In a recent post, Sarah Skwire argued, quite rightly, that one of the great features of the market is that it makes a lot of stuff she doesn’t like. It also, of course, makes a lot of stuff that she does, including the very specific kinds of weird things that individuals like Sarah might wish to consume. For Sarah, the fact that markets produce things like olives and death metal, neither of which she wishes to consume, is great because it means that other people can get their wants satisfied even if she wants no part of them. All that markets require is a commitment to tolerance. If we want the weird stuff that we like, we have to accept the fact that the very same processes that will produce that stuff will also produce things we can’t stand.
I can assure you from first-hand knowledge that Sarah finds olives highly objectionable. This works to my benefit sometimes, because when they are served at a meal or I buy some at the store, I know they’re all for me, and I really like them. In the market, Sarah is not forced to either buy or consume what she sees as revolting little fruits.
However, this isn’t true of the political process. What Sarah didn’t address is how her examples might play out under a different set of institutions than those of the market. The nature of collective choice in markets, especially the voting process, which most closely mimics choice in the marketplace, is such that we choose among “package deals” and that everyone must accept the choice of the majority. Electoral politics, by its very nature, cannot abide the tolerance of minority tastes the way that markets do.
In the most simple case, the candidate getting the most votes (or the amount otherwise dictated by the rules) wins, and he or she is everyone’s president/governor/mayor etc. Those who preferred a different candidate don’t get an opportunity to “consume” their political preference, as there can only be one winner. We are all stuck with that person. When we look at policies, the same sort of story applies. Particular candidates or parties will offer a platform full of a variety of policy proposals. Individual voters might like some of those proposals but also dislike some of them. Some voters might dislike nearly all of a candidate’s positions. Whichever candidate wins, or whichever party wins a majority, everyone will be subject to their attempts to put their preferred policies in place, regardless of whether we liked those policies or not.
Imagine going to the grocery store and rather than picking out the individual items you wish to buy, each store offered a pre-selected bundle of groceries that were available for purchase. Kroger might offer a different bundle than Whole Foods or Aldi, but each store offers only one bundle and you have to buy everything that’s in it. If we push this analogy to its limit, imagine further that you are required to eat everything that’s in the bundle. Similarly, we could imagine restaurants working in this sort of way.
You can easily see the problems. First, the stores would cater to the median shopper and diner, in a pretty good replica of the median voter theorem. Minority tastes would be largely shut out. Second, very few people would be anywhere close to fully happy with their bundle of groceries or their meal. And if you’re required to eat what you buy, some folks are going to be very unhappy about their meals. I would not look forward to watching Sarah try to choke down some olives. (Though she would be looking forward to it even less!) The overall level of preference satisfaction in politics will be far less than in the market because there’s no way to either satisfy minority tastes or offer specialized versions of common goods that better match people’s preferences. This is the problem with the institutions of collective choice: in politics, everyone has to eat the olives.
The collective choice processes of politics, by definition, don’t allow for the possibility of the tolerance of others’ preferences that is the foundation of the marketplace. This is why so many political battles, especially recently, seem so high-stakes. It’s a winner-take-all game, so those who perceive themselves in the minority have every reason to fight hard, if not cheat.
The more goods and services that are provided through political allocation, the more we will deal with this sort of problem. One need only think about extending the grocery analogy to health care, for example. If we think it’s important that no one is forced to eat the olives, and if we think it’s important that people are able to acquire the particular goods and services they want, we need to rely on markets to the largest extent possible. And doing so requires that we extend a degree of tolerance to the preferences of minorities that politics does not require. As more of our lives are centered around those winner-take-all political choices, the tolerance necessary for markets might become increasingly hard to come by.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Watson
Apr 2 2021 at 12:48pm
I like the grocery cart analogy to politics, but I would add one more aspect: after you have chosen your store and cart, you are likely to find that the contents of the cart you have actually received are not the same as what was advertised and displayed when you made your choice.
Walter Boggs
Apr 4 2021 at 6:05pm
That’s inevitable, since the election only begins the process of crafting and enacting policy. It’s as if the items in your cart had not even been designed at the time you were required to select them, but were only an artist’s rendering of what the items could possibly look like in case they were ever to be made.
Phil H
Apr 2 2021 at 11:23pm
I don’t think this analogy does the job you want it to at all!
“Imagine going to the grocery store and rather than picking out the individual items you wish to buy, each store offered a pre-selected bundle of groceries…”
They do! I mean, it’s not just one bundle. It’s lots of bundles (thousands in large stores). But I don’t get to pick whatever I want. I get to pick whatever the store chooses to offer. And a private company generally has zero transparency. I don’t know who decided what to put on the shelves of my local grocery store, how they sourced it, or why they made those choices.
Now, we all know that grocery markets tend to be a lot more responsive to consumer demand than governments. If I go and tell my local store owner that I like fresh pasta, she may get some in, and I may be able to buy it next time. But there’s still a process to go through.
Markets are good, not because they offer some kind of guarantee that you get what you want, but because they offer a fairly fast and flexible mechanism for responding to changing demands. They are quicker than the political process.
Jon Murphy
Apr 2 2021 at 11:54pm
Man, grocery stores in China most be horrendous. Here in the US, I can buy precisely what I want. Nothing more, nothing less. If I want just an single apple, I can buy a single apple. No bundling required.
KevinDC
Apr 4 2021 at 8:59pm
This seems like you’re missing the point of the thought experiment. Your objection, if I’m understanding you correctly, is that the quantity of goods available at a grocery store, while vast, are still finite, and therefore you can’t actually pick whatever you want in some absolute sense, you can only pick whatever you want among the vast (but finite) number of things on offer at that store or stores accessible to you. If you want some kind of new offering, you might have to alert the store that there is a product you’d like to buy that they don’t currently offer, and hope they respond to your request.
This is true, as far as it goes. Grocery stores only allow you to buy the items they have available for sale – you’re definitely right about that! But that’s not really the point. Neither Steve nor Sarah were trying to claim that grocery stores provide an infinite variety of goods. When Steve speaks of being in a grocery store and “picking out the individual items you wish to buy,” I think it’s pretty obvious that he means you can pick out whatever individual items (or combination of items) you want from whatever is available. I don’t think it’s reasonable to read that statement as claiming you will have the ability to acquire literally anything you might want from any grocery store, as if from a Star Trek style replicator.
The point was very different. Among the vast number of things available to you, anything you actually buy and consume you will do so because you wanted to buy it and valued it. Anything you don’t want or value (or don’t value enough, in light of the opportunity cost), you can freely forgo without interference. But if grocery shopping worked like the political process, only one combination of groceries would ever be available at any given time. When Steve is suggesting you imagine a store offering a “pre-selected bundle of groceries,” he’s not asking you to imagine a grocery store with a less than infinite warehouse. It’s more like imagining going grocery shopping and, despite the vast number of options you could otherwise get, every single store would only sell you the ten or twenty most popular grocery items, matching what is determined “popular” according to politics. If those items include food you find repulsive and gag at the very thought of (bell peppers for me!) – too bad, you must buy them anyway. And if it lacks something generally unpopular but you personally find delicious, well, tough luck for you. It wasn’t politically popular enough, so you can’t have it, even if in a free market there would be people who would be willing to sell it to you.
I’m glad these decisions aren’t made at all like the political process. One of the things I find most delicious in this world is black licorice. Yes, I love it – fight me! If black licorice being available depended on “democracy” or anything like it, I’d never be able to get it. As Steve correctly notes, democracy, by its very nature, cannot respect minority opinion.
Phil H
Apr 4 2021 at 10:40pm
Thanks, Kevin. All that makes sense, but it’s telling that by the time you get to the end of the argument, you’re falling back on an absolute statment like, “democracy, by its very nature, cannot respect minority opinion.” This might be true if democracy meant majority rule, but in the democracies that exist in the world, minorities’ rights are respected. That’s the rule of law/constitutional protections/parliamentary systems aspect of democracy.
To take a closer look at how the metaphor works: There are two bad outcomes we can imagine in the grocery store metaphor (1) you are not able to buy the thing that you want (2) you are forced to buy something you don’t want.
I was arguing that outcome (1) is still relatively common – what you want to buy is not always available. I suggest that both the political process and the laws of supply and demand require a process of adjustment before the store/government supply you with what you want. That’s why I don’t think this metaphor does the job that SH wants (drawing a vivid and sharp distinction between government provision and market provision) as cleanly as he wants it to – though I recognize that the market reacts much faster than the government.
The metaphor is more successful when you discuss bad outcome (2): a government forces you to buy a package of all the laws/policies; whereas at the store you pick and choose only what you want. The “public goods” argument for government action would cash out into this metaphor as something like – sure, you only buy what you want at the grocery store, but you’re definitely going to have to buy food. That’s non-negtiable as a result of being human. The public goods that government grocery stores deliver are a bit like whales that everyone has to buy. It’d be great if the government grocery store could offer you a choice of whales, but in practice, that would make the store unfeasibly large. So in the interests of making shopping efficient, the store owner (the government) chooses one brand of whale, and that’s what everyone buys. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternative.
KevinDC
Apr 5 2021 at 10:46am
This highlights a very important distinction that I think is leading you to misunderstand what I was trying to get across. There is a distinction between democracy the political process, which is a verb, and democracies as a designator of particular governments, which is a noun. I think your response here is equivocating between the noun and the verb. Democracy, the verb, does in fact mean majority rule, but that’s not at all incompatible with the claim that “in the democracies (noun) that exist in the world, minorities’ rights are respected.” Partly this is due to the fact that the noun version is pretty imprecise, and seems mostly to mean “governments where free elections play a major role in the political process.” No existing country is a pure democracy. The US, for example, is a constitutional representative republic, but in the common parlance, it would be one of those “democracies that exist in the world” you describe.
With that distinction in mind, I see no conflict between the statement that democracy (the verb) doesn’t respect minority opinion, with the claim that a democracy (the noun) can also respect minority opinions and rights. You correctly highlight things like constitutional protections which ensure the rights of minorities in democracies (noun), but they do this by forbidding the application of democracy (verb). The First Amendment guarantees that people can commit to any religion they wish – or to none. Nobody gets to vote on it. So unpopular religious views are protected in this democracy (noun) but is by being protected from being subjected to democracy (verb). So I wasn’t claiming that countries which get classed as “democracies” inevitably trample minority rights. My claim (inexactly stated) was that the democratic process itself doesn’t permit minority opinion to function, where such a process is applied. Constitutional rights etc function by preventing the democratic process from being applied – democratic countries (noun) respect minority rights and opinions to the extent that democracy (verb) is not applicable. As the Supreme Court noted in the Barnette case:
This sentiment is not merely undemocratic, it’s actively anti-democratic. It’s also a good thing.
You also say:
It still seems to me you’re responding to a much stronger claim than is being made. The claim “when you go to the grocery store you can get whatever you want” could be interpreted to mean “absolutely anything you desire will always be available to you at any grocery store,” but it seems like the much more sensible interpretation is “you’re free to buy any of the things you want that the store has available to sell.” It’s certainly the more charitable interpretation.
Grocery stores have a limited variety in their inventory, and what they have available to sell will be determined by market processes like supply and demand, which you correctly note. Political policies in a democracy are also limited to whatever is within the scope of the Overton window, which is also tied to political processes, as you also correctly say. Still, the metaphor Steve is getting at makes a valuable point. The key difference here is that in a market, multiple outcomes are available, to multiple people, and everyone can get whatever combination of items they want from the available options, even when specific items are unpopular to the majority. With democracy (verb), only one policy outcome will be available, and everyone must have the same thing – whatever was most popular, and within the Overton window.
Also, as a not terribly important side note, I find myself completely lost with the metaphor you offer at the end. The public goods argument talks about the provisions of goods which are simultaneously non-rival (the same specific good can be used by multiple separate parties at the same time) and non-excludable (the producer is unable to prevent people who don’t pay for a good from using it). I might be too short of coffee to see how the issue of non-rival and non-excludable goods fits in with the whale store metaphor.
BC
Apr 3 2021 at 5:45am
“extending the grocery analogy to health care, for example. If we think it’s important that no one is forced to eat the olives”
I thought the question was whether government should compel people to eat broccoli…
Michael
Apr 4 2021 at 8:17am
I think the thesis of this piece is correct, but the bolded goes a little bit too far. Our basic political processes have been unchanged for at least decades (and in some cases for over 200 years). And it has always been the case that “in politics, everyone has to eat the olives.” That’s not a new phenomenon that would explain our recent high-stakes politics.
And some of the key hot button political issues in our current politics are about whether certain “olives” should be available at all to anyone rather than making everyone eat them (abortion, same sex marriage, right to bear arms, criminalization of drugs).
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Apr 4 2021 at 10:02pm
That’s right. Everyone has to bear the costs of CO2 emissions and enjoys the benefits of NASA weather satellites, the LHC, and living in a society were fewer people go without medical l insurance.
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