Collective Action

Russell Hardin

• Publisher: RFF Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781135433093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Costituzioni

Public choice, an important subdiscipline in the field of political theory, seeks to understand how people and societies make decisions affecting their collective lives. Relying heavily on theoretical models of decision making, public choice postulates that people act in their individual interests in making collective decisions. As it happens, however, reality does not mirror theory, and people often act contrary to what the principal public choice models suggest. In this book, Russell Hardin looks beyond the models to find out why people choose to act together in situations that the models find quite hopeless. He uses three constructs of modern political economy--public goods, the Prisoner's Dilemma, and game theory--to test public choice theories against real world examples of collective action. These include movements important in American society in the past few decades--civil rights, the Vietnam War, women's rights, and environmental concerns. This classic work on public choice will be of interest to theoreticians and graduate students in the fields of public choice, political economy, or political theory--and to those in other disciplines who are concerned with the problem of collective action in social contexts.

1

THE BACK OF
THE INVISIBLE HAND

Every individual contributing to the general productiveness of society, says Adam Smith, “intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of [the individual’s intended end]. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”¹ Collective interest, according to Smith, is best served by unfettered private interest-seeking: we live as well as we do because others seek to profit from providing the goods and services we want.

One may sense, however, that all too often we are less helped by the benevolent invisible hand than we are injured by the malevolent back of that hand; that is, in seeking private interests, we fail to secure greater collective interests. The narrow rationality of self-interest that can benefit us all in market exchange can also prevent us from succeeding in collective endeavors.

Smith recognizes the working of the back of the invisible hand, but he seems to think it crucial in only three realms: national defense, the administration of justice, and the erection and maintenance of “certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain: because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a greater society.”² It is in these realms that he therefore sees the need for a state apparatus. But excluding this brief passage and the final quarter of the work, which discusses how the state should finance its operations in these areas, The Wealth of Nations—a voluminous 400,000 words—is almost entirely concerned with the benevolence of the invisible hand, and hence, with the disruptions that state intervention must generally cause.

The problem of the back of the invisible hand has become known as the problem of collective action, or the Prisoner’s Dilemma, or the free rider problem, or the condition of common fate, depending on the context or discipline in which it is used. This multiplicity of terms reveals a failure to generalize the nature of the problem. It has been generalized only recently, most notably—as discussed in the following chapter—in the game-theoretic Prisoner’s Dilemma (which was developed in about 1950, although research on Prisoner’s Dilemma got under way seriously in the mid-sixties) and in Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action, published in 1965. Because earlier writers had failed to abstract from particular examples, they often failed to grasp the significance of the problem and also to recognize other instances of it. (William Baumol notes that “writers, sometimes even those who had considered these ideas elsewhere in their writings, continued to make mistakes and omissions which greater familiarity with the analysis in question might have prevented.”³)

Although not generalized until recently, the problem of collective action has been recognized in a remarkable variety of contexts over many centuries. One may read the logic of collective action out of (or into) Glaucon’s devil’s advocacy against Socrates over the relationship between justice and interest. Glaucon notes that, given the ring of Gyges with its power to make him invisible, not even the supposedly just man “would stay on the path of justice or … keep away from other people’s property and not touch it, when he could with impunity take whatever he wanted from the market, go into houses and have sexual relations with anyone he wanted …,” and so forth.⁴ With greater or less charity in interpretation, one can also find it stated by numerous political philosophers and political economists from the time of Hobbes to that of Sidgwick and Pareto, with especially elegant examples of the problem invented by Hume and J. S. Mill. And philosophers are not alone in recognizing the problem. Novelist Joseph Heller, in Catch-22, portrays a character’s acute awareness of his self-interest in this incident: facing Major Major Major Major’s rebuke for not wishing to fly any more bombing missions over Italy, Yossarian contends that the bombs he could drop would make little or no difference to his eventual well-being, while the risks involved in dropping them might make an enormous difference to him. Likewise, nineteenth-century novelist Anthony Trollope, in Phineas Finn, has Finn aware that one man’s contribution to a demonstration in favor of the ballot would put the man more at risk than it would benefit him.⁵ Indeed, it might be expected that any insight as important and clear as the logic of collective action should be contained in an adage of long standing, and it is: everybody’s business is nobody’s business. It even appears as a notice conspicuously posted in restaurants: A 15% service charge will be included in bills for parties of six or more.⁶

What is the logic of collective action? Suppose with Pareto “that if all individuals refrained from doing A, every individual as a member of the community would derive a certain advantage. But now if all individuals less one continue refraining from doing A, the community loss is very slight, whereas the one individual doing A makes a personal gain far greater than the loss that he incurs as a member of the community.”⁷ This is the logic of collective action: if I am narrowly self-interested, I would presumably not refrain from doing A. I may refrain, but only if my not refraining would adversely affect the behavior of enough others to reduce my advantage from communal refraining by more than it would cost me not to refrain. For example, suppose smog in our metropolis could be prevented if all of us would voluntarily pay to have certain antipollution devices installed in our cars, and suppose further that a referendum to require such devices would pass by a nearly unanimous vote. Voluntary action would not solve our smog problem if too many of us were narrowly rational.

There is extensive evidence of this logic at work: we do not voluntarily clean up our car exhausts or stop burning wood in our fireplaces; we seldom join our neighbors to clean up our blocks or to shovel snow from our alleys and sidewalks; we contribute, at most, trifling sums to collective causes we support, and most of us contribute nothing; most of us in the United States generally do not vote in most elections; fishing nations collectively destroy open-sea fisheries; if we possessed the ring of Gyges and could make ourselves invisible long enough, perhaps most of us would pluck flowers from public grounds until the public ceased to plant flowers.

Nevertheless, the most pervasive and important instance of this logic is probably overwhelmingly beneficial. The logic of collective action is, in another guise, merely the logic of the efficiency of market exchange: the existence of large numbers of sellers makes collusive agreements to raise prices virtually impossible (unless they are backed by state sanctions). It is in this guise that Smith most clearly sees the logic. If the amount of capital of the grocery trade sufficient to meet demand in a town “is divided between two different grocers, their competition will tend to make both of them sell cheaper, than if it were in the hands of one only; and if it were divided among twenty, their competition would be just so much the greater, and the chance of their combining together, in order to raise the price, just so much the less.”⁸ It is the incapacity for collusion that makes sellers finally efficient, causes better products to drive out poorer ones, and leads to most of what Smith holds dear in capitalism: economic growth and progress. Of course, that incapacity also prevents sellers from earning the greater profits they covet.

NARROW RATIONALITY

The argument of the logic of collective action is based on the strong assumption that individual actions are motivated by self-interest—or on the assumption of what I will commonly call narrow rationality or, more briefly, rationality. Obviously, individual actions are motivated by concerns in addition to self-interest. But collective action for mutual benefit is, in an analogous sense, narrowly rational for a group or organization. Hence, it should not surprise us to find that many of those who want their collective interests to be served may weigh their own self-interests heavily, even too heavily to cooperate in serving their collective interests.

The notion of narrow rationality is parodied by William Gaddis in his novel JR. (Since Gaddis’s fiction does not make him a living, he also writes speeches for the heads of corporations—he can perhaps be trusted to have a rich understanding of the motivations that move narrowly rational souls.) One of the elderly Bast sisters in JR begins to tell “the whole story” of how the Basts achieved their propertied state:

Well, Father was just sixteen years old. As I say, Ira Cobb owed him some money. It was for work that Father had done, probably repairing some farm machinery. Father was always good with his hands. And then this problem came up over money, instead of paying Father Ira gave him an old violin and he took it down to the barn to try to learn to play it. Well his father heard it and went right down, and broke the violin over Father’s head. We were a Quaker family, after all, where you just didn’t do things that didn’t pay.⁹

Grandfather Bast’s view notwithstanding, one has an interest in increasing one’s resources only because the resources make it possible to satisfy certain of one’s wants. To be narrowly rational means to act in a self-interested way—when one’s interests are at stake. It does not mean never to play the violin.

There is another commonplace meaning of “rationality” that is used in wider contexts, but which I do not use here. Crudely stated, it is that one is rational if, after considering all of one’s concerns—moral, altruistic, familial, narrowly self-interested, and so forth—one then chooses coherently in trading each off against the others, or even in refusing to make certain trade-offs. Another way of conceiving this notion is to suppose that one’s mind is departmentalized, that one is a synthesis of several selves, each concerned with particular material and all governed by an overall regulator who, in making present choices of how to act, assigns systematic weights to all the selves, according as they have already been more or less differentially satisfied. One could meaningfully say of such a regulator that it was rational or irrational. My use of “rational” in this work is less profound and less interesting than such an alternative. I merely use rational to mean “efficient in securing one’s self-interest.” I do not thereby imply that rationality governs all human behavior or even all political behavior. Indeed, at issue throughout the analysis (especially in chapters 6 and 7 and also in chapters 10 through 14) is the extent to which behavior that is extrarational in this narrow sense would affect or evidently does affect outcomes in collective action situations.

Part of the appeal of the assumption of narrow rationality is almost methodological: it is easy to accommodate in analysis, and it is relatively easy to assess in generalizable behaviors. An additional appeal might be, as is sometimes claimed, that it explains a very large fraction of behavior in certain realms. One can too easily overrate the size of that fraction even in the most explicitly economic contexts. But often the assumption of narrowly rational motivation yields predictions that are the most useful benchmark by which to assess the extent and the impact of other motivations. Occasionally it yields predictions which so nearly fit behavior that investigation need go no further in order to satisfy us that we have understood why certain outcomes, and not others, occur.

The logic of collective action does just this in many contexts, although not in others. It yields a notoriously poor explanation of voting behavior, since it suggests that almost no one would voluntarily vote in, say, American national elections. It helps us understand why half of eligible Americans do not vote, but it does little to help us understand the other half. The logic of collective action is, however, unquestionably successful in predicting negligible voluntary activity in many fields, such as the contemporary environmental movement. Then what about the apparent contradiction to this logic represented by the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations? The answer, as I argue at greater length below, especially in chapter 7, is that environmentalists contribute woefully little to their cause given the enormous value to them of success and given the repeated survey results that show the strong commitment of a large percentage of Americans to that cause. Environmentalists annually spend less on their apparently great cause than 25,000 two-pack-a-day smokers spend on cigarettes. The amount spent is a trivium, and one might find it inconceivable except that it makes clear sense on a narrowly rational analysis. One could go on to note even more embarrassing statistics showing how little Americans have spent on such honored causes as civil rights, the contemporary women’s movement, gun control (as opposed to anticontrol), and so forth.

Admittedly, there are groups such as the Sierra Club, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and women’s organizations that do not seem to fit the narrow logic of collective action. Not only do they not seem to fit, but I think it is clear that some of them do not fit that logic. Nevertheless, some aspects of such organizations (and their associated movements) may make sense on narrowly rational grounds. For example, the waxing and possible waning of the women’s movement may be explained in part by changing self-interest motivations of women over the past decade (see “The By-Product Theory” in chapter 2). The women’s and the civil rights movements may both have suffered from the difficulty of achieving complex goals by contract by convention, that is, by tacit coordination, as argued in chapter 13 (see “Explicit Contract Versus Contract by Convention”).

Another issue has often been implicitly confused with the implications of the logic of collective action. If qualitative groups such as environmentalists and civil rights supporters are very poorly mobilized, it may be asked why there has been so much legislation on their behalf. Part of the answer is obvious: a large number of voters with strong views have clout even if they do not organize (see “Political Entrepreneur-ship” in chapter 2). Another part of the answer is that political outcomes are not a simple balancing of resources available to antithetical interests. The limited contributions of environmentalists are far more effective than the burnt-up expenditures of 25,000 smokers—o...