Copyright © 1981 by Paul F. deLespinasse. Details of generous permission to make copies This chapter may not print or copy unless you have clicked here first.
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After reading this chapter you should be able to:
action
nonassociation point
types of power: pen, purse, sword
association
organization
coexistence
price
gemeinschaft
sanction
gesellschaft
types of association: voluntary, involuntary, trust
value
inducement
market-clearing
(equilibrium) price
Learning a new theory is like learning a new language,- one stumbles at first,- constant practice is necessary,- long discussions with others similarly involved are indispensable. When journalists, television commentators, educators, and politicians persist in interpreting the issues of political economy through conventional categories, the task is even more difficult. Then it is like learning a foreign language with no one else to talk to. . . . *
THE MEANING OF COEXISTENCE
Thinking about the isolated individual is useful but can take us only so far. We now turn to the more normal human situation in which many people coexist with each other. To help bridge the gap, we will discuss the society of two created when Robinson Crusoe acquired a companion. The term "coexistence" became popular during the late 1950s. Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev called for the "peaceful coexistence" of the U.S.S.R. and the United States. But as Khrushchev implicitly admitted by qualifying the term with the adjective "peaceful," coexistence can have a more fundamental meaning: whenever many people live in the same area at the same time, they can be said to coexist. Coexistence, then, may or may not be peaceful.
After many years of total isolation, Robinson Crusoe gains a companion whom he calls Friday. The cannibals visit the island for one of their periodic feasts. Friday, a member of another tribe, is brought along to be part of the menu, but Crusoe rescues him. With a second character in the scene, many new possibilities arise. The fact that individuals coexist with other individuals has profound implications.
Advantages of Communicating. When there is more than one person, communication becomes possible. This possibility is temporarily frustrated for Crusoe and Friday because they do not speak the same language. At first, therefore, they are forced to rely on gestures and sign language, so Crusoe gives high priority to teaching Friday some English.
Why is Crusoe so interested in communicating with Friday? No doubt in part this can be explained by his desire for companionship: "Besides the pleasure of talking to him," says Crusoe, "I had a singular satisfaction in the fellow himself." [Footnote 1] But communicating has many other advantages as well.
Individual decisions about what to do are based not only on information about the current state of affairs but also on experience. Only experience can serve as a basis for deciding what action A will deliver a certain goal X, and what side effect Y can be expected from various actions. The A ---> X + Y formula of the elements of rational action introduced in Chapter 2 and Appendix A, therefore, does not merely bind together considerations of cause and effect and considerations of value. It also integrates the past, present, and future. We decide on present actions to try to get desired future results. But our knowledge of cause and effect relationships upon which current decisions are based necessarily derives from past experience. Communications between Crusoe and Friday enable them to pool their separate experi- ences, thus allowing each to act more effectively to get what he wants.
Coexistence also makes associations possible. We will turn our attention to these shortly. But since we will be defining associations in terms of actions as distinguished from communications, a few words about this distinction are now in order. We are all familiar with the sayings "Actions speak louder than words," and "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." For our purposes the truth of these proverbs, which is dubious, is beside the point. We are concerned with the distinction itself, not the validity of particular propositions in which it appears. In a way, these sayings imply a false dichotomy between communications and actions. All normal human communications employ actions--- deliberate bodily motions. Therefore, the line between words and deeds cannot be drawn very sharply if we merely describe physical events. Not only is there a certain minimum amount of action in all human communications--moving the lips, nodding the head, fingers manipulating typewriter keys--but it is hard to think of any action that could not be used to communicate.
Normally, communication takes place via words or representations of words. We can use "words" loosely to refer to communications in general. But the essential requirement for communication is that mutually understood meanings be attached to particular actions. "Words," then, become motions whose significance lies primarily in symbolic meaning rather than in their natural consequences.
But what if someone assassinates the president in order to communicate unhappiness with administration policies? Does punishing the assassin for murder violate his First Amendment rights to free speech? No court would so hold. To exempt actions producing important natural consequences from legal regulation because they are also communications would produce chaos. Any action may contain a communication. Assassination must therefore be classified as an action, not a symbol of an action--not as words. For this purpose the "sticks and stones" formula may not be a bad test: if the action is one that can "break bones," it has lost its symbolic nature. The relationship between actions and communications can be diagrammed in the form of a "donut" [rendered in square form for Web-version of book]:
______________________
| |
| actions |
| __________ |
| | | | inactions
| | words | | (things not done)
| |________| |
| |
|____________________|
Any point outside the larger circle represents an inaction, something that somebody might have done but did not. Any point between the two circles stands for an actiona deliberate human motion whose primary significance is not its symbolic meaning. Points inside the smaller circle represent communications- deliberate human motions whose primary significance lies in their symbolic meaning.
In daily life, "action" is often used to refer to any or all of these three meanings. Even in analysis in terms of A ---> X + Y, A can just as well refer to communications or to inactions as it can to actions in the narrower sense. For purposes of our discussion of associations, however, "actions" will refer only to things done, not to words or to inactions.
Association is, in addition to communication, the other major factor in the coexistence of several people in the same place. As long as Crusoe remained alone on his island, the only actions that could affect his satisfaction were those he took himself. We have defined satisfaction, in Chapter 2, as the ratio of a person's perceived attainments to his desires:
S = Ap/D
As the elements of the equation suggest, Crusoe can change his own satisfaction in three different ways:
Satisfaction can be expressed as a point on a one-dimensional scale. Crusoe's satisfaction at a given time, for example, can be represented by point K on the following line:
K
Crusoe's _____________|______________
satisfaction (lower) (higher)
Crusoe's actions can have three possible kinds of impact on his own satisfaction. Some actions might leave his satisfaction unchanged at K. A second kind of action might reduce his satisfaction to a level represented by point J.
<-----
J K
Crusoe's _______|_____|_________________
satisfaction (lower) (higher)
A third kind of action might increase his satisfaction to a level represented by point L:
----->
K L
Crusoe's _____________|______|_____________
satisfaction (lower) (higher)
When additional characters enter the scene, actions producing changed satisfaction no longer have to be taken by the person whose satisfaction is to be changed. Friday's satisfaction can be increased by Crusoe's actions, and Crusoe's by Friday's. Friday's satisfaction is raised considerably by his rescue and by food supplied by Crusoe. Crusoe's satisfaction is increased by Friday's assistance; the latter's first assignment is to bury the remains of the cannibals' other victims, a task for which the squeamish Crusoe has no taste.
In addition to swapping favors, tasks beyond the strength of one person can now be accomplished. Crusoe has long ago given up trying to move his hollowed out tree down to the ocean, and it is completely rotten by the time Friday joins him. But the two men build a similar boat and manage jointly to move it "inch by inch, upon great rollers into the water." Footnote 3
Introducing a second person also opens up less congenial possibilities. One person's actions can reduce as well as increase the other's satisfaction. Crusoe, aware that Friday may be dangerous, produces additional insurance:
I made a little tent for him in the vacant place between my two fortifications, in the inside of the last and in the outside of the first; and as there was a door or entrance there into my cave, I made a formal framed door-case, and a door to it of boards, and set it up in the passage, a little within the entrance; and causing the door to open on the inside, I barred it up in the night, taking in my ladders too; so that Friday could no way come at me in the inside of my innermost wall without making so much noise in getting over, that it must needs waken me . . . . Footnote 4
When Crusoe's satisfaction is being changed by Friday's actions, or Friday's by Crusoe's, we can say that the two men are associated or that they constitute an association. Since one person's actions may or may not affect another's satisfaction, the fact that the two coexist does not automatically mean that they are "associated." Nor does communication between people indicate that they are associated in the sense we will be using that term here. In terms of our earlier "donut" model, communications are not actions, and only actions can create an association.
Now let us imagine that in the context of another person's action your satisfaction level is at point P:
P
Your ______________|_______________
satisfaction (lower) (higher)
Are you thereby associated? Before we can answer this question we must determine whether satisfaction P represents a change for you. Just as your own actions may produce no change in your satisfaction, so too may the actions of other people have no impact upon it. But unless one person's level of satisfaction is changed by another's action, they do not constitute an association as we are defining it.
To ascertain whether an association exists between two people, we must, therefore, have a base-line from which to measure each person's satisfaction. Obviously, this point must be the level of satisfaction each would have if the other person took no actions at all affecting him in ways that he cares about. [Footnote 5] Using Crusoe and Friday as our examples, and assuming that the two are not associated by virtue of any action taken by Crusoe, we can represent Crusoe's satisfaction before Friday acts as point Z.
Z
Crusoe's ___________|__________________
satisfaction (lower) (higher)
If Friday's action leaves Crusoe's satisfaction at Z, the two men are not associated. If Friday's action leaves Crusoe's satisfaction at any level other than Z, they are associated:
---->
Z P
Crusoe's ___________|_____|____________
satisfaction (lower) (higher)
<----
P Z
Crusoe's ______|____|___________________
satisfaction (lower) (higher)
Point Z represents the level of Crusoe's satisfaction when he is not associated with Friday. We can call it Crusoe's non- association point with regard to Friday, and for simplicity we can label this with a zero:
0
Crusoe's ______________|________________
satisfaction (lower) (higher)
Crusoe's non-association point is a "floating" one in terms of the absolute level of his satisfaction that it refers to. His satisfaction can also be changed by his own actions, by the actions of people other than Friday, and by changes in the natural environment. The 0 with which we label this point on the line represents not the total absence of any satisfaction but the absence of an association, and it refers not necessarily to the absence of any association, but to the absence of one with Friday. Since changes in Crusoe's satisfaction resulting from his own actions have no bearing on whether he is associated with Friday, they cannot shift his satisfaction away from his non-association point with regard to Friday. Nor can actions by people other than Friday or changes in the natural environment have any such effect. To summarize:
Ways to Classify Associations. In order to determine whether any association exists at all we must establish a zero point. Once we have defined this non-association point an additional opportunity presents itself. Action can change another person's satisfaction either to the right or to the left of the zero point. We can therefore classify both this action and the resulting association in terms of the kind of changed satisfaction involved.
Inducements and Sanctions. The terms we will use to refer to the two kinds of action are "inducement" and "sanction":
Friday's Sanctions 0 Inducements
satisfaction ______________|_________________
(lower) (higher)
Consent. We will classify association in terms of two characteristics:
Consent is a uniquely social phenomenon, involving as it does both action and communication. During Robinson Crusoe's solitary years, the question of consent to action could hardly arise. Once Crusoe had decided what to do he had no occasion to "clear it" with anybody else, for there was nobody else. When another person enters the picture, however, an action that is proposed by one person may be objectionable to the other person, whose satisfaction could be adversely affected. The person desiring to act may take one of two possible attitudes in this social context:
Since all associations result from actions, and these actions can be classified variously as sanctions or inducements, and as unilateral or by mutual consent, we can classify associations in terms of the following table:
Table 3-1. Involuntary Associations, Trusts, Voluntary
Associations
Sanctions Inducements
Unilateral 1. Involuntary 2.Trusteeship
associations associations
Mutual 3. Voluntary
Consent associations
Involuntary Associations. An involuntary association is created by the unilateral imposition or the threat of sanctions. They may be extremely gross or highly subtle. A grossly involuntary association exists, for example, when the victim hands over his wallet in response to the robber's threats. This association involves a sanction that will be imposed unless the victim cooperates, and if the victim could have nothing at all to do with the robber he would gladly do so. But there is no such choice, for their relationship has been unilaterally established by the robber.
Air pollution exemplifies a more subtle involuntary association. Here, the sanction is imposed but not threatened, and the polluting companies, for example, have no desire to manipulate the actions of others. They merely want to achieve cheaply what would otherwise be more costly. They dump waste products from their enterprise into the atmosphere. The pollution is a sanction because it reduces attainments of the people who breath the air-their long-term health and longevity and the general attractiveness of environment. If the magnitude of the sanction is great enough to be perceived, then an association is created between the company and the people breathing the air and that association is involuntary.
Trusts. A second type of association, which we will call "trusts," is created by unilaterally conferring inducements. The most familiar example is the association between parents and children in the nuclear family. Children, especially when very young, are in no position to give or to withhold consent to associate with their parents. The association is created unilaterally by the parents, but their actions--creating, housing, feeding, clothing the child--are inducements from the child's point of view.
Involuntary Trusts Voluntary
I-----------unilateral-----------I I--mutual consent--I
I--sanctions--------I I------inducements ------------I
Figure 3-3. The three types of associations.
Voluntary Associations. Voluntary associations, a third type, are created by the exchange or transfer of inducements or expected inducements by mutual consent. Traditional difficulties fitting the family into general social analysis may derive from its two-dimensionality. Although it is a trust association between the parents (jointly) and their children, it is a voluntary association between husband and wife. Voluntary associations can be far larger than a family. Four of the predominant institutions in modern America-corporations, labor unions, political parties, and churches are basically voluntary associations. The fourth combination of types--sanctions by mutual consent--can exist only when the sanctions are falsely expected to be inducements by the party who consents to them. (Sanctions reduce another person's net satisfaction below what it would be if the actor did nothing at all. Naturally, no one who sees it for what it is would consent to such an action.) Instead of recognizing a fourth type of association--"mistakes"- -we will regard these as a special type of voluntary association. Hence, the definition of voluntary associations is in terms of inducements or expected inducements. This has two advantages: It avoids introducing an additional complexity into our typology of associations. And it makes a person's consent to associate conclusive evidence that he believes a particular action by another person will increase his own satisfaction. We thus avoid problems otherwise posed by the fact that "one person's meat is another's poison."
Rather than arranging the three possible combinations two- dimensionally, we can diagram them along a single dimension, paving the way for further developments in the next chapter (Fig. 3-3).
The two chief possibilities opened up by coexistence are communications and associations. But communications and associations create additional possibilities, and these too may be regarded as elements in coexistence.
Sometimes human interactions are classified into "I-Thou" and "I-it" relationships, or into Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The first pair of terms was introduced by Martin Buber, a modern Jewish philosopher, and the second pair by Ferdinand Tonnies, a nineteenth-century German sociologist. Buber's I-Thou, corresponding with Tonnies' Gemeinschaft, is a relationship that people value in itself rather than as a means to some other end. The I-it or Gesellschaft relationship, on the other hand, is one regarded by those involved as a means to other ends.
I-It Interactions. For example, a person getting a haircut normally does not find intrinsic satisfaction in dealing with the barber. Nor does the barber regard his relationship with customers as important in its own right. Rather, the barber performs his services in order to make money, and the customer comes to the barber in order to maintain a desired appearance. The relationship between barber and customer is an I-it or Gesellschaft one.
I-Thou Interactions. On the other hand most people have some contacts that they find inherently worthwhile, with no ulterior purpose. The concepts of "love" and "friendship" apply to these I-Thou or Gemeinschaft relationships, contrasting with the impersonality or acquaintance aspect of the 1-it. Politics is basically a Gesellschaft, as its scale precludes the more intimate atmosphere required for a Gemeinschaft. But most people find more meaning in their small-scale, personalized I- Thou Gemeinschaft relations. Indeed, a Gemeinschaft might almost be defined as the communication of meaning between people. A Gemeinschaft, though normally found in the context of an association, is thus not an association in our sense at all. The association is merely the occasion or packaging.
Coexistence also makes specialized production possible. Unlike Crusoe, each individual need not be a jack of all trades. Specialization can produce higher standards of living or reduced hours of work or both.
Efficient production requires knowledge, experience, and skill. Individuals who spread themselves too thin cannot acquire these things. The classic analysis is found in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations published in 1776. Speaking of pin- makers, Smith observes:
A workman not educated to this business . . . could scarce . . . make one pin in a day. . . . But in the way in which this business is now carried on . . . it is divided into a number of branches. . . . One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; . . . making a pin is . . . divided into about eighteen distinct operations. . . . I have seen a small manufactory . . . where only ten men . . . could make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. . forty-eight thousand pins . . . . Footnote 6
Specialized labor, which increases total social production, also creates problems. Ways must be found to determine who is going to specialize in what. As specialization increases, it becomes harder for people to evaluate work performed by other specialists. Highly specialized work can be boring and obnoxious. Smith's pinmakers hardly found their work intellectually challenging. And the vast productivity resulting from specialized labor is useless unless transfers take place. Without transfers, people who grow no food must starve and those producing no clothes go naked. As we will see in due course, sharp conflicts arise over the terms on which these transfers will take place.
Coexistence, as we have said, means that more than one person lives in the same area. When this is the case, each individual can no longer consume natural resources without external restraints. Crusoe limited use of resources only to save some for his own future use. But in a normal society resources used by one person become unavailable for others, and resources are likely to become scarcer as population increases.
John Locke's classic principle that workers have rights to what they produce leaves us with one basic question: Who has the right to "mix labor" (as Locke puts it) with given natural resources? When a resource is plentiful, every individual can take all he can use and there is no problem. Crusoe represents an extreme case of this happy possibility. But as population increases, many resources are not abundant enough. People find themselves in a "zero sum game" where more resources for one person mean less for someone else. People then begin claiming exclusive rights over these resources and often incur considerable costs to defend them. Footnote 7
The easiest way to control natural resources is to claim land where they are located. Individuals may try to defend "their" land by threatening trespassers with sanctions, but traditionally this has been a job for governments. "Property" has always been a fundamental political problem. Complicated land tenure rules were a key to feudal politics. The Communists promised land to the peasants in order to gain power in Russia, then took it back again in the collectivization drive of the 1930s. "Agrarian reform" is always a hot issue in the less developed countries. Two of America's most important laws were the Homestead Act and the Land Grant Colleges Act of the nineteenth century. Two hundred years after the American Revolution, 350 years after Europeans settled in North America, Indians were claiming large portions of Maine, Montana, and the Dakotas in serious lawsuits.
It is clear why property issues are so important. People cannot live without producing, which requires both labor and natural resources. Ability to work is worthless to individuals who cannot gain access to materials with which to "mix" their labor.
Coexistence also implies the possibility of social power, as distinguished from power over physical nature. Examining social power, we encounter basic issues about the nature of social causation, or the relationship between an individual's actions and the actions of other people.
"Power" can be a dangerous term. A dean of the Stanford University Law School once argued that the word should be outlawed. It has so many meanings that it is easy to slip unwittingly and illogically from one to another. [Footnote 8] Nevertheless, "power" is indispensable in thinking about politics. Many philosophers have even identified it as the key political concept. We must therefore steer a middle course, neither abandoning the term nor throwing it around loosely.
Social power can be defined as our ability to get another person to do what we want, when its magnitude is sufficient. We will distinguish three types of social power: the power of the pen, the power of the sword, and the power of the purse.
The Power of the Pen. The power of the pen grows out of our ability to say and to refrain from saying things. Of course "pen" is only a convenient metaphor. Under modern conditions it includes the power of the typewriter, the microphone, and the camera.
We can employ pen-power overtly to persuade others to do what we want. We may try to convince them that they will like the consequences of the action we have prescribed or to convince them to change their values so that consequences already expected will be acceptable.
The power of the pen can also be used covertly, although the exact boundary between overt persuasion and covert manipulation is unclear. Manipulation clearly includes cases in which the power of the pen is employed negatively. For example, if we delay sending a message to someone until it will be too late for him to react in a way we disfavor, that is manipulation rather than persuasion.
The power of the pen is vitally important in politics. It is not always true that the pen is mightier than the sword, but this old saying still has some validity. The power of the sword may prevail in the short run, but decisions about using it are based on ideas which have been propagated by the pen.
The Power of the Sword. The sword is a metaphor for the power that comes from our ability to do things that another person does not like. The actions that constitute the power of the sword are sanctions. Other symbolic expressions for sanctions include the gun and the stick. The gun suggests the hold-up man encountering victim and growling, "Your money or your life!" If the victim hands over his money--an action desired by the robber- -the robber, if he is an "honest crook" who keeps his implied word, refrains from exercising his ability to blow the victim's brains out. The stick evokes a scenario in which an obstinate donkey--or elephant: let us be non-partisan!--moves forward to escape the blows of the club urging it onward.
The power of the sword is the power to destroy. It may destroy life, liberty, comfort, or property. In any event, the sword destroys the other person's option of having nothing to do with the person wielding it.
Even so, the power of the sword is not unlimited. The wholesale sanctions known as hydrogen bombs were not technically possible as recently as World War II And even the hydrogen bomb is not all-powerful, as the United States discovered during World War III: atomic weapons were not useful in Vietnam. A steamshovel is a powerful machine, but useless for swatting a mosquito. Yet that tiny mosquito can give you malaria. While Mao Tse-tung may have exaggerated when he said that the atomic bomb is a "paper tiger," he still touched upon an important truth.
The Power of the Purse. The power of the purse comes from our ability to refrain from doing something that another person would like us to do. Actions constituting the power of the purse are inducements. We can make an action that the other person wants contingent upon his acting as we want.
While "purse" makes an excellent metaphor, we should not think of this power merely in terms of money. Indeed, the power of the purse exists where there is no money. In concentration camps, whose inmates have no money, the power of the purse still exists; thing is bartered for thing, and favors are exchanged. Another term used to convey this meaning is the "carrot," in which our donkey is attracted forward by a carrot it would like to eat.
Table 3-2. Types of Power
Metaphor Pen Sword Purse
Other terms typewriter gun dollar
microphone stick carrot
Nature of thing
done or not done communication destructive productive
action action
Name of the
communication or
action pure persuasion sanctions inducements
manipulation
Example seduction rape prostitution
Definition Power based Power based Power based
on our ability on our ability on our ability
to say things to do some- to refrain
and to re- thing that from doing
frain from another per- something
saying son does that another
things. not like. person would like.
Inducements grow out of production. If we can produce something--a carrot, a carriage, or a crowbar--desired by others, we have power. Others may be willing to do something we want if we will give them something we have made. Our production may increase the other person's options by giving him the possibility of trading with us. Of course, if we use the crowbar we have produced to beat up somebody unless he does what we want, we employ the power of the sword rather than the purse. Swords, like all other goods, must be produced before they can be used, but the mere fact that they were once produced does not make their use an inducement. Table 3-2 summarizes the three kinds of social power. In addition to the explanation already presented, the table gives an example of each kind of power drawn from the same arena. How Social Power Is Limited The distinction between communication and action establishes the boundary between the power of the pen, on the one hand, and the powers of sword and purse. The pen is the power of words and silences. Purse and sword are powers of action and, in a certain sense, inaction. We should not be confused by the fact that words are involved in the employment of sword and purse. Offers or threats are not an exercise of power by means of the pen, but a communication of the intention to act in a certain way unless the listener cooperates. The power thus wielded is the power of action, not that of the word. How the Three Powers Are Kept Separated. The boundary between the powers of purse and sword is defined by the non-association or zero point separating inducements from sanctions. It is important to understand that the direction in which one person's satisfaction is changed by another's action does not, by itself, determine whether that action is a sanction or an inducement. An action reducing another person's satisfaction may be either a sanction or an inducement. Likewise, an action that increases another's satisfaction may be either a sanction or an inducement. In order to classify the action we must examine its context: an increase or decrease in satisfaction compared to what? In this case, the "what" is the non-association or zero point as defined above. Lest it seem that we are making too much fuss over a rather technical question, consider the analogous question of measuring temperatures. Ten minutes ago the temperature in our room was 50 degrees. Now it is 20 degrees. Which have we probably been running, the furnace or the air conditioner? Does it make any difference that the first temperature was 50 degrees Fahrenheit and the second was 20 degrees Centigrade? (The Centigrade zero point--0 degrees--corresponds to 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the freezing point of water at sea level.) In order to determine what has really happened here we must either convert the 20 degrees Centigrade to 68 degrees Fahrenheit or convert the 50 degrees Fahrenheit to 10 degrees Centigrade. Having made either of these conversions we can easily see that the room's temperature has increased from 50 to 68 Fahrenheit, or from 10 to 20 Centigrade. Imagine what foolish conclusions we could draw about the effects of furnaces or air conditioners if we indiscriminately used both of these scales without being aware of their different zero points! Now imagine what foolish conclusions we can draw about human associations if we indiscriminately shift the boundary between sanctions and inducements to suit our fancy of the moment. The non- association or zero point is not an unimportant technicality; it is fundamental to any systematic political analysis.
Which kind of power, for example, is used by an employer who reduces, or threatens to reduce, his worker's salary? Or a robber who hands back his victim's wallet leaving him his papers and carfare? It might seem that the employer who reduces a salary is imposing a sanction, because the worker does not like this and it reduces his satisfaction. And since the victim does like receiving back his wallet, papers, and part of his money, the robber's action might appear to be an inducement. But both of these conclusions would be incorrect. They do not properly take into account the context in which these specific actions take place.
Before he is hired, the worker's satisfaction is at his nonassociation point with this particular employer. If he accepts the offer of a job at $20,000 a year, the inducements conferred by the employer increase his satisfaction up to point P:
-------------->
0 P (20,000/year)
worker's ________________|_______________|___________
satisfaction (lower) Sanctions Inducements (higher)
If the employer subsequently reduces his salary to $16,000 a year, this must be represented in the diagram by a reduction in the worker's satisfaction from P to Q:
<-----
0 Q P
worker's _________________|_________|_____|___________
satisfaction (lower) Sanctions Inducements (higher)
Seen in this context, reducing the salary is clearly a reduced or negative inducement, not a sanction. Q is still above the non-association point. The association between worker and employer thus is still a voluntary one.
The converse reasoning applies in the case of the "generous" robber. Before the robbery, the victim's satisfaction is at his non-association point with regard to the robber. The robber threatens to kill him, a prospect which the victim regards as a sharp decrease in his attainments and, thus, satisfaction is reduced to point G:
<-----
G 0
victim's _________|______|_______________________
satisfaction (lower) Sanctions Inducements (higher)
The victim prefers to hand over his wallet because the reduction in his satisfaction to point E resulting from this action is less than that expected if he resists. Functionally, this forking over is the equivalent of allowing the robber to remove the wallet from one's pocket. When the robber refrains from killing his victim this is not an inducement, but a withdrawn sanction. Likewise, if the robber returns the wallet and part of the money, leaving the victim's satisfaction at point H, this is an additional withdrawn sanction.
---> -->
G E H 0
victim's ___|___|__|____|________________________
satisfaction (lower) Sanctions Inducements (higher)
The association remains involuntary, because the victim's net satisfaction is reduced to less than it would have been if he had had nothing to do with the robber at all.
Distinction between Type and Magnitude of Power. We must avoid confusing types of power with the separate issue of magnitude. There should be no presumption that all sanctions are more important or more powerful than all inducements. A sanction such as a $3 fine for jaywalking may affect the satisfaction of the person on whom it is imposed or threatened very little. And a very large impact may be produced by a withdrawn inducement. Most people would far rather pay the $3 fine than to be fired from their $500,000 a year job as president of General Motors or to be removed from the U.S. presidency by impeachment proceedings. Yet these latter events constitute withdrawn inducements rather than sanctions.
In dealing with nature we need not distinguish between power and causation. Power over non-human matter is simply the ability to cause something to happen. If we have the power to move enough electrons through a tungsten wire suspended in a vacuum, we can cause its temperature to rise to the level at which light is emitted. Human interactions are different. In the social sense, power is our ability to get another to act as we desire. But we need not assume that such actions are caused by the person who wields power.
Imagine a deranged worker who hires somebody to murder his employer. The worker uses his purse to induce the assassin to employ the sword. The hireling shoots the offending boss twice, killing him instantly. The death is caused (in the physical sense) by two bullets destroying essential body tissue. The bullets are made to attain high velocities by the explosive ignition of gunpowder. The gunpowder is made to ignite by the gun's firing mechanism. The mechanism's motion is caused by that of the gunman's trigger finger. The finger was made to move by the gunman, and we call this deliberate movement his action.
But in what sense, if any, can we say that the gunman's action was caused by anything? Although we can say that the action was caused by the gunman, this adds nothing to what we already knew. Any effort to go further and say that the gunman was caused to take the action by somebody else does not just repeat what we already knew; it adds something that is patently absurd. The worker who hired the murderer may be thousands of miles from the scene of the crime. Deciding whether to commit this murder is entirely up to the gunman. Agreements need not be carried out; the courts are full of people suing for breech of contract. (Needless to say, no court would enforce an agreement to do something illegal.) Common sense is therefore violated if we say that one person has caused another's action.
Disturbing philosophical implications are raised by any claim that one person's action was caused by somebody else. It implies that human beings are not responsible for their own actions and that there is no free will. It dismisses as an immense illusion our personal experience of making choices about what to do.
We need not come to such drastic conclusions at all. It is quite possible to account for our experience with social power and social causation without coming into conflict with individual choice and "free will." Social causation is the causation of possibilities and impossibilities rather than of actions. A drawbridge operator who lowers the bridge into position makes it possible for us to cross that bridge. But lowering the bridge does not cause us to cross it, and indeed we may choose not to do so. If we do drive across the bridge, this actualizes the possibility, but the action, as distinguished from its possibility, is not caused by the bridge operator.
What Social Power Really Does. Each kind of social power causes possibilities and impossibilities. The pen, for example, creates a possibility when you write a job application letter. By announcing your existence and qualifications, you make it possible for the employer to consider you. If competition is keen, your chances of actually getting the job may be small, but they would have been smaller if you had not applied. "Knock and it shall be opened to you" may put the case too optimistically for secular purposes, but we can be pretty sure the door will not open if we do not knock.
The power of the pen can also create impossibilities. When a junior bureaucrat suppresses key facts that have come to his attention, he may make it impossible for his superiors to learn these facts. Consequently, they may make different decisions than they otherwise would. If Albert Einstein had not told President Franklin Roosevelt about the possibility of atomic bombs early in World War 1I this would have been a negative exercise of the pen. Silences are normally undramatic--this one, however, might have meant no Manhattan Project, no atomic bomb, and a vastly different world.
The sword, too, creates possibilities and impossibilities. Literally, it can make it impossible for some people to take any actions at all, or to say anything. Dead men tell no tales! Conversely, one person's impossibilities are another's opportunity. Lee Harvey Oswald made it impossible for President Kennedy to continue to act, thus making it possible for Lyndon Johnson to do things that were impossible while he remained vice president.
Threatened sanctions make it impossible for someone to act as he otherwise would without suffering artifically attached side effects. Action is not made impossible, but impossible without repercussions. Laws against murder do not make murders impossible, but they may create circumstances where fewer murders happen.
Inducements--the power of the purse--cause various kinds of possibilities and impossibilities. A person offered an inducement enjoys an additional possibility. If somebody offers $2000 for your car, you can choose between having the car but not the $2000, or the $2000 but not the car. If you accept this offer you cannot sell your car to anybody else. Cooperation induced by the purse makes achievements far beyond the reach of any individual possible.
Price. In terms of association theory, a "price" is any action or inaction by a person that reduces his own satisfaction but increases that of another. For example, few people would clean sewers or preside over a blast furnace or prepare other people's income tax returns for the sheer joy of it. Each of these activities probably reduces the satisfaction of the person engaged in them. Yet people do in fact come forward to do these and many other unpleasant jobs. The worker's satisfaction is increased more by the salary paid by his employer than it is reduced by performing the tasks.
"Price" applies to involuntary associations as well as voluntary ones. When the victim hands over his wallet to the robber, his action is a price; it reduces his satisfaction to less than it would have been without any contact with the robber at all. But he hopes the robber will respond by refraining from any action that would reduce his satisfaction still farther.
In common usage, "price" is ambiguous. It may refer either to the asking price or to that at which the deal is actually made-the exchange price. Normally, the exchange price will be less than or equal to the asking price. For example, the sticker (asking) price on a new car may be $6000, but it may actually sell for $5200 after some hard bargaining. Unless we modify the term with the adjective "asking," we will use "price" here to refer solely to exchange price. The price of the new car, thus, is $5200.
Cost. Confusion may occur among the concepts of price, cost, and value. Cost is what a person has to give up in order to get something else that he wants. But costs need not involve giving something up to another person. As we saw in Chapter 2, even a Crusoe has "opportunity costs"; that is, materials used for one purpose become unavailable for others and time used doing one thing cannot be used to do something else. Costs may be seen as the side effects, Y in the A ---> X + Y formula, or they may be seen as actions taken or foregone.
Price is a subset or particular type of cost. It is a cost in a social context, an action which increases another's satisfaction as well as reducing that of the person taking it.
Value. Value represents what a person would be willing to do or give up, if necessary, in order to achieve some desired goal. For example, a person may value a certain new car so much that he would be willing to pay $5500 if he had to in order to obtain it. Naturally, however, he would rather pay less and certainly will if he has the opportunity.
Robert Nozick comments on the implications of analyses along the lines above for students of politics:
From no association will I be able to get something worth more to them than what I contribute is worth to them. Need I accept less . . . ? If one association offers me less than they would gain from my presence, it will be to the advantage of another association that values my presence equally to offer me something more. . . . Similarly for a third association with regard to the second. . . . We seem to have a realization of the economists' model of a competitive market. This . . . gives us immediate access to a powerful, elaborate, and sophisticated body of theory and analysis. Footnote 9
Since price is a concept applying to voluntary associations, says Nozick, the entire accumulated wisdom of what is called microeconomics is directly applicable to voluntary associations. Microeconomics is the study of the behavior of particular consumers and producers in terms of costs, prices, supply, and demand.
Equilibrium in the Market. A key concept in microeconomics is that of a market-clearing or equilibrium price. This is the price or ratio at which exchanges by mutual consent tend to take place. This equilibrium price is defined in terms of "demand" and "supply" for particular things. In our terms, demand is the amount of some product that people are willing and able to buy at a given price. For example, at a price of $100, people in a given area may be willing and able to purchase 1000 TV sets per year. Supply is the amount of something that people are willing and able to produce at a given price. Again, for example, people may be willing and able to produce 500 TV sets per year if the price they can get for them is $100.
As the table indicates, with a price of $100 there will be a shortage of TV sets under the circumstances we have imagined. 500 will be produced but 1000 could have been sold at that price. As long as all parties are free to refuse to deal whenever they prefer, the producers will naturally tend to raise their prices. As the price of a TV set goes up to $150, however, there are two interesting side effects. First, the demand for TV sets will decline. Some people will no longer be willing to buy one; they do not value the TV sets at $150. Others will no longer be able to buy because they do not have the $150 or their other requirements are more pressing. Second, the supply of TV sets will increase. As the price that can be gotten for TV sets increases, the number of sets people will be willing and able to produce at that price will increase.
As the prevailing price rises, supply increases and demand decreases. At some point, they must meet. The price at which supply equals demand is called the market- clearing or equilibrium price.
An equilibrium is a "state of rest due to the action of forces that counteract each other" according to The American College Dictionary. Ring magnets, for example, may be placed around a rod in the orientation in which they appear to repel each other. If the rod is vertical, the magnets will assume a stable equilibrium distance from each other at the point where the repulsive magnetic motions are equal to the gravitational motions of the magnets towards the earth, which tend to bring them together. If the distance between the magnets is decreased by pushing down on the top magnet, they will move outward to their original distance as soon as the extra
Table 3-3. Equilibrium Price
Tendency of
Price/unit Supply Demand Results Price
______________________________________________________________
$250 1000 units 650 units Surplus Down
$200 750 units 750 units Equilibrium Oscillation
$150 700 units 850 units Shortage Up
$100 500 units 1000 units Large Up
shortage
______________________________________________________________
pressure is released. On the other hand if the distance between the magnets is increased by giving the top one an additional lift, they move inward to their original distance as soon as the extra lift is ended.
A disturbed equilibrium thus tends to move back into balance from either direction, and can be thought of as a tendency to move toward a central point from both directions. This is exactly the case with an equilibrium price. The shortages produced by a prevailing price below that at which the market is cleared encourage producers to raise prices and buyers to bid prices higher. The surplus produced by a prevailing price above the market-clearing one encourages buyers to shop around and sellers to underbid each other to try to get the available business. Markets, arenas in which everybody is free to deal at mutually agreed upon prices or not to deal at all, are therefore powerful instruments for coordinating the decisions of millions of independent actors.
An organization is an association whose individual parties occupy continuing roles that exist independently of their immediate occupants. Thus all organizations are associations but not all associations are organizations. Sometimes our terminology reflects the difference between the role (or "office") and the person occupying it. The difference between presidency and president is obvious.
The employment relationship by which individuals enter, occupy, and leave an office is the key to existence of the organization as a special kind of association. Many voluntary associations, particularly the smaller ones, exist only as long as particular individuals participate. The association between husband and wife, for example, lasts at best only until the death of one of the members. The surviving spouse, or both in the event of a divorce, may remarry, but that constitutes a different association, not the same one previously existing. Likewise, a partnership is legally dissolved when any partner dies or withdraws. If the remaining partners wish to continue, they must form a new partnership. This is one reason why large partnerships are rare; incorporation can provide for more stability and simplicity for participants over the long haul.
Essentially, an organization exists independently of decisions by particular parties whether to continue their association with it. Of course, if enough individuals decide to withdraw or not to participate, the organization will die. Organizations are not inherently immortal, but they can exist for vastly longer periods than any individual member. The Catholic Church, thus, is nearly 2000 years old; Harvard University is over 300; the United States government almost 200.
In order for an organization to survive, its leaders must maintain an "equilibrium of incentives" [Footnote 10] for people to participate in it. If the organization is a voluntary association, we can speak more narrowly of an equilibrium of inducements.
Consider, for example, a private college. Parties to this association include students, faculty, administrators, cooks, groundskeepers, trustees, alumni, parents, and benefactors. The students are induced to participate by classes, degrees, and the possibility of learning things they want to learn. In return, they pay tuition and agree to abide by certain rules. The benefactors want to promote certain ideals or developments; in return for their contributions, they derive prestige and a sense of helping to accomplish something important. Faculty are induced to teach by salaries-paid out of the tuition and gifts received by the college-as well as by the intrinsic satisfactions of teaching. As long as college leaders can use the limited resources contributed by various participants to induce the others to keep on participating, an equilibrium of inducements exists.
If, however, the college is unable to pay good faculty members enough, they may start leaving. The quality of instruction may then decline, reducing student willingness to continue paying tuition and further reducing the inducements available to retain faculty. Unless a new equilibrium can be established, the organization will disappear. As long as the equilibrium of inducements is maintained, however, the college's existence does not depend on a continued association with any particular individual. This does not render the association with each individual member involuntary, though, for each is free to end his association, his membership in the organization, if he prefers. In this sense, decisions made by leaders on behalf of organizations can be "binding" on the organization but not binding on individual members if they prefer to leave rather than comply.
The Organization Leader. In economic terms, an organization's leader is an entrepreneur. His function is to bring together the different elements of the organization, to lead and coordinate their various activities, and to arrange the total picture so that an equilibrium of inducements is achieved. Since each individual member is free to leave if he can secure a better deal--more inducements or a lower price--elsewhere, the entrepreneur's task is not an easy one, and he cannot afford to rest on his laurels in a dynamic environment.
Governments, of course, are organizations, often the biggest and invariably the most powerful in their country. Presidents may retire, die, or be assassinated. New civil servants and military personnel replace old ones in a steady turnover. Individual congressmen and judges leave their offices, but they do not leave them empty. The individuals filling government offices are always changing, but the offices themselves continue to exist. Governments thus are organizations as we have defined them here, often the biggest and most powerful organizations in their country. Governments are thus a subset of a subset (see Figure 3-6).
Figure 3-6. Associations, organizations, and
governments.
____________________________________________
| |
| _____________________ |
| | | Associations |
| | Organizations | |
| | ________ | |
| | | | | |
| | | Govt.| | |
| | |______| | |
| |___________________| |
|__________________________________________|
When many people coexist, associations become possible. An association exists when one person's satisfaction is changed by another person's actions. Depending on whether the net satisfaction increases or decreases and upon other factors, an association may be voluntary, a trust, or involuntary. Voluntary associations and trusts pertain only to inducements, or the power of the purse, while sanctions-the power of the sword-are found only in involuntary associations.
Coexistence also permits communications, specialization in different types of production, and conflicts over the right to use scarce natural resources. Specialization has advantages, but these can be achieved only by transferring goods from specialized producers to unspecialized consumers. When this is done through voluntary associations, negotiations about proposed terms of exchange--"prices"--are especially important forms of communication. The "market-clearing" or "equilibrium" price is a key concept in thinking about voluntary associations. Since "price" refers not just to money but to all of the terms of an exchange, basic macroeconomic concepts are directly applicable to analysis of voluntary associations.
The White House is sending out 40,000 Christmas cards "to
friends-it's nice to have that many," Mrs. Nixon said.
(Toledo Blade, December 7, 1969)
Discuss the implications here of the distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Is it possible to have 40,000 "friends"?
YOUNG WIDOW SEEKS HUSBAND. Charming 32-year-old widow with
four children seeks husband, who is perhaps at the present
time also widowed and with young children, in order to
rebuild her life with him. She is gracious, intelligent,
home-loving, highly moral, well educated and has traveled
extensively. Speaks three languages fluently. Excellent
cook and polished entertainer. First rate social
background. Financially comfortable. The right party must
have an irreproachable character and background and will be
thoroughly checked out at the proper time. Absolute
seriousness offered and demanded. Write NR Box 1354.
(National Review, April 20, 1971)
Does this advertisement seem strange to you? Why or why not?
"Schools serve the economic system. Many of these kids will
go into meaningless jobs. . . ."
What is a meaningless job? Is it one which is useless? Why would anybody hire someone to do things which are useless? Does working at a "meaningless" job mean that one's life is meaningless? What are you assuming here in order to answer this question?
[Tlhe proletariat, the modern working class, developed-a
class of laborers who live only so long as they find work. .
. . These laborers . . . are a commodity, like every article
of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the
vicissitudes of competition, to all of the fluctuations of
the market.
Although "vicissitudes" generally is defined to mean "changes" or "alternations," it clearly has a negative connotation here, and Webster's Third International Dictionary indicates that it is a synonym for "difficulties." But does the market exert only downward pressure on wages? Is there any reason to think that equilibrium wages, like all other equilibrium prices, result from a balance among factors tending to push them both down and up? According to Table 3- 3, what would be the side effects of trying to force wage levels above the market-clearing price for labor?
When an organization can be shown to be involuntary in some
significant sense--perhaps that the choice to leave it is not
truly costless for the individual--does government have an
obligation to require that the political system of the
organization be structured democratically? (Charles Anderson,
Statecraft [N.Y., 1977], p. 300.)
In order to facilitate comparability with the bulk of the work in the field, we adopted the definition of voluntary associations as "organizations that people belong to part time and without pay, such as clubs, lodges, good-works agencies and the like" which appears in Berelson and Steiner's widely known inventory of social science findings. . . . (Constance Smith and Anne Freedman, Voluntary Associations.- Perspectives on the Literature [Cambridge, 1972], p. viii.)
The federal government sometimes intervened with troops to
break strikes, as in 1877, 1892, and 1894. (p. 498.)
What does it mean to "strike"? Do you suppose "breaking" a
strike refers to forcing strikers to work, or to forcing
strikers to refrain from preventing people who want to work
from doing so?
***********
* Michael H. Best and William E. Connolly, The Politicized Economy (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1976), P. xiv.
1. Defoe, p. 240.
2. Anticipating Chapter 17, let it be noted that we can regard this changed perception as the action of the perceiving person himself Even though it may have been made possible by the actions or communications of others, it was not made inevitable. We need not pay attention to others' deeds or words. Koestler tells of experiments in which a "cat's auditory nerve was tapped and wired to an amplifier, so that impulses passing from ear to brain were directly recorded. The impulses were caused by the clicking of a metronome. But the moment a mouse in a glass jar was shown to the cat the firings in the auditory nerve were diminished or ceased altogether. The cat was turning a 'deaf ear' on the metronome." (Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, New York: Dell, 1964, pp. 513-514.)
3. Defoe, p. 256.
4. Ibid., pp. 234-235.
5. Measuring from the wrong point can throw investigators into immense confusion. Aristotelian mechanics, for example, asked why the arrow keeps moving after it is no longer pushed by the bowstring. The answers were often hilarious. For Newtonian mechanics with its concept of inertia, the question became why the arrow did not continue moving forever, which was explicable in terms of friction and gravitational motion. Newtonians used the arrow's current rather than its former velocity as the zero point from which deviations must be explained. Measuring from the right point is even more crucial for legal philosophers and political scientists. As to the associational zero point, once we realize the necessity of defining it the battle is over. Compare Robert Nozick: "If I buy a good or service from you, I benefit from your activity; I am better off due to it, better off than if your activity wasn't done or you didn't exist at all. . . . Whereas if I pay you for not harming me, I gain nothing from you that I wouldn't possess if either you didn't exist at all or existed without having anything to do with me. ... Roughly, productive activities are those that make purchasers better off than if the seller had nothing at all to do with them." (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York: Basic Books, 1974, p. 84.) See also Charles Anderson: "A good question that can be asked about any public problem is, How would things work out if no action were taken at all? ... [Ili provides a useful standard against which to measure desirable public intervention, if any is required at all." (Statecraft.- An Introduction to Political Choice and Judgment, New York: Wiley, 1977, p. 57.)
6. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Baltimore: Penguin, 1970, pp. 109-1 10.
7. See Garrett Hardin and John Baden (eds.), Managing the Commons, San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1977.
8. Bayless Manning, "Corporate Power and Individual Freedom: Some General Analysis and Particular Reservations," 55 Northwestern University Law Review 38 (1960), p. 44.
9. Nozick, pp. 301-302.
10. See Chester I. Barnard, The Functions of The Executive, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938, pp. 56-59.