93. Left and Right

Note: This post is the ninety-third in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs defines two distinct syndromes, one covering commercial ethics and one covering guardian, primarily government, ethics.

The last few centuries of politics in western countries has been dominated by a battle between two rival ideologies, the left and the right. It's always seemed a bit mysterious to me that certain groups of policies would end up neatly packaged along an ideological spectrum like that. Given the similar structure of the syndromes and the left-right political spectrum, I naturally wondered if there was any connection between the two syndromes identified by Jane Jacobs and the left-right political divide.

Thinking about it a little, I don't think that an analogy to right vs. left really works, but maybe there is some connection to the distinction between conservatism and liberalism.

The defining element of Conservatism is respect for tradition (a guardian trait) while Wikipedia defines a concern for equal rights which lines up with the commercial ease of collaboration with strangers and aliens, and contrasts with the conservative respect for hierarchy. Similarly, classical liberalism emphasized the role of free markets and that government needed the consent of the governed (respect contracts, come to voluntary agreements). Wikipedia says that, Edmund Burke, a famous conservative, "insisted on standards of honor derived from the medieval aristocratic tradition, and saw the aristocracy as the nation's natural leaders."

When I think of our modern political parties of the left and right, however, even though the names Conservative and Liberal remain, there seems to be some drifting from the traditional Conservative and Liberal roles. The current 'Conservative' party is actually descended from the 'Reform' party, a movement which wanted to fight and overturn the existing hierarchy, and which wants to dispense with tradition in many ways, from the role of the Governor General to the Senate.

Similarly, old-style conservatism involved the concept of noblesse-oblige, in which there was an obligation of the wealthy to help the lower classes, but in modern politics it is the left-wing which supports the lower classes, while right-wing policies generally favour the wealthy. Meanwhile, the Liberal party favours far more government intervention in the economy than would have been considered under classical liberalism.

Looking back at the twentieth century, it seems that the World Wars and great depression led to a new political model, known generally as 'the welfare state' in which government directed a significant percentage of spending in the economy. Since then politics has divided between those who want to continue or expand that trend and those who want to go back to the 19th century of a much more limited government role in the economy.

On the one hand, Jane Jacobs identified mixing of the morals from the two syndromes as the primary form of moral corruption. But on the other hand Jacobs identified a number of examples where government and the commercial sphere could use their respective strengths to accomplish things that otherwise couldn't be done.

At any rate, words like Liberalism and Conservatism have so many meanings these days that maybe this post is just a waste of time, but it seems as though with the emergence of capitalism and the growing importance of the commercial syndrome, there was a period where the new commercial ethics and old guardian ethics battled it out in the political forum but in more recent years the lines have been re-drawn partly along class lines instead with the battle between the classes replacing the earlier battle between Liberalism and Conservatism.

Of course, there is no reason why a party couldn't support implementing Jane Jacobs ideal vision of both syndromes in force, complementing each other as necessary, and kept separate where appropriate. But I guess figuring out just what that last part means exactly isn't so easy.

92. Information Sharing

Note: This post is the ninety-second in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

A number of posts ago, I discussed an essay by Joseph Heath in which he posited that there are 5 distinct types of cooperation: Economies of scale, trade, risk-sharing, information transmission, and self-binding.

This week I wanted to go into a bit more detail on the differences between information transmission and what we normally think of as trade, using the essay, "The Next Economy" by Brad Delong and Michael Froomkin as a starting point.

Delong and Froomkin set out 3 primary differences between information and more typical physical goods:

1) Information is non-excludable - Once a piece of information exists it is hard to control who has access to it (recall the friends episode where Chandler and Joey try to figure out the path that the information that Ross slept with someone else will take to get to Rachel). The primary implication of non-excludability is that goods might be under-produced (as compared to the socially optimal level of production) because people won't be forced to pay a price for the information that is commensurate with the value that information has to them (i.e. somebody might be willing to pay a high price for the latest Sufjan Stevens album, but instead just download a free copy off the internet).

Society has generally responded to this lack of excludability by trying to restore it via copyright and patent laws that go after free riders.

As Delong and Froomkin note, this is a balance between the costs of enforcement and the reduction in information sharing on the one hand, vs. the added incentives to generate valuable information on the other.


2) Information is non-rival - You can't really transfer possession of information from one person to another, you can only share it. Unlike, say, a chair which only one person can sit on at a time, an effectively infinite number of people can have access to the same piece of information.

As the authors say, "the existence of large numbers of important and valuable goods that are non-rival casts the value of competition itself into doubt."

In a goods market, when sellers compete on price they allow more people to benefit from the product being sold by reducing the price to their marginal cost. But with non-rival goods like information, the marginal cost is zero and if competition was to drive the price down to 0, the producers would go out of business. In this environment, competition might end up taking less beneficial forms than lower prices (e.g. methods to lock customers into your product and prevent them from having access to other providers).


3) Transparency: When you're buying a chair, you can usually get a pretty good idea of the quality and comfort of the chair before you buy it. But with information, this is much more difficult. If you don't have the information, how can you judge its value. If you do have the information, why would you pay someone else for it. Information is the side product that allows you to value other products before you buy them, but it is hard to make it work on itself.

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We can see that the unique nature of information undermines some of the traditional commercial virtues that make up the commercial syndrome.

The benefit of competition is reduced with information. Both from economies of scale (people are better off browsing a single large library than they are searching through a million little ones.) and from the hazards of price competition in an environment where marginal costs are zero.

The (financial) incentive to innovation and industriousness is lowered by the lack of rewards that may come for your efforts.

The benefit of being honest is less when it is difficult for people to tell ahead of time if you are lying or providing a poor quality product.

Respect for contracts is undermined by a legal system that places artificial restrictions on sharing of information that reduce overall social welfare and technology that makes evading those restrictions easy for anyone to do with little consequence.

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On the other hand, some commercial syndrome elements seem even stronger when it comes to information - shunning force makes even more sense when there is so little to be gained through the use of it (see the widespread disdain for industry groups that sue their customers).

Collaboration with strangers has flourished in an era of information transmission.

The quick transmission of information has led to a high regard (some might say too high) for inventiveness and novelty.

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With respect to the guardian syndrome, information does have some of the characteristics of public goods, meaning that there are social benefits to government ensuring there is adequate production of them. And indeed government funds most basic research and takes a major role in transmitting information (via education) to each generation of citizens.

But information sharing is no place for the use of force, or respect for tradition, and individuals and companies that spend their time in the world of information generation and transmission often seem just the opposite of stuffy government rules and procedures - so clearly information sharing is not a typical guardian activity.

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To be honest, I'm not sure quite what to make of information as an area of cooperation that seems to be distinct from both the traditional commercial syndrome ethics and from traditional guardian ethics. Maybe the unique nature of information demands its own set of ethics but the relatively new importance of information in the economy means that this has yet to be fully developed.

91. Another View on the Evolution of Cooperation

Note: This post is the ninety-first in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

I happened upon an interesting article the other day by Daron Acemolgu.

Acemolgu points out that researchers often use coordination models to study the level of cooperation in society because these models allow for multiple equilibria - i.e. one with cooperation, one without¹

"Why do similar societies end up with different social norms, and why and how social norms sometimes change? A common approach to answering these questions is to use coordination games, which have multiple equilibria corresponding to different self-fulfilling patterns of behaviour and rationalise the divergent social norms as corresponding to these equilibria. For example, it can be an equilibrium for all agents to be generally trusting of each other over time, while it is also an equilibrium for no agent to trust anybody else in society. We can then associate the trust and no-trust equilibria with different social norms."

As he goes on to point out, this isn't a very dynamic analysis, in the sense that it doesn't answer the questions of why or how we get from one equilibrium to another.

"Simply ascribing different norms to different equilibria has several shortcomings, however. First, it provides little insight about why particular social norms and outcomes emerge in some societies and not in others. Second, it is similarly silent about why and how some societies are able to break away from a less favourable (e.g., no trust) equilibrium. Third, it also does not provide a conceptual framework for studying how leadership by some individuals can help change social norms."

I didn't spring for the $5 required to download the full paper, but from the article it seems like one mechanism posited by Acemolgu for society to move from one equilibrium to another is if a 'prominent' person influences other people with their own behaviour.

"A particularly important form of history in our analysis is the past actions of "prominent" agents who have greater visibility (for example because of their social station or status). Their actions matter for two distinct but related reasons. First, the actions of prominent agents, impact the payoffs of the other agents who directly interact with them. Second, and more importantly, because prominent agents are commonly observed, they help coordinate expectations in society. For example, following a dishonest or corrupt behaviour by a prominent agent, even future generations who are not directly affected by this behaviour become more likely to act similarly for two reasons; first, because they will be interacting with others who were directly affected by the prominent agent's behaviour and who were thus more likely to have followed suit; and second, because they will realise that others in the future will interpret their own imperfect information in light of this type of behaviour. The actions of prominent agents may thus have a contagious effect on the rest of society."

What strikes me, coming back to the discussion about coordination, is all the words we have that, in the right context, mean the same thing: coordination, cooperation, correlation, collaboration, etc. Naturally, the trick with a coordination problem is to somehow coordinate everyone's behaviour. A hierarchical structure can create a monopoly in which one entity/person controls all, thus greatly simplifying the problem of getting everyone to sing from the same songbook. When putting leviathan in charge isn't feasible or isn't desired, then it becomes trickier to get a bunch of independent actors to coordinate on a particular outcome.

The 'prominent' person is like a soft version of the leviathan - not forcing everyone to go along, merely setting a good or bad example and hoping the ripples of that behaviour are enough to 'tip' society from one equilibrium to another. I didn't read the paper so I shouldn't really comment, but the notion that something like JFK asking people what they can do for their country is going to lead to a widespread change in behaviour seems hard to swallow for me. To me it seems more likely that levels of cooperation will be driven by a combination of history (as Acemolgu acknowledges) and changes in fundamental factors like technology (e.g. the medium is the message) and the natural environment (along the lines that I discussed in my last post).


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¹Note: The Stag Hunt, that we discussed back here is an example of a game theory model with more than one equilibrium.

90. Peak Oil and the Commercial Syndrome

Note: This post is the ninetieth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

I guess it took a little longer to get back to the blog than I was expecting, due to post-vacation fatigue and busy-ness. It will be a short post this week as well, as I work my way back into the blogging flow.

While I was away, I was thinking about the relationship between energy supplies and the commercial syndrome. There is certainly causality in one direction as the innovation inherent in the 'Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism' unlocked the energy in first coal, and then oil (not to mention natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, etc.), as western civilization leaped ahead of the rest of the world in technological progress and material standards of living (i.e. comfort and convenience).

But what about the other direction? What if innovation fails in the face of our current energy requirements and the amount of energy available per person starts to decline for the first time in a number of decades/centuries?

The commercial syndrome is based around win-win transactions, but to keep the engine of trade and innovation going, new inputs are always needed. It seems logical to me that the commercial syndrome will flourish most when energy inputs are rising and economic growth is strong. In these circumstances, people are less concerned about distribution and more concerned with just improving their own lot.

But if I consider my limited knowledge of the history of civilization, the current strength of the commercial syndrome seems like a bit of an anomaly, with the guardian syndrome dominant in most times past (although part of that may just be that the guardians wrote more stuff down about themselves and built bigger monuments and so on).

I'd always figured that, even if we struggle to find enough oil or replacements for oil to avoid a downturn in our energy consumption, there's so much inefficiency in our economy that we should be able to manage reasonably well just by not wasting so much energy. But I worry that in an energy downturn, there will be less of a sense that all boats can ride a rising tide, and there may be a tendency to revert to guardian-style battles over distribution of the no longer rising tide of pies.

Looking at the rise in inequality and drop-off in wage increases that occurred in most Western countries around the time of the first oil crises in the 70's, it's possible that we've already been in this situation to some extent for decades now.

Anyway, this is just a train of thought and I certainly wouldn't come to any conclusions based on it, but I do worry that if we can't continually increase our energy consumption, we'll run into serious political problems that will aggravate what would otherwise be manageable energy issues. Certainly our non-response to the threat of climate change doesn't offer much reason for optimism in terms of how well we will deal with any sort of limitations on our insatiable quest for comfort and convenience.

89. Moneyball

Note: This post is the eighty-ninth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Just a short, light-hearted post this week, as vacation calls (next post will be on May 17).

I've been reading the book 'Moneyball' by Michael Lewis. When I started reading it, I didn't do it with the intention of relating it to this series of posts, but I couldn't help myself (yes, it's possible that I should seek help of some sort).

Moneyball tells the story of how the Oakland A's were able to succeed at Major League Baseball, despite having less money to spend on players than their competition, by innovating in their approach to winning games.

Baseball, like most sports, is in essence a guardian activity, fulfilling the guardian precept to 'make rich use of the leisure', by the same token as the 'shun trading' precept led to the establishment of the Olympics only for amateurs, not for professional athletes. Of course the Olympics is a long way from only allowing amateurs to compete, and professional baseball is even further away from shunning trading in any form.

But still, there is certainly respect for tradition in baseball, and deceit for the sake of the task (hiding signals, stealing bases, etc.), loyal fans, fortitude, fatalism, hierarchy and so on.

But out of the pro sports, baseball least resembles a traditional battle for territory where strength and perseverance in the face of the opposition is required. To a large extent, baseball consists of specific tasks that don't involve direct contact with the opposition players and which are amenable to detailed statistical analysis.

In Moneyball, we see how the management of the Oakland A's takes advantage of the statistical nature of baseball to introduce rational commercial syndrome analysis in order to be efficient at the business of translating dollars into wins.

An early chapter, "How to Find a Ballplayer" outlines the clash between the traditional way of scouting and the new, disruptive, innovative approaches taken by the A's.

"Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to baseball."

"Billy had taken to saying, "We take fifty guys [in the draft] and we celebrate if two of them make it. In what other business is two for fifty a success? If you did that in the stock market you'd go broke."

"It was only baseball tradition that allowed scouting directors and scouts to go off and find the ballplayers on their own without worrying too much about the GM looking over their shoulders. And if there was one thing [scouting director] Grady knew about Billy, it was that he could give a fuck about baseball tradition."

It's not just tradition vs. innovation, there was also the related battle between guardian virtues of loyalty and presenting a united front vs.the commercial precept of dissent for the sake of the task

"The old scouts aren't built to argue; they are built to agree. They are part of a tightly woven class of former baseball players."

One of the key points the A's focussed on was to look at the actual factual record of each player's accomplishments rather than focussing on how much they 'looked' like an athlete, like someone you'd wanting fighting with you in a war, as opposed to someone who can stand in the batter's box and tell balls from strikes.

"Over and over the old scouts will say, "The guy has a great body," or "This guy may be the best body in the draft," And every time they do, Billy will say, "We're not selling jeans here"

A final element of the commercial syndrome was 'Collaborate Easily With Strangers and Aliens.' The first person to send the A's down the road of change was Sandy Alderson. In describing t

he difficulty in changing the way things were done, Alderson explained that, "I had credibility problems. I didn't have a baseball background."

So I found it interesting to see the same inroads made by innovation into the traditional way of doing things that Weber described in 'The Spirit of Capitalism' echoed so closely in a book about baseball.

But for all that, the most compelling part of Moneyball as entertainment is a chapter entitled, "The Human Element" which follows A's general manager Billy Beane as the A's, looking to set a record for consecutive wins, first take the lead in a game 11-0, then end up tied at 11 and finally win 12-11. Even in a story about the rational, commercially minded approach of investing in players who are productive, and being innovative and throwing tradition away and being efficient and thrifty, it's still the dramatic elements, the moments when rationality fails that draws us in and moves us. Moneyball works, but it's just business.

88. All's Fair in Love and War

Note: This post is the eighty-eighth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

"She cried, "Hold me back!
Hold me back, take away my gun
Hold me back, hold me back
Somebody won't you please hold me back
Don't let me do what must be done"

- Michelle Shocked - Hold Me Back

First question: What would cause a person to enter into a transaction that makes them worse off?

The most obvious possibility is that they didn't have a choice. Is someone pulls a gun on you on the street and takes your wallet, you have entered into a transaction that made you worse off, but you did it involuntarily. So transactions involving threats of violence are one possibility.

Another possibility is that a person gets tricked into making a bad transaction. For example, they bought something that turned out to be fake, or were promised something that never arrived. So fraud is another possibility.

And of course, people often do things that they themselves regret later. Even things that they know they will regret later as they are deciding to do them.

Now here's the follow-up question - in what cases are win-lose transactions beneficial to society?

Some might respond that taking something by force or fraud is never beneficial to society, but when faced with a situation where police are trying to capture a dangerous criminal or their military is fighting in a war, I think most people come around to the notion that there are situations where force and fraud are for the best and are morally justified.

The two examples above provide different cases for where we see the win-lose transaction as an overall benefit.

In the case of the police, we acknowledge that we are doing harm to the criminal, but we do so for the greater good. If a person has shown that they are willing to commit win-lose transactions that benefit themselves but hurt society (i.e. stealing) then we reason that the harm done by locking them up is outweighed by the harm prevented by keeping them from making more win-lose transactions.

Note that in order for this logic to work, the person doing the enforcing has to be strong enough to impose their sanctions on the criminal without effective retaliation. If criminals are able to retaliate effectively then our attempts to control crime will just lead to more and more violence. Only when someone can establish a monopoly on violence so that retaliation is futile can this cycle be broken. This was basically the main point made by Hobbes in Leviathan.

In a war, the reasoning is a bit different. Typically we rationalize the win-lose transaction in this case by simply not counting the impacts on our enemies in our calculations (or by calculating them with the reverse sign so that any harm caused to them counts as a good thing.)

True, any war effort usually has rationalizations that will justify it as being for the greater good (i.e. preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction), but the reality of war is that the calculus is generally in terms of our country not in terms of the total welfare of the two countries.

So in terms of modelling the win-lose transaction as a net benefit, I see two possibilities. One, based on an us vs. them distinction where we either don't count the harm caused to the other party or treat it as a good thing, and one where we count it, but we use an analysis of the total result over time to show that this particular harm is justified because it is outweighed in the long run by the benefits to society from causing the harm to the particular individual.

Of course, it is also possible that humans are programmed (genetically disposed) to take the former approach (treating harm to the enemy as a good thing) because it works out best for us overall.

A final case that I touched on earlier, is the case of a paternalistic decision where even though one person to the transaction wants to go through with it, another party prevents them from doing so because it is not believed to be in their best interest. For example, someone might want to ride their bike without a helmet but there is a law against that. Not because the person riding without a helmet is causing harm to others, but because we believe they may cause harm to themselves. As we saw previously, hyperbolic discounting (where people do things now that they will regret later) is a major cause of these sorts of situations. Of course trying to establish that society knows what's best for a person better than they do can be a tricky proposition. I'm not going into more detail on paternalistic transactions at this point (maybe in a later post), I just wanted to highlight them as another form of decision that might be regarded as 'win-lose' by some.

87. Us and Them

Note: This post is the eighty-seventh in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

This week, I want to to look more closely at one of the most controversial precepts in the Guardian syndrome, 'be exclusive.'

How to model exclusivity in terms of game theory dynamics seems relatively straight-forward and we have encountered models that apply exclusivity already in discussing the strategy 'tit-for-tat' in 'The Evolution of Cooperation' or in the work of Brian Skyrms in 'The Stag Hunt'

In these models, exclusivity generally takes the form of 'cooperators' (people who choose the cooperative option in a prisoner's dilemma or stag hunt situation) who exclusively cooperate with other cooperators and will defect when they come up against a defector. Naturally this raises questions about how to identify who will cooperate and who will not. It's a thorny enough issue that the famous Lensman sci-fi series by 'Doc' Smith was even named after the device (the 'Lens') that the good guys employed to tell who could be trusted in their fight against the bad guys.

The benefit from appropriate exclusivity is obvious - putting your trust in people you can trust is beneficial while putting your trust in people you can't trust is not.

But despite the obvious benefits, exclusivity is a controversial precept, primarily because, unlike in the hypothetical world of David Gauthier, people don't wear sweatshirts that identify their trustworthiness, so people fall back on measures that are hard to fake such as religion or skin colour.

To see how controversial this is, I'm going to take the example of the closing essay from 'Moral Sentiments and Material Interests' (previously discussed in this series here), "Social Capital, Moral Sentiments and Community Governance by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis.

The gist of this essay is that neither an all powerful government nor a completely unfettered marketplace will lead to optimal economic outcomes and that community governance based on appropriate moral values can often fill in where government and markets fail.

They state that,

"in contrast with states and markets, communities more effectively foster and utilize the incentives that people have traditionally deployed to regulate their common activity: trust, solidarity, reciprocity, reputation, personal pride, respect, vengeance, and retribution, among others."

Of course, that's a nice list of guardian syndrome precepts, which Jane Jacobs observed were generally respected within the ranks of government and contrasted with an opposite commercial moral syndrome, so the positioning of community by the authors as some mid-point on a line that runs from socialism to laissez-faire seems a bit off. They do admit, later on, that the state and community groups need to work together since the state has enforcement powers that community governance groups typically lack.

Gintis and Bowles go on to talk about how it's not just states and markets that can fail, communities can fail too.

"A second 'community failure' is less obvious. Where group membership is the result of individual choices rather than group decisions, the composition of groups is likely to be more culturally and demographically homogenous than any of the members would like, therefore depriving people of valued forms of diversity. To envision this scenario, imagine that the populations of a large number of residential communities are made up of just two types of people easily identified by appearance or speech, and that everyone strongly prefers to be in an integrated group but not to be in a minority. If individuals sort themselves among the communities, there will be a strong tendency for all of the communities to end up perfectly segregated for reasons that Thomas Schelling pointed out in his analysis of neighbourhood tipping. Integrated communities would make everyone better off but they will prove unsustainable if individuals are free to move."

To me, it's not clear how integrated communities will make people better off if nobody wants to be in a minority, but my point is that the authors see exclusiveness as similar in nature to 'white flight¹' and believe that diversity brings self-evident benefits that people are expected to want and get value from.

The authors go on to describe four key elements of a good governance package for communities, the fourth of which is described as follows:

"active advocacy of the conventional liberal ethics of equal treatment and enforcement of conventional anti-discrimination policies. That is is not unrealistic to hope that communities can govern effectively without repugnant behaviours favoring 'us' against 'them' is suggested by the many examples of well-working communities that do not exhibit the ugly parochial and divisive potential of this form of governance."

...

"Other ways of empowering communities can be imagined, but some should be resisted on grounds that they heighten the difficult tradeoffs between good governance and parochialism² mentioned in this chapter. For example, Alesina and Le Ferrara found that among United States localities, participation in church, local service and political groups, as well as other community organizations is substantially higher where income is more equally distributed, even when a host of other possible influences are controlled. Their findings suggest that policies to increase income equality would enhance community governance. But they also found that racially and ethnically diverse localities ... had significantly lower levels of participation. One may hope that pro-community public policy would not seek to increase racial and ethnic homogeneity of groups for this reason."

It's not clear to me how this empirical result squares with the theoretical argument earlier that people are better off in a diverse community, but more importantly note how it is automatically assumed by the authors that the value of diversity outweighs any gains to be made from participation in church, local service and political groups.

Later on the essay has a nice series of quotes from Edmund Burke, Alexis de Toqueville and Mark and Engels all lamenting how commercial morality was replacing guardian morality.

Burke:

"The ago of chivalry is gone. That of Sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded."

de Toqueville:

"as for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them but he sees them not .. he touches them but feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone."

Mark and Engels:

"The bourgeoisie ... has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations ... and has left remaining no nexus between man and man than naked self-interest ... In place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single unconscionable freedom - free trade."

The authors argue that instead of looking to past systems of values, community governance will thrive if it can solve practical problems today (they don't mention the possibility that this may be one and the same thing) or reference their earlier list of moral values that the community uses to help it achieve solutions to modern problems), but it seems ironic that, having said that, they fail to acknowledge that the biggest stumbling block towards community governance, by their own acknowledgement, is their moral value which puts the value of diversity ahead of the gains from a homogenous community.

Anyway, as with the entire book, the essay is well worth reading, although, I did find the closing paragraph oddly hesitant:

"If we are right that communities work well relative to markets and states where the tasks are qualitative and hard to capture in explicit contracts , and where the conflicts of interest among members of society are limited, it seems likely that extremely unequal societies will be competitively disadvantaged in the future because their structures of privilege and material reward limit the capacity of community governance to facilitate the qualitative interactions that underpin the modern economy."

In the future? Latin America exists now, and has been around for quite a while in its highly unequal and 'competitively disadvantaged' state. I don't think we need to wait for the future to test this theory.


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¹As an aside, a quick glance at the NY Times interactive census map shows that white flight is an ongoing phenomenon in most of the U.S.

²Notice the religious origin of the word 'parochialism' which evokes a
combination of exclusivity and respect for tradition.