Against Social Policy

Over the past few years, I have grown increasingly suspicious of the very idea of social policy. This may be biographically rooted in my work during the 1980s with refugees from authoritarian societies with aggressive social policies. It may also be a reaction to working in a modern university and being surrounded by calls to fall into line and march for social change. I don’t like following anything but my own dim vision of the truth. Beyond these personal inclinations, though, I don’t see intentional efforts to achieve one or another sort of society as consistent with democracy.

While different people and different political philosophies use the word “democracy” in a variety of ways, the term most commonly refers to a system of government in which people either make political decisions for themselves (direct democracy) or elect representatives to make political decisions (representative democracy). In the former, there is no question of anyone “re-making” the people, since the people think for themselves and have the freedom to be what they are. In the latter, also, the goal of re-shaping a society along democratic lines is a contradiction because a representative government represents its public as it is; the government does not try to make the public into something it is not. Since a society is made up of people and of the total of formal and informal relations among people, changing a society means changing the people and their relations with each other. It is a profoundly authoritarian effort and even, as it approaches a goal of total reform, totalitarian at its extreme. Political reform is a matter of changing laws. Economic reform involves changing policies relating to matters such as taxation, public expenditures, or interest rates. Either of these may be consistent with democracy. But social reform aims at changing people and their relations with each other. This is a reversal of the direction of action and control of a democratic society, since it involves the authorities attempting to constitute or re-constitute the public, rather than the public constituting the authorities. This is reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht’s 1953 quip that the East German people had apparently lost the confidence of their government, so the government should “dissolve the people and elect another one.” Creating a new society is precisely the attempt to dissolve the people as they are and to appoint the people as one would like them to be.

Social Planning and Happiness Economics

In the past century, we entered the age of social measurement, in which every aspect of our lives can, in theory, be measured. The quest for measures is part of a move toward the planned society, in which experts provide policy makers with the empirical information needed to attain our collective goals. But what are those collective goals? The most common answer in developmental economics is prosperity, measured by the Gross National Product (GNP), on the assumption that high levels of production and consumption are universally desired and that the right policies are those that maximize GNP.  GNP may not always be a good measure of general prosperity, some argue, because it is theoretically possible for one individual or one family to enjoy all the economic benefits, while the rest of the population lives in miserable poverty.  Therefore, social scientists often employ a measure such as the gini coeffcient, an indicator of how evenly distributed the wealth or income of a nation is.

These purely economic measures have met with criticism by those who say that life in a relatively rich country may sometimes be worse than life in a relatively poor country. These critics often maintain that we need more detailed measures of prosperity, such as the infant mortality rate or mental and physical health statistics. The reason we want all of these indicators is that they will enable the experts and the policy makers to design the society that maximizes the well-being of its population, a view consistent with the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, who, incidentally, coined the word "maximize." Bentham argued that the collective goal should be "the greatest good of the greatest number."

The idea of social planning for maximum utilitarian benefit leads, logically, to the view that what policy makers really need to do is to design the society in which everyone has the highest level of general well-being, since even prosperity or health are desirable because they contribute to well-being. Thus, the New Economics Foundation aims at creating National Accounts of Well-Being and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has published a report on well-being across nations, based on 11 indicators, including income, jobs, housing, health, work-life balance, and the environment. This general approach is known as "happiness economics."

One legitimate criticism of policies aimed at producing happiness and well-being is that, given the complexity and unpredictability of human life, they may not work as intended. Arthur Brooks, for example, has argued in his book Gross National Happiness that secularism, excessive reliance on the state to solve problems, and addiction to security may actually produce unhappiness.  But I think there may be a more fundamental criticism of better living through policy, even when we get all the measurements right and the policies actually do make people more secure, more contented, and healthier. The whole project of experts seeking to employ empirical evidence to make the right technological judgments to produce happy people may be inconsistent with human autonomy and dignity.   

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World told the story of a completely planned society, a utilitarian utopia. Chapter 17 contains a conversation between John the Savage, who has grown up on the New Mexico Savage Reservation outside the World State, and Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller of Western Europe:

"But I don't want comfort [said the Savage]. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

Affirmative Action Comes Up Again

Notre Dame Professor James Sterba, in a rejoinder to comments by George Leef, recently repeated arguments in favor of affirmative action. Professor Sterba devotes most of his attention to race-based preferences, although he also states his support for class-based affirmative action.  As I’ve argued elsewhere,  proponents of socioeconomic preferences tend to present their case as if everyone could be upwardly mobile and our policies simply need to promote mobility from families at the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder in order to create a more diverse elite.  In fact, since positions in a society are limited in number at any given time, everyone who moves into a preferred position must displace someone else. There is no way around the fact that preferring individuals who come from lower income or less educated families means discriminating against individuals who come from higher income or well educated families. Socioeconomic  affirmative action systematically disfavors the success of some for no other reason than that their parents have been successful.

Professor Sterba, like other advocates of racial preferences, bases his advocacy on the social benefits that will supposedly flow from these preferences.  Chief among these is the putative role of affirmative action in propelling blacks and other minorities into highly desired elite occupations. Once again, since there exist only a limited number of top occupational positions, favoring members of some categories occupationally automatically means disfavoring others. In other words, we should have racial preferences in educational admissions because these will promote racial preferences in socioeconomic rewards throughout life. The argument in favor of such a continuing practice of discrimination is that it is a necessary evil in order to pursue the “compelling national interest,” in the Supreme Court’s term, of a more diverse society.  This, however, raises the question of the extent to which social policy can re-shape our society, as well as the question of whether a representative democracy should attempt to redesign its citizenry.

Group level differences in achievement and attainment constitute the fundamental characteristic of American society that bureaucratic efforts at diversification intend to eliminate. Race-based affirmative action would not exist if there were no variations in achievement across racial and ethnic groups. The Supreme Court recognized this in the 2004 decision, Grutter  v Bollinger, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor portrayed race-based admissions as contrary to the principle of treating all individuals equally. Therefore, they could be justified only temporarily in order to achieve the diversity that supposedly would eliminate the variations in achievement.  As I have pointed out, though, there is no evidence that the group-level achievement gaps have diminished during the time that the United States has pursued affirmative action policies in educational admissions. In fact, these gaps have increased. While the performance gap between blacks and whites has remained relatively constant over the past quarter century, those between Asians and Hispanics, the two fastest growing groups in American society, have increased. This is largely due to the fact that average Asian achievement levels have steadily gone up. Inconveniently for supporters of race-based affirmative action, this means that preferences for under-represented minorities disadvantage Asians, vastly over-represented in elite educational institutions, more than people in any other category.  The continuing achievement gap, then, calls into question the idea that American society can be redesigned by the tinkering of policy makers. At best, it seems, we end up moving individuals from underrepresented groups into highly desired positions at the expense of individuals from other groups.

Like other supporters of affirmative action, Professor Sterba also maintains that racially preferential policies have benefits for those ineligible for preferences. Notably, he remarks that 8 out of 10 white law students at Harvard and the University of Michigan reported that discussions with students of other races affected their views of the criminal justice system. The role of minority students, then, is to teach whites the black or Hispanic truth. Professor Sterba expects minority students to act as group representatives, whose function will be to consistently remind other students of the goals and interests of the group. Like Irving Howe, in the Dissent magazine exchange with Ralph Ellison in the early sixties, Sterba lays on black Americans the obligation to perform as protestors.

Finally, Professor Sterba cites several studies that have found continuing discrimination in various sectors of American society and, following his expectation that affirmative action will enable minorities to educate whites, maintains that propelling more minority members into elite colleges and universities will create the “political will” to eradicate discrimination. He does not say what he means by this term, but I interpret “political will” to mean the exercise of governmental power.  He seems to be suggesting that affirmative action is desirable because it will lead to a massive inquisition and state intervention to eliminate all discriminatory behavior.  His advocacy of affirmative action, then, appears to be part of a larger authoritarian project for restructuring American society.