Over at LP, Paul Norton outlines some more research indicating that people do best when they have more control over their own lives, with a particular emphasis on heath outcomes. Who knew? No, I’m not being nasty, but this has been one of the most solid findings in social science, and for quite some time.
Paul parlays it into an argument for his broadly social democratic vision, but the problem with social democracy is that — historically — it’s never been very responsive to citizen control. It’s always been about top-down redistribution, and often about top-down allocation, too. And we all know where that leads. Yes, I realise I’m sounding like a classical liberal broken record again, but until people on all sides of politics accept that making allocative decisions on behalf of citizens is almost certain to fail, we are going to be in the same position as the Communist Party that Bertolt Brecht satirized in the headline to this post: oh dear, the people have barfed at us, we need to dissolve them and elect new ones.
You could just as easily parlay this kind of research into support for subsidiarity, the idea that decisions ought to be made by those whom they most directly affect. In Switzerland, for example, this means a commune of two hundred people has to do all its local government stuff itself (the classic ‘roads, rates and rubbish’ trifecta). This doesn’t necessarily twin with social democracy (which still looks very statist to me, at least as people describe it on LP). Maybe there’s a non-statist version of social democracy out there, but I’ve yet to encounter it. When social democracies go non-statist, they pinch things out of the classical liberal toolkit: Sweden has voucherized schools and fully privatized social security. Both work well.
Unless we’re willing to copy the Swedes, someone is still having to make decisions about wealth distribution, someone is going to have to make decisions about allocation. Lots of people don’t like markets much, and that’s fine and dandy, but the alternatives — and it’s fair to say this — have always and everywhere been worse.
Now there’s a mountain of research showing that people who have very considerable democratic control over their local community — via subsidiarity, citizen initiated referenda and democratic mechanisms to recall politicians or force legislation to the polls — are happier and live longer, healthier lives. They also do things like ban gay marriage, or abolish multiculturalism, or legalise drugs. Only one of these things, I suspect, would garner broad support from people calling themselves ‘progressive’.
I’m all for subsidiarity, and I like how it works in Switzerland and California, but it does mean living with what the people want in a very direct way. And what the people want is not likely to be always and everywhere particularly progressive (although it will be rather canny; Hayek was right when he pointed out that average citizens know more as a collectivity than their ‘betters’ on all sides of politics give them credit for).
UPDATE: Not appreciating where research leads (or even how to do it properly) is currently doing very strange things to the Oz body politic; over at Catallaxy, Sinclair Davidson has more. Just on that point, Sinkers has been posting at the Cat for a while now, and he’s both prolific and excellent — well worth a regular read.
19 Comments
How and to whom does one submit a guest post for this blog?
(Sorry about the off-topic question, but I can’t find anywhere else to ask it.)
Citizen control was not responsible for the outlawing of gladiatorial combat, the hunting to extinction of other animal species, the burning of witches, cannibalism, slavery, or a heap of other counterproductive, irrational, retrograde practices. Historically, it is clear over and over that “the masses” would have accepted, indulged in or endured all these pleasurable/onerous vices, but for a minority of not-to-be-denied voices – religious, philosophical, ethical – who successfully convinced enough in the body politic to change the rules or impose new ones: all of which were practical demonstrations of necessarily centralised and universalist responses to the challenge of leadership.
- Outlawing of gladiatorial combat.
When it WAS practiced, I rather get the impression it was sanctioned by the state, not outlawed.
- Hunting to extinction of other animal species
Lots of examples to pick from here, but in some cases it’s the state that is the one attempting to eradicate the species. (Smallpox, the plague, the Ebola virus, AIDS – all species that the government is trying to get rid of)
- The burning of witches
The populace had a superstition about witches for a long time, but it wasn’t until this superstition was actively encouraged by various Papal bulls that it turned into the witch craze, and the series of burnings/executions that occured in the middle ages.
- Cannibalism
???? I can’t think of any real modern occurences of this, apart from the actions of a few eccentric/psychotically demented individuals.
- Slavery
Yeah, I guess the role of the state/leaders in this situation was positive.
Still, I think the majority of the examples you offer there don’t support the argument you want them to support.
SL
” there’s a mountain of research showing that people who have very considerable democratic control over there local community …. are happier and live longer, healthier lives”
I would be interested if you could point us to this ‘mountain’
Interesting picture forming here, Posey. Is it not real cannibalism unless it’s dinner-party cannibalism? The solo gore-mand doesn’t count?
New variant CJD aka “mad cows disease” was the result of manufacturing stock feed that had been fortified with protein from the rendered remains of other cows (and sheep with scrapie). There was an epidemic of Kuru in the New Guinea during the 1950s, which suggests the traditional cannibal ways weren’t absolutely gone until relatively recently. Cannibalism was resorted to for survival at the Seige of Stalingrad in WWII and there are reports that Japanese soldiers ate their Alied prisoners of war in parts of the south pacific in the same period. Survivors of the Andes plane crash resorted to cannibalism in 1972.
And, uhhh … there’s the small issue of transubstantiation. No, I’m NOT catholic-bashing – I draw no conclusions, just observe that Roman Catholics still believe in the LITERAL transubstantiation of wine into blood and bread into flesh during Communion. Others may also but the cattle-ticks are the only ones I know about (it’s amazing what six months writing for a paranormal magazine will teach you).
If Paul (and John Quiggin who has a very comprehensive article just out on why we should be a more left leaning social democracy) really want to see what left leaning social democracies create, then I suggest they take a trip to France. Having the fun of working there once a year, I’ve never seen such a lazy group of people that think the government should do everything to support their laziness — my feeling is that the massive government intervention in everything actually has the opposite effect on people taking control of their own lives. I could compare that to the other place I often work (HK), and it’s quite the opposite, despite few democractic processes.
More empirically, it would be good to look through all the different countries and get some measure of this, and see whether France and Sweden are really bad examples of social democracies failing and working. My bet is there is in fact little relationship between this and the control people feel they have over their lives, at least for rich countries.
I was reading an interesting analysis where a Russian who lived through Stalinism said it was better when WWII was on (even though you were starving and at risk of your life all the time) – because you had some measure of autonomy.
Thanks for the plug.
In a way SL’s line of reasoning suggests that the appropriate metric agsinst which “indigenous” health outcomes should be measured is not non-indigenous community but other “indigenous” communities. So for example Wadeye vs. Cape York vs. Mutijulu vs. Darwin.
You really should get out more. There is a wealth of research out there and some practical examples too that describes how things can and have been made to work differently. For theory David Held is a good starting point: Held, D., Global Covenant the Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus. 2004, Cambridge: Polity press.
as well as
Held, D., Models of democracy. 1996., Stanford: Stanford University Press,.
Then there are some good practical examples in Schweickart, D., After Capitalism. 2002, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
If you want to have a look at a practical example then google mondragon – this is a co-operative that has been going since 1948 and provides a very good model.
Closer to home have a look at the Transition Town movement.
The comment with respect to Sweden highlights what seems to be a major problem for people wanting to make sense of social democracy – there seems to be an assumption that every community every society will have the same solutions. The reality is that there will be as many solutions as there are unique communities – what matters more is the principles on whichn those solutions are based and if they are based on the principles identified by Rawls in the seventies (Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice, ) then it is likely that they will be successful even though the strategies may not work elsewhere.
“The solo gore-mand doesn’t count?” You are wicked, DeusExMacintosh.
Must admit I forgot about transubstantiation and didn’t really have it in mind. I was thinking more of the tucker of our earliest ancestors.
Have to say, now you mentioned it, I never believed the host was God’s body, even at my First Communion. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one either, judging by the appalled looks on others’ faces as we partook of this seminal event. Besides, it tasted nothing like flesh. Guess I was always too much of a literalist.
Sorry for going OT, but I remember my First Holy Communion really well, not least because we’d all had drilled into us that we must not at all costs touch the host. From the beginning and throughout childhood I always had great difficulty swallowing it and eventually did have to resort to fingering it off the roof of my palate or prodding it down out of the back of my mouth so I wouldn’t choke though I felt really guilty about this and wondered for a long time why I was never struck dead.
And on First Holy Communion Day, the scrumptious boy who sat next to me at school, I kid you not actually dramatically and with lurid sound effects and much spittle spat it out on the floor of the chapel after receiving it. I am sure it wasn’t pre-planned. Just one of those things. But we never saw him again after that. He was disappeared from the school.
Apologies for not being about all day, but I trained up to Edinburgh yesterday, which (due to various ticketing kerfuffles) meant getting up at 3.30 am and seeing the, ahem, interesting wildlife around the Oxford railway station at that time of the morning…
And I’m not good with 3.30 am starts.
The thread’s moved on rather, but some of the best studies of subsidiarity and happiness are Frey and Stutzer (2000) ‘Happiness, Economy and Institutions’ (focusses on Switzerland) and Di Tella and MacCullouch (2006) ‘Some uses of Happiness data in Economics’ (more general study), Helliwell (2001) ‘How’s Life? Combining Individual and National Variables to Explain Subjective well-being’ (California and Switzerland).
I will add my usual caveat when it comes to this kind of research, however — and that is ‘happiness economics’ moves away from the traditional focus on revealed preferences and looks at self-reported preferences. The two often conflict — think, for example, of the smoker who states his desire to quit (reported preference), but nonetheless continues to smoke cigarettes (revealed preference). For this reason — among others — the data should be handled cautiously.
Likewise, I take Posey’s point about what people do when they are given very great control over their own governance. As Hayek says, very little of what they do will be actively stupid, but ‘canny’ covers the field rather; there’s no guarantee that decisions taken will be particularly kindly.
Was his name Damien?
Dare I confess that I’ve always wanted to take communion to see what it tastes like? My husband informs me that it usually tastes pretty horrid (nonetheless, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t that boy).
As I’m not baptised, however, I’ve always felt a bit shy about taking communion – plus I’d probably do something silly which would mark me as a heathen. When in church, I constantly stand when you’re supposed to sit, and vice versa.
There’s a dead simple distinction here that the guy at LP and some (not all) researchers are (disingenuously or artfully?) failing to grasp: control or autonomy over one’s own life, not other people’s lives. Big, big difference.
There’s a not at all subtle political agenda in stretching this extensively researched concept to the governance of society.
Besides, in democracies it can easily be argued that we do have control to the extent that we get to vote, yet even then, many people choose not to vote, so having a “say” in politics evidently isn’t as important to people as having a say about their own lives. The macro is not nearly as important as the micro when it comes to health and happiness. The conclusions being drawn are easily dismissed by a superficial glance at people’s real political behaviors, or lack of them.
If someone is micro-managed in their paid work (no matter where they sit in the hierarchy), has no autonomy over the basic execution and management of their working day, but if they do get to personally vote about gay marriage or the budget deficit, well, guess what, the latter is going to deliver them jack-shit happiness, and the former will bring them much unhappiness and poor health. It really is that simple.
Caz, I’d have to agree that being second guessed all the time at work really sucks. That’s one of the things I really hated about being a junior solicitor. I had absolutely no control over my work at all – management, execution or whatever. No wonder I was miserable. I occasionally contemplate going back to practice for about 2 milliseconds, then I recant as soon as I think of that.
The other thing is that some people respond much better to control than others. I have always had difficulty following rules (great trait for a lawyer, huh?) My school reports said that I was clever but a bit of a handful. Not that I meant to be a handful, but I just couldn’t conform even when I tried. My sister, on the other hand, had school reports which said she was a joy to teach – clever and followed the rules (or at least appeared to).
My sister is also a lawyer. Naturally, she has lasted a lot longer in private practice than I did.
So, for someone like me, coming under the control of others is difficult (unless I respect the person). For others, it might not be quite the same anathema. Actually, some people seem to positively desire control by others in their lives (eg, adherents to religions which strictly circumscribe what you can and can’t do).
Of course, one of the reasons I’m not religious is that I just can’t help questioning the rules and that never makes you popular.
I think there’s a difference between rules and autonomy. A lot of people aren’t good with processes, hate them, for whatever reason. But it’s quite possible to feel a sense of control over one’s working day and still work within a structured environment. I’ve always worked in large organisations, so process is a given, it doesn’t bother me. On the other hand, whether I have options as to when I start and finish my working day, or how I manage my work load is extremely important to me.
Someone on a factory floor who feels they have control over their work output is always going to be more satisfied than an executive continually ham strung by a critical and distrustful boss looking over their shoulder.
Then there are those – who I consider to be demanding, childish, leaches – who would fall apart if some manger wasn’t hand-holding and dictatorial. There are many workers who heed the call of a job description requiring that they “work independently”, yet who are incapable of doing anything remotely resembling such a grown up state.
I still vaguely remember reading about the “surprise” of researchers when they identified that CEOs and executives just weren’t very stressed compared to the minions. The reason was personal control. It was a big revelation at the time, because the “common sense” assumption had always been that the captains of industry were all stressed out and dying of heart attacks. Turned out that those doing the least meaningful and least appreciated work, with no autonomy, were the ones with poor health and uncontrolled levels of stress.