Knowledge And Decisions

Political decision making tends toward the categorical in another sense as well. Specific governmental organizations do not simply administer to some generalized well-being of the public, as various social or economic units are free to do. That is, nongovernmental units are usually free to determine their own respective degrees of specialization, and to change these over time as they see fit. Wells Fargo used to run the “pony express,” but now they have abandoned this and conduct more or less conventional banking activities instead. A baby food manufacturer may diversify its activities to include life insurance, and a bowling equipment manufacturer can produce motor vehicles as well. A typical mother changes her whole routine and role several times as a child proceeds from infancy to adulthood. By contrast, a governmental agency has a specific set of assigned activities to pursue, rather than a general goal to maximize, such as profit making or family well-being. Governmental agencies are generally authorized to carry on processes rather than to achieve results. If the postal officials were to become convinced that communications could be vastly improved by a large-scale shift from the use of letters to the use of telephones, telegraph, and various forms of person-to-person radios, it would still have no authority to use the money at its disposal to subsidize these latter activities instead of carrying the mail. If there were a government baby food producing agency, it could not decide on its own that a point had been reached at which some of its money should be incrementally redirected toward life insurance, as Gerbers has done; a government photographic agency could not decide to produce raincoats, as Eastman Kodak has done.

Given categorical mandates and the law of diminishing returns, it is virtually inevitable that governmental agencies would eventually end up doing things which seem irrational as isolated decisions. The aggrandizement familiar in all kinds of human activities — from the dressing of babies to the spread of multinational corporations — applies as well to governmental agencies. But where other expansions are constrained not only by budget limits but also by incremental returns from other lines of activity, governmental agencies with mandated activities have every incentive to push those particular activities as far as politically possible — even into regions of negative returns to society. This is especially apparent in preventive activities, designed to contain various evils. As those evils are successively reduced, either by the agency’s own activity or by other technological or social developments, the agency must then apply more activity per residual unit of evil, just in order to maintain its current employment and appropriations level. If the agency is supposed to fight discrimination against minorities, it must successively expand its concept of what constitutes “discrimination” and what constitutes a “minority.” Urgent tasks such a securing basic civil rights for blacks ultimately give way to activities designed to get equal numbers of cheerleaders for girls’ high school athletic teams.²⁸ A nongovernmental organization, such as the March of Dimes, could — as it did, after conquering polio — turn its attention to other serious diseases, but if it had a government mandate strictly limited to polio, it would have little choice but to continue into such activities as writing the history of polio, collecting old polio posters, etc., while children were still dying from birth defects or other maladies. The point here is not that the leaders of the March of Dimes were either more intelligent or morally superior to the leaders of government agencies. The point is that a non-governmental organization subject to feedback from donors or customers has incentives and constraints that lead to institutional decisions more attuned to rational social trade-offs.