Good Intentions-Bad Consequences by Phillip Nelson

Author:Phillip Nelson [Nelson, Phillip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781524673789
Google: tPGgDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Published: 2017-03-24T02:56:45+00:00

CHAPTER 5

EVIDENCE OF THE GREAT DIVIDE

We have argued that the divide between naïve altruists and the preferences of others is crucial to an understanding of political choices. One way of supporting that proposition is to show that some well-known relationships that are somewhat puzzling can be best explained by that divide.

The Role of Narrow Self-Interest

The public choice literature concentrates on the role of self-interest in determining political positions and there are features of political positions that do depend critically on narrow self-interest. The most obvious are the relationships between political party preferences and the following: income, union membership and membership in certain occupations such as business managers (Nelson and Greene, 2003). The Democratic Party has been the party advocating more income redistribution, more pro-union policies, and more anti-business policies. What the literature has not done is look at the role of self-interest in the context of the role of imitation, tradition, and altruism. In those terms increasing the role of self-interest among all interest groups should on the whole make a person more conservative if one holds tradition constant. Naïve altruism operates in the opposite direction, so an increase in self-interest would imply a reduced role for naïve altruism. Obviously, there are interest groups such as the poor that might very well become more liberal with an increased role of self-interest. But lumping all interest groups together that should not be the case. In the tests that follow we do not vary individuals by interest group, so for those implications the relevant self-interest is some aggregation of the self-interest of everybody.

In terms of the implications we examine, the biggest source of variation in the role of self-interest is between market behavior and political behavior. As discussed previously, people are less interested in their selves in their political choices because their individual political choices have virtually no impact on the policies that are actually adopted – the free-rider problem. But the test for that difference has to somehow control for another huge difference between market and political behavior – the role of externalities. People can have a self-interested reason for voting for costly reductions in external costs that they would not reduce through their market behavior. That proposition flows from the definition of external costs: costs that are not born by participants in a given market transaction, so people as voters might have a self-interest in reducing external costs that they do not have as market participants. The ideals of altruists that generate the big difference between political and market behavior are also based on externalities in one way or another. Environmentalism is the most obvious case. So controlling for externalities is no easy task. Fortunately, there are ways to distinguish between self-interest voting for externalities and altruistic voting for externalities. We will examine several of them.

Goodness at a Distance

If an individual has no narrow self-interested concerns with a decision, his own self-interest will be irrelevant to his decisions. Furthermore, to the extent that that individual associates only with other people

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