It can be hard for group with weak hierarchies to make decisions. Group members need to find a balance between making their own contributions in some areas but acquiescing to the group in others. To make this work, it takes a skilled political leadership with a combination of policy-related and hands-on managerial skills, together with group members who see themselves as acting in the context of a broader whole, not just as grandstanding individuals. The US political system seems lacking in these areas.
He is discussing Alan Blinder’s latest thoughts on political economy.
I think that Taylor (probably Blinder, also) starts with what I might call a teleological political theory. That is, the political process is trying to achieve some end. When you think of the desired end result as, say, the greater foodgood, then you wonder what sorts of individuals and reforms will best achieve that end.
An alternative perspective, which comes automatically to someone familiar with public choice theory or Austrian economics, is that markets and political processes produce outcomes on the basis of behavior. Behavior in turn is governed by incentives and cultural norms. Neither market processes nor political processes can be understood in teleological terms. You have to try to understand them as they are.
I think that the belief that we would have better political outcomes if we had “skilled political leadership with a combination of policy-related and hands-on managerial skills” is naive and dangerous.
Idealistic, but nothing is so dangerous as the absence of ideals.
Quite the opposite. Most of the worst atrocities in history were committed I. The pursuit of ostensibly noble ideals. To quote CS Lewis, there’s a limit to the cruelty if the robber baron, but the tyrant who oppressed for the greater good has no limit to his cruelty because he exercises it with the permission of his conscience.
Of possible interest:
“A real liberal institution need not be produced by a deliberate plan, nor supported by an ex-post consensus regarding its purpose. It often, though not necessarily, arises as the consequences of acts by agents who would not have favored the way the institution ends up working. Its ultimate operations and effects typically do not reflect the desired outcome of any one agent. And it persists and fourishes, under multiple and incompatible ideas of what ‘flourishing’ means, in spite of disagreement among its analysts and defenders regarding its foundation or justification.”
Further down:
“Moreover, the realist liberal’s reasons for reform are partisan reasons. While people of many persuasions live under the listed institutions and appreciate them for di erent reasons, realist liberals will think we have the best way of understanding them, and put forth a distinctive program for helping them achieve the purposes that liberals think they should have. But both institutional functioning and institutional reform, of some kind, are likely to take place even if speci cally liberal arguments fail to triumph. No political theory should imagine itself indispensable. The fact that institutions serve a wide variety of human purposes means that they are likely to lumber on adequately (though not perfectly) well whether or not realist liberals temporarily or permanently carry the day.”
From Andrew Sabl’s “Realist liberalism: an agenda” http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698230.2017.1293916?journalCode=fcri20
What is at work in the teleological approach is the dream that there could be a collective rational management of human affairs, a political providence that would abolish tragedy and contingency from our lives.
The alternative approach accepts the reality of flawed human nature and the impossibility of universal agreement on the ideal, but it requires that intellectuals abandon their salvationist eschatology and vanity and live in the real world, so it is unlikely to gain many followers.
Ed Banfield is worth reading simply as a corrective, even if his views leave something to be desired.
https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/edward-banfield-revisited
Great reading as always with Arnold Kling.
“we would have better political outcomes if we had “skilled political leadership with a combination of policy-related and hands-on managerial skills” ”
In practice doesn’t that usually boil down to “grabs power and then suppresses the opposition?” You might rephrase “It can be hard for group with weak hierarchies to make decisions” to “flat organizations make more gradual, perhaps more sustainable decisions.”
May I suggest we refer to Oakeshott’s description of the functions of “Leaders” in his:
“The Masses in representative democracy” (1961)
To be found in “Rationalism in Politics” (Liberty Fund).
Please, sir, stick to your comparative advantage. Tyler Cowen for economics and lunch. Arnold Kling for economics and folk dancing.
Heh.