Signaling Goodness: Social Rules and Public Choice

Summation

Summation Much of this book focuses on the concept of asymmetric "goodness": for issues such as child care, health, the environment, and redistribution to the poor a person advocates greater government expenditures in part to signal that he is "good," that is, generally trustworthy. Asymmetric goodness has a wide range of implications. 1. There are activities that "loudly" proclaim a person's political views in such a way that strangers can be aware of such views. Such activities have a bigger payoff to goodness advocates because they are signaling generalized trustworthiness at the expense of trustworthiness toward immediate associates (chap. 7). We find more antimarket than promarket demonstrations , activists, and philanthropic expenditures. 2. Who will support greater government expenditures for these issues (chap. 8)? Our answer: those who have lower costs in doing so and those who choose occupations in part to display their "goodness." The main cost of signaling goodness is offending current friends. Those who have more friends and value them more, therefore, will buy less "goodness." In addition, those who get more of their information about political positions of others from friends than from media addressed to a wider audience will be less goodness prone. The reason is an outgrowth of number I above. Those who address a wider audience have more of an incentive to signal their generalized trustworthiness. Consistently, over a fairly large set of variables and issues, those with greater community involvement prefer less goodness-related government expenditures. The goodness occupations are those that provide opportunities to espouse goodness or to put it into practice . We find that members of such occupations support more goodness expenditures than do others. 199 200 Signaling Goodness 3. Goodness government expenditures have grown over time because community involvement has declined (chap. 9). Our model has implications different from other "growth of government " theories. In particular, over a time period sufficiently long to avoid short-run party effects, judges and bureaucrats increasingly interpret legislative decisions on the side of goodness. 4. A person's advocacy of environmental expenditures is only loosely related to the consequences of those policies (chap. 10). We find that people's assignment of nonuse values to amenities cannot be explained simply by the value to users of those policies. Indeed, most environmentalists and much legislation reject the utilitarian procedure, cost-benefit analysis, for valuing these amenities. Nearly all the actions taken by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act result in far greater expenditures per life saved than the market's assessment of the value oflife. 5. People who bear neither the cost nor the benefit of a government action are generally in favor of goodness-driven government expenditures (chap. 10). They can display their goodness at no cost. In consequence, we find numerous cases of a larger governmental unit enacting environmental regulations that have dominantly localized consequences. In all such cases, the larger unit demands stricter environmental standards than the local unit. This breadth of consequences not only shows that asymmetric goodness is relevant to a significant number of issues, but permits a wide range of tests of the concept, tests that on the whole it passes. Most of the rest of the book focuses on another proposition: that people give to charity and vote to enhance their reputation for trustworthiness and to assuage their conscience (chaps. 2 through 4). We believe these two reasons have many similar implications because we expect conscience to increase with increases in reputation variables. Both charity and voter participation increase with an increase in community involvement and with a decrease in the rate oftime preferences. There is a relationship between these latter hypotheses and asymmetric goodness. The same people who give to charity and vote adopt political positions. That a reputation for trustworthiness and conscience is important in determining charity and voting increases the probability that the same will be relevant for voting positions, and vice Summation 201 versa. That the dominant alternative hypothesis-altruism-doesn't work in the charity case strongly suggests that it will not work in determining political positions as well.I Return to the charge in the book's beginning: to explain the more general behavior of which "political correctness" is a current manifestation . Political correctness is just another set of political positions used to signal "goodness." Such positions are an outgrowth of evolutionary pressure to maximize group survival consistent with individuals maximizing individual survival. But since this pressure...