I began subscribing to The New York Review of Books in 1970! NYRB taught be how to be critical of my teachers!
Sep 02, 2025
Is the Right Choice a Good Bargain?
5.
Despite all the arguments of Sunstein and Thaler, Sunstein and Hastie, and Sunstein solo, there is still a lot of room for partisan politics. I mean that to include deliberation—which is necessary in a democracy despite the risks of impulsive thinking, mental shortcuts, cascades, and conformity—but not to stop there. For the truth is that much of our political life is not deliberative at all, not, at least, in the sense of a deliberation aiming at a “right decision.” There is also bargaining, which may produce a compromise between two positions, one of which we think right and the other wrong, and even between positions that are, both of them, “right.” And then there is everything that comes under the heading of “political action”: organizing, campaigning, agitating, demonstrating—for all these are also central to democratic decision-making.
Political action is necessary because many people are missing from the group decision-making described in Wiser. Sunstein and Hastie report that low-status members of the research groups, and also of many real groups, commonly defer to high-status members. This assumes that the low-status members are in the room, but the truth is that very often they aren’t. One of the reasons that group decision- making goes wrong is that the people most affected by the decisions aren’t participating in the deliberations.
Wiser has a brief discussion of “asking the public”—but only to comment, not to join in the actual business of deciding. And yet the conditions of both powerlessness and inequality may be more important than the problems associated with groupthink. They are certainly a central source of “partisan divides.” Organizing, agitating, demonstrating—these are ways of bringing the powerless to the attention of the powerful. They can contribute importantly to democratic decisions, even if they seem nondeliberative, even if the shouting in the street sounds like, and probably is, the product of emotive System 1 thinking.
Sunstein himself is clearly an advocate of greater equality. Years ago he published a book praising President Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address, in which FDR called for a radically redistributive “second bill of rights.”
But in the books considered here, he and his coauthors don’t recall FDR’s famous response to people who urged him actively to promote a redistributive program: “Make me.” Government agencies will make better decisions, at least on such questions as greater equality, if they feel political pressure from outside the room.
Sometimes we will want the people outside the room actually to win—to organize and agitate so successfully that they take over the small groups who dominate decision-making, with the result that they change the political conversation. We may think that their view is right, even if no one has “rigged” the choices. But in fact, all political choices are shaded by our uncertainties, our knowledge of past mistakes, and, in the best of cases, our respect for the people who disagree with us. So, yes, we need to be wiser in the ways described by Sunstein and Hastie; but we also need a radically different kind of decision-making than what they describe, involving a larger number of people inside and outside the rooms where small groups sit.
Read these books; there is much to learn from them. And then pick up Machiavelli, and then Marx.
In response to:
Is the Right Choice a Good Bargain? from the March 5, 2015 issue
To the Editors:
In “Is the Right Choice a Good Bargain?” [NYR, March 5], Michael Walzer asserts that “statistical groups do especially well in answering factual questions,” and refers to an article of Francis Galton (“Vox Populi,” Nature, March 7, 1907) to support the claim. The phrase Walzer puts in quotes—“The ox weighed 1,198 pounds; the average estimate…was 1,197 pounds, more accurate than any individual’s guess”—is nowhere to be found and completely subverts Galton’s main point.
Galton didn’t even bother to compute the average of the 787 contestants who tried to estimate the weight of the ox: he picked out the “middlemost” estimate. One week earlier (“One Vote, One Value,” Nature, February 28, 1907) he had written:
How can the right conclusion be reached…? That conclusion is clearly not the average of all the estimates, which would give a voting power to “cranks” in proportion to their crankiness…. I wish to point out that the estimate to which least objection can be raised is the middlemost estimate, the number of votes that it is too high being exactly balanced by the number of votes that it is too low.
This does not in the least deny Walzer’s assertion, but has enormous importance in determining collective decisions.
Michel Balinski
Directeur de recherche de classe
exceptionnelle (emeritus)
CNRS and École Polytechnique
Paris, France
In response to:
Is the Right Choice a Good Bargain? from the March 5, 2015 issue
To the Editors:
Michael Walzer [“Is the Right Choice a Good Bargain?,” NYR, March 5] points to a central problem with Cass Sunstein’s perspective: the assumption that what is needed is to improve procedures of group decision-making in order to increase the likelihood of making “right” choices about ends, which are conceived as givens. This is technical rationality, which holds ends to be fixed and concentrates on efficiency of means. As Walzer observes, Sunstein misses the larger, and more important, questions of real politics in which ends themselves are subject to an ongoing process of negotiation, debate, and reformulation. Yet Walzer himself also conceives of change-oriented, citizen-involving politics as targeting institutions more than transforming them. To address the problems of politics in today’s world we need more than agitation from outside institutional life, the “system world” in the language of Jürgen Habermas, long a theoretical reference point for Sunstein.
Sunstein, like Habermas and many others, sees major institutions as largely fixed and unchangeable, not subject to democratizing change. This assumption generates fatalism, which has shrunk our imaginations about decision-making, politics, and democracy itself. The challenge is to recognize that institutions of all kinds are human creations that in turn can be recreated, reconnected to questions of civic and democratic purpose. For this task we need to bring in Max Weber as well as Machiavelli and Marx. Weber described the “iron cage” that results from technical rationality. In his essay “The Profession and the Vocation of Politics,” Weber also evocatively termed the pattern “the polar night of icy darkness.” Thawing the polar night is a frontier of democracy in the twenty-first century.
Harry Boyte, Augsburg College, St. Paul, Minnesota; Albert Dzur, Bowling Green University, Bowling Green, Ohio; Peter Levine, Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts
Michael Walzer replies:
I certainly agree, and so would Sunstein and Reid Hastie, that it’s a good idea to read Max Weber; and I also agree, and so would they, that political and economic institutions are human creations. As they were formed, so they can be reformed and transformed. Since Professors Boyte, Dzur, and Levine don’t tell us which institutions they want to transform, I can’t say whether I am ready to join them. Meanwhile, important decisions are still being made inside institutions, like the US Congress and its committees, for example, or inside the White House, and I can’t see what is wrong with trying to influence those decisions to make them more serviceable to ordinary Americans. I don’t think that will happen, or happen in significant ways, until those ordinary Americans organize themselves to bring pressure on the institutional decisions-makers. These writers want something more than that, but that much, these days, would be well worth celebrating.
StephenKMackSD
StephenKMackSD's Blog 