Group Think

I was reading "Reclaiming Democracy From the Market," with MIT economist Daron Acemoglu sitting down to interview Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel. Professor Acemoglu opens with:

From our conversations, and even more from your books, I have the sense that you see political philosophy as not just an inquiry into abstract concepts or a search for absolute truths, but as part of an ongoing dialogue with society about how we should organize our collective life, what we should value, and what we should resist.

This raised an immediate question for me: Who is the "we" Professor Acemoglu was referring to? Sure, one can make the case that it simply refers to "society," but even then, there is a question, because it's unlikely that a society is going to be unanimous about its values and the like. But just as importantly, how does "society" represent a "we" in a way that "the Market" does not, if they are the same people?

At one point Professor Sandel notes:

But even if the wealthy paid their taxes, they might still enjoy a kind of honor, prestige, and esteem that is out of proportion to the value of their contribution, especially when compared, say, to teachers or caregivers.

Okay... so? Honor, prestige, and esteem, unlike something like attention, are not rivalrous; I can give as much prestige to people I decide to, without reducing the amount I have "left over" to give to other people. So why does there need to be a society-wide dialog as to how much any given person is valued.

This is why I'm dubious of ideas, like those of Professor Sandel, that imply that certain choices should be collectively, rather than individually made, when all that really comes down to is some number of individuals deciding that their choices should trump everyone else's. Because, at least as I understand it, markets do represent a kind of social choice; it's simply emergent from a number of individual choices rather than a large group deliberation. So what really does deliberation create that can't otherwise be obtained? Certainly not unanimity. True, collective action gets a group around collective action problems, but even that's different than presuming that this creates some sort of unity.

And I think that this is what kept nagging at me as I read the interview... the idea that some sort of problem-solving solidarity would emerge without any mechanism being proposed for how that would happen. "Democratic deliberation" may be a great thing, but it's not magical. It can't bring together subsets of the populace who are actively at cross purposes with one another, or create enough of a scarce resource to share between people. Granted, markets don't necessarily do any of that, either, but I'm not sure they purport to.

This isn't to say that markets are necessarily better solutions to social problems than democratic deliberation (although they tend to be faster to operate), but in a way that's the point. There are problems, like what happens when one group considers the actions of another group to be an active threat to themselves and/or their interests, that neither institution is well-suited to solve.