Two Ways to Think About the Collective Will

We should trust people more when they have incentives to be rational

What do the people of Gaza want? I have argued that they should be allowed to migrate to Egypt and other parts of the world. Many respond that this is “ethnic cleansing.” This argument assumes, like I do, that much of the population would in fact leave if they had the choice. Yet supporters of the Palestinian cause will often base their moral case on self-determination. This apparently involves taking away choices from individual Palestinians. I’m also for “Palestinian self-determination.” To me it involves not relegating them to one small strip of land and instead letting them go somewhere that is not a war zone.

Consider another paradox. In the months following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, polls showed that around 80%-90% of Ukrainians were against any territorial concessions to end the war, and about 70% said that their nation should fight until victory. At the same time, Ukraine banned men of military age from fleeing the country under martial law. One might ask why such a step would be necessary. If there was a near societal consensus on the desirability of the war effort, you would think that people would voluntarily sign up, or at least stay home and contribute in other ways. Of course, just because the government banned military-age men from leaving, it doesn’t prove that this step was necessary for the war effort. But I think most of us understand that it probably was.

All of this means that in both Gaza and Ukraine, in the early days of each conflict at least, your typical male would likely tell a pollster they want their country to fight to the end, but would also seriously consider packing up and leaving to somewhere safer if the option were available.

There are similar phenomena closer to home. Most Americans say that it is important that their food and groceries be produced domestically. Yet if this is the case, you might ask why tariffs would be necessary in the first place. Nothing is stopping businesses from making things in America, charging a higher price, and benefiting from the economic nationalism of consumers. Yet while you’ll often see a “Made in America” label on goods, this is cheap talk and people in the end care a lot more about prices. When Trump put a tariff of 145% on Chinese goods, a businessman decided to conduct an experiment. Visitors to his website were able to buy a specialized shower head. For some, he offered a Chinese-made product that was $129, while for others he offered one made in America that cost $239. He sold 584 Chinese-made shower heads and no American-made ones. Surveys sometimes show a willingness to pay more money for goods manufactured domestically, but these results don’t bear out in the real world.

One more: The Nazi Party could not even get its own members to boycott Jewish-owned stores. Despite massive propaganda, as long as Jews were able to provide the goods and services people wanted for better prices, they could still economically prosper in a Germany that made antisemitism state ideology. Even Hitler and Göring bought drapery from a well-regarded Jewish firm. When boycotts and voluntary efforts to direct business toward Aryans failed, the government famously resorted to more extreme methods.

The lesson here is that when you talk about what people want, you need to differentiate between what we can think of as two forms of the collective will: political attitudes and the choices reflected in everyday behavior. There are Palestinians who are among the lucky few who have fled their homes and made it to a Western country, but would show outrage if you suggested that all those they left behind should be allowed the same right.

The most important difference between the two kinds of views and attitudes is that, when it comes to everyday behavior, people have an incentive to think carefully about their actions, because they actually suffer the consequences of the choices they make. In politics, one vote or one guy’s opinion is unlikely to make a difference, so people indulge in whatever positions happen to sound good. This simple concept explains why most have such dumb political views. No control over what happens means no incentive to get things right, which means there is little reason to expect rationality.

Gazans at the Rafah crossing. I support their self-determination to leave.

Wokeness sounds good, so people say that all races and both sexes are equally capable of doing any possible job. Yet corporate executives constantly beat themselves up over not hiring enough women and minorities, or at least they did before the second Trump administration. This is because when they act as businessmen, they are plugged into reality, but when they are talking about politics, they blow with the wind. And this hypocrisy is a good thing! You wouldn’t want them all acting on their stated beliefs. It’s not an accident that affirmative action goes furthest in places where quality is subjective or market incentives are muted, namely journalism and academia.

A major division in politics revolves around which form of public opinion you think we should give more weight to. On the About page of the online magazine Compact, we find the following.

Compact, an online magazine founded in 2022, seeks a new political center devoted to the common good. Believing that political forces, not economic ones, should determine our common life, we draw on the social-democratic tradition to argue for an order marked by authentic freedom, social stability, and shared prosperity.

I would translate the phrase “that political forces, not economic ones, should determine our common life” as in effect saying “society should be governed by humans at their most irrational, not when they are most rational.”

Practically everyone agrees that there are some situations where the social good should trump selfish, individual interests. Classic collective action problems provide the clearest instances of this. For example, the best world for me is one where I am allowed to pollute the environment but no one else is. So we have laws creating penalties for pollution, which restrict individual liberty but make most people better off. Yet laws like this are not controversial, even if we might debate questions like whether current environmental regulations go too far. We can differentiate between two kinds of state interventions that overrule individual choice.

1. Those that are used to overcome collective action problems

2. Those that are used to force a moral or aesthetic vision onto society

Most of the examples I bring up above are not collective action problems. If we all decide to just buy American, or government forces that choice on us, any serious economist in the world will say that we won’t become better off. We’ll become poorer, and there’s nothing to indicate that the joy of American-made toasters will provide any substantial degree of psychological compensation, since you can buy domestic goods for higher prices now and nobody does so. Maybe you can say that this itself is a collective action problem; I won’t feel better by voluntarily buying more expensive patriotic toasters, since that will make me poorer than my neighbors, but if everyone is forced to, we’ll all get poorer and happier together through paying more to support American jobs. But this seems quite far-fetched.

If all Palestinians gave up on fighting Israel and focused all their energies on creating political conditions that would allow them to leave, they would be better off. Ukraine is a more difficult issue, in that being conquered by Russia sucks, and, unlike the Palestinians, they could probably start building a decent country in the event they win the war. I think a “free Palestine” would be a basket case anyway, and if I found myself among a people with a political culture that screwed up, I would support surrender to most foreign enemies or mass emigration. So only Ukraine arguably resembles more of a classic collective action problem, where we could plausibly think that the country is better off via conscription, even if many individuals would rather free ride off the sacrifices of others. Gaza has a kind of conscription imposed by Hamas and the international community, in that the people there are forced to remain as human shields. But no one has ever explained to me in a satisfactory way what is supposed to be the greater good that they need to remain on their land for.

Populists, socialists, nationalists, and nativists don’t want to accept that they are usually fighting for 2. They pretend that their policies are actually about overcoming collective action problems, or the selfish actions of a few. Greedy capitalists ship jobs overseas, and employers hire immigrant labor, and practically everyone who opposes immigration argues that stopping this from happening would make Americans better off. Nazis did not simply say they wanted a country where only Aryans were in charge because they hated Jews; instead they represented them as spiritual and moral contaminants and argued they made Germans worse off. When you point out flaws in the empirical arguments of nationalists, they resort to “there’s more to life than GDP” or “we’re a nation, not an economy.” Well ok then. Stop lying about economics if you think it’s not that important. Tell us exactly what we’re getting in exchange for a lower standard of living and more expensive goods.

All of this indicates that socialist and nativist intellectuals are close to admitting that if they’re wrong on the facts, then their positions cannot be justified. Or at the very least, they would have a tough time selling them to others. Most people are pragmatic, and want policies that will make the lives of themselves and their co-nationals better. So while a significant minority of the population just dislikes foreigners or corporations and reverse engineers narratives that blame at least one disfavored group for societal problems, to build winning coalitions, they need to win over those who are open to supporting whatever they think works. It is true that a majority of the public might share similar inclinations and biases, but what makes normies different from ideologues is that the squishy middle can be moved relatively easily via moral or utilitarian argumentation.

Thus, while economic nationalism sells well, most Americans are opposed to Trump’s tariffs. Sure, the average voter loves the idea of Buy American. But as we’ve seen, not enough to actually pay more for domestically-made goods. Regular Americans can afford to be irrational when it comes to their political opinions, but even here, the fact that media and political elites are so skeptical of Trump’s tariffs and are constantly spelling out their costs is enough to make them unpopular. The average voter is of course not so rational that he draws the lesson that protectionism is bad in principle. He just keeps hearing that what Trump is doing is making life more expensive, and somehow goes on assuming that a more thoughtful form of economic nationalism can actually work. A more typical president would just do some protectionist things that sound good but aren’t consequential enough to hurt him politically. Trump, though, because he is crazy and surrounded by sycophants, engages in more clearly self-destructive policies.

I would take one more step, and say that the aesthetic appeals of nativism, socialism, and populism collapse even for many of the most dedicated proponents of these ideas once the assumptions that undergird them are shown to be false. I have always liked the aesthetics of fascism. But as I become more certain that the empirical assumptions of the far-right are wrong, my aesthetic judgments shift accordingly. Tribalism is fun, egalitarianism has no natural appeal to me, and I love watching Game of Thrones and reading about aristocratic societies because life seems a lot more meaningful with hierarchies. I share the rightist disgust instinct for things like fat people and tattoos. But, even if you have such natural inclinations, if you’re also smart and intellectually honest, you have to realize at some point that liberalism is the worldview most correct in its empirical claims, and every other ideology sacrifices human health and prosperity for the sake of maintaining emotionally comforting delusions. And just because your delusions are based in anti-egalitarian principles rather than a notion of equality doesn’t change that fact.

My natural instincts are fascist, but every modern anti-liberal thinker I find painfully embarrassing at an intellectual level, and so the instincts have changed. I can now appreciate trans women. Maybe this is why I hate rightists so much. They’re what I would be if I were dumber, which I find horrifying. I sometimes am tempted to come up with my own non-liberal philosophy, but I don’t think I would have any followers. So liberalism easily defeats all the alternatives.

This is a reason to keep making empirical arguments. Yes, people will often be disinclined to believe them, for reasons of ego maintenance, personal ambition, and, as mentioned already, the fact that there is usually little to no incentive to form rational political opinions.

But sometimes, if your arguments are good enough, you present them well and often enough, and the people expressing those opinions have enough prestige, you can go against the grain of human nature. Liberals have historically been opportunists, being effective in situations when a policy that would usually be popular clearly fails – think Trump’s tariffs – or in places the political discourse is not paying attention, so that well-placed individuals can push through reasonable policies – think of some of the FDA reforms that are currently happening. To expect broad political movements that are in any sense coherent and rational at this point is perhaps asking too much. Such political forces have existed in the past, with mid-twentieth-century neoliberalism being a good example. The conditions for such movements are less favorable today. But hopefully this is only a temporary state of affairs, rather than a permanent shift resulting from changes in communications technology. I am beginning to hope that AI will lead us in a better direction.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

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