Individual Rationality versus Systemic Rationality
The tendency to personalize causation leads not only to charges that “greed” causes high prices in market economies, but also to charges that “stupidity” among bureaucrats is responsible for many things that go wrong in government economic activities. In reality, many of the things that go wrong in these activities are due to perfectly rational actions, given the incentives faced by government officials who run such activities, and given the inherent constraints on the amount of knowledge available to any given decision-maker or set of decision-makers.
Where a policy or institution has been established by top political leaders, officials subject to their authority may well hesitate to contradict their beliefs, much less point out the counterproductive consequences that later follow from these policies and institutions. Messengers carrying bad news could be risking their careers or—under Stalin or Mao—their lives.
Officials carrying out particular policies may be quite rational, however negative the impact of these policies may prove to be for society at large. During the Stalin era in the Soviet Union, for example, there was at one time a severe shortage of mining equipment, but the manager of a factory producing such machines kept them in storage after they were built, rather than sending them out to the mines, where they were sorely needed. The reason was that the official orders called for these machines to be painted with red, oil-resistant paint and the manufacturer had on hand only green, oil-resistant paint and red varnish that was not oil-resistant. Nor could he readily get the prescribed paint, since there was no free market.
Disobeying official orders in any respect was a serious offense under Stalin and “I don’t want to get eight years,” the manager said.
When he explained the situation to a higher official and asked for permission to use the green, oil-resistant paint, the official’s response was: “Well, I don’t want to get eight years either.” However, the higher official cabled to his ministry for their permission to give his permission. After a long delay, the ministry eventually granted his request and the mining machinery was finally shipped to the mines.{101} None of these people was behaving stupidly. They were responding quite rationally to the incentives and constraints of the system in which they worked. Under any economic or political system, people can make their choices only among the alternatives actually available—and different economic systems present different alternatives.
Even in a democratic government, where the personal dangers would be far less, a highly intelligent person with a record of outstanding success in the private sector is often unable to repeat that success when appointed to a high position in government. Again, the point is that the incentives and constraints are different in different institutions. As Nobel Prizewinning economist George J. Stigler put it:
A large number of successful businessmen have gone on to high administrative posts in the national government, and many—I think most—have been less than distinguished successes in that new environment. They are surrounded and overpowered by informed and entrenched subordinates, they must deal with legislators who can be relentless in their demands, and almost everything in their agency that should be changed is untouchable.{102}
INCENTIVES VERSUS GOALS
Incentives matter because most people will usually do more for their own benefit than for the benefit of others. Incentives link the two concerns together. A waitress brings food to your table, not because of your hunger, but because her salary and tips depend on it. In the absence of such incentives, service in restaurants in the Soviet Union was notoriously bad. Unsold goods piling up in warehouses were not the only consequences of a lack of the incentives that come with a free market price system. Prices not only help determine which particular things are produced, they are also one of the ways of rationing the inherent scarcity of all goods and services, as well as rationing the scarce resources that go into producing those goods and services. However, prices do not create that scarcity, which will require some form of rationing under any other economic system.
Simple as all this may seem, it goes counter to many policies and programs designed to make various goods and services “affordable” or to keep them from becoming “prohibitively expensive.” But being prohibitive is precisely how prices limit how much each person uses. If everything were made affordable by government decree, there would still not be any more to go around than when things were prohibitively expensive. There would simply have to be some alternative method of rationing the inherent scarcity. Whether that method was through the government’s issuing ration coupons, the emergence of black markets, or just fighting over things when they go on sale, the rationing would still have to be done, since artificially making things affordable does not create any more total output. On the contrary, price “ceilings” tend to cause less output to be produced.
Many apparently humanitarian policies have backfired throughout history because of a failure to understand the role of prices. Attempts to keep food prices down by imposing price controls have led to hunger and even starvation, whether in seventeenth-century Italy, eighteenth-century India, France after the French Revolution, Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, or in a number of African countries after they obtained independence during the 1960s. Some of these African countries, like some of the countries in Eastern Europe, once had such an abundance of food that they were food exporters before the era of price control and government planning turned them into countries unable to feed themselves.{103}
Failure to supply goods, as a result of government restrictions, must be sharply distinguished from an inability to produce them. Food can be in short supply in a country with extraordinarily fertile soil, as in post-Communist Russia that had not yet achieved a free-market economy:
Undulating gently through pastoral hills 150 miles south of Moscow, the Plava River Valley is a farmer’s dream come true. This is the gateway to what Russians call “Chernozym”—“Black Earth country”—which boasts some of the most fertile soil in Europe, within three hours’ drive of a giant, hungry metropolis. . . Black Earth country has the natural wealth to feed an entire nation. But it can barely feed itself.{104}
It is hard even to imagine, in a free market economy, a hungry city, dependent on imports of foreign food, when there is extraordinarily fertile farmland not far away. Yet the people on that very fertile farmland were as poor as the city dwellers were hungry. The workers harvesting that land earned the equivalent of about $10 a week, with even this small amount being paid in kind—sacks of potatoes or cucumbers—because of a lack of money. As the mayor of a town in this region said:
We ought to be rich. We have wonderful soil. We have the scientific know-how. We have qualified people. But what does it add up to?{105}
If nothing else, it adds up to a reason for understanding economics as a means of achieving an efficient allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. All that was lacking in Russia was a market to connect the hungry city with the products of the fertile land and a government that would allow such a market to function freely. But, in some places, local Russian officials forbad the movement of food across local boundary lines, in order to assure low food prices within their own jurisdictions, and therefore local political support for themselves.{106} Again, it is necessary to emphasize that this was not a stupid policy, from the standpoint of officials trying to gain local popularity with consumers by maintaining low food prices. This protected their political careers, however disastrous such policies were for the country as a whole.
While systemic causation in a free market is in one sense impersonal, in the sense that its outcomes are not specifically predetermined by any given person, “the market” is ultimately a way by which many people’s individual personal desires are reconciled with those of other people. Too often a false contrast is made between the impersonal marketplace and the supposedly compassionate policies of various government programs. But both systems face the same scarcity of resource
s and both systems make choices within the constraints of that scarcity. The difference is that one system involves each individual making choices for himself or herself, while the other system involves a small number of people making choices for millions of others.
The mechanisms of the market are impersonal but the choices made by individuals are as personal as choices made anywhere else. It may be fashionable for journalists to refer to “the whim of the marketplace,” as if that were something different from the desires of people, just as it was once fashionable to advocate “production for use, rather than profit”—as if profits could be made by producing things that people cannot use or do not want to use. The real contrast is between choices made by individuals for themselves and choices made for them by others who presume to define what these individuals “really” need.
SCARCITY AND COMPETITION
Scarcity means that everyone’s desires cannot be satisfied completely, regardless of which particular economic system or government policy we choose—and regardless of whether an individual or a society is poor or prosperous, wise or foolish, noble or ignoble. Competition among people for scarce resources is inherent. It is not a question whether we like or dislike competition. Scarcity means that we do not have the option to choose whether or not to have an economy in which people compete. That is the only kind of economy that is possible—and our only choice is among the particular methods that can be used for that competition.
Economic Institutions
Most people may be unaware that they are competing when making purchases, and simply see themselves as deciding how much of various things to buy at whatever prices they find. But scarcity ensures that they are competing with others, even if they are conscious only of weighing their own purchasing decisions against the amount of money they have available.
One of the incidental benefits of competing and sharing through prices is that different people are not as likely to think of themselves as rivals, nor to develop the kinds of hostility that rivalry can breed. For example, much the same labor and construction material needed to build a Protestant church could be used to build a Catholic church. But, if a Protestant congregation is raising money to build a church for themselves, they are likely to be preoccupied with how much money they can raise and how much is needed for the kind of church they want. Construction prices may cause them to scale back some of their more elaborate plans, in order to fit within the limits of what they can afford. But they are unlikely to blame Catholics, even though the competition of Catholics for the same construction materials makes their prices higher than otherwise.
If, instead, the government were in the business of building churches and giving them to different religious groups, Protestants and Catholics would be explicit rivals for this largess and neither would have any financial incentive to cut back on their building plans to accommodate the other. Instead, each would have an incentive to make the case, as strongly as possible, for the full extent of their desires, to mobilize their followers politically to insist on getting what they want, and to resent any suggestion that they scale back their plans. The inherent scarcity of materials and labor would still limit what could be built, but that limit would now be imposed politically and would be seen by each as due to the rivalry of the other.
The Constitution of the United States of course prevents the American government from building churches for religious groups, no doubt in order to prevent just such political rivalries and the bitterness, and sometimes bloodshed, to which such rivalries have led in other countries and in other times.
The same economic principle, however, applies to groups that are not based on religion but on ethnicity, geographic regions, or age brackets. All are inherently competing for the same resources, simply because these resources are scarce. However, competing indirectly by having to keep your demands within the limits of your own pocketbook is very different from seeing your desires for government benefits thwarted directly by the rival claims of some other group. The self-rationing created by prices not only tends to mean less social and political friction but also more economic efficiency, since each individual knows his or her own preferences better than any third party can, and can therefore make incremental trade-offs that are more personally satisfying within the limits of the available resources.
Rationing through pricing also limits the amount of each individual’s claims on the output of others to what that individual’s own productivity has created for others, and thereby earned as income. What price controls, subsidies, or other substitutes for price allocation do is reduce the incentives for self-rationing. That is why people with minor ailments go to doctors when medical care is either free or heavily subsidized by the government, and why farmers receiving government-subsidized water from irrigation projects grow crops requiring huge amounts of water, which they would never grow if they had to pay the full costs of that water themselves.
Society as a whole always has to pay the full costs, regardless of what prices are or are not charged to individuals. When price controls make goods artificially cheaper, that allows greater self-indulgence by some, which means that less is left for others. Thus many apartments occupied by just one person under rent control means that others have trouble finding a place to stay, even when they are perfectly willing and able to pay the current rent. Moreover, since rationing must take place with or without prices, this means that some form of non-price rationing becomes a substitute.
Simply waiting until what you want becomes available has been a common form of non-price rationing. This can mean waiting in long lines at stores, as was common in the Soviet economy, or being put on a waiting list for surgery, as patients often are in countries where government-provided medical care is either free or heavily subsidized.
Luck and corruption are other substitutes for price rationing. Whoever happens to be in a store when a new shipment of some product in short supply arrives can get the first opportunity to buy it, while people who happen to learn about it much later can find the coveted product all gone by the time they get there. In other cases, personal or political favoritism or bribery takes the place of luck in gaining preferential access, or formal rationing systems may replace favoritism with some one-size-fits-all policy administered by government agencies. However it is done, the rationing that is done by prices in market economies cannot be gotten rid of by getting rid of prices or by the government’s lowering the level of prices.
Incremental Substitution
As important as it is to understand the role of substitutions, it is also important to keep in mind that the efficient allocation of resources requires that these substitutions be incremental, not total. For example, one may believe that health is more important than entertainment but, however reasonable that may sound as a general principle, no one really believes that having a twenty-year’s supply of Band-Aids in the closet is more important than having to give up all music in order to pay for it. A price-coordinated economy facilitates incremental substitution, but political decision-making tends toward categorical priorities—that is, declaring one thing absolutely more important than another and creating laws and policies accordingly.
When some political figure says that we need to “set national priorities” about one thing or another, what that amounts to is making A categorically more important than B. This is the opposite of incremental substitution, in which the value of each depends on how much of each we already have at the moment, and therefore on the changing amount of A that we are willing to give up in order to get more B.
This variation in the relative values of things can be so great as to convert something that is beneficial into something that is detrimental, or vice versa. For example, human beings cannot live without salt, fat and cholesterol, but most Americans get so much of all three that their lifespan is reduced. Conversely, despite the many problems caused by alcohol, from fatal automobile accidents to deaths from cirrhosis of the liver, studies show that very modest amounts of alcohol have he
alth benefits that can be life-saving.{xi} Alcohol is not categorically good or bad.
Whenever there are two things which each have some value, one cannot be categorically more valuable than another. A diamond may be worth much more than a penny, but enough pennies will be worth more than any diamond. That is why incremental trade-offs tend to produce better results than categorical priorities.
There are chronic complaints about government red tape in countries around the world, but the creation of red tape is understandable in view of the incentives facing those who create government forms, rules, and requirements for innumerable activities that require official approval. Nothing is easier than thinking of additional requirements that might be useful in some way or other, at some time or other, and nothing is harder than remembering to ask the crucial incremental question: At what cost?
People who are spending their own money are confronted with those costs at every turn, but people who are spending the taxpayers’ money—or who are simply imposing uncounted costs on businesses, homeowners, and others—have no real incentives to even find out how much the additional costs are, much less to hold off on adding requirements when the incremental costs threaten to become larger than the incremental benefits to those on whom these costs are imposed by the government. Red tape grows as a result.
Any attempt to get rid of some of this red tape is likely to be countered by government officials, who can point out what useful purpose these requirements may serve in some circumstances. But they are unlikely even to pose the question whether the incremental benefit exceeds the incremental costs. There are no incentives for them to look at things that way. Nor are the media likely to. A New York Times article, for example, argued that there were few, if any, “useless” regulations{107}—as if that was the relevant criterion. But neither individuals nor businesses are willing or able to pay for everything that is not useless, when they are spending their own money.
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