to make of this. The argument made here is a commonplace of economics, familiar to everyone who's taken even a single course in the subject. Has been for at least 70 years. And the conclusion is part of the standard fictional and literary tropes we're all familiar with - even those who know nothing about economics.
And yet here it is. How is this possible?
Check also this regarding sweat shops in the global south https://glibe.substack.com/p/libertarianism-and-markets-morality
I dont think this would really convince any socialists/leftist people. idk
"The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree".
Seriously? ... are "us" freer in China, Cuba or North Korea?
Are lesbian and gays more likely to be employed in China?
What is Robin talking about?
Is the NYT publishing every nonsense they are aware of?
Come on ...
Reference-level post. Useful generalisation of the "every flaw in consumers is worse in voters" adage to a wider class of issues.
Socialism's often very unclearly defined. But I think it's safe to say that the people arguing for it are not arguing for any of the communist regimes that we've seen so far.
I'd add that one person's 'arbitrary domination' is another person's freedom. If I find tattoos disgusting (and usually I do) then I should be free to dine in restaurants where I don't have to see them. Robin would deny me this freedom because, I assume, he believes my preference is invalid. But then socialism is not about freedom at all, but about picking and choosing which preferences the socialist believes are valid, and requiring their indulgence, and which ones aren't valid, and outlawing their indulgence. But the market at least allows for niches due to the plurality of preferences, so the tattooed waiter can still probably find a job at a restaurant that caters to clientele who don't care, but in Robin's socialist society where (I'm assuming, perhaps I'm wrong) rules restricting such policies are enforced society-wide, imposing the values of the central authority on everyone, there is no such plurality of options, and thus there is much less freedom. But the freedom of the consumer is, I gather, less than an afterthought to socialists.
Robin's argument fails on its own terms: Capitalist societies that we know of provide ample opportunities to avoid individually, or collectively, the type of domination that Robin highlights principally.
In this sort of analysis it is important that each voter has limited knowledge of the voting plans of other voters.
In a small group, say 10, you might know the likely voting patterns of each other person. Then you know if your vote is decisive or not. If you are likely be decisive, you vote carefully. If 6 people are going to vote one way, vote whatever you want, it won't matter unless you are wrong in your beliefs. (Whoops.) Generally you can indulge in expressive voting without making a difference, and when you do make a difference it can be entirely by mistake, even being entirely rational.
In a large group, say 100, knowing other peoples' voting likelihoods is very difficult, so you can't easily predict whether your vote will be decisive, and very likely in any vote it won't be. So here you have even less reason to vote instrumentally instead of just expressively.
The argument does toss out a game theoretical solution, but that is largely because game theory breaks down REALLY hard when you have a lot of players. You wind up with dozens of possible solutions at best, and so any kind of certainty is impossible, and in any case doing the math to get through things is far beyond what humans can do.
Nope, marginal reasoning holds a lot better than game theory in this case (and nearly all cases... but that's another discussion.) The assumptions required for game theory to be predictive are massive (and massively overlooked in my opinion), where as marginal behavior theory requires very few.
People still voting on marginal grounds makes sense, because they are voting for different reasons. Voting in large groups is largely expressive, supporting the team, much like cheering "GO GO GO!" when watching football at home in your living room. You don't believe it actually helps the runner go, but it feels good to support the team. Doing it is entirely disconnected from the outcomes, so you just do what feels good.
As to suboptimal outcomes, remember that Alice can only control her behavior: whether or not she votes, and for whom/what. If the outcome of the process provides her with direct feedback based on her behavior, she can adjust for that. If the outcome is largely indifferent to her behavior the adjustment isn't likely to happen. It still can; people sometimes feel "buyer's remorse" when they vote and see what their politician actually does. They can even start to recognize over time "Wait... this whole process is crap." Both are very uncommon, however, as there are effectively millions of places to put blame that aren't "my behaviors and my tribe's traditions", and let's face it, those are the last two places people want to put blame.
Normative has nothing to do with it, by the way. The theory is descriptive of how people behave, not prescriptive of how they should behave. That the theory predicts the very suboptimal results of normal human behavior in this context is a feature.
Sorry, hit post too soon. Game Theory, unlike marginal thinking, is both descriptive and prescriptive, but mostly prescriptive. The promise is that if you model the situation correctly you can figure out what you ought to do, what optimal play looks like. The trouble is that modeling the situation correctly requires more information than you can possibly get, and even if you could get it there might be multiple possible solutions, or even so much complication that the universe will die before you can compute them all. Hence why nearly all game theory boils down to "here are two or three players, and we know what all their pay offs are, we know what all their possible moves are, and we ignore that they might be involved in more than just this game and maybe one other." Game theory is great for coming up with interesting games, but pants for modeling behavior in existing social situations which are hugely complex.
Well, remember that there are two key questions asked about voting:
-Political scientists: Why don't people vote more? It is super important!
-Economists (Public Choice theorists): Why do people vote as much as they do? It hardly matters.
I think the question of why people stand in line to vote at all is important, and hard to square with the observation that people don't think it is very important. (Note that when people forget to vote in an election, or can't for some reason, they don't care much. Certainly not so much as it being super important would imply.)
Plus it isn't exactly tautological, although the existence of something that can be described by utility functions is not exactly falsifiable; it is basically just saying "people have consistent preferences, even if those preferences are really complicated." If you stop assuming rationality you basically are saying everything is possible at all times, which is not terribly useful either.
I am not saying there can't be better paradigms, but I haven't seen any that predict and explain better how people make decisions. It is important to keep in mind the distinction between "how people make decisions in general" and how people make decisions in this particular framework". Public choice theory is applying economic models of thought to non-market group decision making. Economic models of thought work really well in explaining all sorts of non-market decision making, so there is good reason to think it works well here as well.
Do you have a link to any particular organizational theories you think are especially good?
Correct. If this logic applied in the real world, nobody would ever vote on anything, especially in national elections where an individual's vote is vanishingly unlikely to have any effect on the outcome. And yet most people do vote in national elections. Even I do, and I know that the paradox of voting tells me I shouldn't.