Bargaining with the devil: commentary on the Ostroms' "quest for meaning in public choice"

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2004 by S.M. Amadae

What draws my focus in these comments is the relationship between humankind's long-term experiment with government, and public choice theorists' contributions to the understanding of institutions and collective action problems central to government. One attractive facet of the Ostroms' research is their steadfast commitment to be relevant to contemporary political practices. They have an unabashed commitment to relevancy, which is not, by any stretch of the imagination, found in every university department. The Ostroms believe that "[c]ivic knowledge is necessary to sustain the continuity of civil relationships in the conduct of civic affairs by both drawing on past achievements and realizing new potentials"; they hold that the question of understanding social cooperation "is ... [important] for the design of institutions to facilitate individuals' achieving higher levels of productive outcomes in social dilemmas" (1998: 9); they also write that "the image of citizens we provide in our textbooks affects the long-term viability of democratic regimes" (1998: 3). The Ostroms, and other public choice researchers, centrally address questions with direct pertinence to contemporary practices of government.

Given this ambitious task, it is evident that social scientists working on issues of social coordination have a privileged place in the evolution and development of human society. Social scientists can take on a special role in human history: they produce knowledge, which may subsequently be reflexively integrated back into the political process. In the words of the Ostroms, "the exercise of self-governing capabilities ... depend[s] on the exercise of an artisanship grounded in an art and science of association," and it is this "science of association" that occupies the attention of public choice theorists. What social scientists learn about human experiments with social coordination can then be translated back into the process of governing, designing institutions, and even perhaps teaching children how to become responsible citizens.

This is an admirable goal, and we should be conscious of the humility necessary for successfully achieving it. The Ostroms' approach to research, I believe, fully characterizes the humility required to recognize one's potential fallibility. To develop my argument, I will focus on Hobbes's thesis of the necessity of an absolute sovereign--to achieve social order--and the related concept of the tragedy of the commons. Hobbes's idea that "Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all" (1992: 404) has proven an intuitively fruitful point of departure for volumes of public choice research devoted to understanding problems of collective action. In short, without an absolute sovereign to enforce social covenants, public choice scholars believed that "the tragedy of the commons" was inevitable. Rational choice models relying on non-cooperative game theory, complete rationality, complete information, and either single or repeated rounds of play, all predicted that collective action situations would result in sub-optimal payoffs to the participating actors: hence the "tragedy."

However, as Lyn Ostrom recounts in one of her American Political Science Review articles (Ostrom, Walker, and Gardner 1992), despite this theoretical convergence on the result of sub-optimal outcomes from the vantage point of both individuals and the group, in "real action contexts" people often achieve solutions that exceed these sub-optimal predictions. While social theorists hypothesize collective action scenarios leading to "tragic" sub-optimal results, the human population at large has demonstrated the capacity to resolve the apparent dilemma. This discrepancy between theoretical prediction and empirical data led Lyn Ostrom, with James Walker and Roy Gardner, to develop a theoretical model that had the power to explain and predict the actual empirical findings. Their research showed that, using communication, groups of individuals were able to achieve close to optimal outcomes through the use of endogenous sanctioning techniques. Ostrom, Walker, and Gardner concluded that populations are capable of governing themselves: "subjects who use the opportunity to communicate to agree to a joint investment strategy and choose their own sanctioning mechanism achieve close-to-optimal results" (pp. 413-14). Lyn Ostrom's, and her colleagues', path-breaking research challenged Hobbes's wisdom and concluded that "covenants, even without a sword, have some force, white swords without a covenant may be worse than the state of nature."

It is impressive that careful experimental design coupled with rigorous analytic models can pose a definitive response to conventional theoretical wisdom that has been with us since the 17th century. However, it is perhaps more impressive that in their great and ongoing experiments with social coordination, humans themselves often resolved the "tragedy of the commons" problem long before it attracted the attention of social theorists. The role of social scientists was not that of teaching people how to solve this paralyzing dilemma. Instead, social scientists articulated a form of knowledge that human social actors had realized at a subliminal level but were notable to articulate in language or theory. I think this raises an important question of who is learning from whom: Does the social scientist draw new insights into age-old human dilemmas, or is the social scientist at times one step behind the wisdom of common human experience? This example calls for humility on the part of social theorists who, it may turn out, are "conceptualizing subjects' decision tasks" in new ways, but are not necessarily providing new strategies for solving basic human dilemmas. After all, teaching the lessons of non-cooperative game theory popular over the last decade, may not have the sanguine results hoped for in civic education classes if it leads to the tragedy of the commons.