Culture and Equality by Brian Barry

Author:Brian Barry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

6

The Public Stake in the Arts and Education

1. The Limits of Laissez-Faire

Liberal institutions are remarkably successful in accommodating cultural diversity. There is a tendency to overlook the extent of this success because it does not make news. Even people who ought to know better, such as television news presenters, sometimes complain that almost all news is bad news. But how could it be otherwise? A plane crash is news; a lot of planes that arrive without incident at their destinations are not. Two countries that are at war are news; all the other thousands of pairs of countries that are not at war are not. There is nothing wrong with this, but unless we self-consciously correct for selection bias we are liable to finish up believing that air travel is much less safe than it is and war much more pervasive than it is. In the same way, by focusing our attention on cases in which a uniform system of liberal laws gives rise to protests, we are liable to overlook the immensely larger number of cases in which there are no complaints.

Within the framework of a general system of law that applies to all alike, people worship in different ways, do some things and refrain from others in accordance with their religious beliefs, associate with some (and not others) in pursuit of distinctive cultural activities, and so on. Many forms of cultural diversity are catered for by the market so unobtrusively that we are inclined to overlook the extent and importance of the phenomenon. Wherever there is an effective demand for some kind of cuisine or entertainment (for example, popular Indian films) that appeals especially to the members of some ethnocultural group, there is an excellent chance that somebody will spot the possibility of making money by meeting the demand.

In the absence of special reasons for public subsidy or provision, liberals will be in favour of leaving to the market the determination of what goods and services are to be supplied and in what quantities. If the point is to satisfy demand, markets have the advantage of leaving people free to decide for themselves how they want their fair share of their society’s resources to be spent. This does not mean that people are constrained to use that share only on private consumption, whether their own or anybody else’s. They are entirely free to contribute to collective projects, either altruistically or in return for participation in the benefits of the project.

Markets, however, respond to effective demand, that is to say, demand backed by willingness to pay. Willingness to pay for something, in turn, depends on how much one wants it and what one would have to give up in order to get it. The market will satisfy the frivolous desires of somebody with a hundred thousand pounds a year before it will satisfy even the urgent necessities of somebody on the minimum state benefit. Although, therefore, it is true that liberals, in virtue of their concern with the liberty

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