I recently posted about two broad lenses one could use to analyze political activism. One form is what I called “activism as production,” which occurs when activists are motivated by a desire to help produce some form of public good – better environmental health, an improved justice system, and so on. The other form is what I called “activism as consumption,” which occurs when activists are motivated by the satisfaction they gain from activism itself – a feeling of community, social status, pride in “being part of the solution” or being “on the right side of history,” and so on. As I mentioned in that post, these are not the only two lenses by which we can view activism, nor are they mutually exclusive. Any given individual or organization can be motivated by either, or by both in varying degrees. But over the long term, we should expect to see a trend in which of these is more prominent.
This is because activism is subject to what Anthony de Jasay has called “Institutional Gresham’s Law,” which I’ve described before. In economics, Gresham’s Law describes the tendency of bad money to drive good money out of circulation, when there is a fixed exchange rate between the two that prevents the situation from moving towards an equilibrium. If exchange rates are allowed to adjust freely on the market, the effects of Gresham’s Law are prevented. Anthony de Jasay described Institutional Gresham’s Law as the tendency for bad institutions to drive out good ones over time.
Institutions that prioritize their own growth and survival over being socially beneficial will drive out institutions that prioritize being socially beneficial over their own growth and survival. Unlike with money, there is nothing that serves as an exchange rate that can keep this process in check. As de Jasay phrases it, institutions are selected “for the characteristics favorable to their own survival.” The selection pressure for institutions, then, is not survival of the most socially beneficial. It is what de Jasay called the “survival-of-the-fittest-to-survive” – which means survival of institutions that prioritize their own growth and expansion over other factors like what is most socially beneficial. As this process goes on,
The same thing can happen over time with activism. Suppose there are two activist organizations dedicated to helping alleviate the same social problem. One is a “good” institution, as defined above, while the other is a “bad” one. Let’s say over time, the social problem both institutions are meant to address becomes substantially alleviated, and is perhaps on the verge of disappearing altogether. A “good” activist organization will acknowledge the progress, recognize there is less need for what they are doing, and reduce the scope and scale of their activism. A “bad” activist organization would deny that any progress has been made, insist that things are worse than ever, and seek to continually increase the scope and scale of their activism. Over time, the second organization would completely drown out the former – not because the second one is better, but precisely because it is worse. The bad institution would have a lot to gain by convincing people that the problem it formed to address is large and growing, even if it is actually small and shrinking.
This also holds true at the individual level. As mentioned in my initial post on this topic, being motivated by “activism as consumption” is a matter of degree, not a either/or dichotomy. But for reasons of Institutional Gresham’s Law, we should expect over time to see a greater proportion of “activism as consumption” crowd out “activism as production.” In the extreme, those who are motivated by “activism as consumption” are the kind of people who find “being involved” as a great source of meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in their lives. I’ve certainly met no shortage of people who describe themselves in this way. As a social problem improves over time, we should expect to see those who see “being involved” as a means to an end being driven out by those who see “being involved” as something to be pursued for its own sake.
But how plausible is it that some people engage in “activism as consumption”? Two researchers (themselves quite sympathetic to activism) looked at this very question. They start off by recounting Aristotle’s notion of “humans as political animals by nature. One implication of this idea is that when people engage in political activity, they are expressing a basic motive fundamental to being human. If this is true, then Aristotle’s logic would further suggest that the extent to which people engage in political activism might be positively associated with their well-being.” That is, political engagement is a deeply felt need that people can feel motivated to pursue for its own sake.
They sought to measure the extent to which activism provides personal psychological benefits, and in what circumstances. What they found shouldn’t be surprising – engaging in activism, in and of itself, provides people with significant personal psychological benefits. As they put it, “well-being was higher to the extent people self-identified as an activist, expressed commitment to the activist role, and reported engaging or intending to engage in activist behaviors. Results were similar across measures of hedonic well-being (e.g., life satisfaction and positive affect), eudaimonic well-being (e.g., personal growth, purpose in life, vitality), and social well-being (e.g., social integration). The results of both studies also suggest that activists are more likely to experience the satisfaction of basic psychological needs, an indicator of more frequent experiences of intrinsic motivation.” Thus, activism-as-consumption has a very fertile ground out of which to grow.
The strength of this effect depends on numerous other factors, such as how strongly people agreed with the statement “Being an activist is central to who I am” – the kind of person I had in mind when I described the more extreme case of those seeking “activism as consumption.” But even if only a tiny number of potential activists fall into that category, because of Institutional Gresham’s Law, we should expect there to be selection pressure over time for that group to dominate activist engagement. And if something like Institutional Gresham’s Law applies to political activism, it could provide an explanation for what Eric Hoffer observed about mass movements – that in time, each mass movement “ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.”
READER COMMENTS
Dylan
Jul 12 2024 at 10:14am
Good post, Kevin. A couple of quick thoughts before I need to start my day.
1) I will need to read the study in more detail on activists having higher well being, but it kind of goes against the intuition that those who care most deeply about a problem to devote their life to it, you would think would also be the ones to let that problem impact their overall well being? Also, in as much as activism of the type we’re considering here, maps to more left wing/progressive viewpoints, and the vogue now is to show the research that the more left wing you are the less happy?
2) I wonder what evidence we might have of Gresham’s law in non-profits? I mean, I can think of a few examples where that kind of dynamic seems relevant. But also lots where it isn’t? I think there’s maybe a mistake in thinking of a charity existing to “solve” a social problem. I can see that applying to say a charity devoted to fight a specific disease, or maybe one to combat a particular environmental problem, but many other social problems are probably not solvable? Things like poverty, disaster relief, diseases, education…the goal of those charities is to help people today, not necessarily try and solve the problem entirely?
Kevin Corcoran
Jul 12 2024 at 11:50am
Hey Dylan –
A few quick thoughts in response to your thoughtful comment.
You write:
I think what you’re saying here (and correct me if I’m wrong) is that people who are most likely to be impacted by social problems and are thus more likely to become activists regarding those problems would also be people whose well-being is harmed by that problem, which in turn makes it seem odd that those activists would have high well-being. Assuming I’ve understood you correctly, there’s a couple of thoughts I have. For one, it’s not at all clear that those who are most impacted by some social problem are necessarily the ones who are most likely to become activists regarding that problem. For example, this story notes that while black Americans are more likely to express support for environmental causes than whites, and they are “disproportionately affected by health issues related to environmental pollution” compared to whites, nonetheless black Americans and other minorities are disproportionately less likely to engage in environmental activism. So for this issue at least, it’s disproportionately minorities in American whose well-being is negatively impacted by environmental pollution, while white Americans are disproportionately likely to engage in activism and to get the well-being boost that comes from it. I don’t know of any reason to assume that environmental pollution is a unique case.
Relatedly, you say,
What I think you’re getting at here is that there seems to be some tension among the following observations – being a leftist makes you less happy, being a leftist makes you more likely to be an activist, and being an activist makes you more likely to be happy? But I don’t think there is any tension here, because we don’t live in a univariate universe. It can be true that all else equal, engaging in activism makes people happier, and all else equal being a leftist makes people less happy. Both can be true at the same time, and one effect can be larger than the other, both overall and in individual instances. Perhaps disengaged and apathetic leftists are wallowing in misery, while engaged and activists leftists are much better off, and even net positive. Indeed, if those two factors are in tension – if being a leftist makes you less happy but more likely to be an activist which in turn makes you happier – we should expect to find that the more left-wing an activist is, the more reluctant they will be to give up their activism, and in particular to resist any argument that their activism might be counterproductive or that the goal behind their activism has been accomplished, because they have so much more to lose psychologically if they accept that is the case.
But my basic claim is more modest than that. Suppose, for example, there is an activist who has dedicated their life to battle against {this thing}. And then imagine that one day, a friend of that activist approaches them and says “Guess what! I found an actual magic lamp with a real genie inside of it, and I just used one of my three wishes to fix {this thing} forever! So you don’t need to do any more community organizing, or fundraising, or marches for it ever again! It’s solved forever, your work is now done!” It would likely be the case that the activist can both be happy that {this thing} is solved, but also feel a pang of loss knowing that the cause they’ve dedicated their life to is now obsolete and unnecessary. My basic claim is that the more strongly people feel that second impulse, the more likely they are to resist the idea that {this thing} really is better. And in the real world, of course, we don’t have anything as unambiguous as genie magic, so people who strongly feel that second impulse will find it easier to resist accepting good news about {this thing}.
Dylan
Jul 12 2024 at 1:28pm
Kevin,
Thanks as always for the well articulated and clear response.
Not quite what I was trying to get at. I don’t think you have to be directly impacted to be involved, but I think you need to feel the problem more acutely than others to motivate you to dedicate your life to it. Let’s say that your cause is world hunger, I’m not saying that you have to be hungry yourself, or even have grown up with food shortages, you just have to be able to empathize with the problem more than the typical person. The type that sees starving children in Africa and says to themselves “This is tragic, I have to do something about it” and then actually follows through and does something. My intuition would be, those that are that in touch with the problem, that can feel it that intensely, are less likely to be happy than those of us who remain in (relevant) ignorant bliss.
The left wing stuff was less considered, I’m not sure I fully buy survey response data on happiness anyway, and definitely think there could be systematic differences in the way people of different political inclinations answer those questions. I take your point on group composition effects and nothing is contradictory in leftist are less happy, leftist tend to be activist more, activists are more happy. But, does happy really match with your experience of activists? I was at dinner a couple of nights ago with an activist woman, she self-described herself as relating most closely with sadness, anxiety, and depression. Maybe that’s coloring my perception, but it didn’t feel out of line with other activists I’ve known.
I agree with all of this. However, I think you’re neglecting the countervailing force that the activist needs to convince the non-activists that don’t feel as strongly about the issue and haven’t dedicated their life to it. Their existence depends on being able to do that effectively. If poverty disappeared overnight, I think it would be hard to shift the goalposts to something else like inequality and convince nearly the same number of people, they might try, but competitive pressures should get us to an equilibrium where the problems that most normal people care about the most are the ones that get supported.
Kevin Corcoran
Jul 15 2024 at 12:30pm
Hello again Dylan –
A couple of quick (or quick by-my-standards) notes before I have to return my attention to Monday.
In response to my attempt to articulate and respond to your first point, you write:
Got it, that clarifies things a fair amount. However, this new formulation strikes me as at best not clearly being the case, and quite likely to be untrue. As a counterpoint to that supposition, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a book with the rather attention-grabbing title of Against Empathy, where he argues that something more like the opposite of what you describe turns out to be true. People who are highly empathetic about some problem, or in your terms who are more inclined to “feel the problem more acutely than others” are, it turns out, less likely to be involved in seeking solutions to those problems, and when they do get involved are more likely to do so in ineffective ways that lead to them burning out quite quickly. I can’t get into all the details here, but one example he gives is the case of a hungry homeless person on the street begging for money. The kind of person who his highly empathetic and really feels that homeless person’s pain is, in practice, far less likely to approach the homeless person and give them money, and far more likely to cross the street to avoid the situation altogether. That’s because the act of “feeling the problem acutely” is emotionally and psychologically draining and often unpleasant – and the more strongly people feel that, the more likely they are to avoid the issue. That aside, Bloom also argues that empathy often leads people to reason about and respond to issues in ways that are biased, parochial, and counterproductive. So at the very least it’s not clear that what you describe makes people more likely to get involved, or to do so in a way that is truly beneficial.
You also write:
It’s funny you should ask, because the event that caused this train of thought to begin rolling in my head was, as it happens, a conversation I had with an activist woman. She told me about the work she was doing as an organizer for an upcoming march or event for a group she had been involved with for many years that was dedicated to calling attention to crimes against indigenous women in Minnesota. I was curious, and I asked her how much progress her organization had made on the issue. And she was almost immediately dumbfounded at the question. She eventually said something about how there’s really no way to tell what the outcomes are, and I immediately thought of several. One point of such demonstrations is to raise awareness – so after such events, is there an increase in awareness of the issue, or has general awareness been increasing over the years these demonstrations have been held? Have crimes or unexplained disappearances of indigenous women been decreasing since this organization has been active? Or have previously unsolved or cold cases started to be solved as a result of increased attention, compared to before? And it quickly became clear to me that not only did she not know the answers to any of these questions, it had never even occurred to her that these were questions worth asking. She spoke of all these years helping to organize these events and her participation in them with such a sense of satisfaction and pride that it seemed to me that, for her, the point of organizing and attending these events was the very fact of organizing and attending them – feeling pride that she was “doing something”, associating with likeminded people, and so on. Whether or not things were actually getting better for indigenous women was a question she never thought to ask because it wasn’t at bottom what the whole point of the thing was to her. For her, the activism was a consumption good – or so it seemed to me at least.
Of course it may be the case that the activist I talked to represents only a minority of activists, while the one you talked to represents a majority. But part of what I’ve been getting at is that it’s not merely a matter of what the pure numbers are regarding the relative percentages. We must also consider what happens when this dynamic is viewed as part of an ongoing and iterative process. Recall, for example, Thomas Schelling’s argument in Mircomotives and Macrobehavior that if you have a multiracial society where there is a small, innocuous preference to have neighbors who are the same race as you, this small and mild tendency will over time lead to a situation where neighborhoods are almost entirely segregated by race. In the same way, the activist version of Institutional Gresham’s Law means that over time, even if there is only a small number of activists who are motivated by consumption, eventually activist movements will be dominated by such people. I think that’s a real possibility and seems at least plausible as a matter of observation – the longer an activist movement continues, and especially as its initial goals become closer to being fulfilled, the lower the quality of the activist movement becomes. Or, again, so it seems to me.
(Okay, I guess that wasn’t quick at all, was it? 😛 )
Dylan
Jul 15 2024 at 12:58pm
Thanks for the quick response, Kevin 😉
The Bloom book sounds fascinating and counter-intuitive, the kinds of things I’m instinctively attracted to, so I look forward to checking it out. The idea of burnout among the most empathetic doesn’t surprise me though, that’s been my experience with the people that I’d say have been activists at some point, it lasts for a year or two, and then they get cynical and quit. Or, they just get burned out on the never ending tragedy.
All of my evidence comes from anecdotal data, which I fully admit isn’t really evidence. I think of my wife, who is the most empathetic person I know. And she makes sack lunches at home with some snacks and money and gives them to people she sees sleeping on the streets or in a subway station. Many times she will slip a few dollars into the pocket of someone who looks like they need it, without them noticing.
I’m curious though for your take on what I thought was my strongest argument, that competitive pressures should minimize the kind of thing you’re talking about. I haven’t checked, so maybe this will prove me completely wrong, but I have to guess there aren’t a lot of charities dedicated to smallpox these days?
Kevin Corcoran
Jul 15 2024 at 3:16pm
To smallpox, not that I know of (and I’d be shocked if there were!). On the other hand, consider the case of the March of Dimes organization. This organization was originally conceived to fight against polio in the United States. But as polio diminished to the point of nonexistence, the March of Dimes continued to exist, by switching its stated mission from fighting polio to fighting birth defects. John Tierney wrote an article using this as exhibit A of what he calls “March of Dimes syndrome” – the tendency of activist organizations to always find new problems to keep themselves in business. As he described it:
Of course, some social problems are so vague and amorphously described that being able to declare “mission accomplished” is almost definitionally impossible. Which is great job security for an activist! But in cases where there is a clear, unambiguously crossable finish line that has been unambiguously crossed (polio or smallpox or ending the Vietnam war), the people who were activist on behalf of that goal for the goal itself will tend to pack up and go home, while the people who were activist simply for the sake of activism will just move on to a new issue. In a way, it’s reminiscent of what Eric Hoffer wrote about in The True Believer, how mass movements become interchangeable to the true believer because mass movements, even those ostensibly opposed to each other, are ultimately drawing on people possessing of the same mindset. Hoffer wrote:
All of this is to say that even in cases where there is an unambiguous victory for some activist cause, I don’t see that changing the dynamic I’m describing. People who were part of the cause to achieve the goal (activism as production) will tend to become less activist, while people who were part of the cause simply to be part of some cause, any cause, will tend to latch on to some new cause – which has the same reinforcing tendency as before, leading to more and more of the activist population to be dominated by those who seek activism as consumption.
Dylan
Jul 16 2024 at 8:25am
This seems right, but also like moving the goalposts a bit? I thought the idea was that bad organizations would convince people the original problem was still growing and getting worse?
There doesn’t seem to me anything inherently sinister in the March of Dimes expanding the mission beyond polio to childhood birth defects as polio became less of a problem. There’s likely a lot of institutional knowledge there on how to run a successful charity and there are obviously still a lot of problems in the world, so taking the knowledge you have as an organization and trying to do something new and useful with it is what I would expect. This is also what happens in for profit businesses. There’s been a small movement over the years to have companies return capital to shareholders rather than to attempt to pivot into something new, but as you can imagine, that’s had limited success. (Although I remember one company that had developed 1st generation drugs for HIV that decided to fold when they still had money in the bank when next gen drugs came out that were so much better)
Now, whether March of Dimes is successful at their stated mission is another question entirely. Maybe they are really good at fundraising, but not so good at effectively directing that cash in ways that will meaningfully reduce childhood birth effects. Personally, I’m glad that the EA movement exists to not only ask those questions, but to try and answer them quantitatively. Lots of other people though, seem kind of shocked and offended by even asking the question, perhaps your indigenous activist was among that group.
The basic point though is, you can’t just look at the activist side of things, you need to look at what they are giving their customers/donors. The charities that don’t provide value to that group, don’t continue existing. I may wish that more donors used an EA framework for evaluating the causes they donate to, but I think anyone of a classically liberal mind would have trouble saying they aren’t providing value to those that willingly donate?
Richard W. Fulmer
Jul 12 2024 at 12:18pm
Good point, and one that is even more true if people’s livelihoods depend upon {this thing} remaining a problem. An NGO whose existence depends upon {this thing} has a demand for studies proving that {this thing} still exists and, even better, is getting worse. If the NGO has deep pockets, its demand will be met.
This seems to me to be a tragedy of the commons problem in which the “commons” is the wealth and civic virtue of the population. NGOs feed off that, competing with each other for attention, contributions, and adherents by offering up ever more apocalyptic scenarios. They bank on the fact that threats naturally go to the tops of people’s mental in-boxes.
A tragedy of the commons can be solved by voluntary agreements between the resource’s claimants or by a third party establishing and enforcing boundaries. Are any such solutions possible in this case?
Monte
Jul 12 2024 at 12:49pm
One very bitter fruit that grew out of the fertile ground of “activism as consumption” during the Ferguson unrest of 2014-2015 is looting. And thanks to fringe lunatics like Vicki Osterweil (In Defense of Looting), who nurture this sort of criminal behavior by legitimizing it as “a valid method of wealth redistribution”, we can expect to to see it continue unabated during mass protests. Looting has, in fact, become an activity highly encouraged by many members of Democratic Socialists of America.
Dylan
Jul 12 2024 at 1:29pm
I swear, the quotes were formatted correctly when I submitted!
Fazal Majid
Jul 13 2024 at 3:29am
The late Science-Fiction writer Jerry Pournelle called this the Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
Jim Glass
Jul 13 2024 at 5:28pm
Parkinson’s Law, as first stated in The Economist, 1955, with data:
British Admiralty officials +78 as capital ships -68% and naval personnel -32% …. the Colonial Office’s staff quadrupled 1935 to 1954 — shortly which it was folded into the Foreign Office due to a lack of colonies to administer.
Jim Glass
Jul 13 2024 at 5:30pm
“+ 78%”, to be correct.
Graham Cunningham
Jul 17 2024 at 7:41am
“Institutions that prioritize their own growth and survival over being socially beneficial will drive out institutions that prioritize being socially beneficial over their own growth and survival.” Educational institutions are arguably a case in point….
“to what extent does our formal schooling system survive because society needs it as opposed to because the Education Industrial Complex needs it? One trenchant criticism can be levelled at all bureaucratic institutions is that it is not in their nature to notice whether the purpose for which they were originally created is still a valid one. They are never going to do a Lone Ranger and ride off into the cultural sunset… “job done”. And education is no exception – it has become “a major service industry creating demands for its own services and validating its own activities”[3]…..” : https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well
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