Knowledge And Decisions

None of this should be surprising. A successful insurgency not only presents different incentives and constraints to its successors, that success itself can winnow out its original supporters in a non-random way. Opportunists within the insurgency are among those most likely to remain after the spoils of success become available, while those most activated by the original ideals that have now been largely achieved may be among those more likely to drift away, either to private life or to other crusades on other issues that remain unresolved in the society. Outside opportunists and careerists are also likely to be attracted in growing numbers over the years. Degeneracy and betrayal are hardly surprising under such circumstances.

The point here is not to single out insurgent movements for criticisms that might be equally (or more) applicable to supporters of the status quo. Indeed, much of the current status quo is the result of prior insurgencies. The more general and more important point is to distinguish between (1) examining issues and institutions in terms of their process characteristics versus (2) examining them in terms of their proclaimed goals or ideals.

Among the ways in which various decision-making processes differ is in the extent to which they are institutionally capable of making incremental trade-offs, rather than attempting categorical “solutions.” Consumers continually make incremental trade-offs when deciding what to buy in supermarkets or in automobile dealerships, but appellate courts may have only a stark choice to make between declaring a statute constitutional or unconstitutional. This is one of the central points explored in the first half of Knowledge and Decisions and remains as relevant today as when the book was written. The importance of incremental trade-offs — whether in economic, social, or personal decisions — is emphasized here, in part because it is so often lost in the shuffle of more emotionally appealing categorical priorities that are its antithesis. The distinction between incremental trade-offs and categorical “solutions” has been highlighted by recent trends in laws, policies, and judicial decisions creating such categorical goals as protecting endangered species, eliminating the last “vestiges” of segregation, creating innumerable “rights,” and promoting “safety” of many sorts — all this not explicitly at all costs, but often in practice treating costs as somehow unworthy considerations to be almost always over-ridden.

Diminishing returns alone can make categorical decision-making counterproductive in its impact, when the point is reached where trivial amounts of one thing are being gained at the cost of devastating losses of another. But, even aside from diminishing returns, categorical decision-making means that the very benefit being sought in one form may be sacrificed in another form. One particular kind of safety, for example, may be achieved by creating vastly greater dangers of another kind, as when pesticides are banned to eliminate their residual dangers in the environment, at the cost of a thousand-fold increase in the incidence of deadly, insect-borne diseases, such as malaria.

The second half of Knowledge and Decisions looks at how different kinds of decision-making processes have been evolving and how particular decisions once made in one kind of place are increasingly being made in other kinds of places — in the schools, rather than in the home, in the courts rather than in the marketplace, and so on. More important, the implications of such changes in the locations of decisions are examined, not only in terms of the accuracy and scope of the knowledge conveyed to different decision makers, but also in terms of what it all means for human freedom.

The analysis in the first half of this book stands as I wrote it more than fifteen years ago. More examples could be added now, but are not needed. However, the trends discussed in the second half have, of course, continued to evolve and so will have to be updated here. The central theme of the second half of Knowledge and Decisions is contained in two sentences in Chapter 7:

Even within democratic nations, the locus of decision making has drifted away from the individual, the family, and voluntary associations of various sorts, and toward government. And within government, it has moved away from elected officials subject to voter feedback, and toward more insulated governmental institutions, such as bureaucracies and the appointed judiciary.