what is politics actually for?

i’ve spent four essays arguing, in various ways, that politics has become too concerned with being right.

too concerned with ideological consistency.

too responsive to incentives that reward certainty, attention, and short-term success.

and sometimes too reluctant to describe a future people might actually want to live in.

leading to the final problem is this series.

what does a better society actually look like?

it’s a much harder question than it initially sounds.

because even if we agreed on all the facts, we could still disagree about what to do.

we could know exactly how a policy affects growth, inequality, freedom, security, and the environment.

and still disagree about whether it should be implemented.

because evidence can tell us something about consequences.

it cannot, by itself, tell us how much we should value each consequence.

1an economist’s temptation

there’s a part of me that wants to approach this as an optimization problem.

define an objective function.

identify constraints.

choose the policies that maximize the objective.

simple.

except, of course, the difficult part is defining the objective.

in introductory welfare economics, social welfare is used as a function of individual utilities.

a very simple utilitarian-looking expression is:

maximize the sum of everyone’s utility.

at first glance, that seems reasonable.

why wouldn’t we want to maximize well-being?

but immediately the questions begin.

what is utility?

can we compare it across people?

does an additional unit of utility mean the same thing for a wealthy person and someone living in poverty?

what if a policy increases total welfare but makes the worst-off person significantly worse off?

what if it produces happiness at the expense of individual rights?

what about people who haven’t been born yet?

the moral problem is a tough one.

2two societies, one uncomfortable choice

imagine four people in a hypothetical society.

we’ll assign each a numerical welfare score, purely for illustration.

society a distributes welfare as follows:

10, 10, 10, 10.

total welfare: 40.

society b distributes welfare as:

4, 12, 12, 16.

total welfare: 44.

society b has greater aggregate welfare.

but its worst-off person is considerably worse off.

which society is better?

if you prioritize aggregate welfare, you might choose b.

if you prioritize the condition of the least advantaged, you might choose a.

and if you care about rights, autonomy, and the procedures by which those outcomes arose, you might need much more information before deciding.

there isn’t a mathematical trick that makes those philosophical differences disappear.

to me, that’s important.

politics isn’t solely about discovering the best technique for achieving an agreed objective.

it’s also about deciding which objectives deserve priority.

3utilitarianism, rawls, and the people at the bottom

utilitarian traditions asks to take welfare seriously and consider the consequences of our actions for everyone affected.

seems appealing.

it asks us not to privilege one person’s interests simply because they are powerful, familiar, or politically convenient.

but a pure sum can overlook how welfare is distributed.

john rawls approached questions of justice differently.

one of his most influential ideas was to ask which principles people might choose if they didn’t know their own position in society.

imagine choosing the rules before discovering whether you’ll be rich or poor, healthy or ill, well-connected or marginalized.

that thought experiment encourages attention to basic liberties, fair opportunities, and the position of the least advantaged.

it isn’t identical to simply maximizing the minimum utility score. rawls’s principles are richer than that, and the difference principle concerns expectations for primary goods within a broader theory of justice.

still, as a contrast to the simple sum, we can illustrate a maximin-style objective:

the two objectives can recommend different choices.

neither formula, on its own, resolves every political question.

but together they lead to something.

when people argue about whether a policy is fair, they may be applying very different moral criteria.

and the disagreement won’t necessarily disappear if we give them better statistics.

4why freedom can’t always be reduced to happiness

now imagine a government could make people somewhat happier by restricting certain choices.

it knows which careers people tend to find fulfilling.

it could improve average health outcomes by imposing extensive behavioral rules.

it could reduce social conflict by limiting controversial expression.

even if some of those policies increased measured satisfaction, we’d still have reasons to object.

because freedom matters.

agency matters.

the ability to make mistakes matters.

and many of us believe people possess rights that shouldn’t simply be traded away for a larger sum of happiness.

this is one reason i find it difficult to think of politics as pure utility maximization.

not everything that matters is comfortably captured by a single numerical objective.

sometimes rights operate more like constraints.

subject to:

that is a schematic representation. not a legal or moral formula.

who am i to create one.

it expresses a simple idea: some things should not be done, even if a crude welfare calculation makes them appear attractive.

of course, deciding which rights are absolute, which can be limited, and under what conditions is itself a difficult political and philosophical question.

there’s no escaping judgment.

5sen and the difference between resources and real opportunities

another idea i find appealing comes from amartya sen’s capabilities approach.

instead of focusing only on income or reported happiness, ask what people are actually able to do and be.

can they participate in society?

can they receive an education?

can they move around independently?

can they make meaningful choices about their lives?

two people with identical incomes may have very different opportunities.

one might have a disability that makes transport difficult.

another might live in a place without functioning public services.

one might have access to excellent education.

another might face barriers that income alone doesn’t capture.

so perhaps we should care not only about the resources people possess, but about their substantive freedom to live the lives they have reason to value.

quite neat.

especially because it connects an abstract philosophical question to the practical work of government.

a functioning train system is not an infrastructure metric.

it changes where people can work.

which schools they can attend.

who they can visit.

how independently they can live.

a good education isn’t only an input into productivity.

it expands the range of lives a person can realistically choose.

and a capable state isn’t only an administrative ideal.

it can determine whether formal rights translate into real opportunities.

6berlin and the impossibility of a frictionless society

isaiah berlin’s work on pluralism i’ve used before adds another complication.

human values can conflict.

not because somebody has misunderstood the evidence.

but because we care about several things that cannot always be fully realized at once.

freedom and security.

equality and choice.

stability and change.

individual autonomy and collective obligations.

this doesn’t imply that all trade-offs are equally acceptable.

it doesn’t excuse injustice.

but it does challenge the idea that there must be a single political system capable of maximizing every desirable value simultaneously.

i think this is where politics becomes intellectually serious.

not when someone presents a long list of good things they support.

most of us can do that.

but when they explain what they would prioritize when two good things conflict.

and why.

7the problem of future generations

there’s one more constraint that economics makes impossible to ignore.

time.

political decisions affect people who don’t get to vote in today’s elections.

future taxpayers.

future workers.

future patients.

future children.

climate policy, infrastructure, pensions, public debt, education, and scientific investment all involve choices whose effects extend beyond the current electoral cycle.

economists often represent future welfare using a discount factor.

where δ determines how much weight we place on future welfare.

small changes in that factor can produce enormous differences over long horizons.

the first line uses an annual factor of approximately 0.99, the second 0.90. these are hypothetical assumptions, not recommendations.

and there’s an important philosophical distinction here.

discounting future consumption because future people may be wealthier is not the same as discounting future people’s moral importance merely because they live later.

we should be careful not to smuggle an ethical judgment into what looks like a technical parameter.

because when we debate public debt or climate investment, we’re partly debating whose interests count and when.

8if i were responsible for governing germany

imagine, for a moment, that i were responsible for setting Germany’s political priorities.

an unlikely and probably inadvisable scenario.

but useful as a thought experiment.

i ended up with a list that included a more capable state, better education, infrastructure, housing, innovation, entrepreneurship, immigration and integration, sustainable social systems, and a stronger Europe.

none of those headings is original.

and that’s the problem with lists of political priorities.

almost everyone can agree that education should improve.

that housing should be affordable.

that bureaucracy should be less frustrating.

that the economy should create opportunity.

that people should be safe.

the fun part begins when you ask what you’d actually do.

would you accept denser cities if that meant more housing?

which taxes would you raise or lower, and what would you do about the resulting budget effects?

would you reduce some existing spending to invest more in education and infrastructure?

how would you balance current pension promises with the interests of younger generations?

which regulations are essential protections, and which impose costs without producing enough benefit?

how would you know whether your reforms worked?

and, perhaps most importantly, what would you do if the evidence contradicted your preferred theory?

that’s where political philosophy meets economics.

values determine what matters.

evidence helps us understand what works.

institutions determine what can be delivered.

and democratic legitimacy determines how we make collective choices despite disagreement.

9momo and lolo, again

let’s revisit our friends momo and lolo.

imagine momo and lolo have reached the end of another long conversation.

momo wants a state that creates the conditions for people to build, invest, innovate, and pursue opportunities.

lolo wants a state that ensures those opportunities are genuinely accessible and that people aren’t left behind by circumstances outside their control.

momo worries that excessive intervention can reduce dynamism.

lolo worries that markets can reproduce unequal starting positions.

both concerns can be reasonable.

both can be exaggerated.

and neither automatically resolves the design of any particular policy.

perhaps they discover that they agree about more of the destination than they expected.

perhaps they don’t.

perhaps they disagree about the destination itself.

the point isn’t to force them into consensus.

it’s to help them identify where the disagreement actually lives.

facts?

values?

implementation?

or the distribution of costs and benefits?

that’s a much more useful conversation than deciding which of them is the better person.

10the limits of my own argument

there’s something odd about writing an essay series criticizing certainty.

i’ve spent a fair bit of time making claims about what is wrong with political discussion.

and i can’t pretend to stand outside the incentives i’ve described.

i like being right.

i enjoy a good argument.

i sometimes become defensive when someone challenges an opinion i’ve expressed publicly.

i probably have more ideological blind spots than i realize.

and there’s always the risk that an argument for nuance becomes an argument for the comfortable status quo.

sometimes the evidence is strong.

sometimes the injustice is clear.

sometimes compromise would mean abandoning a principle that shouldn’t be abandoned.

the goal cannot be to make every political position sound equally respectable.

nor can it be to turn complexity into an excuse for inaction.

the goal, at least for me, is something more demanding.

to be clear about what i value.

to be curious about what i might have misunderstood.

to distinguish my preferred outcome from my preferred instrument.

to take trade-offs seriously.

and to judge political decisions by what they actually achieve, not only by how elegantly they fit into a worldview.

11perhaps politics isn’t an optimization problem

i started with economics.

utility functions, incentives, information costs, principal–agent problems, discount factors.

i still think those are useful ways to understand politics.

but the more i think about it, the less convinced i am that politics can be reduced to a single optimization problem.

because we don’t all share one objective function.

and even if we did, we would still have incomplete information about how to achieve it.

we have different values.

different experiences.

different hopes.

different fears.

and different ideas about what makes a life worth living.

democracy doesn’t eliminate those differences.

it gives us a way to make collective decisions despite them.

that requires argument.

compromise.

sometimes conflict.

and the ability to accept outcomes we didn’t prefer without deciding that everyone who disagreed with us is morally defective.

so perhaps the point of political discussion shouldn’t be to demonstrate that our worldview can explain everything.

perhaps it should be to become a little better at living in a world that doesn’t fit neatly into any single worldview.

i can believe something strongly while accepting that i might be wrong.

i can disagree with somebody’s proposed solution while respecting the problem they’re trying to solve.

i can believe markets create enormous prosperity while recognizing their failures.

i can believe governments are necessary while being skeptical of their ability to solve every problem.

i can care about equality without pretending that every attempt to produce it is costless.

and i can care about freedom without pretending that individual choices never affect other people.

none of that feels contradictory to me.

it feels like the beginning of taking politics seriously.

because politics should be about more than proving that our side is right.

it should be about deciding, together and imperfectly, what kind of society we want to live in.

and figuring out how to make it possible.

perhaps we should be a little less certain about our answers.

and more ambitious about the questions we’re trying to answer.