Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Posts

There’s No Such Thing As The People Or The Will Of The People.

/in /by

Among the most important advances in the social sciences of the 20th century is Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. The full explanation of this theorem first appeared in Arrow’s 1951 book, Social Choice and Individual Values. As explanations go, this one is especially beautiful in its rigor, yet highly technical and inaccessible to the general public. But it can be summarized well-enough: Arrow proved that a collection of people has no “will” in the way that we understand each individual person to have a will.

Stated more fully, Arrow proved that it’s impossible to devise any method of discovering the preferences of two or more persons and then aggregating these preferences into a single set of preferences of the sort that is possessed by each individual person.

One welcome implication today of Arrow’s Theorem is that it reaffirms our understanding that a monarch or dictator who boasts of embodying or carrying out “the will of the people” of the country is either lying or delusional. An implication far less welcome today – although one no less indisputable – is that the results of even the fairest and most-inclusive democratic decision-making procedure are not the will of the people. Indeed, these results are not even the will of the voters. Because two or more people do not share a single mind, no group of people has wants, hopes, and fears in the same way that each individual experiences these attitudes and desires.

Arrow’s proof does not discredit majority-rule democracy as an acceptable – indeed, perhaps as the best available – method for making collective decisions. If, say, the government is charged with supplying national defense, some variety of inclusive democratic decision-making is arguably the best practical means of choosing the size of the annual defense budget. Not only does each and every adult in the political community have the opportunity to register his or her preference, this procedure also ensures against the selection of options that are wildly unpopular.

All good. But the chosen outcome should not be accorded a status that it doesn’t deserve: the chosen outcome is not the will of the people. It’s simply the outcome of the collective-decision-making procedure.

“The People” Is No Person

Another way to put Arrow’s point is to say that it is a gross error to anthropomorphize a group of people, even when that group makes collective decisions according to democratic norms.

Perhaps the single best way to see why such anthropomorphization is an error is to consider what Arrow identified for each individual decision-maker as being the “irrelevance of independent alternatives.” The language here is confusingly technical, but the idea is not – as revealed by this example that I steal from a lecture given a few years ago by my colleague Alex Tabarrok.

Suppose that you have a hankering for a scoop of ice cream. To satisfy this hankering, you stroll into a diner and ask the waiter what flavors of ice cream are available. The waiter replies, “We have vanilla and chocolate.” You weigh these two options for a moment and then tell the waiter, “Please give me a scoop of vanilla.” But just as the waiter is about to serve the vanilla to you, he says, “Oh, I almost forgot. We also have strawberry ice cream.”

How would you, a rational individual, respond upon learning of this additional alternative? You might respond by saying, “Wonderful! I love strawberry! Give me a scoop of strawberry instead.” If you respond in this way, no one would think you odd.

But suppose that you instead respond by telling the waiter, “Oh, now that I know that strawberry is also an option, please change my order from vanilla to chocolate.” If you respond in this way, everyone would think you to be crazy-odd. Normal – “rational” – individuals don’t react in such a manner. An individual who prefers vanilla to chocolate does not come to prefer chocolate to vanilla upon learning of the availability of strawberry.

Yet in political elections such ‘preference shifting’ is neither unusual nor an indication of irrational or otherwise inexplicable behavior on the part of anyone.

For example, it’s quite possible that Ross Perot’s 1992 candidacy for the U.S. presidency – by taking more popular votes from Pres. George H.W. Bush than from Gov. Bill Clinton – swung the election from Bush to Clinton. If the American people were a creature with a will – if the American people were a giant sentient being – it’s as if this creature walked into a polling place in November 1992 and asked “What presidential options do you have?” Upon being told “Bush and Clinton,” this American People creature replied, “Give me a Bush!” But then upon learning that there is available also a Perot, the creature changed its mind and said, “Oh, well in that case, give me a Clinton!”

No rational being behaves in such a way.

There’s disagreement over Perot’s effect on the outcome of the ’92 election. But whether or not he did or didn’t swing that election to Clinton is here not the point. The point is that in fact such electoral outcomes in reality are often quite likely and not considered to be odd or inexplicable. Yet because no individual acts in such a way, electoral outcomes are not properly to be reckoned as the choices of a rational creature with a will – as a rational creature called “the people.”

It’s fair to suspect that I’m making too big a deal about not calling the outcome of any election “the will of the people.” But I insist. To talk of a “will of the people” is to imply the existence of a creature who is greater than each of the individuals who comprise ‘the people’ – a creature to which each individual’s will and well-being are subservient. It’s the tiniest of steps from a belief in such a creature to the conviction that no individual is an end in himself or herself but is, instead, merely a means to serve this creature. And from this false belief in such a higher-order creature, all manner of tyranny has ensued.

Humanity owes thanks to Kenneth Arrow for proving the non-existence of such a creature as the will of “the people.”

Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research. This article first appeared at AIER.org

What Exactly Is Political Economy? It’s Nothing But Three Big Myths (Busted Here).

/in /by

Myths abound. This reality is unsurprising given that the number of ways to be wrong is immensely larger than the number of ways to be right. And because of the enormous complexity and dynamism of society and the economy, myths about society and the economy are especially abundant.

Most economic myths are (relatively) small. Trade deficits are evidence of domestic economic failure or of foreign government cheating – minimum-wage legislation is a boon for low-paid workers – government debt owed to ourselves isn’t a problem even if the size of this debt is massive – active supervision by antitrust authorities is necessary to keep the economy competitive – more immigration lowers the standard of living for many native-born workers – middle-class Americans have stagnated economically for more than 40 years – sound money can be supplied only by the state – economic growth depletes resources: these and a practically uncountable number of other such myths are, and for many years have been, current.

Although such myths will never be completely slain, their baneful impacts can be reduced by sound and unrelenting economic education and public commentary. (To this end, AIER is doing more than its share.) But even more destructive than are these (relatively) small myths are three Big Myths – foundational misconceptions of the nature of social and economic reality.

Big Myth #1

The most pernicious of all Big Myths is that the economy and society – or, at least, any economy that is productive, and any society that is good – are the conscious creation of the state. Classical-liberal scholars have fought for centuries against this social-creationist myth. In the 18th century Adam Smith celebrated the market’s invisible hand and warned against the “man of system” who arrogantly fancies that he (or she) can rearrange flesh-and-blood people in society as a chess player rearranges inert pawns and princes on a chess board.

In the 19th century Herbert Spencer observed that nearly all legislative schemes for uplifting society are doomed to fail because “[t]hey have their root in the error that society is a manufacture; whereas it is a growth.” In the 20th century F.A. Hayek repeatedly insisted on the vital importance of recognizing that while modern society and the economy are indeed the results of human action, they are not – and cannot possibly be – the results of human design.

In the 21st century this essential truth is emphasized and explained eloquently by a host of brilliant scholars, including, for example, Steve Davies, Richard Epstein, Deirdre McCloskey, Tom Palmer, Matt Ridley, and Mario Rizzo.

Yet this Big Myth seems only to spread and strengthen. Listening to politicians, and reading everything from popular punditry to much seemingly deep scholarship, makes clear that large numbers of people – I dare say most – conceive of social order, economic growth, and widespread prosperity as being unobtainable unless engineered into existence by the state.

Big Myth #2

An implication of this Big Myth is another Big Myth – namely, because all that is good in our social and economic relations is made possible by the state, each of us is deeply and forever in debt to the state. The state, dogmatically believed to be a secular creator, is therefore supposed to be owed by each of us everlasting thanks and offerings. (Oh, and owed also praise: singing the national anthem is not far removed from singing “Praise to the Lord” and other Christian hymns that I sang as a boy attending Catholic mass.)

“You didn’t build that!” was Barack Obama’s way of scolding everyone who denies that the state owns an open-ended claim on Americans’ incomes. According to this Big Myth, to complain about paying taxes – and, worse, to actively oppose tax increases – is selfishly to resist giving to the secular creator what is owed to it by each of us puny beneficiaries of the state’s beneficence, magnificence, and grace.

Big Myth #3

A third Big Myth is that government carries out the will of the people as long as its top officials are chosen by majority rule. At root, this naïve faith in majoritarian democracy is mistaken because there is, in fact, no will of the people. “The people” is not a sentient creature with a mind and preferences and fears and hopes. “The people” includes, of course, sentient individuals each with his or her own mind and preferences and fears and hopes. But this reality of each member of the group does not transform the group into a giant individual equivalent in all but size to each of the flesh-and-blood men, women, and children who comprise the group.

This ‘non-sentience’ of a group of individuals does not mean that two or more – or even millions of – individuals cannot agree upon goals to pursue collectively. Should we or should we not pool some of our resources to build a highway? Should we or should we not organize to provide community policing or national defense? And some form of democratic decision-making is the best means available for registering the preferences of each individual in a way that results in an acceptable collective decision.

But this reality does not mean that the results of the democratic decision-making process reveal that “the people” have a will that is in any way similar to the will that is possessed and exercised by each individual. All that even the best collective decision-making process does is to discover a compromise outcome that is acceptable to each member of the group.

Anthropomorphizing any group of individuals, and supposing that the results of majority rule express the will of this collective creature, creates the false and dangerous impression that if any individual objects to a majority-rule outcome, this individual is attempting to elevate his paltry self over a will not only as real as his own but also greater because it is that of many individuals. But, again, “the People” is not a being with a mind or a will. It follows that no method of collective decision-making, not even the most ideal form of democracy, reveals the People’s will. That which is unreal cannot be revealed.

Big Myths Be Gone!

If society would be rid of these three Big Myths, legitimate disagreement would still reign over the size and scope of government. Compromise for collective decisions would still be necessary, and democratic decision-making would remain the best means of achieving this compromise. But the risk of tyranny would be much reduced from what it is now because no one would anthropomorphize collections of people or deify the state.

Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with American Institute for Economic Research and with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Write for CFI