Farrell On Who Pushes To Open

Recently I wrote:

While the public will uniformly push for more opening, elites and experts push in a dozen different directions. If elites would all back the same story and solution, as they did before, they would probably get it. … So elites and experts don’t speak with a unified voice, while the public does. And that’s why the public will win. While the public tends to defer to elites and experts, and even now still defers a lot, this deference is gradually weakening. We are starting to open, and will continue to open, as long as opening is the main well-supported alternative to the closed status quo. … public pushes will will tend to be correlated in a particular direction, in contrast with the elite pushes which are much more diverse.

Also, my poll on “If in your region, pandemic continues to grow, or decline very slowly, for N more months, you will support a weaker lockdown,” got a median answer N = 1.2.

Henry Farrell responded:

People … are in favor of stay at home orders, … It could be that people are lying …but it would be unprecedented for so many of them to be lying. … So why then, may the equilibrium break down? It’s clearly not because of express demand from the public. Nor because of cheating … The plausible answer is that private power asymmetries are playing a crucial role in undermining the equilibrium. Some people – employees with poor bargaining power and no savings – may find themselves effectively coerced into a return to work as normal. … this is certainly a situation where the state and private actors are looking to get into cahoots, but not in the ways that public choice economists have devoted significant analytic energy to. And if you want an illustration of Marxist arguments about the “structural power of capital” to threaten politicians … Where public choice people seem to perceive a “public” that collectively wants to return to work, I see something different – a set of asymmetric power relations that public choice scholars are systematically blind to …

So here’s my bet. If the public choice analysis is right, and this is about some kind of broad and diffuse “public” pushing back against impossible regulations, then we will see a return to the economy sooner rather than later. But we can reasonably presume that this return will be roughly symmetric. … In contrast, if I’m right, we will see a very different return to “normality.” The return to the economy will be sharply asymmetric. Those who are on the wrong end of private power relations – whether they are undocumented immigrants, or just the working poor – will return early and en masse. Those who have the choice and the bargaining power will tend instead to pick safety. …[This] highlights the frequently brutal power relations that public choice scholars shove under the carpet when they talk about the “public” wanting an end to lockdown and a return to past economic relations.

So, Farrell says that it might look like people want to work, but this is only because “power asymmetries” let bad firms force them. If those firms would just be good enough to keep paying full wages, why then workers would happily stay home forever. Thus proving its not ordinary people who push to open, it is really the evil capitalists pushing. As also proven by those polls. Economic theory (what “public choice” scholars use to study politics) just can’t explain why poor people with less savings might be more eager to work; for that you need “private power relations” theory.

Wow. As you can see, I am not making this up.

Look, even if we kept printing plenty of money to hand out to workers to all stay home, eventually there wouldn’t be anything to buy, because no one was making and distributing products and services. And then no one would be happy to stay home. The fact that someone needs to work in order to make our world function isn’t some conspiracy foisted on us by the asymmetrically powerful, it is just a basic fact about our world that would also apply in Marxist heaven, or any other social system.

There are many channels by which such fundamental pressures will be communicated to the political equilibrium, but they must all lead to the same place. We are paying a real price for not working, we will only continue if we see sufficient value in it, and even then for only a limited time. Every non-crazy theory of politics must predict this. And economists, including those who study politics, do in fact predict that the poor will push first and harder, as they run out of resources first. Maybe you blame the very existence of the poor on evil capitalists, but this outcome happens regardless of why there are poor, it only requires that they exist.

Who pushes the least? Rich elites who can work from home selling abstract arguments that blame all problems, even pandemics, on (other) evil rich.

Note that we also have many non-work social needs that push us to open. And employers are similarly willing to stay home if we keep sending them checks.

Added: Farrell quickly responded:

When someone manages to misrepresent my argument twice in 280 characters it serves as an extremely helpful signaling device that I shouldn’t bother clicking on the link, let alone get involved in further debate. So efficient outcomes are sometimes seen in the marketplace of ideas

— Henry Farrell (@henryfarrell) May 18, 2020