Last night, I headed out to dinner with a trio of lefty folks, accompanied by my colleagues Kirby and The Gryph, to discuss possibilities for “transpartisan” collaboration. Incidentally, I like “transpartisan” better than the word I’d habitually used — “multipartisan,” which, though it at least ditches the implicit bias in favor of a polarized left/right schema, still gives the impression that joining some team or tribe is central to politics. Of course, at present, that’s entirely true… but “in the beginning was the word” and all that.
Our conversation sparked two thoughts that stuck in my head. One is that folks who are, roughly speaking, on different “teams” are hobbled by differences in vocabulary, but that often there’s more conceptual overlap than may first be evident. People who’ve studied a little political science are all familiar with the concept of rational voter ignorance, and libertarians (especially those inclined towards Public Choice) make ample use of the idea to understand the growth of the state. The notion here is that people are ignorant about the details of politics and how it works, because the issues are divided up in such a way that it doesn’t pay to become informed. The cost of each individual program or activity undertaken by government is spread across the entire pool of taxpayers. That means it’s not worth anyone’s while (or most people’s, anyway) to learn about and agitate to reform or eliminate any one activity or agency… even though when you bundle them all together, the cost to each person is substantial. Deprived of that personal incentive to become informed, most people adopt a politics as a kind of pure symbolic expression. Charlotte Twight’s book Dependent on D.C. is all about how elected officials manipulate transaction and information costs to encourage this effect.
Now, I’m going to make a guess about the bulk of y’all out there reading this. I’ll bet, first, that the account in the last paragraph is both old hat and fairly uncontroversial and, second, that you’re highly skeptical of the Marxist notion of “false consciousness.” Thing is, they’re the same idea. Not entirely the same, of course, the Marxist version is laden with all sorts of claptrap about reified class interests. But basically, “rational ignorance” can be framed as a particular kind of “false consciousness” — an institutionally conditioned misperception of interests. (Why else are people so anxious to protect a moribund Social Security system that’s bleeding them dry? Why do perfectly well educated people think it’s straight out loony to propose doing away with a Food and Drug Administration that kills many more of us by delaying vital drugs than it protects?) Now, is anything gained by calling this “false consciousness?” The public choice concept is more precise and useful, I think, than its Marxist precursor… but it’s “false consciousness” that’s familiar to many politically active folks on the left, and therefore a useful if you’re trying to have some kind of mutually intelligible conversation. Maybe it’d be possible to construct a whole set of such correspondences, write a Lefty/Libertarian dictionary. Then at least we could yell at each other in a common language.
The other thing that occured to me is related to the rational ignorance problem. One way to frame that phenomenon is as one of “concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.” That is, Archer Daniels Midland gets the “concentrated benefits” of a fat federal agricultural subsidy, so they care about doing something to keep the money coming, whereas the cost of it is diffused across all of the rest of us, and we don’t bother to fight it or even find out about it. Such is the usual story, anyway. But as stock ownership becomes more diffuse, it’s increasingly the same people on both sides of the transfer. In the limit case of maximal diffusion of ownership, you’d just have the very same people bearing the costs (in the form of taxes in the case above, but also potentially environmental damage or what have you) and reaping the benefits in the form of return on shares, but with deadweight losses in the process. Again, the problem is transaction costs: it’s a lot easier to trade shares, thus encouraging corporate agents to maximize revenue by fair means or foul, than it is to scrutinize the behavior of the company you own and try to coordinate a mass behavioral change. This is still, of course, a “concentrated benefits / diffuse costs” problem — but it begins to look more like a classic Tragedy of the Commons than a case of exploitation by narrow interest groups discrete from the exploited. Of course, government regulation is the classic method by which we try to avert the tragedy (to solve the transaction problem via a general rule), but as illustrated above, it doesn’t work very well because the political process is subject to the very same phenomenon that causes the problem in the first instance. Sort of disheartening, huh?
